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28 June 2002 |
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| On Monday we took the fast boat to Siem Reap. It departed Phnom Penh at seven in the morning and left a plume of black smoke along the Mekong river and across the otherwise peaceful Tonle Sap lake. Because the water level is still low we had to transfer to a small boat for the last couple of kilometres and this was the most interesting part of the journey, inching slowly through a Vietnamese fishing village whose boats and stilt houses line a narrow inland waterway. It was noon time, some residents were already snoozing in their hammocks while others were mending their nets or going round in small boats hawking their goods. We arrived at our guest house in the pouring rain to be greeted by the reception staff, a posse of tiny girls who looked barely in their teens. How cute they were! Siem Reap is the main staging post for the temples of Angkor and consists mainly of guest houses, restaurants and internet cafes, a tourist ghetto in the making. It is fairly low key place though and people are still nice to tourists, with none of the aggressiveness that is found in India or China. | ||||