Angkor Wat

Angkor Wat is probably the most famous tourist attraction in all of Cambodia; it is even on the Cambodian flag (fact of the day: the only other country flag in the world that features a national monument is the current flag of Afghanistan). Angkor Wat is an ancient city of temples, but there is also a temple within the complex itself called Angkor Wat, just to confuse things. Over 50% of foreign tourists visiting Cambodia each year go to see Angkor Wat. And I'm not surprised, because it was beautiful.

Angkor Wat at sunrise. We got up at 4.30am for this view

We decided to break the temple viewing up over two days, because 1) there's a lot to see and 2) it was over 32°c and there isn't much shade there. You want to be out of the sun by midday if you can! We had been advised to go to some of the smaller temples on day 1 and save the 'big three' (the three most impressive temples) for the second day. The temples on day 1 were still really impressive, particularly considering they had been built in the first half of the 12th century and pretty much abandoned to the jungle by the 17th century. Restoration didn't begin until the start of the 20th century so some of the buildings were crumbled and falling down, and others had great big trees that had taken root and grown on top.

One of the temples on the first day was entirely surrounded by water, and we had to walk along a long, narrow gangplank over a lake to reach it. It was beautiful scenery and Kim and I spent more time just looking around us at the lake than we did looking at the temple itself. We were lucky because it was such a clear day, so the reflections in the water were amazing.

On the first day we saw five temples and then decided we both needed to find some air conditioning so headed back to Siem Reap, which is the closest city to Angkor Wat and where we were staying for a few days.

We had hired a tuk-tuk driver for the two days, a very nice Cambodian man called Lee, who drove us around the site and told us a bit about the history of the ruins. The next day he picked us up at the crack of dawn (4.30am) to take us to watch the sunrise over Angkor Wat. While we were by no means the only tourists there, we managed to nab a good spot to sit and watch without having loads of people blocking our view - as you know, I'm about the same height as most people's shoulders because puberty forgot to give me a growth spurt, so I struggle a bit in crowds!

After sunrise, we explored Angkor Wat the temple, and saw loads of monkeys! They were wild but very tame, completely uninterested in all the people around them taking photos actually. Apart from if you had food on you: one man had a plastic bag with some water and bananas in and a monkey darted forward, swiped open the bag with his claws and grabbed the bunch of bananas before you could blink. He then sat very smugly eating them while looking the bereft tourist in the eye.

Cheeky monkey, ignoring the sign

The next temple on our list was Bayon, which is made up of hundreds of carved faces of Buddha. This was pretty surreal, being stared down at in every direction. Unfortunately most of the faces are weather-worn or crumbled now but there is restoration taking place in all of the temples, it's just a slow, precise process.

Last but not least, we visited Ta Prohm which was my favourite to explore. This was used in the 2001 film 'Tomb Raider' and it could easily have been the set for an Indiana Jones film too. The building was collapsed in a lot of places and overgrown with plants and trees; it has been abandoned for over 400 years and renovations have only begun very recently. However this made it a fantastic setting to explore and we got quite lost while wondering around its maze-like interior.

There are a few issues I had with the way the site is run however; most of the money to restore Angkor Wat comes from foreign aid. Only an estimated 28% of ticket sales goes back into the temples. This is because Sokimex, a private company founded by a Vietnamese-Cambodian businessman, has rented Angkor Wat from Cambodia since 1990 and manages tourism there - for profit. Sokimex also has a petroleum division, manages hotels, and runs Sarika Air Services. Seems such a shame to me that an ancient wonder of the world like Angkor Wat is being run for profit and that although millions of people pay to visit the site each year (Cambodians can visit for free), they're investing very little back into the area.

Buddhism in Bangkok

Thailand is a predominantly Buddhist country and Bangkok is a city that celebrates this on what appears to be almost every corner. Temples, shrines, statues and monuments are dotted so frequently around the city that you can worship almost anywhere. Or, as a non-Buddhist, you can simply look and admire. Because Buddhism is a beautifully decorated religion.

This is very typical architecture for a Buddhist temple

Some of Bangkok's most famous tourist attractions are temples, the most impressive being Wat Phra Kaew (don't ask me how to pronounce this!), Wat Pho and Wat Arun - Wat means temple, in case you didn't guess. We visited them all and although the architectural style of the temples is similar at all of them, you don't become acclimatised or immune to the beauty, because they are all just so stunning. Most are decorated with mirrored glass mosaic, all pieces hand-cut and hand-placed onto the walls. It must have taken an absolute age to complete and the effect is simply incredible. I couldn't capture it in a photo but they look like they glitter.

Within each temple complex are different buildings, which house different statues and/or shrines. These are situated very closely to each other but can be all differently shaped and sized, depending on the importance of what it houses. The more important a statue, the grander its home.

Statues of Buddha are erected at every opportunity and often grouped together or lined up in a row. It seems that the rule is 'the more, the merrier' within most temples!

Most depictions of Buddha are of him sitting in the lotus position, but we saw a few of him reclining or standing. One statue stands at 100ft tall (and is appropriately named 'Big Standing Buddha') and at one point in history could be seen from a lot of the city; now, many buildings block his view but he's pretty impressive up close, particularly his big shiny gold toes...

You can visit some of the temples at night to see them all lit up. We cycled through one and our guide told us about the demons that stand guard outside each temple to ward off bad spirits and keep them away from Buddha. The green one below is the king of the demons, with one of his sidekicks.

I really enjoyed seeing the intricacies of the religious decoration, having never visited a Buddhist country or even really been exposed to it before we got to Bangkok. I suppose it's similar to Catholicism in the way it makes the house of worship itself a beautiful and significant place. We will be heading to Siem Reap next to visit the ancient Hindu city of Angkor Wat so I am looking forward to seeing some Hindu architecture soon!

Kim and me at Wat Phra Kaew 

Palawan

I don't know if you have ever sat down and contemplated a place before going there, but I have, and when I thought of the Philippines and envisaged what it would be like, I pictured white sand, turquoise water, sea life (and therefore sea food) and beaches and boats and snorkelling and palm trees and stunning landscapes and all those other things that go together so wonderfully when you imagine a tropical paradise. Well, Palawan was the epitome of the Philippines, at least in my imagined version: simply put, it was gorgeous.

Excuse the rope: this a a view from one of many boats

Palawan was also special for more than just the setting: it was the location of our Streatham housemate reunion. Becky flew out to join Vita, Kim and me for a week and it was bloody wonderful.

In Palawan, we spent time in four places: Puerto Princesa, Sabang, El Nido and Coron. Puerto was fine, nothing much to write home (or blog) about but the other three places were all very nice.

In Sabang, there is a subterranean river which has been listed in various travel blogs/reports/articles as one of the new natural wonders of the world. Essentially, it is (as you would imagine from the word 'subterranean') an underground river than you can sail along, inside the caves, under the cliffs. When inside, the person who is sitting at the front of your small boat or 'bangkha' holds a light to shine around the stalactites and stalagmites at the guides direction, to illuminate the inside of the caves. (That person was me; naturally I was keen to sit in front and be involved somehow. Classic teacher's pet)

Unfortunately to take a photo of the incredible sights inside the caves requires an SLR camera of very high quality and between my GoPro and phone, the light quality just wasn't good enough to capture the amazing sights inside the caves. If you are curious, Google it. If you are very curious, come and see it yourself! To make up for the lack of photography, here's Becky and me in hard hats:

We had to wear these not only for protection, but also because the bats in the caves like to poo on tourists' heads

We then headed north to El Nido and experienced tropical rain first hand: I couldn't believe how much water the clouds were holding; it was the kind of heavy rain that feels like you're being punched, and it went on all day and night. Luckily the sun came out the next day and we rented a couple of sea kayaks, to explore the islands around the bay and their secluded beaches.

It took us about 45 minutes to paddle to the first beach but it was worth it: we were the only people there.

Here's us doing acrobatics on the beach. I'm on the bottom right. Very poor form, a shame I'm so useless at anything remotely sporty!

If you want to visit the Philippines for a holiday, I would definitely say Palawan would be the best island for it. It is still relatively untouristy for South East Asia and absolutely stunning.

The bridge over the river Kwai

Kanchanaburi is a town in western Thailand whose main economic income comes from interest in an historical tragedy. It is the site of a former WW2 prisoner of war camp, controlled by the Japanese, and the location of the famous bridge over the river Kwai. Through the town runs a stretch of the Burma-Thailand railway, or as it is more infamously known, Death Railway, built by Allied POWs and Asian slave labour. The full railway line is 415km long, took nearly 250,000 men to build and cost more than 100,000 of these men their lives. The construction took just 14 months, which means approximately 238 men died each day.

After the end of the war, 111 Japanese and Koreans were tried for war crimes because of their brutal treatment of the prisoners and labourers during the railway's construction; 32 were sentenced to death. However, as we have seen from the tragedy that just ensued in Paris, 'an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind' - killing someone for causing the death of another will not bring those men back but simply cause more people pain and hurt and anger.

The people of Kanchanaburi seem to have come to this realisation too: the three or four museums in the town remember the men who worked on the railway and the bridge, and honour those who died at the hands of the task, rather than focussing on the atrocities enforced by the Japanese and vilifying them.

The story of the railway, depicted in films such as The Bridge over the River Kwai and The Railway Man, is one of brutality and horror however. The Japanese had been planning a railway between Burma and Thailand since before the outbreak of the war but after their successful invasion of Burma in 1942, they urgently required a way to supply their troops there overland, as the route by sea made their ships too vulnerable to attack. Japanese engineers surveyed the land, made up mostly of hilly, jungle terrain, and concluded that it would take five years to build. The Japanese army generals ordered that it must be done faster and thus began to transport tens of thousands of Allied POWs up from prison camps in Singapore and Indonesia, to use them as labourers. When they realised that the 62,000 POWs would not be enough, they recruited approximately 180,000 Asians (mostly Malays, Indians and Indonesians) on fake construction contracts, falsely promising good conditions and fair employment. 50% of these Asian men would be dead in just over a year's time. None of their deaths were recorded by the Japanese, so the overwhelming majority are in unmarked graves and remain unidentified.

Conditions for the men were poor to start and only got worse, especially when rainy season hit and disease spread through the camps like wildfire. Meals consisted of salted rice twice a day, so a lot of deaths were caused by mild illnesses that could have been prevented, had they been properly fed and had some vitamins in their diet. Labour shifts lasted 18 hours, so imagine the fatigue and exhaustion that would have occurred with the terrible diet and lack of calories; legend has it that there was a death for every wooden sleeper laid for the track.

The bridge soon became a target for Allied bombers to break Japan's supply lines to Burma, which the Japanese tried to counter by getting the prisoners to line up along the top of it, in an attempt to prevent the planes from attacking their own side. Unfortunately for the prisoners, orders were to destroy the bridge at any cost and there were a number of deaths by 'friendly fire' in the effort to bomb the bridge. It was hit a number of times but only successfully put out of action in June 1945.

After the war, teams of grave finders were sent out to find and recover bodies of the 12,000 Allied soldiers who died during the railway's construction. Large war cemeteries were built to honour and memorialise the late British, Dutch, Australian and American soldiers, one of which is in Kanchanaburi. There is also a large memorial for the 90,000 Asian labourers, whose graves were not identified or marked.

Today the bridge and parts of the original railway are used as part of Thailand's rail network. In between the fairly infrequent trains, you can walk across the bridge and look down the river.

Over all, it was a very interesting and incredibly moving day. I would highly recommend taking the time to come here should you happen to be in Thailand.

Bohol and the Chocolate Hills

While the title of this blog post may sound a bit like a Filipino version of a Roald Dahl book, Bohol is in fact an island in the middle of the Philippines, and the Chcolate Hills are, well, hills. 

We arrived in Bohol by ferry, as one would expect of an island, and immediately made our way to the town of Loboc. There was a wonderfully reviewed hotel in my Lonely Planet book for South East Asia (aka the Bible) called Nuts Huts and we decided that a jungle lodge in a remote town by a river sounded quite nice!

We were right.

This was the view from the hotel balcony. 

The river, also called the Loboc River, was green and cloudy and a very pleasant temperature for swimming. On our first day in Loboc, we decided to have a day of rest, having spent the previous week rushing around the Philippines trying to see everything that was humanly possible (I know, it's a hard life). But really, travelling every other day is exhausting and we all needed a day off to chill out and just soak up the view.

So into the river we got! While we swam, big sailing restaurants rumbled by, blaring 80s classics and generally ruining the jungle ambience; Chinese tourists ate their lunch on board the vessels and took photos of the exotic scenery i.e. the four Western girls in bikinis, swimming in the river they were sailing down. It was quite odd to be looked upon with as much fascination and interest as the beautiful landscape around us and I genuinely think very few of them had seen Westerners before. It didn't feel creepy for them to take pictures of us, despite our attire (we were mostly submerged in murky water anyway) but more like they found us 'foreigners' genuinely intriguing and we were as worthy of photographing ("look at these strange people we saw on our trip to Bohol") as the green river and lush jungle.

Nuts Huts had a couple of kayaks for hire so Kim and I took them out for a spin, while Vita and Emma swam alongside. We headed upstream to a couple of small waterfalls and while the current was not strong at all, I definitely realised my upper strength is somewhat lacking!

Vita and I by the little waterfall. Vita's arm looks like it's growing out of her head!

Kim and I heading off down the Loboc River

The town of Loboc itself was about 3km away from Nuts Huts so late that afternoon we decided to walk in, to see what Friday night had in store. Very little it turned out. 

Don't get me wrong, we found a place that had a happy hour (a bottle of local lager for 40 pisos; so to you and I, 57p) so we set up camp there, but it was certainly not a partying atmosphere! Mind you, we've been going to bed by 10.30-11 every night so perhaps the party started as we getting into our PJs...

It was very pretty though.

The next day we hired two motorbikes (with drivers, before you panic) and we set off, three astride each bike, to see the island of Bohol and its most famous sight: the Chocolate Hills. These are essentially 1200 (more or less) identical, slightly conical hills clustered in the centre of the island. The geological theory is something to do with the uplift of coral deposits or something equally unexciting, but personally I like the local theory better: Filipino folklore has it that the hills were formed from the shed tears of a heartbroken giant. Much more believable in my opinion.

Because rainy season had just ended in the Philippines, the hills were quite green and lush. However, apparently for a lot of the year, the grass is dead and brown, hence their chocolatey name.

Chocolate Hill selfie. This was taken at the top of one of the hills, which you are generally allowed to climb.

That afternoon, we were taken on a bike tour of the rest of Bohol. We drove past some rice paddy terraces which were just beautiful.

Overall it was a very pretty place, lots of little villages with quaint churches (the Philippines is a predominantly Catholic country) but I have to admit, my memory lingers less on the stunning views and more on the discomfort that is experienced when sitting on a motorbike for an entire day with two other people. I think I'll have phantom bruises on my bum for years to come when I think back to Bohol.

Apo Island - sun, sea and snorkelling

I don't mean to brag but the other day i swam with giant green sea turtles. All day.

Apo Island, off the larger Filipino iland of Negros, is famous for snorkelling because it is surrounded by enormous coral reefs, big bright tropical fish and of course, the aforementioned turtles. And for me, it was one of the most amazing experiences I've ever had.

The day began with a bus ride to the boat, after choosing our flipper size from the dive shop - essentially the man in the shop looked at our feet and shouted 'small' or 'medium' before allowing us to try them on. (Perhaps it's guessing game of his to pass the time!?)

The boat ride out from Dumaguete, where we had spent the night, took about an hour and was really lovely - I have never seen the sea so turquoise and clear! We were so excited to get in it that we got into our snorkels as soon as possible!

I have snorkeled over coral reef before, in Costa Rica five years ago, and while that was pretty, it was much deeper there, and not as sunny - when we went out this day however, you could get much closer to the shallow coral and see the sun shining through the water. This was also my first opportunity to use my GoPro underwater and it did not disappoint!

Swimming in a group isn't really possible when your face is constantly submerged; you find yourself drifting  away from people as you start to follow various fish or explore the depths, until you find yourself suddenly alone. And then is when I saw my first turtle. I was so excited that I yelped and inhaled a mouthful of sea water!  

The photo above shows just how close we managed to get to thesse magnificent creatures: this is not zoomed in at all. I followed him around for a while, keeping him to myself, before surfacing to shout to the others to come over and see. I can't describe how incredible it felt to be so close to such a majestic animal; I could have lazily followed him all day, just watching him live his incredibly chilled out life. Turtles are very calm and peaceful creatures and somehow this infiltrates through the water to you, the snorkeler. The most fitting adjective I can think of for the peace that came over me while swimming alongside my new friend is 'zen-like'. 

We were out on the boat for about 9 hours in total, sailing around the bay and stopping to go in the water. It was pure bliss and exactly the type of activity I had expected from the Philippines. In total, I think I saw 8 or 9 turtles, all swimming alone (they are not pack animals).

Below is me and a turtle together - considering how much time we spent in the water with them, and how many we saw throughout the day, this was still a pretty tricky photo to take!

Here is another shot of the coral:

Another turtle:

Me, in all my snorkelling glory:

And finally, happy faces after a brilliant day: