Two Days, One Night, Siem Reap, Adventure

In Cambodia there are so many holidays which means usually I get time off from school. Two weeks ago it was the King’s Birthday on one day and then National Plough Day (to start the harvest season) the next. 

This means that I had time off! Usually with two short days (like every weekend) I would just sit at home. Since there are no more holidays for the rest of the school year, however, I decided to do a short one night trip to Siem Reap! As many people know from past posts, Siem Reap is the province home to most of the beautiful temples in Cambodia. My province also has a temple (Banteay Chhmar in Banteay Meanchey province), however, the most beautiful sites are in Siem Reap. Kyle and I still had not been to Banteay Srei (famously known as the pink temple) nor had we been to Phnom Kulen, which is a small range of hills outside of the temple area of Siem Reap. Phnom Kulen has beautiful views but also has a river on it where ancient Cambodians carved “lingas” on the floor of the river stream-which you can still see today.

I texted Kyle the week before “let’s go to Siem Reap!” and the rest is history. I took my usual taxi from my town to Siem Reap in the morning and got into town at about 11 o’clock. Kyle and I went to a place I had wanted to try called Chumrok Cafe . It is so cute and styled with old Khmer cartoon books hanging from the wall. However, since they didn’t have a lot of food, we then went to The Bean Embassy which was another coffee shop but also had a wide selection of cafe food options. The Bean Embassy was on a compound with a roastery and workshop spaces as well as two buildings for customers to eat and hangout. It was a great place to study and hang out! (Everyone knows that I love a good coffee shop, and usually when I go to Siem Reap or Phnom Penh I always just want to hang out at coffee shops). 

Well, since the purpose of our trip was to go see some temples, our next mission was to find a tuk tuk driver to take us out to Banteay Srei (which is about an hour from Siem Reap town). If you visit Siem Reap you will see that there are tuk tuks everywhere and most of them take tourists to see many of the temples. So after leaving the Bean Embassy we walked about 1 minute down the street until we found a tuk tuk driver who could take us to Banteay Srey. We started to go there, and talked a little with the tuk tuk driver in Khmer, but then the sky opened up and it started to pour down rain. If you know what a tuk tuk looks like, you know that there are no doors on the side of the little vehicle, but usually drivers have rain flaps to pull down when it rains (they are very similar to the rain flaps that you pull down on the sides of a golf cart when it rains). We stopped and pulled down the rain flaps in the pouring down rain, but when I tried to zip it shut, it wouldn’t close… and then our driver said “yes that is broken”. The rain was pouring, the wind was blowing, and although the rain flaps were down, the wind was blowing the flaps in and so the rain was coming in. Despite all of this, Kyle and I just laughed. It was one of those things that was “well, what can you do” and also we knew our clothes would probably quickly dry with the Cambodian heat when it stopped raining. The rain continued on and off for the whole hour we drove to the temple. 

Once arrived, of course it stopped raining (and our clothes did dry pretty quick). We walked around Banteay Srey temple, which is known as the “pink temple” because of its color, but we did think that the color was more orange! There were less people at this temple than at the other major temples, but every time I go to a new temple I just love how much you can walk around it and see (in Siem Reap you could spend multiple days trying to see all of the temples and not even have time to see all of it!) 

We headed back to Siem Reap town and went to our favorite dinner spot: Wild (which was also a reason we wanted to meet up, to get some spring rolls). After Wild, we went to Pub Street, which is the party street in Siem Reap. We sang karaoke and danced a little before we decided we needed to go back to the hostel because we had to wake up at 5:30 the next day to prepare to go to the mountain. 

Thursday morning came: despite having little sleep and being out the night before, we still woke up at 5:30, packed up our stuff and headed to Phnom Kulen.

This information about Phnom Kulen came from the UNESCO world heritage website, for further information visit there, https://whc.unesco.org/en/tentativelists/6460/ : 

“Phnom Kulen range is located 30 km northeast of Angkor archaeological site, Siem Reap province, northwest Cambodia. It is registered since 1992 on the Government of Cambodia’s tentative list as a World Heritage potential cultural site, with the criteria V and VI. Phnom Kulen means the Mountain of Leeches in Khmer. According to the old Khmer inscriptions (and particularly Sdok Kak Thom inscription), the mountain is known as Mahendraparvata, the mountain of the Great Indra, an ancient city established at the late 8th-early 9th-centuries, comprising several temples, the religious remains of this former capital of the Khmer Empire. The capital was settled on the plateau, located 70 Km to the south of the Dangrek Mountains, and 30 Km away from the great Tonle Sap Lake. Today, the Phnom Kulen national Park is a 37,375-hectares protected area, located in Banteay Srey, Svay Leu and Varin districts, in Siem Reap province.”

Phnom Kulen only lets visitors come up the mountain before 11am, and visitors have to wait to leave the mountain until 12pm. This is because the road up and down the mountain is very narrow and difficult to go up and down with two cars. Only motorcycles can go up and down as they please. We drove the 1 hour/1 hour and a half to the mountain and then waited for the gates to open. Once up the mountain, we got to walk around and see the stunning views of nature. We went to a temple at the top of the mountain and then also saw the river with the 1000 Lingas before finally going to the waterfall. We were at the waterfall for about an hour just spending time seeing the beautiful water and also butterflies fly around us. We actually had to leave also around the same time it started raining, and so the timing worked out perfectly!

We had to hustle back to Siem Reap town to catch our buses back home because (1) we had to teach the next day and (2) I had to attend a wedding that night in my town! So I had to go home and change and then go (and I did make it to the wedding, pulled up to my house at 4:40, changed fast and left my house at 5:15 to go to the wedding).