Quik Thinking

If you ever end up visiting Siem Reap, make sure you know what the capital of Madagascar is. Outside every temple are a gaggle of impressively multilingual and endearingly cute kids whose extracurricular activities seem to consist of selling trinkets to tourists. Some of these are even worth buying. As always, however, you need to bargain hard. And these kids employ a unique angle in their bargaining tactics. After you make a counteroffer to their initial wildly inflated price, they will lay down a challenge. If you can name the capital of Madagasar, they'll sell you the trinket at your asking price but if not and they can name the capital of a country you choose then you must buy it at their price. And, believe you me, they've spent far more time than you have memorizing capital cities.

At one point we were leaving a temple after being wheedled by these kids when our tuk-tuk suddenly encountered a parade of elephants walking down the street. It took us a while to pass them and while doing so we could see random people feeding bananas to the elephants as they went. And then, as suddenly as they'd appeared, the elephants vanished behind us as we sped away.

Another random cool thing we got to see required taking a different form of transport. We piled into a motor boat and went down a river into a lake to see what is known as the floating village, a collection of houseboats stationed some distance from the shore. In the midst of these was a fish and crocodile farm. Apparently he crocodile farm used to be a cash cow a few years ago, fetching $100 per croc, but in recent years the value of a croc has dropped to just $20.

One evening we visited the famous night market in Siem Reap. As far as I could tell, it just had even more of the same stuff we'd seen already. But May fell in love with a t-shirt that had a picture of a chicken on it. Sadly, the shirt was too small even for her. Not one to let such minor hiccups get in her way, May bought the shirt anyway and even put it on. I took a photo for posterity. Speaking of inappropriate, we found a place that serves do-it-yourself barbeque, via one of those little cooking devices at your table. In the heat of Cambodia, that turned out to be the worst way to eat a meal. But I guess that's why they can offer a buffet: nobody can put up with the heat long enough to eat very much.

We kept seeing these places that offered to let us soak our feet in a tub of fishes that would eat away our dead skin. Intrigued, we decided to give it a shot. They normally charge $3 for 15 minutes but we got them to let us have 2 people in for 5 min each for a total of $2 instead. The fish were quite ticklish but they did work and our feet looked considerably better at the end. While we were sitting there, they guy running the joint realized that having us laughing as we sat there in full view of the street was good for drumming up business so he let us stay for a lot longer than we'd paid.

For most of our time in Cambodia we shied away from the really sketchy food for fear of getting sick. But on the last day we decided that we should go for it. That turned out to be a great idea as the sketchy resaurants has delicious food that was much cheaper than the stuff geared towards tourists. Some of it was similar to what I'd had in Malaysia and other things, like eating raw flowers, were entirely new. And nobody got food poisoning out of it.

The other thing we'd been meaning to do before we left was get a massage in the traditional Khmer style. May opted out but Kim and I found a place that offered an hour of full body massage for just $4. It proved to be an excellent use of our money as both of us emerged feeling relaxed and refreshed. Right after our massages, we met up with May and set of for a buffet and traditional Khmer dance performance. Unlike the barbecue, this buffet was incredibly good and easily worth the $7 it cost us. The dancing was a treat as well and an amazing way to end the trip.

One of our few regrets about this trip to Cambodia was that we did not shop around for the best price when hiring a tuk-tuk driver for the 3 days we spent visiting temples. Our driver cost us $25 apiece while we were able to find others offering the same service for as little as $40 regardless of how many people we had. 

In the airport on our way out, I was pleasantly surrised to discover that they offerend free wifi at the boarding area. They also had a suggestion/complaint box for people to leave feedback about their airport experiences. The box was made of clear plastic so I tried reading some of the notes. One of them complained that a Customs official had tried to exract a bribe at night! We never encountered any such issues ourselves, fortunately.

In fact, my only beef with the Cambodian airport system was that they made us all get off the place for 15 minutes when we made a brief stop at Phnom Penh and then put everybody through a security check as we got off the plane. Of all the times to put people through a security check, that has got to be the most pointless one! Clearly if we'd boarded the plane already then we must have cleared security. I cannot fathom what they were they expecting to find. Worse still, by the time we cleared security, it was aleady time to reboard the plane and we didn't really have time to even use the toilet!