A Pain Between the Temples

The first night we were in Siem Reap, we all went out for a meal in a huge open-plan tent style restaurant. The waiters and waitresses swarmed in and started putting all sorts of food on the table, mostly consisting of brown stringy meat and pretty much nothing that we had asked for. There weren't any menus, so it was pretty much guess work. 

At the end of the meal, confused and not wholly satisfied, the bill arrived. It worked out at about 4 dollars a head, which we all thought was too much but paid it and got the hell out of there. (We didn't realise then, but this place was a nightmare if you weren't Cambodian. Helen and I would be charged $16 dollars for two plates of fried rice and a plate of soggy vegetables in a few days time, sparking a row that entertained the whole restaurant.)

That night we went with the Irish girls, Aidan, Gil and Zion the Israeli boys and Javier to try and find the All Ireland final. 

We thought our best bet was to head to the startlingly named 'Molly Malones' authentic Irish pub. On the way there, I was asking directions from a couple of other backtwatters. I was just saying thank you and turning around when I got hit on the forehead really hard, so I instinctively swung round and raised my fist, milliseconds away from landing a killer blow to my assailant. I realised that I had in fact walked into a two-foot-wide stone lamppost.

The feeling of embarrassment was, just about, outweighed at the utter relief that I hadn’t tried to knock out my 'mugger-to-be' and also broken my hand. This is, however, why I have a sickle shaped mark bang in the middle of my already too big forehead in all of the photos of us at the Temples. 

And a fear of lampposts.

Molly Malone’s did not have the Gaelic Football on, nor in fact did the poor Cambodian staff know what Gaelic Football was, but they did put the Chelsea match on, and whilst the Irish chappesses and chap trudged around the city in vain we played pool and watched a proper sport with rules and stuff.

I did not lose a game of pool in three hours that night. I was pulling off impossible shots, and I felt like Tom Cruise in The Colour of Money, but straight. That was until the Irish girls brought back some Irish boys who had been trying to find the game too.

One lad, having been regaled with stories of how good I was at pool, took it upon himself to destroy me. But after the ten minutes of silence and utmost concentration from him it turned out he was actually a really nice bloke. Just a really nice bloke with slightly too much testosterone.

The next day everyone else went and had a day at the temples whilst Helen and I scoped out Siem Reap. We both really liked it, and would actually suggest that anyone, young or old, could go there for a ten-day holiday and enjoy it. That night we met up with everyone in the drolly named Angkor What? bar, where we all got quite drunk and the Irish lad told me how shit I was at pool again.

The next three days were strictly business. We rented bicycles from the hotel and, after getting the best egg and bacon ('best' because I got Helen's bacon too) sandwiches in the world, we set off to Angkor Wat and the other temples. We had bought a three-day pass for them, and we realised after the first day that we were going to be absolutely knackered.

We cycled about 30km on the first day, soaking up the most famous temple of Angkor Wat (unimpressed) and the much cooler (and probably our favourite) Bayon, plus a shitload more. I could list them but nobody cares, do you, honestly? I don't even know why I'm writing this now. Then on the second day we ventured even further out, going to every other temple we could. We ended up cycling about 45km that day.

I will not bore you with history of the temples, because I don't know any of it. Here's some photos instead, none of which do the temples any justice. If you like the look of these and you're friends with me on Facebook, I literally took hundreds. More than I can go through to find the best...

[On reflection, cycling around Cambodian countryside - or essentially jungle, to us townies - looking at really quite magnificent and ancient temples was one of the best experiences of my whole life. The skill it must have taken to construct them, the intricacy of the design and sheer scale of them is impossible to convey. Which is perhaps why I didn't try. Or, perhaps, this is another case of my being utterly blasé at the time of writing.]

I will say though that at one temple we met a very special boy indeed. His name was Som, he was dressed as a girl and I think he may have been partially deaf as a child, as he spoke in a shouting, deep, moany voice. 

Som followed me around, pointing at fat tourists and laughing, and trying to grab Helen's boobs and giving me the thumbs up. He then gave me a picture of a flower that he said had drawn, and I gave him some money. This kid was a genius, he had the temple sewn up and people were literally lobbing money at him to try and get him to go away.

Here's Som. Nice lad.

The final day of Templage we got in a moto and drove the 60 kilometres on the world's worst 'road' out to Beng Melea, which is a huge temple like Bayon that the forest has been reclaiming for hundreds of years. This was impressive, but we'd sort of been a bit templed out, and by about three that day we just wanted to get home. But, as we wanted to complete the set, we also went to Bantay Srei.

The guidebooks say 'Although some visitors are disappointed in the comparatively smaller size of Bantay Srei, it is impossible not to stand in utter awe of the intricately detailed carvings.'


Was it fuck. Give me a massive temple with a tree growing out of the wall any day. Carving shmarving.

The temples conquered and at least 40-odd miles of cycling clocked up, we had a few days to let our hair down before my birthday. We went to a swimming pool ran by a friendly old ex-pat called John, the only one we've met apart from Harry that we haven't thought was a complete cunt, and played with a group of Cambodian kids. The best thing about this day, however, was the cups of tea that he made us, I nearly shed a tear.


The night of my birthday saw Hel and I, Bonfire Ed and Nicky - fresh from three days templing as well, Harry and Lekhina and Harry's business partner Phil go to a few bars and generally not do much. We did make the trip out to a Cambodian nightclub, but there were far too many guns on show to relax and no one wanted to give us a drink because - as Lekhina tried to explain - the barmaid had lost her phone and so everyone was looking for it. What a strange story to make up!

The night ended rather abruptly at 4am in a bit of a random argument when Phil, with his 'vast' knowledge of Cambodia, said that the street kids begging us for money at the stall's we were sitting at earned 'probably $500 a day'. I tried to laugh this off but an argument about beggars, politics and economics ensued. I just stared into the distance clutching my warm Black Panther (which is like Guinness but horrible). 

The conversation really should have stayed more along the lines of who our favourite character out of Grange Hill was, or rejoicing at the reintroduction of proper sized Monster Munch*, but alas it was not to be.

*If you're not reading James Cunningham's comments on my blog, you should be, you might learn something. But try to forget that his comments are much more entertaining than anything he's commenting on.