We left the hotel at 7am and had carrot cake and coffee for breakfast at a cafe in the airport – we tried to retain some appetite for the flight, and thankfully a delicious selection of omelette and fish noodles were served on the Silk Air flight.
Siem Reap airport is a lovely spot and the immigration and customs process was very speedy. We proceeded through the terminal straight to met Mr. Ngin, our tuk-tuk driver for the next few days. He whizzed us through town to The Villa hotel – it was a pretty unnerving ride, with no apparent traffic rules and near misses a-plenty.
On arrival a lovely local girl took us through our itinerary and provided us a with a complementary drink. The room itself was huge, with two double beds and a large en-suite. We relaxed there for a while before Mr. Ngin picked us up and ran us round to the Artisans Centre.
Here we saw dozens of young underprivileged or disabled people working on a variety of arts – carving stone, painting and weaving. The shop was very reasonable priced with excellent quality of work – although we just picked up a couple of folded paper souvenirs for our Christmas tree.
We decided to walk back to The Villa, through the old market – countless stalls of silk and paintings etc, although nothing particularly appealing. The market then became endless food stalls – the smell and cleanliness was so poor that it really was quite horrifying…
We hurried through and went on to a nearby restaurant, Amok – somehow retaining an appetite. In contrast to the market, this was a light and airy place and the food was delicious and insanely cheap at around £3 for the main course. We had a banana leaf salad, a fish amok, fried pork mince ‘lap’ and Khmer noodles. Only the noodles (which were similar to tagliatelle) were disappointing.
We continued wandering back to the hotel through the busy and often smelly streets – dumping rubbish on to the streets just seems to be they way things are done here. Back at the hotel we picked up a small picnic as part of our package.
Unfortunately, it was a cloudy evening, so with no sunset to enjoy, the tuk tuk took us to a temple in the middle of a lake – sadly this was a very underwhelming site. Some rubble peeking out of a large, half dry, huge square ditch. The lack of water meant that it was muddy and the sight of homeless dogs and local children playing in it rather tempered the pleasure of the food.
By perfect chance, the wine was from Margaret River, so we asked the tuk tuk driver to return us to The Villa where we drank it whilst playing Scrabble. Much better.
