Trips

        Our lunch was another home-hosted visit, this time in Krovan Village.  Our host was a young man (20-years-old) studying to be a policeman or guard at a temple.  He learned his English selling (hawking) postcards at Angkor Wat.  He hopes to become a guard and make $70 to $90 US a month.  This is also what teachers are paid in Cambodia!  His mother and grandmother cooked us a very nice meal.  I learned how to make the “eyeball” dessert – a flour and water dough wrapped around a chunk of palm sugar and boiled, then cooled.  We ate on the second floor of a village house.  It was very clean.  They use well water and have a western toilet bowl flushed by scooping water into the bowl – there is no need for a tank.  Who knows were the flush goes.

 

Krovan Village - home-hosted lunch	Skinny cows
Pumping water	Making "eyeball" dessert
Skinny, long legged chickens	Village scene
Cutting up a block of ice	Typical house - on stilts to keep it from being flooded during the monsoon season
	After a rest at our hotel, we visited Angkor Thom and the Bayon Temple.  It was also built of laterite stone in the 12th c. by King Jayavarman VII and was the capital of his empire and the center of his massive building program.  The bridge over the moat had another Naga, gods and evils and the Churning of the Sea of Milk.  We entered through the South Gate, another “faces-tower” and three-headed elephants.  The Bayon Buddhist Temple is inside the walls.  There were 54 towers each with four faces but only 37 remain.  Around the lower outer wall are more carvings depicting stories of life in the empire: quarrying the stone, a naval battle, cooking a feast, games and sport, market activities and other daily life events.  The walls really describe life 900 years ago and were one of the highlights of the trip.
Angkor Thom	Angkor Thom
Angkor Thom
	Asperas
Shrine outside the temple grounds	Mon., 10/20/14 – Siem Reap and Tonle Sap (Big Lake)         Today we had and interesting trip into the Cambodian countryside.  We drove from the city toward the Tonle Sap Lake, one of the largest freshwater lakes in the world.  On the way we saw many poor small villages with houses built on stilts and fields of rice and lotus with water buffalo tethered anywhere they could eat and fertilize the fields.  We saw small patches of corn and taro growing along canals.  There were skinny chickens and some duck farms.  Duck eggs are sold in the city markets.  There were a few primary schools, but schooling is not compulsory so many young children are just hanging around.             Our bus let us off so we could have a short ride in a wooden cart pulled by two water buffalo.  Because of the rain the track was soft, mucky, and full of puddles.  It made for a soft ride on the wooden wheels and the animals did not mind the muck - glad we weren't trying to walk!.
Water buffalo cart ride	Aren't they cute?!
Flooded field
Fisherman	Variation on a theme

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