I really like the temples of Siem Reap, Cambodia. They are simply spectacular. This morning my school party set off at 0800 and first walked across The Rainbow Bridge, reputed to be the bridge from the ordinary world into the kingdom of Jayavarman VII. A sort of hell into heaven experience. Information from our guide meant that us teachers needed to check our students' ears and fingers to make sure they had the correct number. Apparently criminals in the time of King J the VII had certain numbers of these appendages removed as punishment and so were not permitted to cross The Rainbow Bridge. Fortunately all the party had the requisite number of fingers and ears and over we went.
The next temple site was Bayon, with its fantastic collection of faces carved in to the pillars and then we walked onto The Golden Temple and finished on The Elephant Terrace, the royal viewing area for polo matches and acrobatics. The temples continue to create a sense of wonder and magic.
Hot and in need of refreshment the party returned to the excellent Tara Angkor Hotel for lunch before setting off to help out at a local primary school. The school, around 20km out of Siem Reap, in the depths of rural Cambodia, has 50 students on role and is free to those who attend. Consequently it attracts lots of children. My students' jobs there this afternoon were to entertain and teach the children while also starting to build an extension to the small toilet block. Somehow or other my group of ten students ended up partnering up with another teacher's group and building a brick wall. What do I know about laying bricks? Very little indeed. How many bricks had I layed in the past. None. Fortunately my colleague knew marginally more than me and the schools Headteacher knew the recipe for mortar so off we went.
Amazingly we managed, thanks to a combination of the willing and the energetic to build four courses of bricks and start work on a small wall around a flower bed. The real test of course is whether the thing is still standing when we return tomorrow! I had to stand back and do a double take at one point though. There was a combination of two English teachers, a PE teacher and me, Drama Man, leading twenty privileged kids from KL and between us all we were actually constructing something useful.
After another clean up it was dinner and then a visit to one of Siem Reap's Night Markets. I really don't like shopping or browsing at the best of times and so mooching around lots of stalls all selling the same stuff wasn't my idea of fun. Yes many of the goods were finely crafted but I really couldn't see anything that I needed or wanted to buy. So I mooched some more, spent 0.75 US$ on a fizzy drink and mooched again. I then came up with the idea of buying a Cambodian SIM card so that I could make a few calls. I couldn't buy one without my passport, seemingly.
Something I could easily have bought without my passport was a massage. I was pestered nearly every step I took along the main drag by people seeking to mess around with bits of me in exchange for money. As the title of this blog suggests I really don't like massages. I genuinely do not want strangers laying hands on my regions and moving them around in strange ways. It just doesn't seem right somehow. There clearly must be a market in it though. There were countless places offering such services. There were also other services that some of these places and some of the associated taxi / tuk-tuk drivers were trying to sell me that I very definitely didn't want to buy. And I started to get increasingly annoyed by assumptions made by too many people. Yes I was a man mooching round a market on my own, but that does not automatically mean that I was wanting to buy sex in any of the varied forms in which it was offered to me. Come on Siem Reap. Please don't become seedy. I don't know exactly why this 'service industry' has come about in this place but the laws of supply and demand are present in all business. Could it be that thanks to the near extermination of a whole generation of Cambodians in the 1970s there is now no moderating effect of an elder generation on a younger one?
Beauty of temples plus hope of education and annoyance of seediness all in one very busy day. More temples and walls tomorrow