Siem Reap, the Beating Heart Between Angkor Wat and Tonle Sa, Siem Reap, Cambodia (B)

I’ve been feeling the need to write about Siem Reap for some time now, but finding the words to describe my emotions without falling into banality is not easy and then I postpone it, but maybeSiem Reap is trivially extraordinary and unique and it is useless to look for other terms to define it.

I stayed there five days, at the end of a Cambodian journey that left me fascinated by the beauty of what I saw, but unnerved by the chaos, filth, corruption and contradictions. Upon my arrival in town I was tired and not really well disposed, but even like this I was enchanted and years later I would go back to enjoy it quietly, without the chock in front of the immensity of the site.

This town on the banks of the Tonle Sap, whose name means “Siam defeated”, has become in recent years the tourist capital of Cambodia, of course thanks to the short distance from the fabled Angkor temples, declared in 1992 a UNESCO World Heritage Site .

The town is very quiet and clean compared to the rest of the country and the tourist standards got rapidly westernized with the opening of mega hotels and shopping centers that open as quickly as pop-up windows beside traditional guesthouse and craft markets, which actually sell also many odds and ends, it must be said. ...... (follow the instructions below for accessing the rest of this article).