Chasing the sun ☀️
Siem Reap

We arrived in Siam Reap in the early afternoon, so we decided to make something out of this half day and went to visit the Apopo Visitor Center. This association trains a specific African breed of rats that are able to smell and detect unexploded mines and bombs. Cambodia is sadly still full of acres of land that are not safe to use because of hidden bombs. These rats are trained to “scan” a field and show a specific behavior, for example digging in the ground, when they smell TNT. In the visitor center we were shown a demonstration of the little heroes in action. This process is also safe for the animals, as they are not heavy enough to detonate the mines. It was very interesting, and at the end we could also hold one of the “retired” rats in our arms: they are very sociable animals and don’t mind at all contact with many different humans.

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The next two days in Siam Reap were dedicated to visit Angkor Wat temples. We hired a tuk tuk driver, Mr. Tiger, to take us around the different temples, giving us a brief explanation of the history of each part. On the first day we started with the main temple, then visited the Bayon temple, the Tomb Raider temple and other smaller ones. We didn’t hire a guide (and we regret it a bit), so we didn’t deep dive into the history of each temple, but it was anyway visually very fascinating. It is basically a huge cluster of big temples, some very different from each other, and all of them have a great level of details in the bas-reliefs on the walls.

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On the second day we went to the main entrance of the biggest temple at sunrise (around 5 AM). It was stunningly beautiful but very packed with people already… Then Srah Srang lake and temple, the impressive Pre Rup temple, and other smaller ones.

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We decided not to spend a long time in Cambodia, and head to the sunny beaches of Thailand. However, we had a very nice time over there, the people was nice, helpful and welcoming. The country still have a lot of economic inequalities, but Fabio was there 8 years ago and this year he saw a better situation in terms of poverty, plastic waste on the streets, etc.