Kbal Spean — and biodiversity conservation, land mines, and butterflies

Kbal Spean is on the slopes of the Kulen Hills, to the north of the main Angkor sites. It consists of stone carvings in and around a river — it is also known as "The Valley of a Thousand Linga" — and is reached by a 1.5km walk from a car park.

The walk is on a well-maintained track, with markers every 100 metres. It climbs fairly steeply and, though it's mostly through jungle and well-shaded, in mid-day temperatures over 30°C it was still a pretty sweaty undertaking. There were quite a few other people on the track, but it was still atmospheric — my first real experience of jungle on the trip.

After lunch I visited the Angkor Centre for Conservation of Biodiversity, a small wildlife rescue and breeding centre near the car park. (This is another joint venture, this time with a German zoological society).

They have a lot of injured birds, including eagles and other raptors, but the highlights here were the huge greater adjutant and lesser adjutant storks. There are also leopard cats, primates including silvered langurs and a slow loris, tortoises, lizards, and so forth.

On the drive back to Siem Reap we stopped at the Cambodia Landmine Museum and then at the Banteay Srey Butterfly Centre, which are rather a contrast. The Museum contains information about and examples of the many types of land mines inflicted on Cambodia over the years, as well as running programs for children affected by mines. It is run by a former child soldier Aki Ra. The Centre is training locals to raise butterfly pupae which can be sold overseas; the idea is to provide a supplement to farming incomes.

There was a brief rainstorm while I was in the butterfly centre, which cooled things down nicely. Back in Siem Reap, Richard wasn't feeling well enough to go out to dinner, so I went off to a hotel where there was a buffet dinner and an apsara dance. Both the dance and the accompanying orchestra had some similarities to Javanese dance and gamelan. (I didn't take a camera along, so there are no photographs.)

I walked back to the hotel in the dark, without being accosted by tuk-tuk drivers — perhaps, without a camera or a backpack or a hat, in the dark, I wasn't so obviously a tourist.

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