Siem Reap museums + Angkor Wat - Cambodia travelogue

the queue at the children's hospital

Next I headed to the Angkor National Museum, where I spent an hour and twenty minutes. This has an excellent collection, including some items removed from sites to prevent theft. On the way there I passed the long queues at the Angkor Children's Hospital (which provides free treatment and attracts people from hundreds of kilometres around).

I went back to the hotel to have lunch with Richard, and rested and read a while before heading off again by myself.

I stopped at the Tonle Sap exhibition run by the disabled children's charity Krousar Thmey. This has excellent information on the ecology and human geography of the Tonle Sap, which I couldn't do proper justice to as I wanted to get to Angkor Wat while there was good light.

I made a few small donations to charities while in Cambodia, but planned to make a single large donation to one when I got back to Australia. In the end it was easiest to make that to Oxfam Australia, targeted to the work they do in Cambodia.

There were a lot of people visiting Angkor Wat, as before, but it's large enough that it doesn't feel crowded.

There is a fantastic series of carvings running all around Angkor Wat, but only some of those had good light so I concentrated on the galleries depicting the Battle of Lanka, the Kurukshetra War, a victory over the Chams, and judgement by Yama in Hell.

I asked at our hotel about shadow puppets and we ended up going to a restaurant that had a buffet dinner and a shadow play performance (for $12). The restaurant was quite busy, but none of the other guests seemed at all interested in the performance.

There were multiple puppeteers, with music from singers and an orchestra consisting of a wooden xylophone (gambang-like), two drums and a flute; most of the performers were quite young. The similarities to the Javanese theatre are obvious, though there are also significant differences — there is no dhalang, for example.

Museums + Angkor Wat