Siem Reap is the center for investigating one of the great ancient civilizations. The temples of Angkor are easily explored from the base of Siem Reap. But Siem Reap has other attractions around it as well. There is the Tonle Sap Lake. This is a lake that is probably unique in the world. Depending on the time of the year, the Tonle Sap River either flows out of the lake, making the lake shrink, or it is flowing into the lake, making the lake bigger. This is a result of both the flatness of Cambodia and of the flows of water through the Mekong. During the rainy season, the Mekong is full of water and flows full and fast. There is so much water that some of it flows up into the Tonle Sap River, pushing water back into the Tonle Sap Lake. During the dry season, the Mekong is slow and carries much less water. Although quite flat, the path of the Tonle Sap River is to flow down towards Phnom Penh and into the Mekong. So during the dry season, the water empties out of the Tonle Sap Lake down into the Mekong and into the sea. This changes the topography of the Tonle Sap Lake and the people who make it their home. There is a community of people who have a floating village in the Tonle Sap Lake. They move about and they have a culture that reflects the changing nature of the lake. It is possible to visit the village. I didn't have time for this, but I wanted to mention it.
There is also one of the killing fields from the time of the Khmer Rouge regime that is in the area of Siem Reap. I also didn't have time to visit this.
I did have time for a couple of closer in places, the silk factory and the war museum. When I got up after my couple of days of adventuring in the Angkor temples, I had had enough of temples for a day at least, so I asked at the hostel what else there was to do. The man who had invited me to stay there, Ma, told me that I could go out and visit the silk factory and the war museum. I agreed to a price to go and he took me out on his motorbike, after I had had gotten some breakfast.
I really wanted to spend some time trying to go to the visitor information office to report the mistreatment of tourists at the border and the theft I had experienced a couple of nights earlier. I had met some people during the ride from Bangkok and we got on well. They were staying at a hotel right beside the original place where I had stayed the first night. I went over and had some dinner with them after the first day in Angkor Wat. On my way back, due to my stubbornness over the use of taxis (I hate using taxis; I think most are crooks who do their best to exploit their fares), I was walking back at a rather late hour. It was late enough that the night market had closed and the demons of the night were out. The demons were the prostitutes. As I was coming up to the bridge, one of the local prostitutes appeared and came up to me. She started asking me to take her somewhere, and walking along beside me, all but groping me. I was intent on getting to my hostel and I had absolutely no interest. She started directing me into a group of other prostitutes and bodily shoved me into their midst, whereupon they all started groping around. I managed to make my way clear and they pretty much let me go. Then they disappeared. That's when I thought, “Hey wait a minute.” And I felt in my pockets. They hadn't been groping me. They had been getting into my pocket and taking my money. Most of my money was in my money holster, but they did steal about 30 dollars from me. Siem Reap was really seeming unfriendly and hostile to me. It was another blow to my fond memories of the country. And I wanted to report the two incidents to the visitor information bureau so they could at least have knowledge of this sort of thing and decide whether they were going to do anything about it. But, probably predictably, they listened and really seemed none too interested in tackling the problem. I put it into as forceful terms as possible. For instance, I suggested that I was very disillusioned by these incidents, and that I would probably be going home and telling people that they might be better off choosing another destination for a vacation because Cambodia was just too unfriendly to tourists. The people at the office seemed supremely unmotivated to do a thing about it.
I shall have to try and tackle this a little bit differently. I will probably be returning to Bangkok and I will go back to the office where I purchased my bus ticket to Siem Reap. I'm going to ask point blank whether she knew how tourists are treated at the border. If she shows any knowledge at all, I will go to the tourist police. I will probably go there anyway and see if the Thai police can discourage people from doing that kind of travel to Cambodia. Maybe, just maybe I can cause some kind of decrease in border traffic, at least using the “helpers” who rip tourists off. And I will also be writing some kind of letter or email to the national tourism bureau for Cambodia. If I can find it.
After failing to get much interest out of the tourism bureau office in town, I headed back to get my motorbike ride to the silk factory. It was about 16 kilometers out of town on the main road to the border. On my way back to the guesthouse, I had seen a bunch of police pulling drivers over. I knew I was going to want a helmet, if for no other reason than that the police were being vigilant. The main reason though was that we were going to be on highways and I wanted some kind of protection. When I mentioned a helmet to Ma, he told me not to worry, as I suspected he would. So I mentioned the police; he almost immediately pulled out a helmet for me. Psychology is a great tool sometimes.
Off we went. It took about 30 minutes to get to the silk farm. I was met at the door by one of the factory's in-house guides. He began to show me the whole process from start to finish.
It starts with the kind of leaves that the silkworms eat. They eat mulberry leaves. And only mulberry leaves. So outside the buildings are a few fields where mulberry trees are grown. When the leaves are ready, they are harvested and chopped up, to allow the worms to eat them easily.
The worms are inside a building waiting for the leaves. The leaves go into the baskets with the worms and the feast begins. The worms gorge themselves for about 24 days, during which time they get large and get ready to build their cocoons for the transformation into butterflies (or maybe it's moths).
After about 24 days, the worms spin their cocoons. The wild thing about the cocoons is that they are made of just one long strand of silk woven by the worm. The particular worm in Cambodia weaves a cocoon with yellow silk.
For a further 3 to 5 days, the worms are left alone. About 5 percent of the worms are allowed to transform and emerge from the cocoons to allow the next generation of silkworms to come about and the farm and factory to continue. But the rest of the worms have to be stopped from changing. I guess the emergence of the butterfly or moth ruins the silk of the cocoon. The only way to stop the full transformation is to kill the worms. Unfortunately, this is not done by gassing them or anything that might be remotely considered humane. They are taken out and left in the sun to bake to death. I can only imagine what even mild animal rights types would say.
After the worms are dead, shrivelled by the sun, they are taken in for the next phase. The cocoons with the dead worms inside are put into a pot of water and boiled. The ends of the silk are found and collected in groups of about 20 or 30 strands and pulled out into a thread, and spooled.
There are actually two kinds of silk that are pulled from the cocoons. The outer layer of the cocoons is coarser and lower in quality. The inner layer of silk is finer and of higher quality. They are removed in two separate steps and two separate boils.
After the silk is removed from the cocoons, it is bleached white. Then it is dyed using mostly natural dyes prepared by boiling various different plants to get different colours.
Once dyed, the silk is spooled.
From the spools, the threads are then spooled onto much larger spools in lengths of 100 meters, from which the weaving is done.
These 100 meter lengths are tie-dyed to make a colour pattern. Each length is dyed with a different pattern.
Once dyed, the lengths of thread are passed to the weavers who use them in a precise order to weave the cloths. If the threads get out of order, then the weaving will get messed up. The weaving is the end of the process, except for more complicated products like wallets, which require some sewing. But scarves and other clothing are completed and ready for sale. And that is where my guide left me, in the store of the factory. I hadn't thought I would buy anything, but they had some wallets that were quite nice. Since I had lost my wallet in Jakarta, it was good to be able to get a new one. And I bought a silk scarf as well.
Following the silk factory, Ma took me to the war museum. It was fairly pricey at 5 dollars. And it was also just a collection of old war machinery that was sitting in the yard of a collector, rusting and rotting away. But it was a slightly interesting anyway.
One of the more interesting things in the museum was the pair of Khmer tyre sandals. The Khmer Rouge had limited resources, that grew scarcer with time. As they ran out of resources, they had to become more ingenious. When their shoes started to run out, someone figured out a way to cut new sandals from old car tires. There was a pair of those sandals in the museum.
After the museum, Ma asked me where I wanted to go next. I had one other thing that I had been hearing about. Somewhere in Siem Reap there was a restaurant that had a show of the ancient cultural dances of the Khmer empire. Ma knew where to go and we headed to the restaurant so that I could buy a ticket for that evening. Once that was done, I headed back to the hostel for a bit of rest.
In the evening, I headed to the restaurant for a very nice buffet dinner and then the show. It was interesting. There were four or five dances that were performed. One of them included the character of Hanuman, the Monkey God. I have been seeing a lot of him throughout southeast Asia. 
One of my favourite of the dances was the fishing dance. It was really just a courtship dance. It was quite artfully done.
The show was enjoyable and I had a good time. On my way back, I passed a book shop where I had exchanged a couple of books earlier in the day. At the bookstore was a young Cambodian girl, in her last year of high school. We had a nice chat and as I was going past after the show I stopped to say goodbye. I had decided to leave the next day and I wouldn't be seeing her again. She took a photo with me before I went on back. I returned to the hostel after a good day overall.
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