sagesex

By now we have been spending some days in Siem Reap, Cambodia. The heart of the city is a street commanding the quaint name Pub Street. It’s all in the name: In heaps, Cambodian and western restaurants and pubs wield special offers and happy hours in order to tout the dwindling mass of tourists. The South East Asian tsunami a few years ago and the financial crisis seem to have badly hit Cambodias travel industry. TukTuk drivers bore themselves to death and restaurant owners bemoan empty tables. You can breathe freely on the markets, even choose your own way instead of just being pushed through: A ridiculous 1,195,259 tourists have visited Siem Reap in the first half of 2009. Luckily, sagesex is coming to the rescue with the ultimate Siem Reap travel tip, helping you to save time, nerves, and money, so you can keep the local bar keepers from starvation.

But first things first: What does compel 2.5 million tourists a year to travel to the Cambodian hinterland? Is it the cheap bars? The friendly prostitutes? We conjecture that what does the trick might rather be the proximity to Angkor Wat, the eighth wonder of the world and biggest super temple in the world. The archipelago of Angkor temples comprises dozens of ruins from the prime time of the Khmer empire, one better preserved and more gigantic than the next. This sunken city in the jungle is said to have been one of the biggest cities of the world with a million inhabitants about the 13th century. So large is the area that most tourists spend several days there, renting either a taxi or bikes for an entire day in order to reach the most remote nooks and discover even the last holy objects.

However, there are some clear downsides to the classical methods of seeing the temples. For example, there is the financial aspect to be appreciated: While bicycles go for a dollar a day, you’d have to calculate $15 plus for a taxi. Add to this the IMHO brazen ticket prize of $20 per day for tourists (OK, Cambodians free). Hereabouts, this sum corresponds to about one day of living in luscious tourist style. While the sun is up, the temperature is above 30°C all the time, which for most tourists, especially for the bike enthusiasts, means the following: Rise with or before the sun and start sightseeing, sweat through midday, and fall into bed early at night so you can restart the procedure the next day. All this just so the exploited, tired and sweaty travelers can share the sight of the best temple in the world with 1195259 others of their kind.

Now sagesex is not known for its love for horrendous ticket prices, getting up early, or mass tourism. As you might have suspected, in collaboration with experts we thus have developed the simple yet ingenious Sagesex Method for Visiting Super Temples. Just follow these three rules:

Go slow!

Besichtigt man täglich nur einen oder zwei Tempel, spart man sich viel Gerenne. Kraft und Motivation sind nicht bei der dritten Ruine schon auf Null. Zugegeben, so braucht man mehrere Tage Zeit, um alles zu sehen, aber die hat man ja auf Reisen für gewöhnlich, wogegen man Nerven gerne mal schont. Einfach in einem Reiseführer die Tempel raussuchen, die für dich interessant sind und einen nach dem anderen abhandeln.

Go motorized!

This saves time and sweat. A trip to the temples and back costs about $5 using a tuktuk, even less per moto taxi. Go mobilize a few people and rent a tuktuk, there’s not much of a monetary difference to biking anymore when you’re four. Bicycles only make sense for extended trips including many temples taking the whole day. And that’s what we want to avoid, as we have determined in the last paragraph.

Only after dark!

This is the truly secret trick about the Sagesex Method. Ticket offices close at 5:30 and it gets dark at about 7. You will simply be waved through without paying. Sometimes you do meet a guard at the temples proper who wants to tell you that the temples close at 5:30 or 6. Simply ignore them in a friendly way or, even more friendly, bribe them with a few dollars. The temples are huge. So when you’re thrown out at one side, you simply walk in on the other side. Apart from a bouncer for every five temples there is nobody around in the ruins at this time. The biggest temple in the world in noble silence at sunset. Sounds beautiful? It sure is! So be sure to try the guaranteed no-rip-off, no-sweat, and no-hubbub Sagesex Super Temple Method at your next visit to Angkor or similar places!

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By now we have been spending some days in Siem Reap, Cambodia. The heart of the city is a street commanding the quaint name Pub Street. It’s all in the...