The tour had officially ended, but Frances, Carey had a couple more days in Siem Reap, so we hired a cute white tuk tuk driven by "Ley Hak Superstars Driver" to take us on a short tour of the city. Our first stop was at the impressive Buddhist temple, Wat Preah Prom Rath.
The temple itself is not that old, but it occupies quite a large piece of land and provides accommodation for a large number of monks and lay practitioners, including the elderly who have nowhere else to live. It also has a number of family stupas (mausoleums).
It has a very impressive with a sculptured scene of the time when the wealthy Siddhartha Gautama (before he became the Buddha). He travelled outside the city and witnessed the poor conditions, under which many of the population lived, including a corpse being eaten by vultures.
The temple also contained a long series of painted relief panels depicting the stages of hie path to enlightenment. The magnitude of the temple did draw into question the amount of money that the church receives which goes into its places of prayer, including the Christian churches. However, it fulfils not only a religious function, but also a social function, supporting those in need when the government does not provide for them.
Also included in this post are some other scenes from Siem Reap.
Next we visited the APOPO land mine clearance project, which uses Tanzanian giant pouch rats to detect TNT in land mines. They have incredible sense of smell (much stronger than in dogs), although they can only be used on cleared land. Dogs are are still more useful in the forest, on difficult terrain or where there are crops because the rats can easily be distracted by the presence of food.
We spent an hour there, while they explained the training system and then watched a demonstration of the rats' ability - which is quite amazing. We even got to hold a rat (about the size of a small possum), but only after washing our arms to remove any contaminants such as sunscreen, insect repellent or perfume.
Landmines come in all shapes and sizes, metal and plastic, which makes detection all the more difficult. It is one of the most unconscionable and indiscriminate pieces of weaponry used in wars or conflict.
We stopped briefly at a local supermarket for some supplies and a restaurant where we picked up some delicious food for lunch.
That night we dined at Tevy's Place (a social enterprise restaurant run solely by women) which had delicious food and not very expensive.
