After checking out of our Siem Reap hotel in the morning, we drove to the edge of town to visit Angkor National Museum’s collection of various relics from the pre-Angkor (Funan) and Angkor period. We each had an audio guide and map to navigate ourselves through the eight galleries. My favorite was the first gallery called “Gallery of 1,000 Buddhas”. Here, we saw different versions of the Buddha and the six hand gestures. The audio guide was especially helpful in this room.

Magnus described this gallery as the museum’s preface as it only featured Buddhas, the predominant religion today in Cambodia. Placing a gallery focused on the Buddha before any Angkor history and the gallery titled “Religion and Beliefs”, emphasizes the importance of Buddhism in Cambodia even though chronologically speaking Hinduism emerged earlier.

Having already spent a few days touring Angkor sites, the museum helped clarify the timeline of the Khmer Empire and my understanding of many Hindu statues and featured some kinds absent from Angkor such as Kurma, the turtle avatar of Vishnu. After a few hours in the galleries, some of us visited the gift shop and I got a banana smoothie at the museum cafe. Here we debated whether this museum visit should have been scheduled to be before we went to Angkor.

Then we left for the APOPO Visitor Center and learned about trained rats that can locate unexploded landmines in the Cambodian countryside dropped by the Pol Pot regime during the civil war and by the US during the Vietnam War.

APOPO (Anti-Personnel Landmine Removal Product Development) is a non-profit NGO that trains African giant pouched rats to sniff out traces of TNT to locate landmines and other explosive remnants. Using rats, APOPO can cover over 400 square meters of land in a day more efficiently and accurately than compared to a metal detector. Even today, long after the Khmer Rouge and Vietnam War, children playing in the woods and farmers tilling fields for rice planting bear the violence from previous generations. Our visit directly helps fund the initiative and I’m very glad we squeezed this stop into the schedule.

For lunch, we all ate together, and I had the Cambodian staple, Chicken Amok. Then we got back on the bus and began our three-hour journey to Sandan, picking up our guide for the next two days, Narith Nou, on our way. We set our bags down at the Chab Meas Guest House and went down the road to eat dinner family style which included beef loklak, fried fish, chicken soup, fried rice, and white rice.

The town of Sandan is on the edge of the Prey Lang Forest. Tomorrow we are going into the forest to visit a Kuy community and learn about their forest conservation and protection work. Though bumpy at points, I enjoyed today’s drive into rural Cambodia. In terms of agriculture, we mainly drove by rice paddies, cashew groves, and cassava fields. Of the three, cassava seems to be the only one being harvested this time of year. The evening here is cooler than in Siem Reap and we’re hearing more insects outside.