Holiday in Cambodia
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What?, I heard you say? Yes, that flimsy joke has been enshrined in a pub's name in Siem Riep (it's actually called 'Angkor What?', with the question mark). Across from Angkor What? is the only slightly more cryptically named Temple Club. This is where, hours after getting into Siem Riep, we met up with Shane and his mates. They, like us, had descended on the bustling town for the obvious purpose of visiting the temples of Angkor.
Shane: He's a friend of Paul Bemowski's, from Atlanta. And, in Bemo's estimate, "cannot hold his p*** either." Don't know who else he could be talking about. (Note: Paul, aka Bemo, is the kind host of this website)
Anyway, broadly speaking, Bemo's quite bright, and, having spent a number of years working in Europe, has a firmer grasp of basic geography than the (possibly unfair) stereotype of the rest of his compatriots. However (according to Shane) our mutual friend Bemo emailed him to say that, since we were in the same part of the world, we should meet up - at this time Bex and I were in Beijing and Shane in Bangkok... Against all odds and by utter fluke, Shane checked into the exact same hostel on the same day as we did in Hanoi, and only a couple of hours apart!
The long and the short of it is that we managed to cross paths in the aforementioned pub in Siem Riep, where Shane and random other travelers would meet every evening at 19hoo. A habit that we continued days after he'd started his journey back to work on the other side of the world.
Siem Riep is a really 'happening' place. There are really good hotels and cosy guest houses popping up all over the place. And, oddly for this sort of thing, it's not too garish or tacky on the whole. The centre of town is full of all sorts of great restaurants, featuring food from all over the world: local Khmer faire, pukka Indian thalis, Thai currys, Italian (sort of) pizza, Mexican burritos, English bangers&mash etc. etc. Some of the bars are incredibly trendy; the sort of place that, had it been uprooted and set in London, I'd feel very threatened by. Many with free wiFi and furnished with too-cool-for-school d00dz chilling out with their iMac notebooks. In short, signs are, there's buckets of money pouring into this region. As Becky put it: after what might be kindly put as laissez faire French colonialism, a la carte justice dished out by B52 bombers, and then one of the worst known genocidal regimes in human memory, "the b*ggers deserve every chance they get"; more or less.
As mentioned though, the main reason to go to Siem Riep though are the temples. and these don't disappoint. Like most people I imagine I was trying not to expect too much to avoid being underwhelmed (in the same way, perhaps, as i was by the terracotta warriors) after all the hype, stoke by such things as tomb raider. Fortunately this wasn't the case.
Our first experience of the temples was going to catch the sunrise over Angkor Wat (a word to other first timers though: it's probably best to see them at sunset for the first time). Having got up at 04h30, and headed out on a tuk-tuk, we were hoping, and maybe even half expecting, it to be fairly quite out there. Needless to say it wasn't. We marched in the darkness into Angkor Wat with the sound of hundreds of other Tevas scraping on the stone paving around us.
As avoidable as this may sound, it wasn't too bad. The temple grounds are absolutely huge, over one kilometer square, so it swallowed up the teeming hordes (and all their camera equipment too). The sunrise, to be honest, wasn't unlike the sunrise you see when you stumble out of a foreign pub at five in the morning. When the central towers themselves were lit up from behind though, they were magnificent silhouettes like pineapples with the leaves chopped off and stuck upside down on top of a stack of sculpted bricks. I managed to climb the very steep steps to watch the sun coming up over the jungle; for someone who suffers vertigo, Becky wisely decided not to.
Coming down from the central collection of 'pineapples', by chance (again, we didn't have a proper guide), I saw incredible reliefs carved into the stone running along a wall perpendicular to the path from the main entrance. These were spectacularly ornate, and rival anything I've seen around the world. Apparently, these aren't even the good ones; they've been moved to the National Museum in Phenom Penh. After seeing these, I caught site of a troop of monkeys scampering around the walls. Bex then lost focus of why we were here, preferring to 'talk' to the gibbons; and I had to drag her off to see more temples instead.
And there were certainly more temples! Throughout the forest, endless grey stone structures emerge from the greenery. We were doing the 'mini tour' which got in all the major temples (at least for the non-specialist) but only saw a fraction of what there is to see. Each one was different, from clusters of columns with beatific closed eyed faces facing the four cardinal points, to others intentionally left much as they have been for a thousand years, with trees growing between the cracks and dominating doorways; some where pyramids and others just a pile of stones. Others still have extensive vaulted ceilings. We were quite 'templed out' at the end of it all; I could go on, but, I'm sure, then you'd be too.
In conclusion, I'd like to recommend this place, Siem Riep and Angkor, as one of the best historical sites to visit. Bigger than the pyramids, more intricate than the Alhambra, and, I'd say, more mysterious that Machu Pichu.
And so, back on the bus back to Phenom Penh - where the plan is to arrange a visa for Laos. The only remarkable thing about this trip, apart from working air-conditioning, was the huge 5-inch caramelised spiders that were on sale along the way next to the pineapples and mangoes.
After the dread of Tuol Sleng, Becky decided she didn't want to see the further horrors of the Khmer Rouge that are being kept for posterity. So this morning, i went on my own.
Predictably, what I saw was utterly shocking. At least the Nazis had a coherent plan of whom to exterminate, however barbaric that was. The Khmers just seemed to randomly destroy their own brethren.
Walking around the killing fields (it's actually fairly small) i stepped over clothes sticking out of the dry caked mud of the path. Some of the clothes had bright floral patterns, but most others were like black pyjamas. Dry splintered bones could be seen where visitors had worn away the mud where they walked. Here and there, still, small piles of bones would be stacked under a tree. Signs would dispassionately mention details, like: "Here 180 headless bodies were found in this mass grave", "This is where the truck stopped to offload the people to be executed". Every now and again there would still be tombstones that belonged to this place's earlier function, that of a Chinese cemetery.
Finally, in the middle of it, a tall narrow Buddhist stupa, the corners in bright white marble - to remember the dead. Inside the glass walls it has shelves stacked to the roof, packed with cleaned white skulls. Some of them still showing the sign of how they died: a bullet hole here and there, but more often than not, impact craters on the side or front of the skull. "Carnage incomparable and human squander/Rucked too thick for these men's extrication"; to borrow a description from Wilfred Owen (describing the killing fields of the Somme).
rgds
//richard
(Phnom Penh)
