Days 109-111: Siem Reap, Cambodia

We took a bus from Phnom Penh to Siem Reap, home of the famous Angkor Wat temple complex and Angkor Thom royal city. It’s a 6-7 hour drive even though it’s only 300 odd kilometers, due to the poor quality of the roads and the fact that the bus has to share them with cows, bikes, and a few other cars. We would’ve preferred to take a boat up to Siem Reap, but this being the dry season, decided that getting stranded on a sand bar didn’t sound like much fun. The tedium of the bus ride in no way presages the wonder of Angkor, which astounded and amazed us, despite all we’d heard of it beforehand.

The Angkor area was the center of the huge Khmer empire of the 9^th to 15^th centuries, and in it they built over a thousand temples, palaces, and tombs. The ancient city sprawled over a vast area, the largest preindustrial city in the world, and from it they controlled an area that included most of what are now Cambodia, Lao, Thailand, and Myanmar. The temples vary widely in their current conditions, ranging from the largely pristine Angkor Wat to piles of stones spread across the forest. There’s so much history, art, and religion crammed into this place that your mind goes into overload. And it’s so beautiful that our camera was overwhelmed and keeled over dead half an hour after arrival! There’s plenty of charge in the battery but the camera just won’t turn on… I guess we’ll just have to come back again!

The city of Siem Reap is much more built up than Phnom Penh since most tourists to the country seem to fly directly in, visit the temples, and fly back out. There were two million tourists last year and they’re expecting many more this year. We were quite glad to be here during the quiet season, since Angkor Wat was already quite crowded enough for our tastes! I’ve heard rumors of fifty new hotels being built in Cambodia – and this in a country that may only have 100 hotels total now! The Japanese appear to be moving in wholesale, followed by the South Koreans.

We did the grand tour on our first day and hired a guide to teach us more about the history of the temples, the significance of various buildings, and the myths behind the friezes carved into the walls. We first visited the ancient royal city of Angkor Thom, which still has a giant moat and wall around its 9 square kilometer interior. In the very center of the city lies the Bayon with its many gigantic faces and huge bas relief stone carvings. We walked around quite a bit, visiting the mostly collapsed Bauphon (it was built on a base of sand), followed by the Phimeanakas, Terrace of the Elephants, and Terrace of the Lepers.

We next headed up to Ta Prohm, the site where much of the temple filming for Tomb Raider (the original one) was done. This temple was thoroughly overgrown by shrubs and trees, and while they’ve removed most of the shrubs, they’ve left the trees, which have over the years worked their way over, under, and through what’s left of the temples. The trees and temples combine to create an amazing atmosphere, one in which I’d happily spend days basking.

Afterwards we visited Angkor Wat, the most famous and best preserved of the sites in Angkor. It’s also, unsurprisingly, the most visited, and was mobbed when we were there, although we were happy to see that a large fraction of the mob was Cambodian. We weren’t as enamored of Angkor Wat as we were of many of the other places we visited. Probably some combination of the crowds, our already being tired and sheer sensory overload. We’ll happily go back and try it again to see if we like it more the second time! We ended the day atop Phnom Bakheng and watched the sun set over the ruins.

We spent the next couple days visiting more temples on our own, spending more time on the less visited (and less restored) sites that we found we enjoyed more. The access at these smaller sites is amazing; at some there is no signage, no paths, and no one watching. You can walk through the remains of the temples, around the old walls and moats, down the ancient hallways. We were of course careful not to add the wear and tear on the sites, but you can go an amazing number of places even so. The lessons from our guide the first day, plus a handy guide book gave us the tools we needed to decode a lot of the iconography and religious significance of the sites, but it was really just wandering around in the ruins that gave us a feeling of the former majesty of these temples, how awe inspiring they must’ve been at the time.

Three days was both not nearly enough and the perfect amount of time in Siem Reap. We easily could’ve spent a week photographing it, but three days is great as an introduction. Plus there were many, many more restaurants we wanted to go to! To our surprise, Cambodian food has been some of the best of the trip! We knew nothing of it before arriving and have been amazed by how consistently great it has been. My best description is that it is a more hearty Thai food. Take the same spices and sauces as Thai food, but add potatoes and other starches, cook a bit longer, and serve. But that’s a vast simplification; there is a huge range to the cuisine that we didn’t have a chance to sample or to learn to make. And for that as well we need to go back!

Days 106-108: Phnom Penh, Cambodia

We’re back in the land of right hand side driving again, and it’s almost gotten us killed. Since leaving home, the only other place we’ve been in with people driving on the right was Lao, but even that was more of a “drive on either side of the road” kind of place. Not that Cambodian driving is more predictable, but many of the drivers at least honk before they start driving on the wrong side of the road! So all of our training to look right first before crossing a street has to be unlearned now; but in reality you have to look both ways several times before crossing, and having 2 people to look both ways simultaneously really helps given how erratic the drivers are (and how bad the roads are in places).

Phnom Penh is in remarkably good shape considering its history. The modern city was built up by the French, whom were forced out in 1953. Then the city was flooded by two million refugees from US bombing and Khmer Rouge fighting. When the Khmer Rouge won, they forced everyone out of the city and it was abandoned for four years, as part of their radical agrarian vision. When the Vietnamese invaded, they too let the city disintegrate, which lasted until around 1992. And for all that, some of the original French buildings are still in decent shape (after how much reconstruction I don’t know), and the Royal Palace is still beautiful.

The aftereffects of the war are still visible in the people and the economy. More so than any other place we’ve been, there is a large homeless population in Phnom Penh. Many of the cyclo and motorbike drivers sleep on their vehicles at night – the cyclo drivers get a MUCH more comfortable bed! And where there aren’t people asleep on their vehicles, there are people on cardboard sheets covering large swaths of sidewalk. I’ll try to never complain about a hard bed again. The offers from the motorbike drivers here also reflect the poverty – instead of the usual offers of just women, here I get offered “Weed, ladies, cocaine, heroin?” And the weed is offered in the open – the have “happy” pizzas with it as a topping in some of the restaurants here. Illegal but unenforced, apparently.

Mary and I spent our first day there walking through the Royal Palace, the Silver Pagoda, and the National Museum. The king still lives at the royal palace, and a section of it is cordoned off to give him some privacy. Cambodia is a constitutional monarchy, but the king still (usually) revered by the people. The palace is beautiful, replicating in stone and concrete what was originally done in wood. Next door is the Silver Pagoda, which sadly is closed, but apparently contains some amazing treasures and artifacts including a Buddha covered in nearly 10,000 diamonds. Nearby is the National Museum, which contains artifacts from other Khmer archeological sites all over the country. Sadly, many of the artifacts were looted from other sites around the country, or recovered from looters. It’s fun to walk around, but without the surrounding buildings or any explanatory text, the statues and friezes seem extra-lifeless.

Since arriving in Cambodia, I’ve been reading a fair bit about the Khmer Rouge and the Cambodian Genocide, after realizing that I didn’t know that much about such a sad chapter in world history. I visited the Killing Fields and the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum (S-21) to get a real world dose of what I’ve been reading about. They not surprisingly reminded me a lot of the extermination camps in Poland – a very peaceful feel in the air, shattered by horrific thoughts about what happened there. Neither site is as well documented as it might be, but tour guides and guide books fill in the gaps well. It all made me think of Darfur a lot and how badly we’re all doing at stopping this kind of thing from happening again.

One final note in an already too long entry; monks are people. I’ve always thought of monks as being rather removed from the world, meditating in their monasteries. But throughout Asia, and particularly in Lao and Cambodia, we’ve seen them in all aspects of their lives. They take the bus, go shopping, chit-chat, and even visit non-religious sites and take photos, like any other tourist! The monks aren’t ordinary people, in that they always sit higher than everyone else, women can’t touch them, and they’re less likely to strike up a conversation with you, but they’re definitely still people.