Until recently, Cam­bodia was off the agenda of all but the most extreme of trav­el­lers.  Viol­ence and strife meant most simply bypassed the coun­try all together.  Thank­fully, not so much now.  There is still viol­ence here, you will not go far without see­ing lives filled with more strife than you can image, but the Cam­bod­ian exper­i­ence is no longer just an exer­cise in poverty tourism.

We entered the coun­try from the Laos bor­der on a long bus jour­ney to Siem Reap, home of Angkor Wat.  Look­ing at a map of the coun­try you would be for­given for think­ing that the jour­ney should be short and dir­ect and there­fore that our bus company’s determ­in­a­tion to go via the cap­ital of Phnom Penh, way down in the south, was merely a way of increas­ing their price.  How­ever, this is not the case.  Trav­el­ling over the middle of Cam­bodia is nigh on impossible and all roads go via the cap­ital.  This meant that our, per­haps, 10 hour bus jour­ney was going to change into a bot­tom numb­ing 28 hours.

ahhh, Laos – already I miss it.

It all came about when our Laos trav­el­ling com­pan­ions decided to fly out of Siem Reap.  They left the jour­ney as late as pos­sible so that they could make a final rush for the air­port (they were fly­ing to Aus­tralia) and sleep on the flight.  The last thing they thought we would do is join them.  Our sens­ible option would have been to enter Cam­bodia at a slower pace and then take a week or so to work our way around to Siem Reap, but we decided that we wanted to be at Angkor Wat for Christ­mas day and so the mis­sion was on for us all.

The first chal­lenge was the bor­der cross­ing.  The south­ern Laos bor­der has, until recently, been closed.  The latest Lonely Planet edi­tion makes no men­tion of being able to get through at this point.  How­ever, the enter­pris­ing Lao­tians have real­ised that open­ing the bor­der here will expo­nen­tially increase the tour­ists com­ing down to the 4000 Islands region.  The effect is to turn this quiet back­wa­ter sec­tion of the Mekong, seen by only the com­plet­ist, to a bust­ling West­ern haven for those cross­ing into Cambodia.

Bust­ling is good for money but what dam­age will it do to the area?

The private bus com­pan­ies are all for this change and many deals have sprung up for easy trans­port to Cam­bod­ian cit­ies.  We chose to take a bus at $20 a head.  It star­ted with a boat ride out of the water locked islands fol­lowed by mul­tiple small 12-seater trans­ports to the bor­der.  The bor­der guards inspec­ted our Laos Visa’s and entry cards and pen­al­ised all who had lost them (the vast major­ity of the Vang Vieng Crowd), then they poin­ted out down a simple road to Cam­bodia.  As Cesca and I walked I could not help but ima­gine snipers watch­ing our every move, and so we danced across the line More­cambe and Wise style, just to show them.

On the other side we were ushered into a more trans­ports and then onto a lar­ger bus.  The usual frauds were in oper­a­tion about chan­ging cur­rency, which involves a con­fid­ence trick in con­vin­cing you that any Lao­tian cur­rency can­not be changed any­where else on your trip.  This is, of course, rub­bish and the rate being offered is very bad.  How­ever, the rate all over Cam­bodia is bad and the best idea is to change all your Kip to US Dol­lars before enter­ing Cam­bodia at all. The real jour­ney then began in earn­est.  The north east of Cam­bodia is per­haps the most un-touristed area, and for us it was passing by in flashes out the win­dow.  Trekking is avail­able here, but like in all of this war rav­aged coun­try, step­ping off the path can be deadly.

We arrived that night in the dark­ness of the cap­ital.  There are very few times that I allow a tout to select my hotel for me but this was one of them, as we had no idea where about we were.  The hotel was actu­ally quite good and obvi­ously had a large crowd of tour­ists stay­ing.  We crashed out and awaited the next day.

The next day came with an unwel­come change of bus.  This new bus was stacked with wood.  That is to say, the entire inside of the bus, under every chair and in every nook and cranny, were large planks of wood that had been stacked and were tak­ing up all the room.  For a tall man this made the jour­ney even more dis­tress­ing.  Now the bus plied its way up the west­ern side of Cam­bodia towards our final destination.

All busses make stops, but the stop here was one I will not forget.

Spiderville is very well named.  The bus stopped and we all piled off to stretch our legs.  I was quite sleepy and did not take a clear look at the food items proffered by the lady tout sit­ting out­side.  It was only when my mind grabbed my eyes and fixed them onto the thing crawl­ing on the young lady’s arm that I real­ised she was selling deep-fried Tarantulas.

She saw my eyes widen, “You want spider?” She said while pulling the arach­nid back into place as it tried to scamper up her top. She then pulled it off and offered it to me, legs a-wiggling.

“Err, no.  No thanks very much, I am fine,” I man­aged to say back­ing away slightly.

The girl was sit­ting down on a bucket, which I thought was only her chair.  It was not.  She took my hes­it­ance to mean that I did not want this par­tic­u­lar spider and so she stood up from the bucket and showed me her selec­tion inside.  Twenty of the mon­sters were all tum­bling over each other to be my deep fried food choice.

“Bwah­hhh,” was an accur­ate trans­la­tion of my reply and I quickly moved on.

The next girl was selling deep fried spiders too and had a pile of paprika col­oured crawl­ers on a tray on her head.

After a few fur­ther spiders sellers I was able to pur­chase a Coke and make my way back onto the bus.

A few brave souls bought one to eat and a large offer­ing was passed around the bus.  Lenin, our trav­el­ling com­pan­ion, tried a leg but I passed it on,

“Sorry, I’m try­ing to cut down…”

The deep-fried spider is offered around.

The rest of the jour­ney was quiet and we rolled into Siem Reap about 3pm.  The sun still beat down on our heads as we organ­ised a tuk-tuk into the centre.  The city of Siem Reap is based around the river run­ning through the middle.  The arc of the river forms a T-junction with the main roads lead­ing off, head­ing towards the hos­pital and Angkor or fol­low­ing the flow towards the air­port.  The town-planners know that the draw of Angkor is mag­netic and so most of the roads into the city are lined with hotels built or being built.

We were planted in the main road and grabbed a cold cof­fee to cool down.  Our plan was to find a hotel and then organ­ise our trips to the Wats, but this was not eas­ily per­formed.  All the hotels in the centre of town were full and we had to settle for one 20 minutes walk from the night mar­ket.  We did get one piece of luck and organ­ised our Angkor trip with the driver of our tuk-tuk.

The Wats are clustered around the big Angkor Wat, but a few are fur­ther out and even one is way off in the moun­tains.  The tra­di­tional 3-day tour is to visit most of these with one sun­set and one early start for a sun­rise.  We arranged a late start for the first day and an early start for the third.  Some drivers are very exper­i­enced and know­ledge­able about the Wats and are more like fully-fledged guides.  Our driver was a young guy who could not offer these ser­vices, but was very sweet, so we hired him.  The price is entirely nego­ti­able and we did our best, how­ever, I do not think we got any sort of “good deal” and settled on $70 for the three days.

Our driver, just before I made him jump out of his skin.

We ate out that night after the short walk into town.  We ate at a local res­taur­ant on the main road and enjoyed a clas­sic selec­tion of vari­ous local del­ic­acies.  Even­tu­ally we asked what one strange dish was to be told by the owner that it was a rare type of local potato.  The descrip­tion exten­ded to a lot of gesticulation.

“How big is it?” asked Lenin.  He soon found out when the owner went and got one.  It was enorm­ous.  Quite how any­one found out that it was edible I couldn’t imagine.

Our meal, very nice local fare.  The mon­ster “potato thing” — “You eat it!?”

We met up with our guy in the morn­ing and he drove us out to the first of the Wats. There are many ways of doing the tour so to hit as many Wats as pos­sible, and our guide and Francesca had a long and heated debate about which order we should do them in.  After agree­ment, we drove up to the entrance and bought our three day tickets.

The magic of the temples of Angkor are almost bey­ond imagination.

I have met many people, in my travels, who have claimed to be “templed out” — tired of see­ing one sim­ilar look­ing temple after another.  I always ask them if they have been to Angkor, as the qual­ity of temples here truly eclipses any­thing else I have seen or heard about.  Angkor’s temples have been clas­sic­ally described as:

“…a rival to that of Solomon, and erec­ted by some ancient Michelan­gelo …grander than any­thing left to us by Greece or Rome, and presents a sad con­trast to the state of bar­bar­ism in which the nation is now plunged.”

Henri Mouhot

An Ele­phant guardian.

The redis­cov­ery of the temples was thanks in most part to west­ern explorers who found many of the num­ber deep within the jungles of the 18th cen­tury.  Most had given them­selves over to nature and took many years to be returned to glory, a task that is still ongo­ing.  One temple was left in its ori­ginal con­di­tion and this won­drous struc­ture has mul­tiple trees grow­ing out of the roof!

Over­grown with trees and half fallen down, some of the Wats are all the more won­drous for the damage

The basic Wat is a reli­gious city-state, act­ing as both state temple and some­times as cap­ital to the kings who built them.  Thus, they are often of a very large size.  The cent­ral motif is usu­ally the “temple moun­tain” and/or “gal­ler­ied temple” which rises majestic­ally above the city and rep­res­ent Mount Meru of the Hindu archi­tec­ture.  Mater­i­als used in con­struc­tion are the main way of dat­ing the struc­tures and the early Wats are com­prised of blocks of later­ite, which is a deeply pit­ted red rock sim­ilar to breezeblocks.  Later Wats are sand­stone and rep­res­ent the peak of the kings powers.

The amaz­ing carvings of the vic­tory of Vishnu / a Dev­ata – naked boob angels

At its height the Khmer empire ruled parts of what is now Thai­l­and and Viet­nam.  The Thai con­nec­tion draws a lot of trouble as the Thai’s often claim to be the right­ful inher­it­ors of the wats, some­thing that has caused con­flict between Cam­bodia and Thailand’s armies in the past.  A recent Thai act­ress almost ruined her career by sug­gest­ing as such pub­lic­ally and was forced to form­ally retract the state­ment lest her com­ments led to war.

A detail descrip­tion of all but a few of the wats is impossible here.  The sheer size of the his­tory on dis­play is enough to fill a thou­sand blog posts and this indeed is one of the won­ders of the area.  One thing I can com­ment on is the his­tory of their use.

Cam­bodia is a Buddhist coun­try, one of the main Theravada Buddhism coun­tries in the world.  How­ever, the Angkor temples were all at first con­struc­ted as Hindu sites (mainly wor­ship­ing Vishnu) and later con­ver­ted to Buddhism when the empire faded.  This means that the exper­i­ence of walk­ing around them is one of vis­it­ing an ancient and lost reli­gion.  All the Hindu art on the walls, and there is much, comes across as dead.  This feel­ing was later thrown into sharp relief when vis­it­ing India, as there it is the other way around.  There the Hindu’s have sup­planted the Buddhists and it is Hinduism that is prac­ticed and vibrant.

One of the smal­ler sites / Nandi the Bull, Shiva’s mount – a sure sign that this is a Hindu temple

Mostly the walls depict reli­gious teach­ings in the form of the Hindu epics.  Vishnu has come to Earth a num­ber of times in the guise of “Avatars” and the stor­ies of these vis­its are one of the main forms of Hindu know­ledge.  Many walls tell the story of one such incarn­a­tion; Krishna, who fought in a large war and was a genius lover.  Oth­ers tell the Hindu cre­ation of the world story, which has demons and gods pulling a large snake wrapped around a moun­tain and churn­ing the “Sea of Milk” to cre­ate life.

One dis­cour­aging sight at the wats comes at you the minute you step from your tuk-tuk.  The child labour here is rampant.  At some of the wats the level of hassle almost ruined the exper­i­ence.  At oth­ers you find small shrines together will a child minder, who wants a dona­tion “for Buddha”.  Many of the chil­dren are selling items rather than simply beg­ging, but still it is most upset­ting.  We pur­chased a book detail­ing the temples from one kid only to find another selling it far cheaper only a few stops down.  I par­tic­u­larly dis­agree with beg­ging, and at the price they wanted for their items, this is what they were doing.  There must be a fact­ory churn­ing out cop­ies of books on Angkor and then selling them cheap to fam­il­ies that send out the kids to sell them.  This heart break­ing aspect of Cam­bodia will be dis­cussed in greater depth in another blog entry.

That night we met up with our friends for one last night on the tiles together.  We headed down to the Tour­ist Street and into the Angkor What? bar around 7pm.  We left it at 3am in the morn­ing.  Our pos­ses­sions were memor­ies of dan­cing on tables, play­ing the “beer mat game” (a real meet­ing of two mas­ters between Lenin and I) and T-Shirts gif­ted to those who man­age to drink 3 buck­ets of whisky and coke.  We had four of these T-shirts between us and Lenin (almost) pulled.  As a last night out with our friends it was a great send off and I still today miss them (almost four months later.)

Cesca is the table elf / The crew dis­cuss the next drink

The next night we bid farewell and Lenin and Bob­bits headed out to the air­port.  It being Christ­mas Eve, Cesca and I upgraded our room for Christ­mas and settled in for another day at the mother-wat, Angkor Wat sun­rise on Christ­mas Day.

Up since 4am on Christ­mas day, Basho fights off the heat to record the “Xmas Mes­sage” video

More to come.

• The next entry is a spe­cial photo jour­ney through the Wats and Angkor Wat.
• After that comes more about Siem Reap and then our jour­ney to the south coast beaches for New Years!

Regards,

Basho

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