Here I am in Laos, waiting for my Chinese visa, so it's again time to bring people up to date on the trip. I left off my last instalment as Joanne and I set off for Angkor, so let me write this chapter about our trip to Cambodia, which started early on the morning of May 17th.
There can be few land borders in Asia that offer such a stark contrast from one side of the frontier to the other as the Thai-Cambodian border. From Bangkok, an air-conditioned bus zipped along a modern divided highway that makes most Canadian roads look shabby in comparison. We dozed our way through a prosperous, utterly flat rice-growing countryside, passing through bustling provincial towns of well-stocked shops. The roads were full of new Toyota and Isuzu pick-up trucks, new tractors were hard at work plowing the fields, and industrial shrimp farms were springing up in the marshlands. Three hundered kilometres slipped by in four comfortable hours of reading, and suddenly the border town of Aranya Prathet loomed up in the windshield. Ten minutes in a tuk-tuk and the reality of the dividing line became clear.
The border was busy with trade, hundreds of handcarts bringing Thai manufactured goods, from plastic bottles to ice cream cones, along with mangoseens and rambutans and jackfruit, across into Cambodia. Nothing seemed to flow in the other direction except a tide of ragged children, hands outstretched and chanting softly "One dollar, mister." The gantlet of beggars stretched across the no-man's land separating the two border posts, and insistent hands pawed at us aw we queued up to have our passports stamped. A sign at the Thai border post warns that "Crossing the border to gamble is not safe, and your security cannot be guaranteed."
Once into Cambodia, a clutch of new luxury casinos, some still under construction, rose above the litter-strewn dirt lanes of Aranya Prathet's poor sister Poipet. The picture was one of abject squalour. Thais and Westernenrs seem impossibly wealthy next to the Cambodians in dirty, torn clothing sitting by the road. Shifty-eyed teenagers loitered with intent; we kept a firm grip on our bags and our wallets. The only Cambodians with wealth to flaunt seemed to be the bar girls and prostitutes crossing with their Western "boyfriends".
Transport touts had been badgering us in ones and twos while we waited at the immigration wickets. Once we emerged onto Cambodian soil, they descended like mosquitoes. "Where you go, mister? Siem Riep? We go private car. Right now, OK?" Joanne and I walk along, haggling as we go, sorting through the lies and sales pitches until we can stand it no longer and choose one guy at random to take us to Battambang. We have joined forces with Edward, a Dutch traveller who has cannily asked a neutral English-speaker, the local pharmacist, for the correct, local fare to Battambang: 120 Thai baht, or US$ 2.60. The baht, rather than the Cambodian riel, is the currency of choice in western Cambodia.
We settle into the back of a pick-up along with 8 Cambodians and sundry sacks of rice and jackfruit and our rather nervous-looking tout. At the first police checkpoint outside town, he is shaken down for a 60 baht bribe by the traffic police. Two hundred metres further, a second checkpoint sees our hapless tout get a ten-minute dressing down that leaves him in tears and sees Joanne, Edward and I turfed out onto the roadside. The next passing pick-up takes us, and we squeeze into the back seat of the truck, leaving our crestfallen tout sobbing beside the road.
Cambodia, for a completely flat country with relatively little traffic, has roads that are a national tragedy. Once, forty years ago, they were smoothly paved, but now decades of neglect, floods, war and landmines have left them destroyed. Our driver would have been a strong contender in the Paris-Dakar rally. He got up to 80 km/h on the brief paved sections, then slalomed expertly between the crater-like potholes before braking centimetres before the pavement ended entirely and easing down the escarpment to the tortured dirt surface that made up most of this, the major highway of the country. Given that this border area was the primary battlefield between the Cambodian government and the Khmer Rouge, I wondered how many of the huge potholes were originally caused by landmines.
We bounced around in a parody of Brownian motion inside the truck for an hour before turning off south to Battambang. For a few kilometres, it seemed as though the road would improve, but it was a cruel tease; soon we were amidst and inside craters even larger than before. We staggered from the truck after three hours shaken and bruised, relieved that from Battambang we could take a boat.
For the second-largest city in the country, Battambang was a disappointment. Huge puddles drowned the dirt tracks that passed for streets; stray dogs nosed through reeking piles of garbage. The graceful colonial buildings promised in the Lonely Planet seemd to be bombed our and abandoned. The only building which had been painted in the last decade was our hotel, doing well on the takings from foreign aid workers. A mine-sweeping unit was staying there overnight. Joanne and I were glad to escape the next day, leaving Edward to explore the charms of Battambang in greater depth.
The speedboat ride cost US$15 a head, but anything seemed preferable to another truck ride. For three hours we sped through the meanering lower stretches of a very narrow river, passing floating fishing villages and fish traps that provided perfect photo opportunites in the warm early-morning light. Elaborate bamboo fishing derricks lifted nets out of the water for small boys to remove a handful of small wriggling silvery shapes before dipping the net in again. Brahminy kites, drongos and egrets circled overhead, joined, as we entered the great Tonle Sap inland sea, by thousands of openbill storks circling far overhad on thermals. Another half-hour brought us across the northern end of the Tonle Sap, never in more than a metre of water. The lake fills to four times its surface area and many times its normal volume at the end of the rainy season, but we were crossing it at its lowest water level. We transferred into a shallow-draft longtail boat for the last few kilometres, churning up the muddy lake bottom with our propeller. Frequently a crewman would jump overboard to wade and push while the pilot poled. As a torrential rain squall broke, a ride on the back of a motorcycle brought us the last fifteen kilometres into Siem Riep.
As soon as the rain had abated, it was time to see some ruins. We hired a motorcycle taxi each, bought a week's pass to the ruins for a very steep $60 and headed for Angkor. I first saw the ruins of Angkor in 1996 and was overawed by them. I had seen dozens fo other impressive ruins since then; would I still feel the same magic? As we approached the huge moat around Angkor Wat, I held my breath. Suddenly, above the majestic jungle trees, five rounded sandstone towers soared into the sky. "Look!" I yelled to Jooanne. She began to flap her arms in excitement. We drove around to the west entrance and left our drivers to their siesta as we crossed the moat on a huge causeway.
I needn't have worried. Every step seemed to envelop me further in a historical spell. A huge entrance tower, carved with graceful apsaras (heavenly maidens from Hindu mythology) gave access through the great wall, a kilometre on each side, that rings the inside of hte moat. Inside a raised walkway led us on to the vast bulk of the main temple, soaring upward in a vast symbolic representation of Mt. Meru, the Hindu equivalent of Mt. Olympus. The size of the temple is astounding; bigger by far than any European cathedral, larger even than the Temple of Karnak in Egypt, it may well be the biggest single religious structure in the world, with a central building over 200 metres square and 70 metres high, surrounded by the wall and the moat.
The raised walway leads through a cleared, manicured lawn that gives the air of an English country house. A railing in the form of a serpent's body encloses the walkway, leading us on to the temple itself. Up we go, past the wonderful bas reliefs, up past the Hall of a Thousand Buddhas, up a giddy, steep staircase that belongs on a Mexican pyramid, and suddenly we are atop the temple, surrounded by apsaras with their Mona Lisa smiles, gazing out across the ruins and the flat jungle beyond. The dozens of tourists around us fade to insignificance beside the scale and majesty of the conception, revealed from our apsara's eye vantage point.
But Angkor Wat is about more than its massive size. The hundreds of apsaras, no two exactly alike, gaze out playfully from every blank surface. Hundreds of Buddha statues adorn the dark interior passageways, clothed in orage roabes, surrounded by burning incense sticks tended by shaven-headed white-robed pilgrims seemingly as old as the temple. These statues are later additions, for Angkor Wat is a Hindu temple, dedicated to Vishnu the Preserver. It dates from the time, 800 years ago, when Hinduism, borne eastward from India by traders from the subcontinent, was the dominant religion not just in Cambodia but also in modern-day Vietnam, Thailand and parts of Indonesia.
Hindu mythology provides the subject material for my favourite feature of Angkor Wat, the 800 metres of bas-relief carvings that surround the lowest level of hte temple. We drifted around, inspecting the intricate details of the battles from the epics Ramayana and Mahabharata ( ancient India's equivalent of the Odyssey and Iliad ), a graphic depiction of the 37 heavens and 32 hells awaiting in the afterlife, and, perhaps most famously, The Churning of the Ocean of Milk. A long line of grimacing demons and serene gods strain to pull on the body of hte serpent Vasuki, wrapped around Mt. Mandara. The mountain rests on the back of a giant tortoise, an incarnation of Vishnu, who is keeping the mountain from sinking during the thousand years that the churning continues. They are trying to produce an elixir of immortality, but an important byproduct is the apsaras that float above the scene and go on to adorn the walls of Angkor Wat and the other temples.
Wandering back through the lower levels, we stopped to chat with orange-robed monks from the modern monastery in the Angkor Wat grounds. Their flamboyant colours contrasted dramatically with the sober grey of the ancient stones. Joanne got a few good pictures of monks, and even got one of them to blow bubbles out over the temple. Happily, we sat on the temple steps and watched the sun set.
If there were no other temples than Angkor Wat here, this would still be an amazing site. As it is, though, there are dozens of other ruins scattered around the landscape, remnants of the great imperial age of the Khmers, when they controlled modern-day Cambodia and much of Laos and Thailand and battled the Cham empire for control of southern Vietnam. The next morning, we set out to visit two more of the star attractions of Angkor: the Bayon and Ta Prohm. The Bayon, constructed about a century after Angkor Wat, is Buddhist rather than Hindu; the state religion had changed, as it was doing all over Southeast Asia, as Buddhism and, in the south, Islam supplanted the gods of Mt. Meru. The great attraction of the Bayon are the over two hundred giant stone faces adorning each side of every one of the towers of the temple. The faces, broad-cheeked and thick-lipped, remind me of the monumental faces of himself that Ramses II had carved all over Egypt. The faces are supposed to represent the all-seeing nature of the Buddha but it is widely supposed that they are portraits of King Jayavarman VII( 1181-1219), the greatest builder of Angkor. He rebuilt the Khmer capital after it was sacked by the Cham in 1177. All but one of the numerous temples that he commissioned features these monumental faces.
Joanne had wanted for years to come to Angkor specifically to see these faces with their enigmatic half-smiles. We spent happy hours snapping photos of half-shadowed faces, doging the huge camera crew from a Thai TV channel who were doing the same thing. Eventually tiring of this, we set off to see the Bayon reliefs.
The Bayon has not just one but two layers of relefs. They are less monumental and more lively than tose of Angkor Wat, showing details of everyday life. The outer level shows scenes of battle between Jayavarman VII's army and the Cham enemy, distinguished by odd flower-petal-shaped helmets. Interspersed among the marching ranks and armourd elephants are scenes of daily existence: fishing on the Tonle Sap, cutting and polishing stones for a new temple, playing chess on a boat, the king watching a circus performance. The animals of that long-gone world are still around today: egrets, storks, wild boar, chickens, deer. Others, sadly, have all but vanished form the Angkor area: tigers (often shown chasing and eating Hindu holy men),. leopards, rhinoceri. The clothing, the pastimes and work of the common people have scarcely changed over the years; oxen still plow rice fields around Siem Riep and fishermen still cast nets by hand from dugout canoes.
After lunch we drifted through the immense but relatively unimpressive ruins of Angkor Thom, the new capital founded by Jayavarman VII, before setting off for Ta Prohm. Only partly cleared and restored by archaeologists, it still exudes the atmospere it must have had when early European travellers like Henri Mouthout "rediscovered" Angkor in the 1860s. In fact, Ta Prohm has such an air of what an undiscovered temple should look like that it was recently used as a set for the film "Tomb Raider II". Huge trees still grow out of and over the ruins, tearing the temples apart stone by stone, decade by decade. The roots of these immense trees spread a hundred metres from the tree trunk, pushing up through the stones that litter the ground. Joanne and I shot picture after picture of the wonderful desolation, the triumph of the vegetable kingdom over the works of man.
The next day was devoted to a longer field trip, out to Banteay Srei and Kabal Spean. I had been unable to visit these sites in 1996 because of the danger from Khmer Rouge gunmen, so I was keen to see them this time. Banteay Srei embodies all that was glorious about ancient Angkor and all that is wrong with modern Cambodia. The 28-kilometre drive out brought us past the zone of relative tourism-generated affluence around Siem Riep, out into a countryside of desperate rural poverty, where transport was at a premium, where bicycles laden with 60 kilos of firewood or three children shared the road with ox-carts and tiny 125 cc motorcycles carrying four adults or, often, an immense trussed pig or hundreds of live chicks. The only new vehicles on the road were new white Toyota Land Cruisers with UNICEF or UN World Food Program or Save the Children or The Halo Trust (Princess Diana's anti-land-mine charity) written on the door. There was no electricity, and the houses could have come straight from the Bayon reliefs. When we got to Banteay Srei, the entrance was lined with child beggars or hideously maimed landmine victims. Somehow it seemed wrong to be enjoying the delicate artistry of the temple and shooting off rolls of film while we were surrounded by such abject misery.
The temple itself was a joy of rococo carvings of vines, and delicate reliefs cover every square centimetre of the red sandstone. It seems to pulse with life and vitality, and reminded me strongly of the great temples of Khajuraho in India. It was founded by a private citizen, and somehow seems more human in size and conception than the huge royal temples. Over the doorways were Hindu scenes: Indra, god of the weather, seated on his three-headed elephant; Krishna (another incarnation of Vishnu) lifting a mountain with one hand to give shelter to shepherds; the demon king Ravana shaking Mt. Kailash to get the attention of a meditating Shiva; Kama, the god of love, shooting an arrow at Shiva. It was a pleasant way to learn some of the mythology of Hinduism.
Armed with a watermelon and some sandwiches, we pressed on further, along dirt roads, to Kabal Spean, where the upper reaches of the river that flows through Angkor are adorned with sacred lingams and carvings of Vishnu. As the water flows over them, the river is sanctified. The carvings make for wonderful time exposures, but sadly many have been stolen to feed the international market in stolen art and antiquities.
The last three days passed in a blur of temples. One day we went Roluos,to the oldest temples in the area, comparatively unimpressive brick structures that made Joanne sick. (Or maybe it was a dodgy curry the night before.) I spent that afternoon wandering past the Angkor bas-reliefs again, trying to fix them in my memory. The next day, we teamed up with Edward, who had arrived the day after us, utterly unimpressed by Battambang, to visit some of the outlying temples on the Grand Circuit. We started with the temples built just after Roluos and before Angkor Wat, trying to follow the chronology of the construction. The East Mebon had wonderful carved elephants staring out over the rice fields, while Prasat Kravan had eerie reliefs lit by a shaft of light from the mid-day sun.
Then it was time for more Jayavarman VII faces and dancing apsaras. We began to notice how all of his temples, even the Bayon, bore marks of hasty, sloppy work and unfinished bits, and how all the thousands of carvings of the Buddha on the temple walls had been methodically chiselled out. Apparently there had been a reversion to Hinduism after his death that had resulted in this anti-Buddhist iconoclasm. As well, once a king was dead, it was evidently difficult to keep his projects going, as his successors had their own projects to attend to. Jayavarman VII's reign was the high point of Angkor influence; from then on, the Khmer lost ground to the Thais and the Cham until the Thais delivered the final blow in the 1400s by sacking Angkor. The unfinished carvings and shattered Buddhas bear witness to the decline and conflict that engulfed the empire. It has been estimated that the total population of Cambodia may only now be reaching the level it was at under the Angkor kings; certainly, the general prosperity of the country doesn't seem to have increased since then.
Onward in a final burst of temples: the water temple of Neak Pean, with its equine incarnation of the Buddha saving drowning sailors from a shipwreck; more Tomb Raider scenery at Ta Som (a tree engulfing one of the huge stone faces) and Preah Khan (fallen ceilings and piles of rubble impeding access to an apsara worshipped as the likeness of Jayavarman's queen). A final farewell to Ta Prohm and the Bayon, and it was time to head back to Bangkok. After a five-hour spinal massage (this time in a bus), we were back at the chaos of Poipet, and another five hours saw us safely back in Bangkok, glad to be back in a country that seems to work.