Cambodia

What a great country Cambodia is! Despite all the hardship that the guide book forewarned me about I had a great time in Cambodia. Wonderful people, great sights to see and fun things to do left a lasting impression on me. What more could one want from a country!

My journey from Bangkok was one of contransts. The smooth, swift bus journey from Bangkok to the border couldn't have been more different to the several hours and an overnight stop in Sisophon that I had to endure to travel the 150km to Siem Reap. The potholes were so big at times that they were more more like bomb craters and swallowed the pick-up truck whole! One delight that compensated for the discomfort was the fact that I got my first real bread in 3 months in Sisophon. Children were selling delicious, freshly-baked baguettes to the people about to leave on the on their long pick-up journeys. It's the simple things that you miss when you're away from home for so long.

Siem Reap is the modern town nearest to the ancient temples of Angkor. Depsite everybody primarily using it as a base to see the temples, it's a nice town in it's own right. I spent several pleasant hours walking around the market, chatting with the locals and having fun. I met a monk at the local pagoda and he took me along to the school for an hour where he taught the children the buddhist mantras. It was interesting to see that the monks only seem to enter the order for a few months or years and the commitment usually isn't for life. The main aim often seems to be to get and education and monks often want to chat and prcatise their English. Many of them say they want to work in the tourist industry after they finish their time at the Pagoda and make lots of money... something that struck me as rather odd for a buddhist monk, but things are rarely as you'd expect them in Cambodia. Another stark contrast that confronts everybody before long in Cambodia is that between it's friendly people and it's horiffic recent past. Before I'd even got to the temples at Angkor, I'd been shown a stupa (a buddhist monument) which was a memorial to the victims of the Khemer Rouge and contained the skulls and bones of numerous victims.

The temples of Angkor were the main drawcard in Siem Reap and in the end I bought a week long ticket to visit them so I could enjoy them at a leisurely pace. I'm glad I did so as people with 1 or 3 day tickets seemed to be rushed to see them all. My first stop, and the most renown temple there, was Angkor Wat. The site is huge measuring 1.5km by 1.3km and the architecture is very hansomely proportioned. Unfortunately, a lot of the decorative sculpture there has either been stolen, removed for safe keeping, or damaged by the elements and so the experience was less dramatic that it might have been. Nevertheless it's an imposing place and fortunately the beautifully carved Apsaras (heavenly nymphs) and the Gallery of the Bas-Reliefs have remained largely intact due to their positioning and give and indication of what the temple must have looked like when it was newly constructed.

A portion of one of the Bas-Reliefs.

Beautiful, dancing Apsaras.

The next major temple, and a favrouite among many visitors, is the Bayon. Again it has some Bas-Reliefs (one even depicting some ancient jugglers!) but it's most striking feature are the more than 200 huge faces carved around it's towers.

The Bayon temple.

A close-up of one of the towers.

I also visited the exquisitly carved Banteay Srei temple and the close by Kobal Spein or 'River of 1000 Lingas' where the river-bed has been carved with images and lingas (Shiva phalluses) in a very eerie way.

Shaddowy sculptures at Kobal Spein, the river of 1000 lingas.

Some of the most interesting temples were those that were still covered with jungle. They could easliy have been straight out of an Indiana Jones movie and, in fact, a portion of the new Tomb Raider movie was suppoed to have been filmed here recently.

The temple of Ta Prohm, still deep in the jungle.

There were many more temples that would take far to long to describe here, but one group that I enjoyed was the Towers of the Chord Dancers. It was a line of small towers which local legend says were used to string ropes between for tight-wire performances for the king who would sit on a platform opposite. The archeaologists don't believe this is true, but it just goes to show that circus skills must have played a strong roll in Khemer culture. This place was also the site of a rather unnerving incident for me. While walking around the area, I very nearly stood on a small, green snake that was slithering across the grassy path. I didn't spot it until I was astride it. I jumped away as it turned round to look at me menacingly. It gave me a shock at the time but when my heart had slowed to a more normal pace I thought less of it as it was only a small snake and I thought it couldn't have been very dangerous. However, a couple of days later when I described it to my moto driver, he said "Oh! You are very lucky! If he had bitten you you would have had only 20 minutes to live!". It might have been just a coincidence, but that day was Christmas day and although I didn't receive any presents in the conventional way, I think I had more than my fair share of good fortune come to me.

I spent some nice afternoons at the temples just reading a book, writing the odd postcard and generally absorbing the atmosphere. Having the whole week with which to visit the temples I was also able to take an occasional morning or afternoon away from the temples when saturation point was getting near.

I saw the land-mine musuem which was a very interesting little place but not officially sanctioned in any way and the thought did cross my mind that something unfortunate could happen if any of the defused land-mines that were literally piled-up there hadn't been completely made safe. One of the people I met actually asked if he could take a mine home with him as a souviner! His request was turned down, though he was given a sharp spiked object that was tipped with poison and left lying on the ground for the enemy to stand on. He said that if the customs officiers asked him what it was, he said he would claim it is some kind of barbecue utensil. Cambodia is rather strange like that. There don't seem to be too many rules to obey. On more than one occasion I was stopped by a policeman who offered to sell me his official police badge for $3! When they earn only $7 per month, it's easy to understand why these things happen.

The silk farm just outside Siem Reap was a delightful place where I was given a very comprehensive and informative tour about the production of silk products from breeding the catepillars and moths and extracting the threads from their crysalyses to dying and weaving the fabric. I also had a possibly my best massage every at Angkor Massage where blind masseurs give excellent shitatsu.

One experience that made me smile was a trip to the barber's. I needed a haircut so I popped into a small Khemer barber's near the hotel. For one dollar I got the full treatment, this included a hair cut with hand powered clippers, a head and neck massage and a full shave. Full being the operative word. He shaved my forehead, my earlobes, the tops of my ears, the bits between my eyebrows and my eyeballs and just about everywhere whether there was hair there or not! I've no idea why they do this but I made sure I gave the barber a generous tip for service above and beyond the call of duty.

It was time to leave Siem Reap and Angkor so I went to watch one last sunset from the top of Angkor Wat. I waited there long after the sun had gone down, until there was barely enough light to see by to climb down. It was the perfect end to a amazing week.

I took the fast boat to Phnom Penh so I would be able to celebrate New Year there. It was rather like a narrow boat propelled by a rocket - a rather bizarre form of transport. Most people sat on top and as we got out into open water where there was quite a swell; the bow wave was breaking over the rear three quarters of the boat drenching everyone there in minutes. I was fortunate to be close enough to the front to escape the worst of the spray. However, there were 2 boats going to Phnom Penh that day and if the other one hadn't broken down and we hadn't had to tow it for a while before abandoning it in the middle of the Tonle Sap (the great lake) then we would have been there by mid-morning. As it was I was sitting out in the sun during the hottest part of the day and when I got to Phnom Penh I was rather sunburnt despite a generous application of factor 30 and desparate attempts to hide under various items of clothing.

I arrived in Phnom Penh in time to celebrate a great New Year. The party started at the guest house where there was free food and Khemer party games. The games were great and Potato Ruler was the best one by far. The only way I can think of to describe it is as a game of conkers with potatoes tied round your waste, crossed with a pancake race. The party ended at 11pm (yes, 11pm) with some rather dangerous hand-held roman candles which spat flames all over the maternity hospital across the road. I guess when your country is full of land mines these things seem quite tame. The party relocated to the Heart of Darkness where midnight was a rather vague event as nobody in Cambodia seems to know the exact time. Despite that hic-up, the party continued until the small hours started to get big.

Phnom Penh is a great city (it has a circus school so it must be cool). There weren't a huge number of interesting sights but it had something intangable that was very likeable.

The Tuol Sleng museum at the former school which became the concentration camp where the Khemer Rouge tortured thousands of people before sending them to the killing fields was a very powerful place where you could simply walk round and see the terrible conditions that the people were kept in. One room showed pictures of the victims carefully taken by the Khemer Rouge who documented in great detail everything that happened there. The faces in the images tell an awful story.

Another stark remider of the horror of the Khemer Rouge regime was the killing fields of Choeung Ek just outside the city. Over 17,000 people were killed here and dumped into mass graves. A stupa now stands as a memorial to them and contains the skulls of the bodies that have been exhumed - many still lie in the graves. It makes very plain the scale of the atrocities comitted.

The memorial stupa at Choeung Ek.

Phnom Penh did have some more upbeat sights. The markets are amazing places, alive with all sorts of activity. I spent several easy hours just wandering around taking in the sights and sounds. I joined the Hash House Harriers for an afternoon. They organise a paper chase followed by a beer session which was great fun. My favrouite, though, had to be the Sovanna Phum shaddow puppet show. The characters were really brought to life by the puppeteers and the whole show was a joy to watch even though it was all in Khemer, though we were provided with a short summary of the stories told in English.

Wat Phnom, the place where the city of Phnom Penh was founded - according to legend.

After Phnom Penh I spent a few days at the beach in Sihanoukville where there are wonderful beaches with sqeaky white sand. I did a day trip into Ream National Park where we discovered a beach that could have been the beach.

Ream National Park.

I also made a trip north from Phnom Penh to a town on the Mekong River were there is a small population of freshwater Irrawaddy dolphins. I thought I'd have to wait for hours for a small glimpse of the creatures but to my amazement they were visable for most of the time I was there. I sat for 3 hours seeing them playing and jumping while the sun set across the river. On the way back to Phnom Penh, I stopped off at a small town called Skuon which is famous for a Khemer delicacy - Spiders! I tried on and was plesantly surprised to discover it tasted rather like barbecued chicken. Unfortunatley I don't have a picture to put on the website but rest assured that there are some in my other camera and I'll try to remember to put one up when I get back home.

That's about it for Cambodia. I took the bus trip to the boarder along highway #1, which I'm sure my moto driver from Sien Reap would have described as 'a very dancing road!', and crossed over into Vietnam...