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Published: October 15th 2008
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Plet and his tuk tuk
Our guide around Siem Reap and the temples at Angkor The next three days were spent viewing the temples of Angkor. I do not want to take anything away from their majesty or beauty, but after a while they do all seem to merge into one mass of falling down stone and you start to suffer temple fatigue.
The ‘ancient’ temples of Angkor are an incredible proposition - the first time Angkor Wat appears in front of you, it is breathtaking, and the scale of the ruins - littered over 120sq kms of countryside is impressive to say the least - it’s just that they’re not very, well, ancient.
Much is made of the age of the temples, but the oldest ones were built circa the 10th century. Now, my mother works in a hotel which is a castle which was built around that time and it it still standing, people sleep in it, in the upstairs. It is not reduced to a pile of rubble. So does that just mean that the materials or the workmanship was shoddy in Ankorian times? Some of the later temples (also reduced mainly to rubble) were added in the 16th to 18th centuries - my dad has jokes that are older than that.
So whilst I don’t want to take away anything from the slightly gothic beauty of the temples - of which those that are becoming lost to the jungle - with roots and branches breaking through and fusing with the stone, are by far the most impressive - I would query whether they should be using ‘ancient’ in their marketing literature, especially when the Egytians were doing the same sort of thing, on a massive scale 2000 odd years before.
The Egyptians didn’t have the humidity to contend with, or the ever encrouching jungle, or the bullets and bombs of the civil war and the Khmer rouge, or decades of looters stealing the heads of statues and chiselling the bas reliefs from the walls to sell abroad.
Even now, when the temples are guarded 24 hours a day, artifacts can still be stolen to order for those willing to pay. Slowly, looted items are appearing in auction rooms, or are found in private collections around the world, and are being ‘gifted’ back to the Cambodian people from whom they were stolen. Heads are united with an appropriate body and found a new home in the National museum at Phnom Penh, or the new multi-million dollar museum at Siem Reap. It is unlikely that any of the recovered items will ever return to their original sites. The temples are just too far gone. Efforts to restore of even just maintain the various sites are an uphill struggle.
We decided to spend our last day in Siem Reap having a bit of a lie-in and wandering around the town. The previous four days had been a flurry of temples and tours and it was nice to have the opportunity to go for a dander and take in the town. We also wanted to buy some books for our tuk-tuk driver, Plet who has been trying to improve his English. We had arranged to have dinner with Plet that evening and he had promised to take us somewhere where the locals go, a little out of town.
So we met Plet just before sunset and he drove us out of the city along the banks of the river to a restaurant built on stilts rising above the flooded paddy fields, where we sat on the floor on a large rattan mat. There was no menu, so we left it to Plet to do the ordering, which would be a shared meal ‘Cambodian style.’ We were unconcerned, as we hadn’t seen anything particularly unusual on Khmer menus and as we arrived I saw a heaped plate of the fresh shrimp with pepper sauce we had enjoyed so much the day before being delivered to our neighbours.
As we waited for our meal, we asked Plet what we were to expect of the three dishes he had ordered. He paused, as if looking for the correct words.
“One is a bird, with a long neck that eats fish and lives in the paddy fields, the second is a small bird, that does not fly but moves very fast and the third is pork.”
“Ah, pork.” I responded, relieved that at least one of the items was an animal I could at least identify in a line-up. I guessed the first one may be some sort of heron type bird, but hadn’t really seen any birds in any of the paddy fields, so couldn’t be sure. I was unsure about the second, although I was pretty sure it wasn’t going to be a chicken, which is the only flightless bird I could think of that wasn’t a penguin or an emu, neither of which are indigenous to Cambodia, and remembered on reflection that chickens are only flightless if they have had their wings clipped.
“No, f-r-o-g” Plet replied, taking more time over his pronunciation this time. Excellent. Having spent most of this trip as a virtual vegetarian, with only the odd prawn or chicken curry confirming my omnivore status, this was going to be a lot of unusual meat in one go.
When the food arrived, there was enough for about 6 - not one slight tuk-tuk driver who kept repeating the disclaimer “I am sorry, I am not dying of hunger” and two slightly out of their depth Brits. The ‘bird with the long neck’ arrived in a curry style dish with green beans, and appeared to be made almost entirely out of the aforementioned neck as it consisted mainly of bones. The frog put in its appearance in a quite delicious citrus scented soup, and if we had been better accustomed to the birds of Cambodia, then we may have been able to identify the flightless bird, arriving as it did fried in it’s entirety.
The views overlooking the paddy fields and lake were exceptional and uninterrupted by buildings made for a stunning red sunset, and we had a thoroughly pleasant evening learning more about our new friend Plet.
Our time in Siam Reap had been enlightening and enjoyable and I’m not sure I was quite ready to leave. But leave we must, so after dinner, we packed our bags again in preparation for our bus trip to Phnom Penh in the morning.
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