Advertisement
Published: December 6th 2006
Well - I've made it back after a whistle-stop trip around Cambodia. I'm so pleased I made the effort to go there, even if it was for only 6 days. Spending three days at the Temples of Angkor was one of the most unforgettable experiences of my life. A truly awesome place, with hundreds of temples with ornate and stunningly beautiful architecture, with Angkor Wat, the largest religious building in the world, it's centre piece. The two days I spent in Phnom Penh were memorable for very different reasons, with a visit to the Tuol Sleng (S-21) Museum where the Khmer Rouge committed some quite sickening atrocities on their own people, and to the Killing Fields of Choeung Ek for even more gruesome reminders of the genocide that took place there between 1975 and 1979.
The journey from Bangkok in Thailand to Siem Reap in Cambodia was a pretty gruelling one. Overall we had to change buses four times during the trip, each bus being in slightly worse condition to the one before it. The road from the border town of Poipet to Siem Reap is a notoriously bad one - pot-holes in the road is too polite a phrase
The memorial stupa at The Killing Fields of Choeung Ek
8,000 skulls of the victims stacked in shelves in the tower give a chilling reminder to the atrocities carried out there.- I'd say more like craters in a dust track! After leaving Bangkok at 6.30am we finally arrived in Siem Peap drained and exhausted at 8.30pm.
The hotel was slightly out of town, but with a nice airy room with air-con and satellite TV for $5 dollars a night I wasn't complaining too much! The following morning I met a very nice man called Vanna ("Mister Crazy Bean" to his friends) who agreed to take me round the temples for 3 days on the back of his moped for $30 dollars.
In three days you can only see a certain amount of temples. The Temples of Angkor cover a large area and you could easily spend a week here exploring them all properly. I got taken to the main ones, Angkor Wat, The Bayon, Angkor Thom, Ta Prohm, Banteay Srei and Bakong, as well as a few obscure ones off the beaten track.
Angkor was the capital of Cambodia's Khmer empire, and between the 9th and 13th centuries the Khmer kings built temple after temple, each one bigger and better than the last, cultimating in Angkor Wat - which really is bloody massive.
The Bayon was
At a Camodian wedding party
The bride and groom join us for another drunken photo! the first temple I went to. It looks nothing more than a pile of rocks from a distance, but once you get inside it you realise how stunning it is, with over 200 giant stone faces smiling down benignly at visitors. It was one of the most unusual and beautiful places I had visited so far on my whole trip. Nobody knows who the faces are meant to resemble - some seem to think they an old king called Jayavarman VII but no-one knows for sure.
Next up was Ta Phrom - also known as "Tomb Raider" temple, as part of the movie was filmed here on location. It's in the middle of a jungle and nature has been allowed to run amok here, with tentacle-like tree roots slowly strangling the stone work of the building. You feel like Indiana Jones wandering through the narrow corridors and passageways!!
Angkor Wat was amazing. I wouldn't say I felt the same sense of awe I felt when I first saw the Taj Mahal, but it was still bloody impressive. I think the reason I felt that way is the huge causeway you have to walk up to get to the
temple - when you first gaze upon it you are still some distance away. When you get up close though you truly appreciate it's size and the beauty of the place. It really is impressive. Surrounding the main temple complex are an 800 metre long series of amazingly exquisite bas-reliefs, including one call The Churning of the Ocean of Milk - a beautifully executed carving depicting lots of gods and demons churning up the sea to extract the elixir of immortality. I visited the following morning at sunrise and the whole place had a reveral sereneness about it.
The rest of my time at Angkor was spent visiting other temples that form part of this massive archaeologial site. They were all a moped ride apart, and Bakong and Banteay Srei were both really good, as well as one called Kbal Spean, which was the home of some really intricate riverbed carvings. There was a nice waterfall there as well so I was able to jump in and tick another "waterfall box"!
My mad moped driver, Mister Crazy-Bean (aka Vanna) very kindly asked if I would like to attend his best mates' son's wedding on my last day in
Siem Reap. I said I would be honoured to attend and experience a Cambodian wedding party. It was one hell of a do! We turned up at 12.30 in the afternoon and were greeted by the bride and groom and their parents. Once we were taken to our seats we had to wait for our table of eight to fill up with more guests before the food and drink arrived. It a very leisurely affair, with folk turning up sporadically into this large marquee that held around 200 people. When our table was full with the beers started coming. Everyone poured out a glass of beer, Mister Crazy Bean shouted something that sounded like "Choy Koy!!", everyone chinked their glasses together and drained their glasses in one go. I took a few sips then put my glass down, but Mister C-B slapped me on the back and said "No no Sean...you drink in one gulp!" - so I picked up my glass and drained it like everyone else! Before I had put my glass down, another round of beer had arrived, and the lads were pouring again. It seemed the Cambodian wedding tradition was to get completely trollied as quickly
Angkor Thom temple gate
A serene face gazes down... as possible. Luckily the food started arriving at that point. Eight courses in all, and I must admit some of the time I had no idea what I was eating. I tried something that looked and tasted like lamb, and Mister C-B said to me "So Englishman..you like dog meat?" I spat it out straight away, but then the rest of the table burst into guffaws of laughter. I got another slap on the back from my new friend - "Don't worry - my little joke - no dog meat on menu today!" That was the cue for the 5th "Choy Koy!" of the afternoon, and soon everyone was in good spirits. The music started afterwards, and the bride and groom came over for a chat. They were a very nice couple, and even though they couldn't speak a word of English, Vanna kindly translated my best wishes. A very drunk father of the bride managed to drag us up for a bit of Cambodian house music, and I was having a whale of a time. The afternoon finished with each table getting a bottle of Johnnie Walker whisky and a few cans of soda and coke each. That just
about finished me off. It was only 4 o'clock in the afternoon and I was in serious need of a lie down. I must have been drunk because I let an equally tipsy Mister Crazy Bean take me back to my hotel on the back of his moped! Not clever or funny! It was a great do though, and I felt priveleged to be invited and see how another culture celebrate a wedding.
By the way, I met a really nice couple on the coach to Siem Reap called Micheal and Helen.They were both teachers based in Cardiff taking a year off after they got married (that's what I call a honeymoon!). We ended up staying at the same hotel, and even though we did our own thing at the Angkor Temples, we got the same coach down to Phnom Penh together. We stayed in a very nice area just by Boeng Kak lake - there were loads of guest houses there, all with decks at the back that stretch out over the water. Very nice.
I had only one full day in Phnom Penh before flying back to Bangkok the following day, and Michael and I went
to see the S-21 museum and the killing fields. Helen abstained because she thought she'd find it too upsetting. Totally understandable.
When the Khmer Rouge took power in 1975, they decided it was "Year Zero" - they abolished money and private property, and ordered city dwellers into the countryside to cultivate the fields. Phnom Penh became a ghost town. Thousands of people who spoke foreign languages or wore spectacles were branded as "parasites" and systematically killed. Hundreds of thousands died of exhaustion, malnutrition and starvation. Almost 2 million people died between 1975 and 1979 as a direct result of Khmer Rouge policies. Vietnam invaded Cambodia and overthrew the Khmer Rouge, forcing them into the jungles on the border with Thailand. The Khmer Rouge continued a guerilla war throughout the eighties armed and financed by China and Thailand (with indirect US support) against the Vietnamese backed government in Phnom Penh. A peace accord was signed in Paris in 1991 between the warring factions, and very gradually Cambodia has returned to normality.
The S-21 detention centre was a sobering place to visit. It used to be a high school before being converted to it's use as a prison to interogate
and torture people. It has been left exactly as the Vietnamese found it when they invaded - apart from the bodies of the prisoners the Khmer Rouge butchered before fleeing. I left S-21 with tears in my eyes. Room after room of photos of the people murdered there - men, women, babies, children, pensioners. Anyone they deemed to be "intellectual" was rounded up, along with their whole family and taken to S-21. They were tortured until they signed confessions admitting to things they had never done, before being taken to The Killing Fields to be executed. I won't say here, but the things they did to those people were sickening and by far the cruelist I've ever seen. There are signs everywhere saying "silence please" but you can't talk in there anyway - you have too big a lump in your throat.
It was a bumpy tuk-tuk ride out to The Killing Fields of Choeung Ek. Once there, the centrepiece, amid the 129 mass graves, is a huge white stupa that serves as a memorial to th 17,000 men, women and children murdered there by the Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1978. Behind the stupas glass panels are the
skulls of 8,000 victims excavated here in 1980, rising upward, shelf after shelf. Some of the skulls bear witness to the fact that some people were bludgeoned to death in order to save precious bullets.
The whole day left us feeling emotionally drained. The bizarre thing is hardly any of the Khmer Rouge have been brought to trial for their crimes, due to bureaucratic bickering. Pol Pot died under house arrest in 1998. You would have thought, nearly 20 years after the event, justice would have been metted out by now.
Michael, Helen and I decided to see the sunset by the Tomle Sap river for our last evening in Phnom Penh. We went to a very nice place called The Foreign Correspondents Club (thanks for the tip Angela!), and had most enjoyable evening on the roof terrace drinking half price gin and tonics during a generous two hour happy hour! After that we went into a nice blues bar with some chilled live music (including a great version of "Wish You Were Here" by Pink Floyd).
So a nice way to round off my trip to Cambodia. I really liked it and I thought the people
were both friendly and welcoming. Despite ther horrors of the past, you can see tourism becoming more and more popular out there, especially with a huge draw card in the Temples of Angkor. Driving around Siem Reap, on thge outskirts of town, the whole place was a building site, with luxury hotel after luxury hotel being built to meet future demand. My recommendation would be get here sooner rather later before it becomes even more touristy!!
Off to Koh Tao now for some diving lessons!
Ciao for now.
Sean
Advertisement
Tot: 0.086s; Tpl: 0.016s; cc: 8; qc: 24; dbt: 0.0525s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
kim
non-member comment
ankor wat
hi sean, those stair at Ankor wat are horrendous arent they! i tried very hard to get some pics to show just how steep and high they were but you just cant. all i know is that i was crawling up them and was petrified. yet again, very odd seeing all these places again but wonderful too. Keep it coming big boy!