Cambodia

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Next stop, Cambodia. We took a bus from Saigon to Phnom Penh; Cambodia’s poverty was pretty evident as soon as we entered the country. At some point we were trying to figure out how much to tip for service. An American ESL teacher living in Phnom Penh (yes, another U.S. citizen who chucked it all in to live in Asia) said that a dollar doesn’t mean that much to us, the “rich” tourists, but it means a lot to the Cambodians, so we tried to keep that in mind when tipping. There is a lack of environmental awareness; garbage lay all over the side of the road, from the Vietnamese border into Phnom Penh. Not so much in Siem Reap, which is dependent on tourism (the temples of Angkor Wat), so keeps its streets relatively clean.

People call Cambodia “a little bit of heaven, a little bit of hell.” The Khmer (aka Angkor) Empire was a powerful empire in Southeast Asia until the 15th century; they left the Angkor Wat temple complex (heaven) as a reminder of their devotion to their gods. The Khmer Rouge were Cambodian Communists (rouge = red = communists); they left the killing fields (hell) as a reminder of their destruction. Start with the hell first. If anyone's seen the movie, The Killing Fields, you’ll know what the hell basically consists of, although pictures or movies cannot capture the horror of what went on there. We went to Choeung Ek, a few miles outside Phnom Penh, where 17,000 men, women and children were executed between 1975 and 1978 by the Khmer Rouge. Wikipedia (Wikipedia, The Killing Fields) says there are over 20,000 mass grave sites found so far in Cambodia; Choeung Ek is just one of over 300 “killing fields” throughout the country. 1.75 to 2.5 million people were killed during this time throughout the country, out of a population of about 8 million people; that is almost one out of four people. Bullets were too expensive to use on the victims; people died of torture, starvation or disease. Most of the buildings used at Choeung Ek have been bull-dozed over, but there are markers representing the sights of the atrocities, and there is an audioguide you can use to follow along. There were countless mass graves, with remnants of clothes and fragments of bones and teeth of the victims.

We also went to the Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocidal Crimes (S21), a detention center where people were held and tortured until they were sent to the Killing Fields (if they survived that long). It was once a school, taken over by Pol Pot’s security forces. The Khmer Rouge liked to keep records, so the rooms show photos of many of the victims, before and after their torture. You can also see the tiny cells victims were kept in. It was awful to see it; I only went into a few rooms. One of the few survivors was at the complex, selling his autobiography, which I bought, but have not read yet. We had planned on going to Myanmar, which is undergoing its own form of genocide, but decided against it.

And onto the “heaven” aspect of Cambodia: Angkor Wat, outside Siem Reap. We’ve been booking our hotels mainly through hotels.com, with mostly good results. There was a miscommunication in Siem Reap, though, and we didn’t have a reservation. We’ve been traveling on a budget, so not spending that much money on hotels. Because of the screw-up, hotels.com put us up at a fabulous hotel outside of town. Instead of squeezing into about 200 square feet (one hotel we stayed in had 147 square feet, including the bathroom), we got a family suite, with two bedrooms, a living room, with a fabulous pool. They also had a great New Years Eve buffet/party. One last comment on the Khmer Rouge. At the party, we met the owners of the hotel. She’s Cambodian, but speaks French fluently. I asked her where she learned French, and she said that she lived in Versailles. How/why did she get to France? Her family was killed by the Khmer Rouge when she was 14, and she ended up in France as an refugee orphan.

Angkor Wat is a complex of temples, the most famous being Angkor Wat itself, dedicated to the Hindu god Vishnu. Other temples in the complex were built to honor Buddha; some temples honored both. The temples were built between the 9th and 13th centuries. It is a HUGE complex, and you can’t see everything in a day. You really need to pace yourself, especially in the heat. The Angkor Wat temple was built in the 12th century. The details on the carvings are amazing. Lonely Planet says “the temples are the perfect fusion of creative ambition and spiritual devotion. The Cambodian ‘god-kings’ of old each strove to better their ancestors in size, scale and symmetry, culminating in the world’s largest religious building, Angkor Wat ... the ultimate expression of Khmer genius is matched by only a few select spots on earth ... one of the most inspired monuments ever conceived by the human mind. Stretching around the central temple complex is an 800 meter-long series of bas-reliefs, and rising 55 meters above the ground is a central tower, which gives the whole ensemble its sublime unity. The temple is the heart and soul of Cambodia ... the epicenter of Khmer civilization and a source of fierce national pride ... Simply unique, it is a stunning blend of spirituality and symmetry, an enduring example of humanity’s devotion to its gods” (Lonely Planet, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and Northern Thailand, 2017, p. 218). Angkor Wat contains more than 3,000 figures of dancers, with 37 different hairstyles. We had already seen some of the beautiful statuary in a museum in Phnom Penh, but this was truly amazing.

Many temples in the complex were built by Jayavarman VII, who was a believer in uniting, not dividing. He was Buddhist, but he included Hindu statues to honor that religion. He would spend five years having a temple built and often dedicated to a family member; after five years, finished or not, he would start on another temple and dedicate that to another family member. Jayavarman VII’s successor was a Hindu and wanted nothing to do with Buddhism, so had just about all of the Buddha images in one of the temples destroyed. (Undoing the work of one’s predecessors - sound familiar?) One detail pointed out by our guide - in what looks like a normal corridor with steps at the openings to each “room,” the openings continuously get shorter, so that by the center of the temple, visitors must bow down to get through. The people who worked on the temples volunteered their services to honor the gods. I spent some time pondering that people could create such beautiful architecture, with such attention to detail, using the tools they had, at that time period, not for money, but because of their devotion to the gods they believed in.

Ta Prohm is the temple built in the late 1100’s that people are probably most familiar with. This is the temple with 300-400 year old trees growing out of it. “Humanity first conquering nature to rapidly create and nature once again conquering humanity to slowly destroy (LP, p. 224). If you go through the temple by yourself, it looks impressive, but you may not appreciate the details. Our guide/driver pointed out several things, including what looks like a separation in one of the trees growing out of a building. If you look more closely, you see the exposed sculpture of a woman’s head where the tree is separated (we have a photo of it). The movie Tomb Raider was filmed at Ta Prohm.

Another interesting temple is Banteay Srei/Citadel of Women, or as our guide calls it, the Lady Temple. The “jewel in the crown of angkorian art ... some of the finest stone carving anywhere on earth” (LP, p. 226). Angkor Wat is bigger, but this was more beautiful. It was begun in 967, and each carving tells a story. We spent three days touring the temples, but only saw a few of them. We went into the pool at our hotel each day after visiting the temples to cool off.

One US$ is worth about 4,000 Cambodian riel, but visitors really need US dollars to survive here. Everything is quoted and paid for in US$ - hotels, restaurants; even bargaining for tuk tuks (local transportation) is done in dollars. Which is easy enough for American visitors, but maybe not for European or Asian visitors, who aren’t used to dollars. If you give $10 for a $8.50 tab, they’ll give you US$1 back, and the rest in riel. You have to ask if you can use the riel (mostly small things, like for something in a local kiosk).

Traffic is crazy here, too; there are five traffic lights for a city of 230,000 people. Like Saigon, if you want to turn left, you simply start moving in that direction, and oncoming traffic just drives around you. One thing that fascinated us was the process of buying gas. There were some gas stations, usually for cars. More often, though, we saw what looked like bottles of moonshine at kiosks on the side of the road. Turns out this was gas, usually for motorbikes. There is a funnel, and the kiosk owner just poured some of the “moonshine” into the tank.

Back to Bangkok for a few days, then Bali, where we met in 1991.

Lots of pictures for Cambodia (131)

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Photos

Street scene
Many houses were built on stilts because it was generally cooler under the house