Cambodia, Angkor What??

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You will definitely need a brew for this one and maybe a bite to eat.....it’s the biggest blog yet!

There is nothing quite like the feeling you get when you arrive in a deserted city late at night, restless from the bus ride, you then have to find somewhere to stay....it’s a city, how hard can it be? Well, first you need to establish where you are on the tiny map in our BIBLE (Lonely Planet; South East Asia on a shoestring) when all the streets have numbers assigned instead of names. Odd numbers go north to south, even number go east to west. This seems easy enough until you realise that half the streets listed in the map are missing and some other random number, totally out of sequence is in its place (if you can find the tiny sign at all). We needed to get to the river, a 50/50 chance of either north or south and the bags were starting to get slightly heavier with every step.... we got it wrong not once, but TWICE. The first time Nat was right and I convinced her we were going in the wrong direction, 10 minutes later we were both convinced that I was wrong and were actually further away than when we started. I kept quiet until we decided on somewhere to stay!

This place is Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia. On exiting the bus, 2Km from where we needed to be, there was rubbish piled high up on the sides of the main street and it stunk. Not long into the journey Nat and her backpack nearly jumped on to my shoulders as a big rat (this rat could have eaten a small child) scurried along across our path. Not the best start to the stay!

The next morning the rubbish was all gone and the city looked quite clean in places. The 2 major things to see here in Phnom Penh are centred on the rule and atrocities of the Khmer Rouge’s communist movement of the 1970’s. Now take note this brief history lesson is important (and interesting if you saw the sights!)

“Straight after the end of the American war which spread into most of Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge guerrillas were fending off Americans when the Americans retreated and stopped the aerial bombardment. Mr Pol Pot who was head of the Khmer Rouge party told the people that they were all safe as the Khmer Rouge had defeated the Americans and that he was now the leader of the country. Not long after Pol Pot told the people that the Americans were to start revenge bombings and that everyone should evacuate to the rice fields. Here, he and his disciples implemented a peasant dominated communist society; which meant everyone was forced to work in the fields for up to 15 hours a day, with just a few tablespoons of rice porridge each day. Mr Pol Pot saw intellectuals as a threat to his idealism and begun a drive to systematically wipe them all out. He would ask for volunteers to help rebuild the city; engineers, teachers, doctors were promised a better life and a respite from field work but instead they and their families were sent back to the city and to the former primary school dubbed S21, a prison. Young children were brainwashed, given power and force to torture innocent people, with some even killing their parents.”

History lesson over!

We visited S21 on our second day in Phnomn Penh. In the 8 months of the Khmer Rouge oppressive over 4000 people were sent here to be interrogated. This was one of many interrogation facilities throughout Cambodia and has been left pretty much as it was when the only 8 survivors were released following liberation by Vietnam; blood stains are still literally visible on the floor. All the torture tools of the trade were still in place only the mutilated corpses had been removed, but in each room a photograph of how it was actually found was hung unceremoniously on the wall.

We spent much of the morning wondering around the site, occasionally passing some visiting Cambodians in floods of tears who will have experience this unbelievable and horrific regime. The reformed Cambodian government post liberation still consisted of the leaders from the Khmer Rouge and the murderers held a place on the UN Security Council until 1998. They are now on trial for war crimes; in fact they went on trial the day after we visited S21 in November.

From S21 and the slave driven rice fields, if not already dead these people were then subjected to further torture and then execution at the Killing Fields situated just outside the city. We visited here on the same day in the afternoon. In total nearly 2 million people were killed across Cambodia in little over 8 months, the age gap in the population is clearly visible when walking around anywhere in Cambodia with most people being 35 or under. In the particular killing field we visited, they could ‘process’ 400 people a day. Mass graves contained up to 1600 corpses and some of the exhumed skulls still have blindfolds around the eyes.

After two very sombre and thought provoking days we left Phnomn Penh and headed north to Siem Reap, home of the 8^th wonder of the world and the largest religious complex ever created, Angkor Wat. Siem Reap is the base for every one visiting the temple complexes but is in-fact one of the best towns we have visited, surpassing even Laung Prabang in Laos which is a world heritage site. One thing we did notice was the Cambodians courteous, welcoming and helpful attitude towards the Westerner’s (us). This is somewhat different to other countries in SE Asia where helpfulness is usually interpreted as a scam or a ‘you come visit my shop’! We thought this maybe something to do with the previous problems they have been through as a nation (as mentioned before).

We planned to purchase our tickets for the religious complex one evening so we could go to see the sunset then return the following morning for a full day extravaganza of temple spotting. Setting off on our free shopping bikes borrowed from our guest house, we were soon in a race against the sun on the 12Km to the temple complex, trust me, these machines are not designed for anything more than a moderate trundle to and from the market but still we made good progress. There’s nothing more satisfying than overtaking another cyclist, fully shrink wrapped in lycra when we are straddling the most pathetic excuse for a bike I have ever seen! Anyway that’s another story! We got our tickets and rode to the temple which was recommended for the sunset views over the flood plains of the Ton Sai Lake. We soon ‘had a jog on’ as the sun was accelerating towards the horizon and we still had the hill beneath Phnom Bakheng (a temple) to get up by foot. We were nearing the top in time by at least 10 minutes, so we slowed the pace and then saw lots of people at the foot of the temple. It soon dawned on us that this mass of people was in fact the queue to get up to the temple, with estimated waiting time of hours.......GUTTED!!

The next morning we woke at 04:30 even more determined to get some good photos so off we went on the ‘bone shakers’ for a further 12Km but this time to the main attraction, Angkor Wat. We were probably the 9^th or 10^th people there (90 minutes before sunrise) and managed to grab the last prime spot right at the lakes edge with no one to get in the way of the perfect shot. As the crowd began to swell behind me, Nat had disappeared to ‘rest her eyes’ and I was increasingly aware of the company I was in. At least half of the people beside me were part of a photography class and they all had big stupid tripods and meaty SLR cameras, then there was me, all alone with the mighty Fujifilm F80 picked up from Hanoi for £150. Yes the inferiority complex had set well and truly in and after listening to what the photography lecturer had to say I was not only feeling inferior but also incompetent. As the crowd jostled for the perfect shot behind me, I was shielded by the wall of tripod legs to either side of me, or so I thought....

At this point some Japanese dude had spotted my potential weakness, the lack of a tripod. Nat, fully caffeinated by this time had alerted me to the imminent threat on my right shoulder who attempted and this is no exaggeration, to set up a 5ft tripod right in front of my face! I watched patiently timing my attack perfectly and as soon as his own tripod touched down on the water’s edge he was sent on his merry way, back to the cheap seats with the rest of the now at least 150 people. I may only have a small handheld camera but if I was there first, tripod or not, I was there first....BOOM!

After burning most of the battery on the sunrise shots, forgetting we still had a full day of temples to go at, we went for a brew and planned our route. All of these temples were built between the 8^th and 11^th centuries and are scattered over a vast area to the north of Siem Reap city. Our Nat planned itinerary would cover the 4 main monuments, Angkor Wat, Angkor Thom, Bayon and Ta Prohm. The route would take us a further 10Km away from the city and it left a monster of a trip back after a full day on our feet. The effort to fit everything in was really worth it as there is nothing like this anywhere in the world, the only problem is there is not enough space for pictures in the blog to do this place justice.

After a couple of days rest we would be attempting the mammoth 48 hour trip via Bangkok to a tiny island called Koh Tao in the gulf of Thailand.

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[Brett]

John Cody Fidler-Simpson
forget power stations; get a job with the BBC groove! the new john simpson! (no relation to Homer)