Cambodia is so different to it's western neighbour. Not all for the best.
26th November 2005

I crossed a border once and regretted it
The tourist epicentre of Cambodia
Why it is the tourist epicentre of Cambodia
All very well but I still don't know what Angkor Wat is
A return to town and some sad truths about the modern history of Cambodia

Deja vu

As we arrived at the border point between Thailand and Cambodia, a shiver ran down my spine. Beyond the barriers was a huge wide red dirt road. It looked just like the stretch of perfect graded laterite that faced us when we crossed from Ethiopia to Kenya. I am still haunted by what that road turned into further south. I almost wanted the visa process to fold in on us and not have to progress such was my trepidation. It’s so odd. We knew there was only a maximum of about 60 miles before we got down to the main road, Route 6. OK so we might have to take our time but we weren’t exactly in a hurry anyway. If all proved better than I felt it would, we could stop at a village down the road and take a side trip out to some other ruins.

We tend to look for signs that things aren’t meant to be. If the bike is reluctant to start for no good reason, there must be some cosmic message telling us to leave the next day. Here, although a bit complicated by the fact that we wanted to change over from our nearly full passports to our new ones (I had to go back to Thailand and get an entry and exit stamp in the new passport before Cambodia would look at it), formalities progressed pretty smoothly and the visas were less expensive than we’d been quoted by the American who had been here the other day and also less than we would have paid in Bangkok. These are not what we would consider negative signals.

OK, the road was dirt, but it was nice dirt; not much loose stuff on top, nicely knitted matrix of subbase, no major potholes and no slippery patches to confirm rumours that they’d had rain in these parts. The road was one thing, the bridges another. Once upon a time these bridges had been knocked up out of quality timber. Timber bridges in the tropics don’t last though and it became something of a lottery as to what strategy to adopt. Some clearly had enough decking left for cars and trucks, some for motorcycles and some with little to indicate that they were ever more than a pile of fire wood. A couple of places we followed the tracks down the side of the embankment and through shallow washes only to see a motorbike trundling over the vestiges of a timber trestle. Another time we clattered over a few choice chunks of lumber to notice a local prefering the terra semi-firma route with his cargo of Buddhist monk.

Finally we arrived at the mother of all jury rigged bridges. There were a couple of guys who seemed to be extracting a toll for using this mockery of a stream crossing and we shunned their offer to push us over. I’ve found in the past that having extra ‘random’ hands pushing Berthette tends to upset my balance alarmingly and so I’d rather Berthette and I did our own thing. A car came the other way and with supervision from the bridge-meisters managed to keep it’s tyres on the not so straight and extremely narrow. At least I knew that it could take the weight. I shuffled over with some difficulty but avoided any scary moments.

After a bit of reflection, we could see that these guys were providing a much needed service to the public and we felt that though I’d gone solo we ought to tip them for their offer of help. We handed over the smallest note that we had - 20 Baht (25 pence) but spotted that the next motorcyclist gave them 100 Riel (1.25 pence). No wonder the chap seemed rather made up. I’m sure I could see him in my mirror dancing with glee as we rode away. Nice to know someone was having a good day.

The road, predictably, did not improve. I kept holding out hope that at some point close to the main highway it would become paved. In fact the opposite was true and matters deteriorated with a few spine jarring potholes starting to appear.

I knew Hippy was dying for a pee but being the well brought up lass that she is, an element of privacy is required. Here there was an Ethiopian number of people around but rather than walking in packs bearing rolls of corrugated iron sheeting, the populace here is a gently rolling continuum of conically hatted cyclists. There was the small issue of not wanting to leave the road to pee in a country riddled with land mines. Point taken. I’d promised to pull up at a service station so she could use the facilities but there were none. Hippy insists that we passed one but I think maybe the extreme pain from her bladder had sent her into a trance and she had hallucinated. None of these villages showed any signs of electricity, let alone the sophistication of petrol pumps - or so it seemed to me as I continued in my own bulge-eyed trance staring at the road six feet in front of my wheel.

There were no road signs that we could decipher and our requests for ‘Siem Reap?’ were met with a consistent bemused look. The idea of trying to find the more minor road out to the ruins and the thought of what it’s condition might be got me into the mindset of making it to the proper road asap. We followed our noses and hoped that our dead reckoning would get us through to the main highway. Heading south could not fail.

We experienced no relief whatsoever at reaching ‘Route 6’. Rather than the shiny black thoroughfare that it’s name suggests, the stretch of road from our junction up until the blacktop starts just short of Siem Reap is possibly the worst piece of highway we’ve been on. The potholes are so prolific and so deep that it is simply impossible to try and weave around them. One or two of the holes must have been in the region of 5 feet deep with a bit of soft mud in the bottom. It was extraordinary and I wasn’t in the mood for extraordinary. Just possibly it might have been better if had not been for the other traffic on the road. Car drivers simply overtook where they liked without a care what was coming towards them - this was not poor judgement, thinking that they would be able to pull back in again before they reached their opponent. No, it was shear bloody aggressive lunacy. Bicycles and motorcycles scattered to the verges in panic.

Reaching tar was a mixed blessing. No more bone jarring drops into cavernous hollows but now the cars could kamikaze their way down the road at double the speed. Positively mental. I don’t think Hippy likes the way I ride in these circumstances. I like to call it assertive - keeping my position a reasonable way out from the kerb (kerb - that’s a bloody joke) and with my headlight on to dissuade oncoming nutters from overtaking. If they insist, I will then pull over towards the side. I feel this gives me a bit of manoeuvring room. Give them an inch and all that.

Getting into the urban zone was a blessed relief. There is a blanket speed limit of 30 km/h which makes everything so much more tranquil - well, it would do if the wankers in cars realised that the rule also applies to them and that no quantity of horn blowing will make other road users simply dissappear.

Siem Reaping the yankee dollar

Usual first day mistake - rather than shopping around we plumped for the first place that seemed clean and was within our budget. Siem Reap is a young tourist destination and has yet to find the optimum balance of accomodation options. They say that this is not high season but given that the majority of visitors come as an add-on to their Bangkok/Thailand holiday and that Thai destinations are now in high season I cannot see it. A very high standard of room can be had for 5 dollars a night. Who is going to opt for the slightly down at heel ones for 3 or 4? When we checked out of our first place after one night and moved 100 yards up the road, the manager gazed at us serenely as if to be accepting that oddly everyone seems to spend just one night there. I read somewhere that in this part of the world the floor being clean is seen as essential but the condition of the walls is unimportant. Indeed, it is rather nice to kick of ones shoes at the doorstep and know that you can walk around on cool clean tiles inside. But if you want to attract and keep the custom of picky westerners like us, clean off the cobwebs! It’s not rocket science. They would have had to do a lot more than that, though, to compete with the new place we moved to. Cheese. Oh, I love countries that have been under the French thumb. Or is it simply that Gringo Reap has all the luxuries (some might say essentials) that tourists require.

This is a dollar economy. It joins the list with Zimbabwe (specifically Vic Falls), Ecuador, Costa Rica and to a certain extent Panama and Guatemala. I completely sympathise with countries that rely heavily on tourism wanting to earn as much hard currency as they can but it gets my back up when everything is quoted in dollars. At petrol stations before we got to Siem Reap, prices were quoted in riels, within the city limits, pumps dispense in dollars. As I see it there are two problems; pride and confidence in local currency goes out of the window and actually they are missing out on the opportunity to make even more money - first you diddle the silly tourist on the exchange rate and then inflate the prices hugely because they can’t work out what everything costs. Come on guys, you know it makes sense. There is one neat bit of chicanery. Every price is rounded to the nearest 50 cents but there is no use of coinage in Cambodia (good thing we didn’t give the bridge whallah some Baht coins, he’d probably have thrown them back at us!) so you get a handful of riels which is probably troublesome for most tourists and so they give them away to the poor handicapped landmine victims who swell the population in town.

We wanted to get our hands on a reasonable quantity of riel as, so far as we could see on the way down from the border, dollarisation is almost certainly only a local effect. We found a bank that would give advances on our visa card with no charge and naievely asked for a million and a half riels. My, it feels god when you try to make yourself a temporary millionaire. We were informed that they could only advance dollars on the card and then exchange them at a poor rate (the same poor rate is offered all over town). There’s the rub. On the one hand I’m advocating that they should stiff the tourists in this way and now I’m on the recieving end I don’t like it. A ‘proper’ tourist in the next queue told us that we should just get dollars as they’re accepted in all the villages. We thought perhaps he was referring to the villages that he had been taken to locally rather some of the untouristed places that we’ve already seen.

I’ll finish off the whinging tourist bit that webmaster Will finds so excruciatingly tedious with a quick harangue of the Angkor Historical Park. Actually not so much a whinge as a great deal of sympathy for yer average Cambodian. The entry fees for the park are $20 per day, $40 for three days or $60 for a week. Actually these are pretty fair prices. But who gets the money? According to our guide book, the whole site is managed by an oil company. The tickets are issued by the Sokha Hotel which may in turn be owned by whoever the oil company turns out to be. In return for the huge sum of money that this company collects, responsibility is limited to maintaining the access roads and keeping the place tidy. There is no responsibility for maintaining the ruins at all. Stabilisation and renovation is funded almost entirely by external agencies. I had a clandestine discussion with the manager of our hotel who acted all the time as if the wall has ears but he managed to make it clear that there are folk at the top levels of government and the civil service who are doing very nicely thankyou. Meanwhile the poor sods who got their legs blown off are hopping about with hats out for handouts.

The Temples of Angkor

Everyone wows about Angkor Wat but this is but one of a series of huge temple complexes covering an area the size of two pages of the Lonely Planet - I mean it, its that huge. The ‘grand tour’ of just the major complexes at the centre of the site is over 15 miles long. The rectangular city wall around Angkor Thom alone encloses an area of about 9 square km. By my reckoning you could fit around 150 football stadia in there - that is just about every single football league ground in the United Kingdom. It is bloody enormous in fact.

We write our journal from a list of one or two word notes about events that have happened. I will cut and paste these notes in at this point;
banteay samre
kbal spean
banteay srei
excellent dirt road
other kbal kulon con
beng melea?
bayon faces
more ruins - ta som, banteay kdei, ta prohm, neak pean, east mebon island no longer, preah khan
the biggies? southern gate heavy, elephant terrace, terrace of the lepers, saga of biphuon, angkor wat , size of a moat and temple, the roluos group

Each name relates to a ruin of vast proportions and we didn’t even go to see huge numbers of the outlying ones. There is a tale associated with the question mark. Patrick ‘the wussy’ Watson failed to deliver his missus to the ruins of Beng Melea citing road conditions and signing as an excuse. There was also the point that a cunning chap has monopolised the road there (built it, may be a better expression) and so is charging for punters to go there. OK, so its not much but it is a bit insulting to have to pay again having got a ticket for supposedly the whole works. The ruins are supposed to be an ununcovered equivalent of Angkor Wat itself which is tempting but all you have to do really is go to Angkor Wat and picture it covered with trees - saves a bumpy journey, a couple of litres of petrol and the entrance fee.

Without delving too much into specifics, we need to talk strategy here. You need to consider your ruin threshold before buying tickets . I think I steamrollered Hippy a bit into taking the three day option rather than the whole week. We’d already seen some less extensive but apparently architecturally similar Khmer ruins in Thailand and I didn’t want to get ‘ruined out’, knowing that Cambodia has many more pre-Angkor sites that demand visitation. We were at least agreed on strategy. For some bizarre reason, all the ‘three day itineraries’ we’ve seen have Angkor Wat listed in the first day. Have these people no concept of climax. As always, we looked at the whole list of temples in the three-day essential listing (these must surely be the best examples) placed them into reverse order of excitement and visited them at the other end of the day to that recommended. Thus we would build up to the most exciting ruins and visit them each at their least congested time. OK, so we may miss out on the perfect sunset or sunrise venue but is it really so special when you share it with a chattering crowd of 500 other tourists?

Top tip it is a little advertised fact that you can expedite your early entry into the ruins by buying your pass the evening before. Tickets are available from 4:45 and you can save yourself another 5 minutes if you take a passport photo with you. Otherwise you can get your piccy taken for free for inclusion in your pass. Having acquired your pass, you can enter the park the same evening and get a bonus sunset.

In our case it confirmed our rightmindedness in strategic planning. We went to the ‘best’ place for sunset views, Phnom Bakheng (and that one wasn’t even in the notes, was it?), and instantly regretted it. We were caught up in a wheezing tide of grockles single mindedly wearing out the unmaintained laterite pathway to the summit of the hill thence scrambling up the precipitous steps to the top tier of the temple therefounded. The sunset didn’t really happen so all the trip did for us was fill us with dread about the days to come. Its so hard not to be selfish and want the place to oneself but we have to admit to being part of the disease.

There’s no point punctuating our waffle with all the names of places and so we can simply report that we did our best to plow a lone furrow and were at times depressed and at others delighted. It seems there are far too many variables involved in trying to find solitude. Certainly escaping the grand tour destinations and heading to the outlying ruins to the North East was a good move but there were still bus loads competing for ‘that’ camera angle.

The most remarkable thing for me was that by far the finest bas relief in brickwork was at a tiny temple, Prasat Kravan where there was only one other visitor.

We can’t hope to compete with the eulogies heaped upon the stone masonry by far greater writers and so I wont.

Hawkers abound in the Angkor Park and they are in touch with their Egyptian side. They will not let it lie.

Everyone had mastered the English that had been spouted to them so often it is now their mantra.
“When I come back” (meaning “I will try to find a way back that avoids you”) has become “When you come back you buy, yes?”
“If I buy from anyone it will be from you” (meaning “I am not buying from anyone”) is turned around to “If you buy, you buy from me, right?”)
I couldn’t decide whether this was sarcastic fun-poking or a real effort to create a trading relationship.

Standard offerings were recorders in raffia cases, small bronze Buddhas, scarfs and postcards. One chap was was much more off the wall and was offering ‘his’ police badge. I wasn’t sure of its validity as a get out jail free card with the Phnom Penh traffic police so I turned him down.

Other sharks in shirts labeled ‘Police’ were trying to charge us for parking and offering us an old oft-folded parking tickets in return for half a dollar. I wonder how many folk hand over cash to these naughty chaps. When you say “No” they don’t stop to argue, just head off to the next sucker.

The pukka guards who were checking tickets were extremely helpful and friendly. I found it odd that they could be watching the parking rip off going on but not do anything about it. There’s very much a live and let live thing going on with this Buddhist culture. I guess the same rules apply to road use - the folk forced off the side never seem to get irate with the idiots who create the problem. Are there traces of the old Hindu class structure ingrained in society after a thousand years of Buddhism that makes them feel that “He’s driving a car so he must be more important than me. By comparison my rightful place is in the gutter.” Or maybe its just in the Highway Code.

How many people can you get on a 100 cc motorcycle. This all rather depends if you have a trailer or not. In Cambodia, the motorcycle is seen mostly as a tractor unit and they can be spotted with couple of hudredweight of 4x2 on the back with up to eight grown men perched on top.

Suggesting that the management of Angkor Park is poor would be unfair. It provides amenities appropriate for its clientelle. Most folk coming here are quite adventurous and so will have a go at the oddish food served at the rustic stalls. Conversely, they mostly come from reasonably privileged European backgrounds and expect good toilets. Angkor provides. There are even instructions for the user not to attempt to squat of the western pattern elevated bowls.

But what is Angkor Wat. Brief notes for the uninitiated.

OK so you’re a representative of this dynasty of kings who rule in a mostly Hindu society. Being a king and a Hindu means that you have god-like qualities, the greatest of which being control over the masses. To prove how fantstically powerful you are and to thank the real gods for having been so nice and allowing you to be born in the position you were, you are obliged to create apropriately impressive ornate monuments. Your scriptures inform you that Mt Meru is a pyramidical kind of a mountain and there are three levels between earth and heaven so the shape of your buildings is kind of pre-ordained.

OK so you’ve piled the stones up and they look awfully impressive but a little drab. Whack a few towers on, why don’t you! That’ll mean there’s some rooms to shelter in when it lashes down. Talking of the rain, you’ll need some ponds to control the floods when you get those deluges between the 9th and the 11th full moons.

Still a little drab? OK, lets look at what we can do with the walls. See that grafitti? Imagine what this building would be like if we scratched in the walls like that but in a planned kind of way, say pictorial representations of the scriptures. Then even the no-brainers who can’t read can enjoy the stories.

Oh, your dad did all that already. So build a bigger one!

You can really imagine this being how it all happened - at least that is what occurred to me in my perhaps odd interpretation of all that I saw at Angkor. Whatever the sophistication of reasons for what was created here, there is no denying that it is truly stunning. Were it a thousand years older it would have been way ahead of the burial chamber of Mausolus and lots of the other also-rans as a Wonder. Is it the most impressive pre-industrial human achievement, though? Hard call. The Romans were a great deal more sophisticated, what with their fancy arches and stuff. The Egyptians managed to shift much larger lumps of rock over larger distances and in, my estimation, larger quantities.

It is the profusion of stunningly beautiful carving that does it. From simple geometric patterns on perfectly jointed walls to the most wonderfully accurate rendition of facial expressions, every form of stone masonry is represented in Angkor in its finest execution.

A rather glib tourist was slighting the French for their tardiness in restoring the Baphuon temple. “So how come if it was originally built in 25 years, the French haven’t managed to rebuild it in 20?” His question merited no reply, there are so many reasons. Why didn’t he just stick with thinking about the first part of his comment. How on earth did they build that in 25 years?

Siem Reaping the consequences of landmines

There are essentially only two things that the honest European will confess to knowing about Cambodia. One is Angkor Wat (and I know plenty of folk who have never even heard of that) and the other is something about Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. I confess up until 6 months ago, all the names meant to me were names that I heard on the news but never really concentrated on. I’m sure someone has written a book of the worlds worst attrocities and right up there will be the Cambodian genocide. It is an awful shame that this is the only image we might have of another country. On the streets of Siem Reap, book sellers push carts around and their entire stock is either guide books of Angkor or books about the horrors of Pol Pot’s Cambodia.

I guess it is hard to move on when there are so many folk with missing limbs to remind you of the horrors of a Cambodia under minefields. It is a very difficult thing as a tourist, how to deal with the begging by men who cannot any longer perform effectively in a culture of manual work, children who have no parents and women with children who simply cannot get a start in the world. Do we adopt one and treat them generously? If so, which one? Do we give a little to each? Do we give nothing at all, justifying it that we’d only be leaving a void behind when we move on? Is it our fault? Is it our resposibility? Oh, it must be so easy to be the cynical one who feels nothing as they walk past.

There are some promising initiatives in Siem Reap. There’s a former landmine clearer, Aki Ra, who runs a museum and a campaign to rid the world of land mines. He fosters landmine survivor kids and ensures they get an education. The kids provide a thrice weekly performance of the recent history of Cambodia through music.

There was an interesting note on the wall about which countries were not signatories to a 1997 ban on landmines. The only country that really surprised me as a non-signatory was Finland - what’s that all about. According to the information, as of 2002 landmines were still being produced in 10 countries including the United States and China. Kyoto, declaration of human rights, landmines? What else haven’t they signed up to? I perish to think. I digress.

There’s a school teaching massage to blind folk, a series of art and craft shops raising money for the training of disabled folk and education of needy children. There’s even a school of hotel management funded by the French and Australian governments. In general there is a pride in these people but getting a leg up is awfully difficult