Did I say early?
I lied; 4.15am is ‘faw shaw’ earlier than early. But you only go to Angkor Wat once. Unless, like us, you’ve already resolved to come back as soon as possible and spend a week having a closer look. But that’s a story for another weblog.
The roads are slightly less crowded at 4.30am but the main gates and ticket office into Angkor Wat are in fact open. I’m not sure about when or if the people running the place sleep, but we weren’t the first bus full of people to come through that morning. At 4.45, when we pulled up at the carpark in front of Angkor Wat, people with torches were walking over the causeway and in through the main gates. On our side of the moat there was a low but wide stone wall, and Nak took us a little way along this wall to a point where we would be able to see the towers of the central altar when the sun came up.
Light leaked into the sky in shades.
I started twiddling with my tripod and doing some practice shots and what-have-you, changing lenses to see what came of it, that type of thing.
‘Are you ready, Greg?’ says Louise.
‘Yep.’
‘Everything set up? Ready to go?’
‘Yes. All set. Thanks for asking.’
‘OK. Just wanted to make sure you were ready.’
Light uncloaked the building slowly; details became available. By 6am the sun was more or less up and we had just seen a magical thing. I probably should have spent more time sitting still and watching and less time humming around trying to work out the best angle, but it’s just too much fun.
At 6.30 we walked across the road for breakfast, at outside tables in rows with a long thin plastic awning over each of them, and had omelettes and strong coffee. A man in a truck pulled up to deliver steaming chunks of ice, jumping up on the back and cutting them off with a very big knife. We sat under the shade and everyone showed off their photos.
Next we went driving through long straight roads lined with forest to Ta Prohm, which viewers at home may have seen in a movie called ‘Tomb Raider’. This temple is famous for being more or less overgrown with forest, which does make it feel more like you could be discovering it rather than being taken for a tour around it. Thankfully no one’s tried to pull all the trees out, otherwise it would fall apart, because there are a lot of trees growing in, under and through many parts of the stonework. There is a lot of restoration work going on, though, because the trees die or get blown over or something like that, but have already done the job of separating the stones.
At the front gate, where we stopped and drank water and reapplied mosquito repellent while Nak explained the history and the construction of the temple, there is a pond covered in green, and the early shadows of the trees made ink black marks across the surface. Huge stone blocks gathered, fallen, at the edge of the water, extinct like thirsty dinosaurs. Through the gates, past the corridors inside the exterior wall, Nak took great pains to point out one small Buddha statue set in a wall panel, very low on the edge of a corner. This temple was also built as a Hindu temple, became a Buddhist, and then all but one of the Buddhist icons was removed when the emperor after Jayavarman came in.
Further on, in the next courtyard, we stood inside a small altar which had the odd property of resonating deeply when you stood against one of the walls and thumped your chest.
In the same courtyard the doorway was blocked by fallen rocks, but you can climb partway up on the rocks and look over at one of the more deserted parts of the temple. You might even want to pretend you were the first there. Through the central altar we came to the doorway which was used in Tomb Raider, with the tree roots spidering down, and on the wall nearby an apsara statue was illuminated in a ring of sunlight, the odd product of the shapes of the trees. In the next hallway the same beam of light reached in to touch a statue engaged in seated meditation.
Through the hallway we arrived more or less at the exit, where again we had half an hour to have a look around for ourselves. I went one way to have a look at the ponds near the outside wall; Alice went inside to look at some of the more entangled trees, and came enthusiastically running back to drag me over to one of those ‘do not miss this’ spots, where tree and building looked like they were actually designed to go together. Either the tree was carved out of stone, or the building had grown up underneath the tree, but over the years that had gotten to know each other quite well. When the building crumbles or the tree dies, they might even be sad to part.
On the way out we saw Team Sony all lined with their shiny tripods and new Sony digital cameras and also Sony Alpha T-shirts. Uh huh… get a Nikon.
Next temple on the cavalcade was Banteay Srei, a small temple about 20km away from the Angkor Wat complex, which has some of the more intricate carving panels of any of the temples we saw, and it’s not on quite the same scale as other temples. But it is very beautiful. In the small altar which you walk through before going inside the main walls are some statues shaped figuratively like male and female organs, which were used for fertility rituals. Through the two metre high main walls there is a small moat and, again, steps up to the main altar. The main altar consists of three buildings, which are dedicated respectively to Shiva, Brahma and Vishnu. The carvings on the panels of these buildings are ridiculously detailed; but still not quite up to the Duomo in Florence, I found myself thinking.
On the way back to the bus I couldn’t resist parting with $10 for a shiny colour book about the purpose, past, present and future of all of the temples we had visited and the 50 or so that we hadn’t. That was when we started to get an idea of just how vast the whole complex is, and just how many slaves the Khmers must have disposed of getting it all done.
But there are more immediate problems than that. There are two important buildings in the vicinity of the temples; the first is a children’s hospital that spends most of it’s time dealing with malaria and haemorrhagic dengue fever, which we didn’t get around to visiting to donate some blood, and the Landmine Museum. It seems straightforward to have a museum dedicated to letting everyone know just how big a problem UXO (unexploded ordinance) still is in Cambodia, but this one has a little twist. The museum was started, and is still run by, a guy called Aki Ra that was one the Khmer Rouge child soldiers, who later decided that he would have to get stuck into undoing some of the things he had done. He has no idea how many land mines he would have planted during his time as a soldier, but is estimated to have found and defused more than 50,000 mines since then. There is a video of him defusing a mine on display and the only safety equipment he takes with him is a big knife to dig around the edges of uncovered mines.
He knows most of what is useful to know about the design, explosive content and detonation mechanisms of just about any kind of mine or grenade, and treats some of them almost like old friends.
Within the museum there is also a charity and school which assists victims of land mines, most of whom are children. And as a matter of fact, his name isn’t Aki Ra; that’s a name which was given to him by some Japanese friends – having been corralled into the Khmer Rouge at a young age, he has no idea what his real name used to be.
The penultimate stop before lunch was Pre Rup, which was designed and used as a crematorium back in the day. The temple itself is not amazing, considering some of the stuff we had seen, but the area around Siem Reap is so flat that the view from the central altar is expansive, even though it’s not that far up. Something like 30m up some steep narrow steps. In the courtyard below are two chambers where the cremation actually took place, and I had no overwhelming desire to have a look into those. Meanwhile a parasite couple hovered around, the lady taking endless photos of one of the cute little girls selling trinkets and books and whatever (but not buying anything), while the gentlemen decided he would join our group and follow us around for a while so that he could listen to Nak explaining all the interesting historical points, like how old the temple is, and which emperor’s reign it was constructed in, whether that emperor was Buddhist or Hindu and what have you.
On the little plateau of the central altar, there are three main towers housing statues, decorated with colourful fabric and so on, while some of the outer towers are beginning to crumble, but in so doing they reveal just how solid the original brickwork was.
By now it was getting on for 1pm, maybe a bit after, and it was pretty hot; everyone had drunk enough water to feel like they were still thirsty but also their eyeballs were floating, and it was time for lunch. On the way back past Angkor Wat, towards one the plastic table cafes near where we had breakfast this morning, we did a whistle stop at Srah Srang, which was used more or less as the Emperor’s swimming pool. It’s 700m long and 350m wide, so he must have been a pretty good swimmer. I’ve got no idea how deep it is, but like the moat around Angkor Wat it’s kept topped up by irrigation from some much larger reservoirs a little way away. At the front end of the short side there are steps leading down into the water all the way along, and in the middle of the front side the stone steps extend out into a platform, reaching a little further into the water; out on the ‘lake’ a small boat with green-uniformed maintenance staff sailed along.
I was the only one who wanted to have a look at the swimming pool so we pulled the bus up and I jogged over and jogged back, staying around long enough to have a good look and be absolutely stunned at just how big the damn thing is.
Finally we got into the shade for lunch (this is cool season in Cambodia, by the way). I had fried rice with vegetables (amazing) but with it I had a whole fresh coconut, refrigerated and then cracked open so that you can drink the juice. Can’t beat it. Everyone was very tired from the early morning and would have been worn out anyway, so lunch dragged on a bit and we didn’t get back in the bus until just about three o’clock.
Next and last was Phnom Bakheng, which is a proper hill – I forget whether it was there to begin with or whether it was built – and it took us about 15 minutes to walk up to the top. At the top there is a small temple, your standard square outer wall, grass courtyard, steep narrow steps up to the main altar with a big flat plateau and thin towers with altars inside them. The bricks were warm, the view was incredible, and there was an stereoscopic ringing noise which sounded like some kind of important alarm but turned out to be from a Bell Grasshopper. What species of bell grasshopper I don’t know; but it didn’t make a cyclic sound like your normal grasshopper or cicada; it was a constant ringing noise. In other words humans can’t hear the cycles.
You can get a real good look at Angkor Wat from up there, and the yellow balloon going up and down above the same. We briefly debated waiting around for sunset, and wondered about how people would get back into town if people wanted to split off and have one group that wanted to go back to town and one group that wanted to wait and so forth, but in the end we just had a sit-and-take-it-in for 15 minutes and then strolled on back down the wide path, in the forest shade, to the bus. We were back at the hotel not long before five but no one really wanted to go anywhere for the moment, except for us who wouldn’t have minded cashing some traveller’s cheques, except that it was late on friday afternoon.
For dinner, later on, half the group went to a restaurant in the market in town, while others went and had large cheap piles of local desserts and still others had an unconventional fish massage; you put your feet in a bucket of fish and they help themselves to any and all dead skin on your feet. It tickles and then feels great the next day.
No such thing as a rest day though; no, we’re off to Kampot tomorrow and have to be at the bus station at 7.30 to get on the bus. So we pre-ordered our breakfasts and fell into bed.
Greg
