Day 36 Angkor Thom and Angkor Wat, Siem Reap, Cambodia

Day 36 - His.

We got up and it was raining. It continued to rain until well into the afternoon and we got absolutely soaking wet. But, of course, as we sat eating breakfast we had no idea that was going to happen and so we were full of high spirits as we knocked back the coffee and covered ourselves in deet.

We were heading off to see what 3 million people a year come to see – the temples at Angkor Wat.

It turns out – as so many things do in life – that there was more to it than that. The temples are actually part of a city, the city of Angkor Thom, which was a city of 1 million people when London only had 300,000 and America had a few mud huts and no idea of what the white man would do 7+ centuries later.

To see the temples and city you really need transport, luckily we had a bus and driver, though I did see a lot of tuk tuks and the odd German tourist grimly cycling through the rain. The reason you need transport is because the complex is big! I mean it had a million people in it – you don’t fit those kinds of numbers in the area covered by a leisurely stroll. The majority of the city was made up of wooden houses which have long since gone (mostly thanks to termites and the tropical climate) leaving only the stone built palaces and temples which are now separated by row upon row of trees as opposed to dwellings.

Our journey began at the ticket office with dire warnings from the guides not to let our passes get wet. A three day pass costs $40 and they take a photo of you and print it on your pass with an inkjet printer. Which means even sneezing on it will make it illegible. After that you are free to roam, but outside each temple site there is a little crowd of guards and they are most diligent about checking passes. Around from the ticket office there is a little shop selling plastic wallets for the passes but we agreed it was a waste of 50 cents – after all how wet could we get – we both had cagoules. I will come back to this point later!

We got back onto the bus, drove past the main temple of Angkor Wat and went off into the trees. It was a bit like Christmas and Easter when you have to drag the kids past the shops and all they want to do is to press their noses against the glass and drool. Equally we all looked longingly out of the bus windows as we drove past wondering why we weren’t stopping. It turns out the guides had decided to start at the opposite end of the site. A typical trick of experienced guides, I note. They take you the wrong way round so it is quiet when they set off as nobody has got there yet and quiet when they finish as everybody is now at where you have been. Cool.

So we started off in Angkor Thom which was the last part built (Around the 12^th century) and worked our way round the various staggering sights until three or four temples later we staggered into a small restaurant to have lunch, a drink and a rest.

It had rained all morning. And it had rained in the way it can only rain in the rainy season in a tropical country. Which means it was like taking a 4 hour shower with your clothes on. The cagoules just weren’t up to it and we were all soaked through to the skin. Four hours of wandering round Cambodia in a rain storm will really teach you what soaked through to the skin means. Everything but everything was wet – so buy a plastic bag for your pass!

Mine and Patti’s had survived by virtue of being buried in Patti’s bag beneath two bin liners but I will be drying out dollars for the rest of the evening with the hotel hairdryer.

There is one serious drawback involved in looking at sights like Ankor Wat. It was stunning, it was beautiful, it was beyond description, it was magical, but.... there was so much of it. And the drawback is – we are only human. After a while one wedding cake carved pile of sandstone looks pretty much like any other pile of wedding cake carved pile of sandstone. After a while, as you wonder round, you realise – you can have too much of a good thing.

The plan had been to go to the jungle temple and visit the main temple of Angkor Wat tomorrow. When this was announced by our guides, a mini revolt soon put paid to that idea and we are going to the jungle temple in the morning and went to Angkor Wat this afternoon.  Angkor Wat was the main temple and capital city in the 12^th century and remains an important site today. It is astonishingly well preserved and it is obvious why 3 million people want to see it. It is, of course, huge and took us 2 hours to walk around. It was full of people and, oddly enough, monkeys. They live on the scraps the tourists leave behind. Which isn’t as monstrous as it sounds as the favourite thing of tourists to do is to drink coconut milk – straight from the nut. The locals grab a coconut, lop off the top with a machete, stick a straw in it and serve it up to the tourists. The tourists drink it down and chuck the rest away into a big pile. So the monkeys are living off a constant supply of fresh coconut and thriving. We saw troops of them all over the place.

We dutifully walked around, listened to our guide (I think there will be a pop quiz later) climbed to the very top (up a very rickety and ladder like construction) so we could ooh aaah at the view and struggled down to the bus and the next temple. Thankfully it had stopped raining but as it was very, very humid and hot, we were now drenched in sweat and it might as well have continued to rain.

The next temple we went to was Banteay Srei or the woman’s temple. It was pink. Not a bright pink, rather a gentle iron oxide red pink, mostly the result of the type of sandstone it was constructed from and having come straight from Angkor Wat it was tiny. It was so small Heidi was prompted to ask the guide if little people had built it. I think she was serious. Our guide assured us normal sized people built it, but it was so small as the stone it was built from was rare. I liked Heidi’s idea better and I spent the rest of the temple tour imagining midget sized Khmer running around worshipping like ants.

All day the idea had been to stay out until sunset and see the sunset over a temple. As romantic ideas go it was a good one – but then again like most of these ideas it was better in conception than realisation.  The temple we went to was used mostly for cremating the dead and it was clearly  top of local guides list of temples to see the sun set by. At half past five there were a couple of hundred of us perched on the top facing west looking at a cloudy sky and preparing for disappointment. We were not disappointed in our disappointment. The sun was completely obscured by clouds and all that happened was the sky turned grey then dark and we all climbed down. A salutary lesson in not setting your expectations too high – though I am sure if the sky had been clear it would have been marvellous.

One of the big problems around the temples are the hawkers. They don’t have the same degree of intimidation as the ones surrounding the pyramids in Egypt but their persistence is to be admired. It is really, really tempting to get tired and rude with them but totally unnecessary. The Cambodians are generally a kind hearted people and thanking them for showing you their wares, complimenting them on the quality and the reasonable price and then saying no thank you works pretty well with all but the most determined. Some of them find it most amusing. We met one woman trying to sell us table cloths who just could not stop smiling. When I complimented her on her beautiful smile, and I wasn’t kidding – when she smiled her whole face lit up and she was truly beautiful – she broke into such a fit of uncontrollable embarrassed giggles she gave up trying to sell us her table cloths and chatted amiably for a little while until our bus arrived  - and she waved us off still smiling.

Day 36 – Hers.

When the city of Angkor Thom was built, Cambodia was a large empire – covered almost entirely by tropical rainforest.  Elephants, tigers, boar and monkeys roamed the jungle. Crocodiles lived in the moats surrounding the temples.  The ecologically disastrous deforestation begun by the French in colonial days and continued under successive regimes and throughout decades of war has put paid to most of the large wildlife – and hunting has removed most of the rest, but we saw more wildlife today than we had any place else in our travels.  As Rob mentioned, groups of monkeys scampered amongst the tourist areas, eating coconuts – I was yet again reminded of Jungle Book.  He didn’t mention the turtles in the moat, the millipede on the steps or the hundreds of dragon flies circling the temple towers at sunset. We stopped at a village in a reforested area, to see how the villagers made palm candy  (very, very sweet – and it was stuck in my teeth for hours...) and I was afraid it might be the sort of area one might encounter snakes. ‘No worry,’ said Limny, ‘There are almost no snakes in Cambodia – if the people see one, they catch it, cook it and eat it...’ I know from yesterday, then, that I don’t need to worry about tarantulas either.

The carvings in the temples are remarkably preserved: celestial dancing maidens, friezes depicting everyday life, stories of battles and religious themes – Buddhist or Hindu, depending upon the era and beliefs of the king.  There were also written records of the building of the temples, the distinctive Cambodian cursive script carved into stone a thousand years ago, but still legible (if only I could read it).  Unfortunately, a lot of the statues are reconstructions – apparently you can see an excellent collection of the originals in the Louvre.  A few went missing earlier, though – Cambodian villagers from centuries ago used them ‘to make barbecue’.