On-the-Road Tales

We joined a tour at our hotel to get to an outlying area of the temples. We first drove to Kbal Spean where we walked up another mountain to get to the river of 1000 lingas. The sandstones in the river bed are carved with intricate designs and the people believed the water that flowed over these stones brought good luck and was holy. It is amazing after all these years underwater, the carvings are still visible. There was an Aussie couple and a Taiwanese guy on our group. They were both naturalists so stopped often to video rare catepillars and random bugs. Nancy and I lost our interest soon after the marching group of large termites. Guess entomology does not run in our family! The Taiwan fellow had studied stick insects intensively but was now working on mollusks. This prompted him to frequently prode the foliage looking for snails. Considering the guide had warned us about cobras and informed us that snake bites were a leading cause of death in the country, I was okay with keeping my distance. We descended and drove to Banteay Srei temple. This was considered an experimental temple, built in the 10th century, where they were testing out different types and hues of stones for various carving. The intricate designs found on all the doorways and towers were impressive. Next we visited, Preah Ko, Bakong and Lolei all from the 9th century. The Khmer history involves alot of kings, fighting and moving capital cities. Each reign tried to build something grander and more impressive than the next so the temples just kept getting better. While Cambodia once had a grand empire, its history is blighted with more recent events.

Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge reaked havok on Cambodia and its people from 1975-1979. They were communists and sought to control their countrymen through fear. During their reign, they murdered millions of people, – millions. They tortured children, elderly, disabled. They slaughtered anyone with a formal education, business owners, government workers. They exterminated 90% of the artists, dancers, musicians and destroyed all their tools. They almost succeeded, in the period of 4 years, in destroying everything about the Khmer culture and broke the spirit of its people. It is really a shocking occurance in recent history and was only ended when the Vietnamese invaded and stopped Pot.

The reminder of this time are ever present. In one of the ruins we visited that day, there was a wat – religious building, locked up and cordoned off. It was colourful though fading from lack of maintenance. Apparently this holy place was used to torture children and their blood still splatters walls. I was to learn these buildings exist thoughout Cambodia – temples, schools, houses which appear abandoned with the gates locked up because noone will go near them. The monks on this compound will not go near the temple at night because it is said to echo the screams of the children. When they drained the moat around the ruin they extricated the bodies of 10,000 victims. I know genocide has happened before and still is happening in parts of the world but I still find it incredulous. The psyche of the people have to be affected when they live right beside mass graves and pass daily reminders of where they lost their family.

The magestic ruins of the Angkor complex did not escape the Khmer Rouge. This faction beheaded any statues or buddha they came across. 1000 years of artifacts destroyed by a rogue band of soldiers. One of the temples had already been dismantled for restoration into thousands of pieces, when the group took over. The Khmer Roughe destroyed all the meticulous records of which peice went where so archeologists were left with the “‘worlds largest jigsaw puzzle’.

We returned to town and checked out Molly Malones for dinner. Logically – there is an Irish bar in the middle of Siem Reap Cambodia and Nancy bought a shirt for her husband to reach out to the NY advertising base…

Up at 0500, we jetted out to the airport for our 0800 flight on Bangkok Airways to Siam Reap, Cambodia. We walked through what seemed like endless shops and stores to the gate and were bussed out to our ornately painted 737. It was a short 45 minute flight to Siam Reap and I was surprised at the terrain as we approached. I had always envisioned the ‘jungle’ to be dense mountainous forest like S.America but the area was surpringly flat and the trees sparser than I expected. We landed and stood in line for a $20 photo visa. Nancy is much less inclined to go with the ‘wherever I end up’ approach to travelling I revel in. In addition, she stated Air con and hot water were mandatory so my hostel accomodation choices were definately not in the running so she had prebooked a guesthouse and our transport was waiting outside. Our vehicle, and the mode of preference, is a tuk-tuk. Basically a two wheeled carriage of sorts that attaches to a moped. So us and our backpacks climbed in and hung on as the journey began. The 15 minute ride from the airport was our introduction to Cambodia. We could not quite figure out what side of the road they drove on because, well, they drove on every side in both directions. It was a cacophony of bicycles, mopeds, tuktuks, pedestrians, pickups, cars, and trucks. Sounds like a normal road except there were left hand and right hand drive vehicles and the pickups and mopeds were stacked with everything you could and could not imagine. The tiny two-wheeled motored transports often carry whole families mom, dad, toddler, toddler holding infant. The pickups had whole villages perched in the back, in the cab, on the roof, and on the hood! with motorbikes, rices, plastic chairs etc in the mix. Mopeds would cruise by with a bamboo cylinder attached full of piglets or 2 or 3 full size pigs strapped down on the way to be sold at the market, When this is your only form of transport – you do not have a hell of a choice.

We made it to The Villas at Siem Reap and checked into our room. Angkor Wat is one temple in an area chock full of similar ruins. You buy a pass to visit the whole complex and can go out after 1700 the night before your pass starts to watch sunset and enjoy 3+ days. So we purchased our 3 day $40 pass and headed to Phnom Bakheng. We climbed a small hill to perch on the top of a ruin. It was hard to concentrate on the setting sun when there were no fewer that 1000 other tourists milling in your space. Apparently the largest tourist group to Cambodia are Koreans and they were everywhere, by the busload. Next were Japanese with more Nikons than one could count. There were surprisingly few westerners. We descended the mountain after the nice sunset with the hordes and amazingly found our Tuk Tuk driver amid the melee. We headed into town and had dinner on pub street at the Red Piano.

Today is May 1. Today is the one year anniversary of my Dads death. I can not quite believe it has been that long and in all honesty I remember every detail of that day like it was ... [Continue reading this entry]