Day 106 – Rolous Group, Khmer Rouge history
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…
Tags: Travel
dunlewey
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