PACE

a journal entry..

1-10-06

-last day in Siem Reap.

Trying to decide what to do. I’m really tired, so is Becky. Myra & Marjos come in. I’m almost asleep. They want to rent a bike for a while. I tell them to go on without me, but after they leave I decide I’m going to be missing out and go after them.

We get the bikes & start riding away from the guesthouse along the river. Things suddenly get very quiet as we pedal through and away from the busy part of Siem Reap. Just real people living, a small shop or restaurant, or a street stall.

A kid rides up alongside me and starts talking. It turns out I’m the first person oustside school hes got a chance to practice english with. He talks to me a bit & then falls back to Marjos. I ride up ahead to Myra.

Everything kind of opens up as we get further along. There are fields on both sides with palm trees & some kind of canal or river running through it. Theres a kid & his dad fishing in the brown water. The kid is throwing the net in and diving into the water. They’ve caught a few catfish which they keep in a cage dipped in the water.

Its about 3 or 4 and the sky is clear blue all the way across except for some thin clouds on the horizon.

Myra & Marjos at that spot

We ride on and come to a stop where a man comes out & asks us i fwe want to continue up and head for a sunset boat trip. We but tickets for $6 and ride up. Its quite a ways up on a dirt road. On the sides are small wooden thatch houses. Kids are running in the street and people are just doing their things. Nobody is giving us the ‘what the fuck are you doing here’ look, and we see a few tourists coming back, so I think we’re on the right track.

We eventually make it to the water, lock up our bikes and hop on a boat. Its driven by Dre, an 18 yr. old Cambodian guy. The boat is about 12 ft. long and is driven by an old crank motor. Its only me, Myra, and Marjos and I see some other boats drive by full.

Dre takes us up the river which is basically a floating town. House boats on the side, even a Catholic church. All floating. Dre points out the school, the church, and some other ecological boat/building. He also tells us that there are 3 peoples living here – Cambodia, Vietnamese, and Muslim. Why is unclear.

floating church

The river opens up to a huge lake and we go a ways out. Its now aobut 5:30 and the sun is about to go down. This is the place where people take the boat to Phnom Phen.

2 little girls are floating on the water, splashing each other from the buckets they are riding in. Myra takes a picture, one of them smiles & gives the peace sign.

Out on the middle of the lake the sunset is amazing & when the sun drops, everything goes a shade of purple. I’m wondering if Marjos feels left out since Myra & I are together talking or holding hands or whatever. I think she is ok, we don’t ignore her & go back to sit with her.

We head back in after the sunset. The colors coming back in are worth the whole trip.

As we are coming back in, the smell of smoke is in the air – cooking fires from the houseboats. The trees and bushes lining our way back stand out as silouhettes against the orange sky at the horizen, gently fading up into a grey-blue.

CAMBODIA

Cambodia has been an intersting ride.

In 1975 the Khmer Rouge killed about 2 million Cambodians, they actually killed their own people and knocked the country back into the stone age. The wanted to create an agrarian society and ended up killing off anybody even suspected of enough intelligence to oppose them.

In Phnom Phen they have a place called ‘The Killing Fields’. A huge tower filled with skulls stands in the middle and is surrounded by pits that were used as mass graves. Chilling. Actually, its really fucked up. They have peoples skulls piled up in this glass tower, the bottom case filled with the scraps that were their clothes. Some skulls are cracked or shorn from being beaten in with blunt objects. Some have bullet holes. There are pits that were just filled with the bodies of women and children. Sick stuff.

Before we got to the Killing Fields ( there is a movie of the same name out..), we pulled up to this outdoor building thing, which I thought was Killing Fields.. Wrong I was. It was the shooting range. Fuck signatures or liability, or safety really, you just roll in on a motorcycle and see 3 Cambodians with shotguns and full automatic weapons on the wall rack.

‘Sit down, Sit down’ , he says. I do as he says. Some guy next to me is pumping a shotgun when they hand me a menu. You can get an AK-47 ($30), and M50 ($30), a Tommy Gun($25) , a grenade ($15), anti-aircraft gun ($35), rocket launcher ($200) , coke ($1), or fanta ($1). I went with the AK-47.

The guy hands me a camo jacket and tells me to come with him. We go through door after putting on earphones and here we are at the shooting range. A brick/rock wall at the end with a target up. I sit down at a wooden table to the sounds of machine gun fire next to me. We are seperated from the next guy by a black tarp. I empty my clip first on semi-auto, then he flicks it to automatic and I unload the rest of the clip in about a second and a half. As we were driving away I kept thinking I should go back to throw a grenade, but we never did.

After that we went to S-21 , which was an old school building converted to into a torture chamber building. The Khmer Rouge had thousands of people chained up to beds or small brick rooms where they tortured/killed them. 14,000 people went there, 7 made it out alive.

Cambodia hasn’t been all death and genocide though. We went to Kampot, a small town south of the capital and visited Bokor national park. A huge national park protected by armed Rangers who undergo extensive training on capturing poachers.

It takes about 2 hours by truck (they pack about 8 of us in the back of a pickup) to get to the top of the mountain where everything is. The roads, well, the dirt track up there is shit. The ride was ridiculous and with nothing to hold onto you had to hope that you wouldn’t get tossed out and onto the rocky path.

In the 1920s the French built a whole community on the top of this mountian. A casino, a church, houses, a water tower, etc. Its all abandoned now, but its cool to see all the old buildings.

On New Years Eve, the Cambodian people had a huge party in the old casino and 2 people were shot to death. Apparently people didnt really think anything of it and carried on partying. I’ve heard from a couple people that Cambodia now is like our Old West.

The story we got from a few people is this: There was a Cambodian gangster at the party sitting in the middle of the road in front of the casino drinking. A 4-wheel drive vehicle came up the path and I guess the lights shone in the guys eyes and he didnt much appreciat that, so he took out his gun told them to turn off the headlights. When the guy did, the gangster started shooting into the car. What he didnt know is that the guy driving was a bodyguard from the Capital, Phnom Phen. He was strapped as well and shot back. I dont know who got killed, maybe the bodyguard or the gangster, or people they were with, but 2 people ended up dead.

Still travelling with Becky, but now we are soon off to Vietnam to meet up again with Myra and Marjos from Holland. ‘Nam man.

If its not keeping you up nights, then whats the point.

pace.

Angkor Wat, one of the most beautiful and mysterious historical sites in the world. Located over 192 miles to the North-West of Cambodia’s capital Phnom Penh, Angkor has been “protected” from tourism, and the customs and the cultures of the people living there have not changed much. However, intense internal warfare for over fifty years has impacted on the people and to an extent on the physical structure of the temples at Angkor. In 1991, the Khmer Rouge, the guerrilla movement, controlled the area. It was then very difficult to visit the area, and the only way to get there was by Helicopter from Phnom Penh.

For many years, Angkor Wat was totally isolated from the Western World. Large, thick jungles covers the area, and it is located in the center of Cambodia. The French colonialists were the first westerners to get exposed to Angkor. They heard rumors from the local population about “temples built by gods or by giants.” Most of the colonialists referred these rumors to folk tales, but some believed that there really was a “lost city of a Cambodian empire”, which had once been powerful and wealthy.

The temples were first discovered by French missionaries in 1860. Henri Mahout, a French botanist started intensive research and restoration programs. These research efforts continued until 1968, when the Vietnam war disrupted the studies. Initially, he did not believe that the temples were built by Cambodians, but by another race which had concurred and occupied Cambodia for over 2000 years ago. His theory would later be proven to be incorrect, after that researchers discovered scripts on the walls of the temples, and stone sculptures, that have made it possible for archeologists to piece together the history of Cambodia. Now it is known that Angkor, was the great capital city of the Khmer empire from the city’s founding in about AD 880 until about 1225.

The history of Angkor Wat dates back to the kingdom of Funan. This kingdom was established by an Indian Brahmin, and in AD200, the country was peacefully settled by Indian traders. Four hundred years later, the kingdom had become a prosperous trading region. As the area was located on the Pilgrim rout between China and India, Hinduism and Chinese Buddhism was adopted by the new settlers. The Indian and Chinese influence can still be felt in Cambodia, and the temples of Angkor Wat closely resembles Hindu and Buddhist temples that can be found in Northern India and in Nepal. In the end of AD600, the Funan Empire lost much of its power to the kingdom of Chenla. The capital of this new empire, Sambor, was located about 40 miles to the Southeast of Angkor. During this time, beautiful sculptures and carvings in sand-stone was popular. In AD750, a king with a reputation of being a war-like person, who was able to expand the Chenla kingdom. However, trade with India stopped, and the Indonesian Empire raised to power.

In AD800, the kingdom of Kambuja was established, and king Jayavarman I took control over the kingdom. He built several capitals near Angkor Wat, were responsible for many social changes, and was able to size land to the North and to the East. In AD889, a nephew of Jayavaram became the new emperor, and he was able to bring peace and unity to the Khmer Kingdom. In AD944, Jayavarman V established many Mahayana Buddhist temples near Angkor, and moved the court to Yasodharapura, at Angkor. Cultures prospered, and so did the Khmer empire. In AD1000, Suryavarman, a young man who may have come from the Malayan provinces of the empire, ascends the throne of Kambuja. He would become the king of Kambuja for over 50 years. He is responsible for the planning and foundations of the city of Angkor. In AD1051, Udayadityavarman II succeed Suryavarman, and continued to build the city of Angkor, and restored many of the temples. Angkor was now both a sacred temple city and the center of a vast irrigation system.

Massive expansion of the city continued throughout the next 200 years, and ambitious building programs expanded the city. Many temples were built. The temples are spread out over about 40 miles around the village of Siem Reap. Temples and similar structures to the temples that can be found in the city of Angkor are common sights in Thailand, Laos, Vietnam and in China. Perhaps the most famous temple, Angkor Wat, is a temple dedicated to the Hindu god Vishnu was built during this period.

Angkor Wat is the highest achievement of Khmer temple architecture, and is today the “flagship” of the temples at Angkor. The temple is a huge pyramid structure. The compound at Angkor Wat covers an area of 1,500 by 1,300 m (4,920 by 4,265 ft) and is surrounded by a vast moat 180 m (590 ft) wide. Along the causeway leading to the enormous entrance gate are balustrades shaped as giant serpents, which are believed to represent emblems of cosmic fertility. The temple consists of a towering complex of terraces and small buildings that are arranged in a series of three diminishing stories and surmounted by five towers. The roofed and unroofed structures are covered with bands of finely carved stone sculptures. The walls are covered with carved reliefs that illustrate Hindu mythology, principally scenes relating to the god Vishnu, to whom the temple was dedicated. The “mass of bas-relief carving is of the highest quality and the most beautifully executed in Angkor.” All the temple mountains of Angkor were filled with three-dimensional images and every inch of the walls are covered by sculptures.

In the beginning of AD1200, the Angkor and the Khmer empire started to decline. When jayavarman VII died, the Thai Empire in the West emerged as a major power in the region. The Thai capital was moved to Ayudhya, near Angkor, and obviously threatened the Cambodian kingdom. In AD1389 the Thais attacked Angkor, and the city fell into the hands of the Thais. The 15th-century conquest of the Khmer kingdom by the Thais resulted (1431) in the final abandonment of Angkor. The city was deserted and the capital was moved to Eastward to the region of the present capital Phnom Penh.

Miraculously, very little damage has been made on the Angkor region as a result of the bloody civil that has terrorized the Cambodia for over 30 years. The Khmer Rouge, an extreme-left organization has actively organized guerrilla activities against Prince Sihanouk’s government. In 1975, many Buddhist monks who lived in the Angkor temples were massacred along with the majority of the Buddhist population as a result of a “social reorganization”. However, Angkor Wat suffered very little structural damage in that attack. Today, archeologists from all over the world are actively involved in the restoration process of the temples. Much of the history of the “Lost city” of Angkor is still a mystery, but Angkor has entered the “Coca Cola” and “Kodak” age, and as Cambodia is becoming more developed, the mystical atmosphere at Angkor will disappear.

summary stolen from:

http://www.geocities.com/TimesSquare/1848/angkor.html