Warsaw to Bangkok

Angkor was a city the size of New York, with a population of one million. The site sprawls, but the main ruins are within easy biking range of Siem Reap, the tourist trap town where you stay. In fact, bicycling gives you a little bit of down time in between the sites (and touts).

The first monument you come to is Angkor Wat. Justifiably famous as the world’s largest religious building, Angkor Wat was constructed in the mid-12th century under the patronage of King Suryanvarman II. It is a grand combination of scale and detail. The approach is several hundred metres long and it needs to be to allow the visitor to take it all in – Angkor Wat is 1.5km wide, with towers up to 65m high. The use of scale was also evident in the stairs – they are twice as high as a normal step (even mine) and very steep. You don’t just walk up – you climb. You are supposed to remember this!

Inside, details are everywhere. Carvings of Hindu myth line the outer walls for the temple (as opposed to the temple’s outer wall). These amount to a few kilometres of intricately carved scenes of demons, gods, soldiers and battles. Other carvings and inscriptions are all over the Wat. Amazingly, despite the hordes of tourists, Angkor Wat is so big you can easily find your own quiet corner.

Next is the hilltop Phnom Bakheng, which is on the whole a standard Ankgorian structure only noteworthy for its views. There are many smaller ruins that don’t attract the same crowds as the Big Four. One I liked was Baksei Chamkrong, the area’s only pyramid (more like a ziggurat to me), with a tower on top.

From there, I entered the walled city of Angkor Thom. Mainly jungle at first, it gives way to many ruins, chief amongst which is the Bayon.

The Bayon is much smaller than Angkor Wat but receives as many tourists so you’ve got to time this one to get the full effect. It is famous for its many towers, which are adorned with faces on all sides. Design-wise, it is the antithesis of Angkor Wat’s epic scale and right angles. The Bayon is humble yet impressive – a beautiful granite labyrinth of faces and prayer rooms. Getting lost in its depths is incredible fun, and it was relatively empty when I visited it so it was a real pleasure to explore.

After lunch – a trying ordeal of screaming touts and aggressive saleskids who ought to be in school – I headed down the “Small Circuit”. This took me to the Thommanon – a minor ruin of aquamarine mosses, dark passageways and approachable scale. It was one of my favourites.
I stopped briefly at a couple of others before visiting Ta Phrom, another of the Big Four. Ta Phrom is great fun – the French left it alone for the most part so it is still “one with the forest”. Trees grow out of the walls, their roots twisting around the stones. The ruins are large, and there are many amazing examples of the forest and the ruins evolving into a symbiotic interdependency. Gorgeous.

The afternoon waning, I visited another ruin, the Srah Sreng, one of the reservoirs used by the Angkorians. This is quite large, but pales in comparison with the two main reservoirs, one of which is still over half full.

At this point, I was templed-out and more importantly touted-out. At each monument, vendors scream and shout at every foreigner within earshot. This incessant bludgeoning of my eardrums I find to be extremely rude and it did a lot of damage to my impressions of Cambodian people. I could rant a while on this, and on how they exploit their children, and much more but I’ll save it. Let’s just say it was the worst example of human rudeness and greed I’ve ever seen. And I spent two months in China.

The next day I tackled the Big Circuit. This is longer, but with half of it overlapping the Small Circuit I had less to see. I wanted to return to the Bayon, but it was utter bedlam there so I figured I wouldn’t get the same feeling from the place that I did the day before. I proceeded directly to the last of the Big Four, Preah Khan. Part Bayon, part Ta Phrom, this rambling, photogenic complex hides behind an unassuming facade but delivers big time inside. Ancient gardens, Bayonic mazes, altars, jungle vines…I spent a couple of hours poking around Preah Khan.

This was followed by Banteay Prei, a small ruin with tiny Hobbit doors. Neak Pean followed. This is a series of pools, some still with water, and a small monument in the middle. The steps going down to the water evoked in my mind the Labi Hauz in Bukhara. Neak Pean was undoubtedly a social gathering place and it was great to close my eyes and imagine the bustle that must have been.

A few more temples, much quiet bike riding, a troop of roadside monkeys and that was my Angkor experience. When I stopped to take pictures of the monkeys, one of them hopped on my bike and tried to abscond with my water bottle. I bought a cd from some musicians that play around the many temples. They lend great atmosphere to the place.

The next day I took a hell-ride to Bangkok. Shoehorned into an airport shuttle, bags piled to the ceiling, a group of us were bounced along something approximating a road for 8 1/2 hours to the border. Ridiculously, we were 48km from the border town of Poipet 4 hours out but the bus company decided to use another border crossing 200km away. Because, after all, you can never spend too much time in the middle of Cambodian nowhere.

We changed buses after crossing the border. The bus in Thailand was quite roomy and plush by any standard. It was a good thing, because the driver reckoned the highway was a good place to drive 60kph. Oh, and you know you’ve been in the backwoods of Asia too long when the driver goes along on the left side of the road and you don’t even notice for two hours until someone points out that they drive backwards like the English here. I just laugh thinking about the first time, back in Uzbekistan, when the driver rode on the wrong side and how frazzled I got. I can’t believe that’s normal for me now.

The roads south of Stung Streng are terrible, so people generally take the boat. Conditions in the seating cabin are beyond cramped, and the airflow minimal, so the roof is popular. It is a beautiful way to ride, no question, past forests, villages, and the occasional temple, all with the cool wind in your face. Every now and again, just to remind you who’s boss, you get a big slap of Mekong upside the head. Thankfully, the wind and sun dry you out quickly.

However, the sun is a little too good at its job, and sunburn is the natural result. After 5 1/2 hours, I was totally lobsterized and was forced to retreat to the dismal seats and diesel fumes of the seating area.

Before long we arrived at Kampong Chom and were herded into a minivan, population 18 or so including the roof. You know the IKEA ad where the little car is piled up with twenty feet of stuff on the roof? Welcome to Cambodia. Being squished and unable to shelter my seared flesh from the sunshine, I found the three-hour ride to be hell.

The quay district around the Royal Palace in Phnom Penh is fairly civilized. There aren’t many areas of PP that are safe at night. Still, there’s no shortage of beggars and touts. The latter are a racket, with adults across the street managing little kids who flog books, magazines and much garbage. The books are wrapped in plastic. In China, this means it is not a bootleg. With prices like $1, in Cambodia they certainly are, if there’s anything on those inside pages at all. There are also beggar rackets, where babies are strapped to toddlers who wander around trying to look forlorn and cute. Yeah, they’ll see any of that money.

Phnom Penh is a chaotic, filthy hole. It lacks Vientiane’s charm. Worse yet, it lacks the character and culture of every chaotic, filthy hole I saw in China. Those at least are hardcore Chinese. It’s rather difficult to pin down precisely what Cambodian is. One fo the reasons for it can be found thirty minutes’ walk from the Royal Palace, the Stepford Wife of royal palaces.

The place I refer to is Tuol Sleng, or S-21. This set of humble, crumbling school buildings represents to the world the horror of the Khmer Rouge. It is Asia’s Auschwitz. Prisoners of all sorts came here. These included political opponents, intellectuals (defined as anyone with an education), the entire familes of intellectuals (smart people have smart children, you see) and anyone else deemed an enemy of the revolution. Many Khmer Rouge soldiers were kept here, for such crimes as eating unauthorized food (ie. fruits growing the forest). The Khmer Rouge kept files on everyone that came through, including photographs, childhood biographies and “confessions”. The purpose of S-21 was to extract confessions from all prisoners of their allegiance to the CIA, KGB or Vietnamese. Whether or not they had such allegiances was not the issue. The confessions were extracted by all manner of brutal torture – electric shock, medieval devices, farm tools.

The school buildings are filled with photographs that the Khmer Rouge took of the prisoners – men, women and children. If you were marked for death, your whole family was. If the torture didn’t make you divulge their whereabouts, there were many Khmer Rouge spies in the countryside who would be sent to find out.

When the Vietnamese liberated Phnom Penh, they found the last bodies left by the Khmer Rouge. Generally, prisoners were not killed at Tuol Sleng, but in their haste to escape the guards made some exceptions. The coffins of these are in the courtyard. Photos of what the Vietnamese found are in the rooms in which they were found. You walk into a sunlit room – a normal room – and see what was there twenty-five years ago. A blood-stained corpse on an iron bed, the implements of murder lying on the floor.

In another building are cabinets filled with the skulls of bodies found on the premises. A poster mourns the Cambodian entertainers who died simply because their popularity was deemed a threat.

There were rules for the prisoners. Some of the language is shocking – for example “Do not give pretexts of this and that. You are forbidden to contest me.” ‘This and that’ – they did not care what the person had to say, unless it was the confession they sought. Once they had it, the person was sent to Choeng Ek – the Killing Fields. One of the most ghastly exhibits is a bust of Pol Pot. In the name of glorifying this most evil of men, seven people alone survived Tuol Sleng – all sculptors.

One of the most sickening thing about S-21 lies at the gates. Souvenir stalls, hawkers of books on the Khmer Rouge, and tuk-tuk drivers practically begging to take you to the Killing Fields infest the area. I looked at the barbed wire, the concrete, the gallow’s pole, the coffins, the skulls, and then at these people trying to leverage all of this for a buck. Call me judgmental, say that they are poor and desperate for money, but to me it’s like Khmer Rouge Land – a theme park of torture and death. Commercialization of the greatest suffering of their own people – I fear the Cambodians have learned nothing. If they had, they would show more reverance for the site. They may have tried too hard to forget.

The main focus of the second day was the Killing Fields. These lie 15 km out of town. Most of the prisoners from Tuol Sleng were taken here for execution once the “confessions” were extracted. The area is the largest of Cambodia’s many killing fields. A total of 89 mass graves have been unearthed, some 9000 bodies found, and this is a little less than half of the site.

The graves were small squares. The victims knelt blindfolded around the square and one by one the Khmer Rouge executioners – largely teenagers – bludgeoned them. The use of teenagers was because Pol Pot felt they were more impressionable and could more easily be moulded to his specifications. To save bullets, most of the victims were clubbed with axes, hoes and thick bamboo rods. Death was not always instantaneous – many were buried alive after the clubbing. Ex-Khmer Rouge soldiers received special treatment. They were beheaded with the saw-like branches of palm trees. Babies were dashed against trees, or tossed in the air and shot like clay pigeons. These trees still stand on the grounds.

Today, a massive stupa filled with skulls is the centrepiece of the Killing Fields. Most of the skulls are cracked or have large holes in them from execution. Untouched graves remain at the back far away from the main area. But even in the area were the bodies were exhumed, the land is still littered with bones and teeth and these rise to the surface with every rain. The toe of a boot sticks out from the pathway, teeth litter the grass and recently uncovered limbs are piled up at each grave.

The area is somewhat commercialized, though a little more tastefully than at Tuol Sleng. But it still blows my mind that anyone could come to a place like this looking for a new pair of sunglasses, or trinket jewellery.

Overall, I was not particularly enthused with Phnom Penh. There are some pretty buildings, but they’re well hidden behind walls, corrugated iron and barbed wire. It’s a very standoffish city that way. As friendly as Cambodians can be in other settings, in PP they hassle you nonstop. Everybody with nothing to do buys a motorcycle and becomes a taxi driver. There are far more of them than the market justifies and consequently they are very aggressive. They hound you at every street corner, in front of every restaurant and while you’re walking down the sidewalk as the roll by.

There are also a ton of expats in town. Whether diplomatic or with NGOs, they lend their own unique brand of toxicity to the atmosphere. Living in plush houses or swanky hotels, driving SUVs with an even greater sense of entitlement that SUV drivers back home, they are better than us humble backpackers. They talk loudly on their cellphones about their business, and are too good to answer a simple question. Moreover, the contrast of their showy wealth and the filth and poverty of the average Cambodian is ugly as well. I can’t imagine the locals being too impressed with these people either. No, Phnom Penh will not go down as one of my favourite cities.