Cambodia - Land of Conflicts

Arriving in Siem Riep we found a great guest house, dumped the bags and headed straight into town for some birthday beers to celebrate Jonny’s 40th Birthday. Tucking into some great Khmer curry and Anchor draft beer, we met a Canadian couple and before long we were rather drunk.

Siem Reap is a strange place and not at all like we imagined. It is one of the poorest places in Cambodia and yet has the country’s premier tourist attraction, the temples of Angkor Wat, on its doorstep, attracting tens of thousands of visitors every year. It has a huge amount of high end hotels, flashy bars and clubs, restaurants galore and in parts not dissimilar to Kao San Road in Thailand albeit, a slightly more tasteful version. We were here for the same reason as every other tourist; to visit the infamous site, Angkor Wat.

We hired a tuk tuk driver for the day ($10) and set off for the site. The site is far larger than we thought and you can easily spend 2 or 3 days exploring the site but we opted just for a one day pass and hoped to cram in as much as possible, given our limited time in Cambodia. It was 40 degrees and about 80% humidity when we headed out to the site at 9am so perhaps trying to do it all in one day was a little ambitious and after only a couple of hours we were already waning but with regular ice cream and iced coffee breaks not to mention a ridiculous amount of water, before we knew it the sun was setting & we had seen most of Angkor’s best parts.

Angkor was once a huge empire that stretched several hundreds of kilometers from Myanmar to Vietnam and had over 1 million inhabitants. The temples that remain today are the remains of that empire, build over 900 years ago, the heart of which was in Cambodia. The stone temples were the places for gods, with all the normal buildings and structures built of wood which have long since decayed or been destroyed. The temples lay forgotten until the late 19th century when they were ‘rediscovered’ and work began in the early 1900’s to restore and reveal many of these huge structures. Work still continues but some of the more interesting ones are those that have yet to be cleared or restored and still remain engulfed by jungle.

The principal temple; Angkor Wat was built around 1100 AD as a funerary pyre for the then emperor. It is surrounded by a large moat and is the largest religious building in the world. The temple comprises 3 elaborate levels and is incredibly well preserved with thousands of stone carvings all the way around it and through the halls.

Moving on from Angkor Wat is Angkor Thom, the fortified city of Angkor with 5 monumental gates each topped with 4 faces of Avalokiteshvara (Buddha of compassion). The city walls stretch for more than 12km and are 6m high and 8m wide. It was built after Angkor Wat, around 1180AD and leading up to one of the main gates to the site, is a line of scary looking giants, there to protect the site from possible invasion. Within the walls are some amazing monuments but in particular is one called Bayon, which is a complex of over 216 giant faces of Buddha and another called the ‘Terrace of Elephants’ which is a 300m long terrace with, as the name suggests, huge elephants engraved all along it.

There are a number of other monuments and temples that we whiz past in the tuk tuk while driving around this huge complex and whilst most have been lovingly restored using local materials, there are others that are currently being restored with the help of Chinese donations and help, that do not seem to be quite as in keeping... the stone colour is different and pieces have been put together that seem like they should not belong together... maybe it will all make sense one day.

The last of the temples on the day’s agenda, was Ta Prohm, the site that was used in the first Tomb Raider film. This temple was also discovered over a century ago but has been left to the elements and remains as it much did when it was discovered, with the jungle devouring most of the structures that still remain. It was also build in the 12th century and apparently took over 80,000 people to maintain. It is a maze of corridors and crumbling intricately carved stonework and is by far the most impressive of all the monuments on the site.

After a few exhausting but really good days in Siem Reap, we opt to take what is built up to be one of the most beautiful boat cruises in Cambodia, to the town of Battambang. It may be a very beautiful boat cruise in peak season when there is a half decent amount of water in the rivers, but out of season, it wasn’t quite the cruise we had in mind. The slow boat we opted for (quite deliberately after hearing some bad tales of the faster speed boats doing the same route), didn’t materialise as they didn’t have enough passengers, so the speed boat it was. You are probably imagining at this point the sort of speed boat you see in movies or on holiday.... not quite. It was more of a wooden dugout canoe with a diesel car engine attached to the back. You could not hear anything over the noise of the engine, the tranquil boat ride we had hoped for came to an abrupt halt complete with enough toxic diesel fumes to knock you out. After only 100 yards, the driver (a young lad of about 18) crashed into the first of what would be 3 sand banks in his attempt to get us out of the first river and into the lake. The journey was meant to take about 7 hours, suspecting that it may take considerably more if we carried on crashing & breaking down at the rate which had in the first 45 minutes. What with the noise, lack of comfort & lack of water, we opted to get off the boat while we still could & and take the bus. Much to the bemusement of the driver, he took us ashore and from out of nowhere a tuc tuc raced down the muddy bank to pick us up and take us back into town. The boat company refused to refund us the money despite not providing the boat we booked, and not being able to get a bus, undeterred we took a taxi to the town of Battambang taking a mere 2 hours and arrived in time for lunch. Far more civilised.

One of the hostel staff in Siem Reap was originally from Battambang and so had friends who worked in a 4* hotel in town. He called ahead for us and booked us rooms for $15 a night..... great hotel with an outdoor swimming pool which was just what we needed. The following day, 2 girls that had been on the same boat, checked in and regaled the tale of the boat trip we had missed.... it had taken 9 hours and they had spent considerable time digging the boat out of sand banks, there was no respite from the sun and the scenery although nice, was not as outstanding as it was made out to be. All in all we felt we had made a good decision. Battambang was a nice enough place and had a couple of half decent cafes and restaurants and a few old colonial French buildings so proved to be a good stop over for a night or two, before taking a bus direct to Phnom Penh as time was running out and we had a flight booked back to Kuala Lumpur a few days later.

We had booked a great little guesthouse in the centre of Phnom Penh, dropped the bags off and headed to a restaurant run by a friend from home; Mark, who we had not seen in many years. Mark now lives there so he met us and suggested places to visit and how to best to occupy our limited time there. The food in the restaurant he had was also very good and we tucked in and had our quota of English grub to see us through another few months.
Phnom Penh is unlike other Asian cities not least due to its historical, bloody past. It is flashy, new and modern in parts and old, rambling and chaotic in other parts. In stark contrast to other places, the key sights are not just the usual beautiful old buildings... the Royal Palace, National Museum and some of the many temples and pagodas but also the historical sites where horrific, unthinkable atrocities took place under the rule of the Khmer Rouge in the 1970’s. Cambodia wants the world to know what it went through at the hands of the Khmer Rouge and wants to open it to the public and allow visitors to see what happened so it can never happen again. The 2 main sites to see are the Tuol Sleng Museum, also known as ‘S-21’, a school turned prison during the Khmer Rouge rule, and the ‘Killing Fields’, made famous by the film of the same name in the 1980’s.

In 1975, the Tuol Svay Prey high school was turned into ‘S-21’, the main prison, detention and torture centre for the Khmer Rouge. It was here that anyone who was arrested for any crime (a crime included simply being educated), would be held, tortured and ultimately taken to the Killing Fields and executed. In the history of the prison, only a handful of the tens of thousands that passed through, were not executed. All that remains of the school are some rusty beds, the makeshift walls created to form cells in the classrooms and now the museum where mug shots of all the prisoners are displayed. The Khmer Rouge were very clinical in the records they kept too and so every detainee was logged and photographed. Any prisoners who died while being tortured, were buried inside the prison and at the peak of the regime, it is estimated that over 100 men, women and children were killed there each day.

The Killing Fields of Choeung Ek are 14kms from central Phnom Penh and it contains over 129 mass graves, containing over 17,000 people of all ages. The site is still being excavated and each year after the monsoon rains, more bones and clothing are revealed. Many of the victims were bludgeoned to death to save bullets. This is one of just many sites all over Cambodia and it is estimated that almost 3 million people died during the 3 year reign of the Khmer Rouge. There is now a white stupa on the site which acts as a memorial to the people who died. Cambodians believe that the spirit or soul of a person can only be free if they are buried properly and so by building a religious stupa on each of these sites around Cambodia, it is a way of bringing peace to the souls of everyone who were so brutally killed. Controversially, in 2005, the Killing Fields were sold to a private Japanese Company, enraging many Cambodians that the government are financially benefitting through the murder of their loved ones.

There is a real conflict of interest as to whether to go to these horrific places and promote ‘war tourism’ or not however it is an instrinsical part of Cambodian history and to go and not see what went on only a few years ago while the world was blissfully unaware would be the crime.

Having really warmed to the city of Phnom Penh after the few days we spent here we left Cambodia and flew back to Kuala Lumpur again, this time to meeting up with Kerry and Gus who were stopping off to see us en-route back to the UK after finally having the holiday in Australia they should have had over Christmas.