Siem Reap and Angkor

The transition from southern Thailand a few days previously to Cambodia was quite striking. April is the height of the dry season and normally the hottest month in Cambodia. While southern Thailand was bright green the drive to Siem Reap was through an unrelentingly flat, brown and dusty landscape. The flatness ensures that the horizon is distant; the harvested or fallow paddy fields are visible in outline because of the low earth walkway barriers that demarcate them, but almost all were drained of water. A few water buffalo still congregated around muddy ponds to wallow but there seemed to be many more Brahma cattle grazing in the stubble of the rice fields.

Apart from the villages the only people were occasional individual figures, tiny in the distance, digging in a field or herding cattle. The scenery is more reminiscent of north India before the monsoon. No doubt once the rains begin the landscape is transformed, but in April it remains pretty desolate.

Slightly incongruously to my mind, we drove past several small groups of Western tourists pedalling expensive-looking touring bikes along the seemingly endless straight road - sooner them than me, but at least not much need for gears.

After the drive the entry into Siem Reap is a bit bizarre in a Las Vegas-y kind of way. Suddenly several dozen brand new, luxurious multi-story hotels appear, strung out side-by-side along the road. Siem Reap is the base for, I think, about 2 million tourists a year visiting the Angkor temple complex a few miles out of town.

True to out flashpacker status, while Jessica and Gerold peeled off in search of cheap backpacker accommodation Birgit had booked us into a smaller boutique hotel - the Golden Banana - a few minutes walk from the center of town. Described in the Lonely Planet guide as being popular with the gay crowd it was one of the nicest hotels we've stayed at on the trip - friendly, stylishly but not ostentatiously designed, and with good food.

Once evening had falled and it had cooled down a bit we strolled into "downtown" Siem Reap. Quite a revelation! It's an old French colonial outpost that has survived wars and Khmer Rouge. The old town is a grid of streets probably less than a kilometer square around a central market. The houses are almost all two-story, solid colonial structures, with arches and verandas on both floors, most of them now converted into shops, restaurants and bars. Most striking, after the traffic chaos and intensity of Bangkok, Siem Reap is largely car-free. The streets are populated of course by the ubiquitous scooters as well as cyclists and tuk-tuks, all flowing in the usual apparently chaotic fashion but at a steady few miles an hour. The town is therefore comfortable for pedestrians and despite the thousands of tourists and locals milling around there was none of the sense of crowding you get elsewhere as pedestrians, street stalls and street life generally are all jammed onto narrow and badly-build pavements.

The sense of elegance and calm also extends to the small river that flows through the town: it's lined by ancient trees, gardens and parks - one of France's cultural victories in S.E. Asia. From a purely practical point of view it seemed to me that, whether by accident or good planning, the town has been adapted extremely well to absorb the huge flows of tourists, most of whom arrive and leave by air and spend only a few days. This impression was reinforced by the very high level of spoken English among most of the young Cambodians there: ok, it's an utterly tourism-dominated town but language and hospitality industry skills require planning and infrastructure. Coincidentally Birgit had been on the Thai-Cambodia border 20 years ago doing research in the refugee camps. She remembered that it had been rumoured at the time that, although hundreds of thousands of refugees were being sent back to villages and fields that had not yet been de-mined, priority for de-mining resources was being given to the site of Angkor to get the foreign-exchange earning golden goose up and laying. If so pretty cynical but maybe not wrong.

We'd been advised that the best way to see Angkor was to start before dawn, beating (most of) the crowds and watching the sun rise over the ruins. So we succumbed to the packaged tourism, got up at 4.30 the next morning and hopped into the tuk-tuk we'd booked via the hotel for the half-hour ride out to Angkor. We were glad to have fleeces - it was pretty cold in the wind on the tuk-tuk. The poor youngsters at the hotel looked absolutely numb - they said it was almost unheard of that it was so cold at that time of year. When added to the floods we'd just avoided in southern Thailand ut certainly seems to have been volatile weather - either global warming or a more localised side effect of the Japanese tsunami?

We arrived still in pitch dark at a large parking area with a few coaches and a few dozen tuk-tuks already parked, and joined the stream of a few hundred early-bird tourists walking over a stone causeway towards the first temple site. I'm sure there are a number of man-made and natural wonders that easily transcend the touristy trappings into which they've been necessarily packaged. The Taj Mahal definitely - maybe Macchu Picchu and Ayers Rock. Angkor is stunning. The sight of the ruins emerging into the first pre-dawn light, accompanied by the sounds of the surrounding forest was magical (cliche unavoidable).

What really astounds you about Angkor is the scale: it's not a temple (Angkor Wat is only the best-known site) but an entire complex of cities, with religious, royal, administrative and military buildings at their core. We spent a couple of hours at each of three of the main sites; in between the tuk-tuk would putter along at 20mph through the forest to deliver us to the next site maybe 5-10km distant. We could have spent days on the various sites, all of which are in varying states of decay and restoration. The stone ruins themselves are really just the bare skeleton of what was build in the 11th and 12th centuries by the Khmer empire. It's worth checking Wikipedia for a detailed history - some researchers think now that the wood-build urban area, long since rotted away, that surrounded the stone-build cores may have covered 1,000 sq km and held a million people, making it by far the largest city in history at the time.

The entire culture was dependent on a system of reservoirs and canals that stored, transported and regulated water supply through the seasonal fluctuations and supported the paddy rice and aquaculture economy. I hadn't previously realised that the Mekong River is a rough barrier separating the primarily Chinese-influenced culture of Vietnam from the south Asian Indus-Ganges civilization, of which Laos, Cambodia and Thailand were the furthest easterly outposts. "Angkor" is a derivation of "nagara", Sanskrit for "city". The deities and iconography originally represented at Angkor are all familiar Hindu gods - Rama, Vishnu, Ganesh et al. These were overlayed by Buddhism later, but you can see the fundamental influence of India throughout Khmer culture - music, dance, cuisine.

https://picasaweb.google.com/101224237690804823445/UploadInPhmonPenh?authkey=Gv1sRgCLrq2uPw08zW4QE#slideshow/5591269876490138690

Try the link to a slide show for the Angkor photos. Next episode ... we move on to Phnom Penh.