Angkor Wat

Siem Reap was not like anywhere we’d been before.

Angkor Wat is an international tourist destination attracting two million visitors each year and the city of Siem Reap has absorbed a wide variety of cultural influences as a result. The incredible food options, the style and price of accommodation, the transport choices around the city, all affected by this huge daily influx of global travellers.

It was really well done actually – the Cambodian government had reached out in the 1980’s and asked for countries to help preserve the world heritage that Angkor Wat is, and so the temples had been ‘sponsored’ by different countries – great opportunities to learn how to preserve and protect on both sides of the deal and a wonderful array of different influences in the cultural impact on Siem Reap.

We saw large groups of Indian tourists, back packers, tour buses filled with a good old mix of nationalities, ‘incognitos’ in blacked out SUV’s with plenty of ready cash, and some people for whom this was clearly a pilgrimage.

The main roads were wide and clean, there was colour and beauty everywhere. You could get any type of food you liked…and you could pay for it all in dollars if you wanted.

The streets around our hotel were smaller, and the stalls and shops were where Cambodians bought their fruit and veg. There were shops selling pots and pans, an old woman sat behind little mountains of pulses and grains, and street food stalls looking after the hard working tuk-tuk drivers. It was lovely to have the ‘authentic’ so comfortably alongside the ‘catered for’.

It was a great place to spend a few days and there was a lot to see…

Mr Bee Sophorn arrived at 4.30 to take us to the Angkor Wat ticket office in his motorbike rickshaw. A very civilised vehicle with a shade covering, and quite comfy seats. (…and let’s call him Mr Bee from now on).

The ticket office was busy. Every tourist buying photo card entry tickets…hundreds of thousands of dollars coming in every day.

Cambodia is a country that recently experienced genocide on a massive scale. A genocide which ended only 45 years ago…estimates of how many people died vary between one and three million – there is no way to underestimate that tragedy.

Every Cambodian will have been touched by the enormity of it…Mr Bee’s dad was in the army and was killed by the Khmer Rouge. Leaving his mum alone with a two year old little boy…

How had the healing begun here? It must have been such a terrifying and horrific five years, from 1975 to 1979. I am at a loss to understand how a country can murder so many of its own people…and the people committing the atrocities were sold the weapons by the west…

Is it possible to sell weapons ethically? Isn’t it in the sales pitch? ‘You can count on these landmines and cluster bombs killing, maiming and destroying peoples lives’. Perhaps we should consider not selling them at all…it is hard to point to a situation where they have been used well…

Our tickets purchased, we strolled around the building looking at the beautiful pictures of the temples. I bought a sun hat and then spotted an ATM – I popped my card in and the reassuring – ‘just a moment please’ and ‘LOADING’ appeared on the screen. After thirty seconds I started to get twitchy and after a minute I started pushing buttons to try and cancel the request, nothing happened.

After two minutes I was beginning to lose it…all our money came and went through that card. It was a very long way home without it!

Theo went off in search of someone who worked here to help us and Rosa hit the machine causing all the alarms to go off – it freaked me out a bit, but I was also pretty impressed, a bright moment in what was not a great situation.

The alarms turned themselves off after a minute or so and one of the women from the tourist team arrived back with Theo. I went to ask Mr Bee if he would come and translate and he explained that she thought it was probably the slow internet connection …we should wait.

A very long ten minutes passed.

She pointed to the helpline number and we rang it.

For anything to happen my identity had to be verified. And we also needed someone to stay and wait with the ATM machine in case it ‘woke up’ and gave my card back. Rosa and Theo stayed and Mr Bee and I headed all the way across town to the ABA bank.

It was actually quite a pleasant journey, Siem Reap is a beautiful city and we were now down to a balmy 37 degrees after the heat of the day.

Most of the next hour and a half was spent sitting around. I handed over my passport and the bank sent someone out to the offending ATM – Mr Bee went back to collect Rosa and Theo, and I sat and watched the air conditioned world go by. My panic had subsided a little when someone had answered the hotline number – now I was preoccupied with ‘will they give it back’.

The credit card fraud team had tried to contact me in Malaysia because apparently buying ferry tickets in Jakarta, taking cash out in Sumatra, and paying for hotels in Malaysia is ‘suspicious activity’ as far as they are concerned (…have they not been paying attention to my spending over the last seven months?)

I tried to ring them but my mobile phone spend cap cut me off half way through my conversation with the fraud officer.

The card was now only working in ATM’s and part of me was wondering if the game was up and the fraud squad were finally busting me for using my own card…

Rosa and Theo arrived and then we waited some more.

I had to go and sit at a desk, sign a photocopy of my passport, which took two attempts because she wanted my signature to look exactly the way it did on my passport (note to self – practice signature!) and then she handed it over.

…time to go and put it straight in an ATM machine, and what better place than at the bank.

A tense few seconds during the ‘please wait a moment, LOADING’ phase. but all was well – I’d ring the fraud team when I got to Thailand.

Mr Bee took us to a restaurant Theo had found online and he waited outside until we’d finished – ‘no, thank you’ he didn’t want to come and join us, he preferred to sit outside and he wasn’t hungry …that man was heading for a healthy tip!

An early night and an early rise. Breakfast clutched in our hands we headed off in the dark with Mr Bee the next morning.

I reckon between one and two thousand people were at Angkor Wat to watch the sun come back and as sunrises go it was decent enough…the ocean had spoiled me a little I suspect, but we loved being up in the cool of the day, sitting chatting on the ancient stones of one of the temple buildings watching the golden orange sky lighten.

Angkor Wat itself is a massive and iconic temple complex, but it’s not where we left our hearts, mine belonged to the monkeys playing in one of the pools at Angkor Thom. They were quite shallow pools with steps going down to the edge. I have never seen monkeys swimming, I didn’t even know they could swim, so it was just wonderful seeing their complete ease and delight in the water.

…we sat and watched them for ages. Leaping on each other, diving underneath to pick up little stones and seeds, splashing and shrieking like any group of kids I’ve ever taken to the pool at Greenbanks.

Our other outstanding temples were Phnom Bakheng and Ta Prohm. The first because of the views from the mountain top where it was built some two hundred years before all the other temples.

It was beautiful up there and Rosa saw a drongo (a stunning  blue and black bird) on the way up and I saw a pair of toucans when we got to the top. It was perfect really.

The temples are old and nestled into the jungle that surrounds them, and in the case of Ta Prohm, the jungle is moving in, tastefully.

The combination of temples made of stone, carved in intricate beauty for both Hindu and Buddhist gods – and the sight of three hundred year old trees with roots wrapped around a ten foot high wall or an entrance way, was magnificent.

Mr Bee waited patiently at the entrance to each temple with a cooler box full of cold water – he even carried two umbrellas….

The last thing you want to do in intense heat is wear a hat but you have to protect yourself from the sun… ‘Ladies and gentlemen I give you the umbrella, the parasol, the portable shade device!’

It made such a difference to our temple exploring experience. A thoughtful man our Mr Bee.

We sat and watched dragonflies dancing and listened to birds behind one temple, marvelled at the intricacies and sheer volume of carvings in several others…we took a little nap on a bench, and we took it slowly.

Rather sensibly we did exactly what Mr Bee suggested…went the way he had figured out over years, a tried and tested route through the vast area of Temples.

We managed to persuade him to accept a drink from us during our first lunch together but he wouldn’t sit with us, I suspected he’d had enough of slightly stilted conversations over the years to know what worked for him.

The second day was as lovely as the first, challenging in the heat, but the stone and earth, carved and natural beauty in the stillness of the jungle was worth the effort.

We walked further on that second day, wandering through the jungle from temple to temple. We came across a sign saying, ‘Gibbons have been released back into the wild here, sponsored by…’ We could hear them in the far distance calling to each other…

It was a place where you could go at your own pace and absorb as much or as little as you wanted. At every entrance and exit there were people checking tickets, employed to sit in one of the most beautiful places we had been, any job can be tedious and repetitive but our ticket checkers  looked pretty cheerful and they were on it.

Also at the entrance to each temple were guides, speaking am incredible array of languages, who for a few dollars could fill you up with stories of the daily lives of the inhabitants 900 years ago, explain all the different shrines, and talk you through the meanings of the carvings, some covering huge areas of wall, some tucked into alcoves. We didn’t have many dollars left so didn’t hire a guide …but we heard snippets as we wandered around.

One of our favourite discoveries were several colonies of bats living in the temple towers – Rosa being the lucky recipient of our only ‘bat shit’ experience : )

When we were thirsty we would fill up on fresh coconut juice and then head into another temple – Mr Bee’s laminated guidance sheets giving us an outline of each so  we knew something before we headed in.

As we walked from one ancient structure  to the next  on that second day , marvelling at the sheer scale, I really understood what Ellie and Louis had loved about this place. Somewhere go the imagination to wake up and write poetry and stories… i wondered who is need to talk to about bringing a few Komodo dragons here and releasing them into the wild…? Dragons and temples – that would be a fabulous combination : ) 

Back in the sane world Mr Bee invited us to have lunch at his house on that second day, which was like a home from home…although they had mango trees, pineapples and bananas growing in their garden. Our homes were roughly the same size with their kitchen being outside and under cover because of the heat.

Me Bee’s wife Geva made us a wonderful stirfry with rice and we ate loads of fresh mango – picked right off the tree…

Mr Bee’s mum came and spoke with Rosa a little as she was from China originally, Rosa being brave enough to try although the dialect was tough for  her.

The youngest of their children was not very well, he was very thin and his early birth had affected him in some way. He spent most of his time cuddling one member of his family or another in the hammock.

I could see the strain on the faces of the family, and I could feel the love. There is no doubt at all that if Geva and I lived near each other we would be friends. Her generosity with lunch and mangoes was matched by mine with cash. A sensible exchange we both benefited from in our hearts and our bellies.

We headed back out with Mr Bee to a couple more temples and then back to the hotel at 4.00 – we could see it would be great for Mr Bee to get home early and we were fine not seeing another sunset. Sometimes rest is best! We paid Mr Bee what he was worth and said a respectful and grateful goodbye. 

Tomorrow we were leaving for Thailand and time back with our lovely cousins – five days of time out from travelling …five days ‘at home!’