Cambodia Part 3 : Battambang

Peace Naga.

Another long bus journey, this time to a terminal on the outskirts of Cambodia's second city (population around 150,000!), Battambang.  Immediately I sense a contrast to bustling Phnom Penh, here traffic seems much lighter, and the tuktuk drivers far less aggressive, this is all good, and makes for a pleasant walk to my hotel, which is itself rather nice - my room has actual furniture, and there is even a rooftop jacuzzi!  So, liking the place so far, it has a laid back feel to it, there seems to be more of a French influence surviving here than the rest of the country - where, beyond the availability of demi-baguettes and patisserie, you wouldn't really guess at the colonial history.  Here, there seem to be a lot of French tourists sipping wine in restaurants of an evening, and why not.  Seems to be a very artistic place too, lots of sculpture about, I pass wood carving workshops, there is a performing arts school here too, their circus shows being one of the city's attractions - a bit pricey for me I fear.  I do splash out on bicycle hire - three whole dollars per day, this gets me a machine with actual gears, and even disk brakes, well worth it.  For it is only a short ride out into the country, and there is much to see - though in fact, it is enjoyable enough just to be out riding around, the wind in my face more or less compensating for the scorching heat.  I find a convivial place to pause anyway, a few kilometres south of town is what purports to be Cambodia's only winery - well, they certainly have a lot of grapes growing, all under curved translucent shelters to protect them from the monsoon rains.  Not sure if any fermentation goes on here though - I partake of a little 'wine' tasting, and while I am no connoisseur, it's my impression that these beverages have been created with a mixture of grape juice, grain alcohol, and spices such as ginger.  Hmm.  Back to town where I visit various substantial statues, one of Vishnu, a large 'peace Naga' constructed by welding together various firearms handed in during a (fairly recent) amnesty, and most impressively the huge 'Battambang Man'.  Apparently the latter refers to the local legend of a man who found a magic stick, and used it to become king - as you do.

Temple art here is so entertaining.

I am sure you are wondering, are there temples here?  Well of course there are... again, bicycle is the best way to reach them, a notable example being Ek Phnom, a little way to the north, here there is a modern Buddhist temple, complete with massive Buddha statue, and nearby an 11th century Wat in the Angkorian style, as big as many I saw in Siem Reap, though clearly it has suffered over the centuries - there is hardly a single intact piece of carving to be seen.  I manage a longer journey, some twenty kilometres to the south, to visit Wat Banan, a rather better preserved Angkorian temple, this time built on top of a substantial hill - I am getting some exercise here for sure.  Also interesting is a nearby complex of huge caves, where I actually pay for a guide - well, it was either that or just push past him to get in.  Worth a dollar to have him point out stalagmites, veins of quartz in the rock, and even a colony of bats on the roof high above.  I ride on, heading west on what turns out to be a dirt track alongside a canal, well my $3 bike copes well enough, there is another temple this way, Prasat Snung - again, modern Buddhist next to the crumbling remains of ancient towers.  From here I can head back to Battambang along National Highway 57, taking in the most famous local temple, Phnom Sampov, on the way.  The route looked good when I planned things, but two problems arise, firstly I don't get far before the 'National Highway' turns into a surface of dirt and gravel - I guess they're rebuilding it?  Worse, it's starting to rain, just a few big fat drops at first, but before long I'm riding through a storm, into the face of a stiff headwind and a deluge of water, lightning bolts crashing into the surrounding hills and fields.  Not entirely pleasant, but the real problem is it is turning the already poor road surface into a sea of mud, increasingly hard to get any traction on... I push on, the rear tyre spinning in the mud, but after half an hour or so when I pass a shelter on the side of the road, packed with locals whose mopeds are parked outside, I have to stop for a bit.  They look at me curiously, I am the only cyclist here... well, the rain doesn't stop but maybe eases off a little, so after a rest I head back out, and thankfully after a kilometre or so the road returns to a tarmac surface.  I reach Wat Sampong, and though it is raining I still climb the many steps to reach the temple, more because it is there than anything else really.  The vaunted view from the top is of a landscape blurred by the torrential rain falling... still, I do get to see a life size diorama of Monkey, Tripitaka and all, so that is cool.

All aboard the bamboo train.

Food here is good, I mainly eat at a French owned place opposite my hotel, where there is also draft beer for $1 (or less during happy hour!) and a pool table, good to see my pool skills have not left me.  Am liking amok I must say... another local speciality around here is apparently spring rolls, well go on, I may have had these before somewhere, they're good though.  I find a handy local newspaper by the bar, in English, with details of various local attractions, one that catches my eye is the 'bamboo train', so I head off on my bike next day to check it out.  This turns out to involve a ten kilometre or so stretch of railway, surviving from the network built by the French back in the day - much of it now defunct, although reconstruction work is now underway, trains will be able to run all the way from Bangkok to Phnom Penh within a year or two.  But here there are trains, of a sort, still running - each consists of a wooden frame, resting without suspension on metal bogies, and topped by a bamboo platform.  The thing is driven along by what looks like a lawnmower engine, attached to the axle via a car fan belt... supposedly these were used by locals to move themselves and goods, back when the roads in this region were more or less unusable, but now it is the preserve of tourists, me and three others pay $5 each for a trip up and down the line.  Turns out to be something of a thrill ride, maximum speed is perhaps fifteen miles per hour, but the way the 'train' rattles along the warped rails, over rotting sleepers and bridges, with us passengers crouched inches above the track is, exciting to say the least.  Amusing to see what happens when two trains meet going in opposite directions - whichever one has fewer passengers has to offload them, and then the entire thing is dismantled and carried off the rails.  I take a turn carrying one end of the carriage, it's actually pretty heavy for all that it's made of bamboo.

Sheltering from the monsoon at Wat Sampov.

Well, that was Cambodia then... from here, it's just another long bus back to Thailand, where I have more planning to do - this world travel thing does not organise itself you know.  Have to say I was rather impressed by this country - it is certainly amazing how the place has been reconstructed since the horrors of last century - even after the Vietnamese invasion, there was an on-off civil war going on for years afterwards, with the last remnants of the Khmer Rouge not surrendering until 1999.  Nowadays the place seems to be thriving, there is new construction everywhere, and a general atmosphere of optimism - I can certainly see myself coming back at some point.  I might well pass through here on my way to Viet Nam at some point I suppose - need to check off the last bit of French Indochina as was, after all.  Was talking to one of my fellow passengers on the bamboo train, he reckoned a good cycling route was to go from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City,  Hmmm...

Photos to go with this post can be found here.

Cambodia Part 2 : Phnom Penh

Cambodia-Vietnam Friendship Monument.

After the general awesomeness of Siem Reap, wherever I went next was always going to have a hard time living up to it, and to be honest, Phnom Penh, which I reach after another day long bus trip, doesn't make a great first impression.  My hotel is near a busy, and loud, construction site, and walking through the city is a hectic experience at best.  There is no traffic control here, and Cambodians share with Indians the great idea of having an unofficial extra lane next to the edge of the road, mainly for mopeds, going against the flow of traffic.  This all makes crossing the road a whole lot of fun.  Then there is the way that here in Phnom Penh, being outside is to be continually assailed from all sides by people trying to sell you things, mostly tuktuk drivers and motorcycle taxis, but I also get men trying to hawk fake rolex watches, kids offering string (one dollar), and the tuktuk guys offer other things, 'mariwanna', or indeed 'ladies'.  A sign inside my hotel room gravely informs me that sex with children is a crime.  Hmmm.

The Ton Le Sap / Mekong confluence is directly behind me.

Still it's not all bad, there are a couple of broad, paved avenues near my hotel, leading to the Independence Monument (every former colony has to have one), these are good to wander along, quiet during the day, at night they're crowded with locals, groups playing football or some kind of 'foot badminton', not to mention the very popular 'sandal boules', and there are also lots of monks sitting and chatting.  Plenty of temples here of course, all gaudily painted in gold and silver, one near the Royal Palace is lit up like a christmas tree at night too.  There's a nice riverside walk too, the Ton Le Sap river, much wider here than back in Siem Reap, meets the Mekong here, and you can stroll for a mile or so up from the confluence.  Nice to see the Mekong again, many miles downstream from where I last saw it in Vientiane - I am struck by the idea of boating down it all the way from Huay Xai to here, or even through Viet Nam to the South China Sea - think there may be issues with border police though.

Inside the Royal Palace complex.

Back to the Royal Palace for a look inside - again somewhat expensive at $10.50 for a ticket.  It does seem that everything here, with the exception of beer, is surprisingly pricey, I guess the weakness of the pound against the dollar does not help.  Turns out you don't get into the palace itself for your money, rather there are a couple of substantial walled gardens containing, oh yes, temples, plus a large number of stupas, which I gather contain the cremated remains of successive members of the royal family.  Cambodia seems to be, like Thailand, staunchly monarchist these days, there are pictures of the king everywhere - not too surprising given that their period without a royal head of state turned out... badly.  Well, it's interesting enough here, the huge collection of gold and silver Buddha statues inside one of the temples is impressive, and I'm struck by the mural that runs all around one of the walled gardens, depicting various mythological scenes - for instance, giant demon with a mouthful of sword wielding monkeys, next to a scene of a similar giant demon, again with the monkeys, but this time another giant, this one with many hands all holding swords, is cutting him to pieces.  Of an evening, I enjoy that cheap beer, and more local food - seems the spicy beef with rice thing I had in Poipet is 'Lok Lak', my favourite though is Khmer speciality 'Amok', a yellow curry with coconut and, I think, cabbage, is most tasty.

Schoolrooms converted into a cell block.

The memory I will take away from Phnom Penh though, is rather a grim one, after spending a rather harrowing few hours at the former S21 prison, converted from a high school by the Khmer Rouge back in the seventies.  I find myself unable to skip any part of the audio guide, stories from some of the handful of prisoners who survived out of the 20,000 who passed through here, details of what happened in each room I pass through, testimony from former guards and even the camp commandant.  It is utterly horrifying, somehow more so in that this was going on in my own lifetime, with perhaps the most poignant thing being the sheer absurdity of Pol Pot's regime.  They abandoned modern, urban civilisation, driving people out of cities to communal farms, believing this would somehow create a communist utopia - of course the result was mass famine, some two million people died in all.  Intellectuals were rounded up and brought to prisons like this, hundreds of them around the country - although the Khmer Rouge leaders were themselves university educated, having picked up revolutionary communist ideas in Paris.  Here in the prison you can see the evidence of the regime's disdain for any kind of skill or education, the shoddy brickwork used to convert classrooms into cells, even the torture equipment converted from heavy wooden furniture... and of course, in the stories of the Kafkaesque madness that went on here, people tortured for weeks before an acceptable confession was extracted, said confession generally being entirely fictitious, at which point they were taken directly to the infamous killing fields.  I find myself looking with a new appreciation at the 'Cambodia-Vietnam Friendship Monument' near my hotel - I guess these people have reason to thank the Vietnamese, who invaded in 1979, driving the Khmer Rouge from power.

Memorial to the victims.

Photos to go with this post can be found here.

Cambodia Part 1 : Siem Reap

Apsaras.

I've taken a little break in Thailand to recover from the India thing, recharge my batteries, and of course plan further adventures - I have something coming up soon that is taking rather a lot of planning, stay tuned for updates on that one.  Now though, time for a little bit more of southeast Asia, I was quite taken with Laos a couple of years ago, what will Cambodia be like then?  Easy enough to get to, a 48 Baht train journey from Hua Lamphong station to Aranyaprathet, then a 20 Baht shared tuktuk takes me to the border, straight through Thai passport control, walk across the friendship bridge (donated by Great Britain!) and I'm in Cambodia.  The border town on this side is Poipet, which has a dubious reputation as a den of scammers who will apparently try to sell me a visa or bus ticket at inflated prices.  There is also a substantial zone right on the border filled with casinos - gambling is illegal in both Thailand and Cambodia, but the authorities turn a blind eye here and so it's somewhere for wealthy Thais to come and indulge their vice.  I don't actually have any trouble with touts, in fact I nearly walk straight into Poipet without going through immigration, which seems oddly easy to do, but I manage to spot the office on the other side of the busy road, and after a bit of queueing to show my prepurchased 'evisa', I'm in.  By this time it's dark, and I'm not terribly encouraged to note that Poipet has no working streetlights, making a walk along the busy main road to find an ATM a little less enjoyable than it might be, particularly when I have to cross the road - I am already missing those little footbridges they have in Thailand.  It takes a while, but I eventually get some dollars - somewhat surprisingly, the main currency here, there is the local Riel as well, but it is only used for small change, the rate being 4,000 to the dollar!  On to my hotel, which again is a little odd - a large, but bare and windowless room.  I do at least manage to find a bar cum restaurant, where the beer is very cheap, and while the menu is entirely in Khmer, there are pictures, so I can point to something which turns out to be beef with rice, good enough for me.

Angkor Wat in all its glory.

After a little struggle to check out of my hotel, which initially seems to be devoid of staff, I head off to find a bus to Siem Reap - I think I get lucky there, a sleeper bus is making its way back I assume, and I pay seven dollars to be the only passenger, bargain.  This takes most of the day, so just time to check into another hotel - rather nicer this one, if not ideally situated a mile or so out of town.  A little walk then to find, yes a bar and restaurant, here I can get a beer for a whole seventy five cents.  I am pleased to see that Siem Reap has working streetlights, wonder what else there is to see around here?  Oh yes - the Angkor temple complexes of course.  A mind bogglingly vast area filled with temples of various ages, and in various states of repair, some four hundred square kilometres of them apparently, I invest in a somewhat pricey (sixty two dollars!) three day pass but even with that I'm not going to be able to see everything, will do my best though.  Borrowing a bicycle from my hotel, I spend many hours pedalling about, parking up at various spots to then wander around one complex of buildings or another, beginning with the most famous and best preserved, Angkor Wat itself.  Situated at the centre of a square plot of land, around a mile on a side and surrounded by a broad moat, this is on a scale comparable to anything I saw in India, a huge intricately carved pyramid surrounded by galleries, all built of age blackened stone.  Interesting to compare this to India in fact, as these temples were built to venerate gods which we'd nowadays call Hindu, in the case of Angkor Wat for example, Vishnu.  The story of gods and demons churning the waters by pulling on a giant snake crops up here as well - the moat around the temple representing the water, and the Wat itself the rock around which the snake was wound.  Snake or Naga statues are everywhere too, though most of the carvings are of 'Apsaras', which I see variously translated as 'heavenly nymphs' and 'celestial dancers', they take the form of attractive young ladies wearing few clothes...

The Elephant Terrace.

It does make me wonder if the various huge fortresses I visited in India were built on the flattened ruins of temple complexes like this, I would not be surprised.  Well at least this is all still here, albeit much of it relatively ruined.  A little to the north of Angkor Wat is Angkor Thom, again a square moat, this one more like three miles on the side, and within a bewildering array of temples from different eras.  At the centre, the Bayon temple, again a pyramidal structure, this time surmounted by innumerable stone towers, carved with huge, inscrutably smiling faces, then a walk through the surrounding woods reveals more and more megalithic structures, the Bachuon temple, where stones from the collapsed top of the pyramid were reused in later centuries to create a huge reclining Buddha along one of the walls - which has since, in turn also collapsed.  There's a continual impression that, grand though the remaining temples here are, they were once much more so - every where you look there are piles of cut stone, sections of massive statues sunk into the ground, great piles of masonry where another temple must have stood.  Often attempts at repair or conservation are apparent, but it does tend to look rather like a lego set that has been broken and inexpertly put back together, the carvings on one block not matching up to the next, sometimes a ramshackle assembly of stone that can only be an approximation to the original structure.  But still, a lot survives, I walk past the elephant terrace, with carvings of pachyderms as you'd expect, but also huge gods and demons supporting the walkway.  There's also a 'leper king terrace', the walls covered with an array of carved nymphs and snakes, and still the temples continue, getting older and more ruinous as I head away from the centre, until I reach Prah Palilay, a smallish edifice in comparison to the more famous ones, but fascinating in the way it has been overtaken by the jungle, trees growing out of the stone to create a scene that reminds me of the Ents attacking Isengard in the Lord of the Rings.

I probably could have jumped it.

Is there any other stuff here then?  Sure, it's not really a big town, but there is a market where tourists with annoying facial hair come to buy harem pants... nearby is Pub Street, which does indeed have many pubs, some selling beer for a mere fifty cents.  I'm not quite that poor, I head upstairs in one bar where it's a whole one dollar twenty five (more or less, they can't seem to make up their minds), the reason being that here we get an Apsara show.  Well, I am kind of doing the tourist thing here... it is perfectly wholesome anyway, the heavenly nymphs here seem rather more conservatively dressed than the ones carved on the temples, and there are also some traditional dances not involving Apsaras, such as the charming peacock dance.  Other things - one day I ride south on another ancient bicycle, along the Ton Le Sap river which broadens out into a substantial dock where Chinese tour groups are piling onto boats.  Not me though, I park the bike up and keep walking along the river on what rapidly becomes a dirt track, between the river and some kind of inlet, with many houseboats and many dubious smells.  I get past a guy who says something about my needing a ticket, he has a chap in uniform sat next to him, not sure if this is a scam or just advice to go back and get on a boat.  Next up, the path is broken by a few metres of water, allowing long tail boats from the inlet to access the river... local kids jump over it, but I pay a thousand Riels for them to drag a metal footbridge across for me.  A mile or two further and I reach Ton Le Sap the lake, largest in southeast Asia apparently.  Something to see, although very hot work walking to it, I am almost tempted to swim, but still remember the smells from the houseboat area.  There is also a substantial floating village a little way out on the lake, Vietnamese refugees I believe, that will be where the tour groups are going, there to have people try to sell them scarves I expect.  Oh, and back at the Angkor complex, there are more temples too, would you believe?  I visit Preah Khan, again set within a huge square moat, this must once have been almost as grand as Angkor Wat, now it's a picturesque ruin, patches of well preserved carvings here and there, but mostly tumbled piles of eroded stone, and huge trees growing over the walls, the gnarled, grey roots seeming to form part of the design.  Northeast from here, I reach the East Baray, a huge artificial lake, built as a reservoir and now a strange sight, trees poking up here and there, and of course it has its own temple, Neak Pean, reached via a lengthy boardwalk it turns out to be a sort of water temple, a walled enclosure containing a square pond, with a carved tower at the centre.  Things start to blur a bit, I remember Mebon for its splendid elephant statues, and Ta Prohm, another ruin in the midst of being consumed by the jungle, I gather it was used as the set for one of the Indiana Jones films.  And that is about it, my time here at an end, barring another evening of cheap beer and food.  Have to say this place was pretty awesome, I would come back, but for now there is more of Cambodia to see, off to the capital Phnom Penh tomorrow.

Photos to go with this post can be found here and here.