Saddle Sore – Angkor Wat, Cambodia

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…There is a vertiginous weight about the structures.  Passing through the gates into the temple enclosure, struggling up the endless steep stairways, I am acutely aware of the intention of Angkor’s architects: impress the bollocks off people – make them feel very small…

Me and J-man get on the slow train out of Bangkok.  Actually, there is no fast train.  We buy first class tickets (US$1.60), so at least we get seats with cushions.
The importance of comfortable seats in the life of a traveller cannot be overstated.

(Top photo: just a small part of Angkor Wat.)
(Below: Bangkok railway station. Not very good seating. Unless you are a monk.)

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We get off the train in Sara Buri.  It is already getting dark, so we check into the only hotel in town.  Sara Buri’s one and only hotel is a good example of why competitive market forces are important.  Evidently the management have decided to take full advantage of their monopoly.  It’s not that the place is expensive, it is just dirty.  Very, very dirty.  This is without doubt one of the filthiest dives I have ever spent a restless night in – and I have slept under bridges.
There is a well upholstered armchair in the corner by the bed, but it has a large Brown stain on the cushion, so neither of us is game to sit on it.

In the morning we hitch a ride to the Cambodian border with a pair of friendly paramedics. There is a sort of yoga mat type thing on the floor, a stretcher, and a box of bandaids. Thai ambulances aren’t as luxurious as Australian ones, but perfectly comfortable if you are not actually injured.

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(Above: me (L) and J-man riding in a Thai ambulance. Our sad matching outfits are unintentional.)

Poipet is a classic border town: noisy, dusty, and short on charm.
We elbow our way through the passport circus, successfully sidestepping multiple attempts by men in uniform to extract gratuities.
Once we have escaped the border post, we find a street stand that has cold beer and refresh ourselves.

It’s time to part ways.   J-man is catching a plane back to Oz in a few days, and he is travel weary.  I don’t blame him.  For a first time away, he’s had a big ride.  We have hitchhiked across Malaysia and Thailand.  He’s experienced culture shock, chilli burn, dehydration, Bangkok, and Thai public transport.  I can see he is ready to go home.
It’s an emotional farewell.  We’ve had our ups and downs, but travelling together over the last month has been mostly great fun.  Being Aussie blokes we don’t say much.  We drink our beers, hug, shrug, wish each other good luck, and J-man heads back up the street to go through the circus one more time, in the Thai direction.
I think about how we started this trip together, as father and son, and how we have become friends.  Everywhere we went, people assumed we were buddies, or brothers.  I felt good about that.  Friendship is the sort of relationship I always tried to have with my son.
I won’t miss his socks, but I will miss his company.

As I pick up my bag, and start down the road, a hot wind gusts into town.  The streets of Poipet, like most Cambodian towns are only half sealed.  The wind picks up a blinding cloud of red dust, and throws it at me.  I wrap my scarf round my face and squint.  A squall of rain sweeps in after the wind, and the red dust sticking to everything turns to mud in about thirty seconds.  This is really the wild east.

In Siem Reap, I luck out and score a fantastic dorm bed for two bucks a night.  It’s the opposite of the dive in Sara Buri; clean, friendly and well maintained.

(Below: Siem Reap.)

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Siem Reap is an odd town.  It is very green by south-east Asian standards.  The city still possesses a quaint charm, reminiscent of the French colonial era.  Siem Reap has parkland.  Tree lined streets.  Lakes.  Delicious pastry. I’m not in Siem Reap for the pastry though.  I have another mission altogether.  I’m here to see Angkor Wat.

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(Angkor Wat.)

The great temple city north of Siem Reap is legendary.  I sit in my humid hotel room and read about it on WikiTravel.
Apparently, Angkor Wat Archeological Park covers an area in excess of four hundred square kilometres, and is packed with hundreds of spectacular architectural monuments.  The scale alone is amazing.  The oldest ruins date back a thousand years.  The site includes several distinct walled cities, and historians are still puzzling over the purpose of some of the structures.  Angkor Wat itself, the best preserved of the temples, is surrounded by a massive moat, which still contains water.

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(Angkor Wat in it’s heyday – as depicted by a popular hotel-lobby-artist.)

I decide to hire a bike to ride around Angkor.  The site is simply too large to see on foot.  A day ticket costs US$20, so I need to make the most of my time.
There is a place up the road from my hotel that hires bikes.  They have two types.  There are old fashioned looking things with girly looking baskets on the front, or sporty looking mountain bikes.  The girly, old fashioned bikes have more comfortable seats, but the mountain bikes have twelve gears.  I test ride both types.  I decide to go with the mountain bike.  I tell myself that it will be good to have gears, but really I am just embarrassed to ride a bike with a basket on the front.  I hand over money, climb on my mountain bike and peddle away, clicking the gear levers and feeling very sporty.  By the time I have ridden back to the hotel, the hard saddle is already bruising my butt.

I get up early.  It’s barely six o’clock as I set out on my mountain bike.
The ride from Siem Reap to Angkor Wat is easy.  It only takes about fifteen minutes, along a well paved road called Charles-De-Gaulle-something.  The high season is over, so I don’t have to queue for my ticket.  I ride into the National Park, through the increasingly dense jungle.  Up ahead I see the first glimpse of stone spires amongst the trees.  The Charles-De-Gaulle-something road sweeps into a turn, and dramatically, spectacularly, arrives at Angkor Wat.  The road follows the edge of the moat.  This is a moat on a much grander scale than anything I have seen in Europe.  Two hundred metres of water separates the temple from the surrounding land.  I chain my bike to a tree, take a long drink of water, and enter Angkor Wat.

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(Above: Angkor Wat; the bridge across the moat.)

The scale of the place is overwhelming.  Everything is massive, from the stone bridge across the moat, to the intricate carvings on every surface.  There is a vertiginous weight about the structures.  Passing through the gates into the temple enclosure, struggling up the endless steep stairways, I am acutely aware of the intention of Angkor’s architects: impress the bollocks off people – make them feel very small.

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Everywhere I look there are superb reliefs; beautiful motifs of dancing women, flowers, animals and warriors.
Angkor Wat makes me feel the same kind of awe that I felt at Mont-St-Michel and The Louvre.  This incredible, enourmous structure was devised and created by human hands, but the labour and artistry involved is almost impossible to imagine.  Millions toiled on the temples and palaces of Angkor.  The construction took hundreds of years, and the temples were regularly redesigned, depending on whether Buddhism or Hinduism was in favour with any given king.

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(Above: Angkor Wat masonry.)

As in Europe, vain monarchs committed acts of heinous vandalism, in the name of piety.  This king built a temple dedicated to such and such a god, and then that one came along a century later and smashed the faces off all the sculptures, and replaced them with new ones depicting his preferred deity. (Reminds me of The Mezquita, in Cordoba.). Add to this over-zealous renovation; the ravages of war, earthquakes, colonial theft, and the ever encroaching jungle, and it is a wonder that Angkor Wat still stands.

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(Above: Angkor Wat.)
(Below: the gateway to Angkor Thom. The balustrades of the moat bridge are sculpted to represent a leviathan tug-of-war.)

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After Angkor Wat, I peddle a bit further down the road to Angkor Thom.
Angkor Thom is less famous, but just as beautiful as Angkor Wat.  The structure is less well preserved, but still impressive.  Piles of fallen stone blocks testify to the massive task of restoration that Angkor presents to archeologists.

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(Above: Angkor Thom collosus.  This photo is available to buy in the Print Shop.)

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(Above: Angkor Thom.)

UNESCO, and many other international organisations have given assistance to Cambodia to preserve and restore Angkor.  One of the biggest ongoing projects is the removal of land mines from the site.  Cambodia’s violent modern history left her with a terrible legacy of unexploded mines.  Angkor Wat is still a living city in a strange way.  Many people work and live on the site, on the periphery of the ruins.  Little food stands, restaurants and souvenir stalls are everywhere.  To make the site safe for the local people who live there, as well as tourists, millions of dollars have been spent on land mine clearing.  There are still signs on the side of the road warning the unwary not to stray into the mine-littered jungle.

After Angkor Thom, I am starting to feel fatigued.  By lunch time the sun is getting brutally hot, and I feel like I have clambered up a million stone steps.  I feel that peculiar kind of aesthetic overload that magnificent cultural sites give me.  It is just too much to take in.  It’s the way I felt after a full day wandering the streets of Paris.
I have a snack and restore my energy a bit.  One more temple before I call it a day.

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(Above: Ta Prohm. You can buy a print of this photo from the Print Shop.)

Ta Prohm is small and in very poor shape, but it is probably the most recognisable Angkor structure.  The jungle has almost consumed Ta Prohm.  It’s walls and spires are entwined by the roots of massive trees, so enmeshed in the structure that they have become an inextricable part of it.  The contrast of grarled wood, ancient trees and carved stone is arrestingly beautiful, and the site is cool and green, because the trees growing up through the stone form a natural canopy overhead.  The trees in Ta Prohm are such an intricate part of the temple now, that the restoration teams must care for the trees with the same diligence that they manage the architecture.  Where trees have died, or fallen, they have torn down Ta Prohm’s walls, or left huge gaps in the masonry, making it dangerously unstable.

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(Ta Prohm is undergoing constant maintenance and restoration work.)

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(Above: Ta Prohm is being consumed by the jungle.)
(Below: a small shrine in Ta Prohm.)

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By the time I emerge from Ta Prohm, I feel like I hardly have the energy to ride back into town.  I get on the bike, and peddle back down Charles-De-Gaulle-something in the sweltering afternoon heat.  The bruises on my arse from the morning ride ache.  I’m sweaty, dusty and sun burned.  It feels like the ride back to town is twice as long as the ride out.  I’m glad J-man isn’t here to mock me for being old and frail, although it would be good if he could dink me.  (Dink: Australian slang; to give another person a ride on the back of your bicycle.)

Luckily, there is a girl deep frying some sort of delicious looking fruit pastry on the side of the road.  I buy four pastries, and consume them with shameless rapidity.
I ride a bit further.  I’m sweating so much my hands are getting slippery on the handle bars (nothing to do with the fried pastry).
Another road-side stall!  This one is selling fruit.  I don’t know the names of any of the exotic fruit in Asia, but I love them all.  I buy a kilo of brown-squishy-delicious’ and a kilo of furry-pink-bit-like-lychees’ and sit under a tree to eat them.
After four pastries and two kilos of fruit, I ride even slower, but feel better about being sore and sweaty.

I get back to town, and I can no longer feel my butt.  It’s completely numb.
If you are planning a visit to Angkor Wat, my advice is: hire the girly looking bike with the comfy saddle.

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(My day pass for Angkor Wat, me, and Benjamin. Cambodia uses US$, as well as their own money, which has Angkor Wat illustrated on it: top left.)
 


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