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Environmentally responsible recycled art!

Safety message: On an entirely unrelated note, you cannot make toast by placing a slice of bread on a pyrex plate on an electric hotplate.  The plate explodes. We live and learn. Or rather we learn, and, if we are lucky, we live.

I’m off work this week, so I had time to draw Mrs Gwynn before Christmas. Because you wouldn’t really want her turning up at Christmas.

Today we took a 90 minute tuk tuk ride to the site of Beng Mealea, which receives few visitors due to its distance from Siem Reap and its ruined state. Reports describe it as a “jungle adventure” with piles of fallen masonry to be scrambled over and vines covering the remains of the buildings. It has only become accessible in the last few years, after landmines were cleared and a surfaced road built.

We bought masks to filter the air on the dusty roads (check out my hair after no trim for six months, no brushing that morning and a few minutes in a tuk tuk !):

Roadside scenery:

Local transport:

I was taken by the traditional wooden two-storey houses on stilts in the villages we passed along the way, but was lulled by the scenery and forgot about photos (Stu took most of the pictures I’ve put up here). At Beng Mealea, our first stop was the toilet, about which I had some fears, which proved unfounded, as the loo block was clean, western-style and had paper. The temple setting was more bush than jungle, or perhaps it was just the dry season weather giving the vegetation the sun-flattened, dull-barked look I mentally file under “bush” (I forgot to mention - a stretch of the airport road was lined with gum trees - I felt suddenly nostalgic!), but the tall trees provided welcome shade regardless. At the entrance to the site we acquired a guide, a young woman who spoke, I think, no English, who led us around the wooden walkway that has been constructed around some, but not all, of the temple, and helped us negotiate the piles of rubble. Though shorter than I, she climbed up and down the hills of big, jumbled rectangular blocks with great agility and confident stretches that put me to shame. Being a complete coward and not experienced in climbing anything more challenging than stairs, I found that I did best physically and mentally as a quadruped, and did most of my exploring on all fours. Squeezing through a window and stalking over roofs, we found carved false doors, crypt-like corridors, a library covered in strangler figs, an inaccessible courtyard covered in a wild carpet of plants, and ways rendered impassable by fallen ceilings.

After the tour finished, we were free to explore on our own. Even at the major temples, visitors are given the right to climb steep and dangerous stairs and only shut out of structurally unsound areas. I can’t recall a single warning sign at Beng Mealea. We overheard a guide telling his two Japanese tourists that a rockfall at their feet was where another two Japanese girls had fallen and broken limbs in the wet season. Exploring was great fun, and we even managed to get slightly lost!

Walls, windows and trees:

A window:

This dancing Shiva was on a fallen stone at the bottom of a pile:

Us:

These kids were climbing around the ruins, carrying tinder (I think), or possibly thatching material. [Edit: Stu thinks it’s a straw doll]:

A shaft of light in a corridor:

As we explored, I started to feel puzzled by the generally good condition of the temple’s intact parts and carvings, and of the rubble in the piles. Furthermore, while strangler figs had certainly got going over the walls, there were none of the giant silk cotton trees that we had seen at Ta Prohm and elsewhere. The invasion of the jungle didn’t seem a particularly ancient one. Something wasn’t adding up, and when we were leaving, Som enlightened us. The temple had been in good condition, he said, until the civil war, when it was damaged by artillery. For me this cast a retrospective shadow over the fun we’d had exploring this “lost jungle temple”. Still, I’m glad we went. Many an old ruin became a ruin because of a war, I guess.

We were back in Siem Reap in time for lunch. We ate at a French restaurant where we’d had a good meal the night before (when we were regaled by a drunk in the open-walled house next door - the guy seemed to be speaking in tongues - but the lunch hour was devoid of free entertainments). Rather than have a “proper lunch” as my mother would call it, I had very improper deep fried pineapple rolls in an excellent chocolate sauce.

And then it was time to head back to the airport. This time Som’s wife and her mother rode with us in the tuk tuk. Som’s wife had come up to see him, and I wondered how many of the people working in Siem Reap are actually from there, and how many have come in search of a living on the tourist dollar.

One final, inexplicable mystery greeted us at the airport. The fancy homemade ice cream was cheaper there than in town. Wonders will, indeed, never cease.

I still want him to be both a grownup and a chibi. Chibi is definitely easier to draw, though.

Day Three

Our early morning trip to Ta Prohm was great. It had been quite crowded in the afternoon yesterday but this morning we were amongst the first visitors and were able to wander almost alone around the carved ruins and admire again the dripping trees, vaguely subaquatic, like anencephalic cephalopods.

Every site at Angkor is attended by hawkers selling T-shirts, scarves, postcards, pirated Lonely Planet guidebooks, wooden flutes and other tourist paraphernalia. They’re polite, but pushy and inclined to mob you. I bought some wooden bead bracelets off a grubby waif with a voice like Marianne Faithfull - just a cold, I hoped - who came up to us as we were getting into our tuk tuk. If aid is going to Cambodia it isn’t reaching these people in sufficient amounts - or if it is, the adults are using their kids to make money rather than sending them to school.

We only stayed out for the morning, and went around some of the less famous temples and monasteries. The largest was the monastery of Preah Khan. The front approach crossed a moat sprinkled with pink lotuses. The bridge was decorated with a depiction of the churning of the ocean of milk, with asuras tugging on the great snake Sesha who was used as a rope to turn a mountain to stir the ocean:

A corridor:

This structure looked Romanesque:

Garuda vanquishing a naga serpent:

Awesome tree at the back of the monastery:

The star attraction at the small Buddhist temple of Ta Som is this strangler fig:

There was something of Versailles about Neak Pean, an artificial island with a Buddhist temple on it, featuring the remains of sculpted fountains. Since this was the dry season, the water had to be imaginary:

Neak Pean was originally a hospital, with four bathing pools representing earth, water, wind and fire, based on the Hindu belief that health requires a balance of elements in the body. Neak Pean in the wet season.

We headed back to Siem Reap and had lunch at a place called the Dead Fish, a guesthouse with a restaurant and barand in a warehouse-like building decorated with shop mannequins and other cool curios. The Khmer curry with sweet potatoes was mild and tasty. Next to the toilets was a pit with a pool full of small crocodiles:

As we came out of the restaurant a motorbike went past with a distinctly organic, nearly human screaming sound. A live pig was strapped to the pillion, shrieking in (presumably) terror.

We had a quiet afternoon and wandered a bit around downtown Siem Reap. I bought three loose woven striped silk scarves at a market. They’re lightweight but warm and will be perfect for Europe - so I’ll have to go to Europe in the autumn or winter again! (Venice in winter, maybe…)

Day One

It takes about half a day to get from Bangkok to the Cambodian border town of Poi Pet by bus, after which it tends to take many more hours to get from Poi Pet to Siem Reap, the town near the Angkor ruins, partly because the road falls apart in the wet season every year, and partly because the bus operators stage breakdowns to get you to Siem Reap late at night so that you can’t find your hotel and have to stay in accommodations their company either owns or receives kickbacks from. Therefore we went by plane, necessitating an early start, as you never know what Bangkok traffic will be doing. Bangkok Air has a monopoly on the Bangkok-Siem Reap route. By some mysterious coincidence, the road to Siem Reap is predicted to be built properly in 2009, the year the monopoly expires.

The traffic was fine, so we arrived early at the cheerless silver-grey oddity of Suvarnabhumi airport, which was designed by Germans and looks a bit like a sandworm from Dune wearing bits of the Sydney Opera House. I think I’ve mentioned before that there are no cushions on the seats in the departure lounges. I suppose you’re meant to feel that you’re sitting on a deck chair in the sun; in my case, I always feel simply that my bottom hurts.

We had only brought cabin luggage. Our 125 ml bottles of sunscreen and moisturiser were disallowed despite being less than half full. A search of the duty free shops for a cheap product in a 100 ml bottle was unsuccessful. We ditched ours rather than bother checking them in. I wonder if an ordinary chemist shop after the security check point might not do good business?

The Bangkok Air flight was actually an Edelweiss Air plane. Our captain made announcements in English, German and French - “Because he can,” Stu said. We taxied around for so long that it felt as though we had caught a bus after all. I nearly dozed off before we reached the runway. After we finally got airborne, the flight lasted all of forty minutes, during which the efficient crew managed to feed us (sandwich rolls and cake, all fine).

Siem Reap airport is small, attractive and relaxed, but they could do better with their visa procedures. There were two queues, one to hand in your passport and one to get it back, but they weren’t labelled, so that half the passengers, us included, thought there was no difference between the queues and stood in the wrong one, wasting a lot of time.

Outside we met the tuk-tuk driver who’d been waiting patiently to take us to our hotel. Siem Reap is full of hotels and guest houses, with rooms going from about $7 to hundreds of dollars a night. We’d booked into the Golden Orange, a $20-$30 place in the town itself. Most of the expensive hotels, we soon saw, are on the road to the airport, appropriately named Airport Road, a long, straight, dusty Third World boulevard lined with dozens of those expensive hotels, new palaces with a look of grandeur attempted on the cheap - Mc Mansions for holidaymakers, set back from the scruffy, unpaved roadside. Between the hotels and on the no man’s land off the road, local life goes on, looking like the poorer parts of rural Thailand. There are tiny, open lean-to shops thatched with palm leaves, makeshift eateries and stalls selling gasoline out of drink bottles. Most vehicles on the road are motorbikes, and there is the familiar sight of two or three generations riding together on one bike.

An ambulance comes wailing up the road. Someone on a bike says, “Farang”. A crowd of people are looking at something in a ditch beside the road. Apparently a car swiped a tuk tuk.

The Golden Orange is clean and comfortable. There’s an open-air bar with a grotty and dilapidated but free pool table. After checking out some attractive gardens across the road and wandering down the sluggish river a short way, we spend most of the afternoon playing pool and watching TV. We arrange for the driver who brought us from the airport, whose name is Som, to take us around the ruins tomorrow. Angkor Wat is only one building in the remains of a city. It’s all much too big to get around without a vehicle, and a tuk tuk only costs $12 a day.

Day Two

The buffet breakfast at the hotel was decent, offering noodles, omelettes, bacon, sausages, pancakes and fruit. Having fuelled ourselves with this and coffee, we met Som outside and climbed in his tuk tuk, which had a roof decorated with magenta linoleum and patterned upholstery that we would learn to recognise as we searched for our ride amongst those of other sightseers at each location.

It took about half an hour to drive to the ruins, along a pleasantly green road. The morning air was full of smoke from fires burning outside palm-thatched encampments. Some of the fires seemed to be for cooking, others for burning rubbish.

After buying our passes at the entrance to the Angkor site, our first stop was at the bottom of a hill. Som told us there was a temple at the top with a good view of Angkor Wat at sunset. He says there would be a lot of tourists there in the afternoon and asks if we’d like to go up now.

It was worth the climb. The temple was pyramid shaped, with precipitous stairs. There wasn’t much left of the building. Four lingas enshrined at each corner and a statue of Nandi the bull at the bottom made it clear that Shiva was the principal god worshipped here. It was a peaceful but dramatic spot with a great view, including a distant grey cutout of Angkor Wat with the morning light behind it. Only one other couple was up there. The sun was already starting to bite, so we went down the hill again. On the path we saw a hunstman-sized spider carrying what appeared to me to be a piece of polystyrene. We pondered what a spider might want polystyrene for, then Stu, suddenly enlightened, said it must be food wrapped in silk - the spider carrying its morning meal home in a package. I don’t know why I even thought it was polystyrene…

At the Shiva temple:

Homage to De Chirico?

Our next stop was the city of Angkor Thom, which contains a number of buildings, the most famous of which is the Bayon, decorated with big smiling faces:

We liked this small structure with trees growing out of it:

And this cool tree, which was stretching up through the wall like a piece of chewing gum:

A dog at Angkor Thom:

Next came my favourite site, and Stu’s too, I think, the 12th-13th century monastic complex of Ta Prohm, which has been left partially as it was found, with enormous silk cotton trees growing over it. The roots of these trees drip down and along the walls like melting wax. They’re destroying the buildings, but they’re beautiful and highly photogenic things in their own right. They embody the process of nature gathering man-mad structures back to itself and bring the life force right into the empty shells of the buildings and walls. They’re Shiva-like trees — creation and destruction, peace and violence in lockstep.

We went back to Ta Prohm early the next morning. These pictures are from both days:

After a couple of small temples, Angkor Wat itself was the last thing we saw on the first day. Since it faces west, the idea is that you should visit it in the evening. It was extremely crowded and its front face was marred with scaffolding. The scale of the building is impressive, but there’s little in the way of statuary or interesting nooks and crannies. The main attraction is the wealth of bas reliefs on the walls of the outer colonnade, but not being deeply interested in the doings of medieval Khmer kings we found them a bit too much like wallpaper. As in Egypt, the sculptors had filled in space with repetitive patterns and conga lines of soldiers.

There was a grassy yard inside the colonnade where we flaked out on a rock for a while and took a picture of this young monk:

It was a long day and we didn’t do anything that night except watch Dark Prince, an average Dracula film whose main attraction (for me) was a gaunt and gothy Rudolf Martin. Pallor, leather pants, etc., yay. Barking dogs woke me up in plenty of time to wake Stu for another early start.

Last night  I dreamed that David Bowie had been inspired by Trinity Blood and was going on tour as Isaak. He was wearing a long black wig, cut off at elbow length for some reason (and badly cut, too), and was dancing around on folding grey cardboard stage sets designed by Adrian Belew, who in this version of reality had studied architecture before becoming a guitarist.

As part of the act, Bowie got zipped into a kind of giant gimp suit that was attached piece by piece. As a piece went on, he sometimes took something off his body and threw it away, such as a pack of cigarettes or a watch. When a giant black firehose was strapped over his groin, he slipped his hand underneath, took off his penis and casually put it away somewhere inside his jacket.

I feel rather confused and disturbed by this.

Moving right along…

Australian law states that no child under 12 can give consent to sexual activity. Legal precedent has established that child rapists must expect imprisonment unless there are exceptional circumstances. Apparently one of those circumstances is that victim and rapist–the victim especially, perhaps–be Aboriginal.

A 10 year old Aboriginal girl in a remote Queensland community is raped by nine males, six of them under 16, and three of 17, 18 and 26, one of them a repeat sex offender. Judge Sarah Bradley (white) lets the nine off with suspended sentences and probation orders, saying the girl “probably agreed” to have sex with them.

The girl had already been removed from the community after being raped there at the age of 7 and was living in foster care, but was returned. She is now back in foster care.

The mind boggles. Was the judge worried about the high suicide rate among Aboriginal prisoners, afraid that the young men, if sent to jail, would never be rehabilitated? Her remarks suggest that she views underage sexual promiscuity as normal for Aborigines. Judges have made similar statements before, supporting tolerance of child abuse in Aboriginal towns. This tolerance comes from either of two extreme positions, both arrived at sans a functioning moral compass - one being that since some Aboriginal tribes had a history of marrying young girls off to old men, Aboriginal girls in the modern age are fair game for sex in the name of respect for tradition, and that whites have no right to interfere in indigenous affairs, however sordid and vicious; the other being that Aborigines are savages who can’t be expected to control themselves and are, in any case, doomed and not worth helping. A confused mixture of both notions probably circulates in some heads; both place Aborigines outside the human mainstream.

Perhaps the judge feared being branded an interfering racist if she upheld the letter and spirit of the law. Yes, Aborigines are disproportionately represented in the prison population, and Aborigines serving custodial sentences are known to suffer to an uncommon degree. But, sorry, that doesn’t grant them a license to commit crimes or to turn their own communities into hellholes where women and children are persistently abused. Nor should a judge, for any reason, set a precedent for treating child rapists gently. My heartless view is that if such creatures hang themselves in jail, or sniff petrol till they die, well, that’s some nasty matter cleaned out of the gene pool and society, whatever their cultural background or the colour of their skin.

Aboriginal activist Boni Robertson said “There is nothing culturally, there is nothing morally, there is nothing socially and there is definitely nothing legally that would ever allow this sort of decision to be made.”

The Queensland Attorney General has lodged appeals against the sentences and the state Premier, Anna Bligh, has ordered a review of all sexual assault cases on the Cape York Peninsula in the last two years.