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.