That’s right, I went to Hanoi, didn’t I? I’m just waiting for Stu to wake up in London and tell me whether he likes the apartment I found today.

[Whole lot of stuff about house hunt deleted. Gin drunk. Start again.]
Umm, what was I saying? Hanoi, yes. We spent a couple of hours in the morning exploring the Ho Chi Minh museum. Unfortunately, Uncle Ho himself, who is preserved like Lenin, despite his stated wish to be cremated, was not available for viewing. I think they’d sent him off to Russia for repairs. Never mind. Here’s where he usually lives:

The museum near the mausoleum is much more interesting than you’d expect. The curators have constructed a visual narrative around the struggle of the proletariat from the industrial revolution onwards, with an emphasis on Cubism and Surrealism.

The rise of capitalism and skulls:

I think this room was about the Spanish Civil War:

This display possibly refers to a revolution in Africa (?):

The plenty we will all enjoy under Communism:

Working class hero:

There are ensembles of weapons and furniture labelled along the lines of “the decadence and brutality of the colonialists and the bourgeoisie”; gifts to the nation, including a lovely tea set from Russia and some crystalware from Vietnamese in New Zealand; a set from Blake’s 7 –

– a pyramid–

and, naturally, at the centre of a significant space, a statue of the man –

– who, in the excerpts from his speeches, comes across as an idealist with strong moral certainties. I confess I was reminded of the words of H.L. Mencken: “Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on ‘I am not too sure.’ ”

I am not too sure I agree with Mencken entirely — perhaps civilised societies do need to whoop up their moral values sometimes — but he might approve of my uncertainty, I guess.

Near the mausoleum was a “pagoda” — more like a cabin on a pole over a pond — with these two charming little pepperpot structures nearby:

And a temple featuring a painting of an old saintly man and a dragon:

I wonder what his story is?

Afternoon saw us at the Temple of Literature, something of an oasis of quiet in Hanoi. The traffic noise still intruded, but was muffled. The temple is dedicated to Confucius “in honour of scholars and men of literary accomplishment.” (from Lonely Planet). No women, as far as I know.

Inner gate:

This tree wins some kind of prize for matted roots, I think:

We liked these two joined specimens:

The steles over the distinguished scholars’ graves were fronted by decorative turtles, symbolising wisdom and awareness:

Before the temple there was a forecourt with bonsais and two topiary birds in pots, with which two very cute little girls were playing, picking up leaves that had fallen and were lying in the pot and sticking them back on the birds. We did get pictures, but I don’t want to post photos of children that were taken without permission — however, you can imagine it. Here are the bonsais, anyway:

The main temple had a red colour scheme without and within:

The temple complex was quite large. In one of the buildings a demonstration of classical Vietnamese music and singing was taking place. There was almost no audience, so I sat and listened for a while, feeling sorry for the performers who were playing to empty seats. I confess it sounded rather atonal and not very pleasant to me, but afterwards, when we were sitting in a courtyard watching this frog –

–we heard strains of something more familiar.
Me: That sounds like Thai hillbilly music.*
Stu: It is hillbilly music. It’s “Banjo on My Knee”.
So it was. The twangy instrument — I know not its name — suited the song quite well.

*Thai rural musicians play a kind of music that to my ear sounds like American hillbilly music at times. Same pentatonic scale, perhaps.

And then we went home and collapsed.

Something I forgot to mention in the previous post: at the merchant’s house was a piece of historical explanation saying that during the period of French colonisation the street the house was in had been known as Rue des Pavillons Noirs, the “Street of Black Chessmen”, so named because of “Black Chessman” troops stationed there. I think this is a mistranslation and that it ought to be “Black Flags“, an irregular force of mostly ethnic Chinese, who were used by the Vietnamese government to suppress indigenous tribes and fight the French. (If any French speakers are reading this, perhaps you can confirm or correct this.) But I liked the idea of a street of black chessmen — it conjures up all sorts of fantastical images.

Many of the streets in the old town have names starting with “Hang”, which means trade, followed by the word for whatever sort of shops are there — or used to be, once upon a time. Businesses still are clustered into types along these streets, so that there’s a street of metalworkers, a street of silk shops, and so on.

Street in the old quarter:

Memorial House is a Chinese merchant’s dwelling restored as a museum. The two-storey dwelling is built around a courtyard with wooden shutters opening onto it from the upper rooms:

The interior was filled partly with the furnishings of a comfortable home in the late 19th century –

– and partly with exhibits and art, collectibles and knick-knacks for sale. I especially liked these tin toys made by artisans from Khuong Ha village, including working steamships that run on burning oil — just like your train, Dad, if you’re reading this:

A pile of mid-autumn Moon Festival lanterns lying at the back of the front room:

“Don’t miss the small entry,” says LP, “to House 102, which includes a fully functioning temple where most people would have a lounge room.” The book omits to elaborate that House 102 has a fully batshit temple inside. This is the entrance (well signposted for the foreign tourist):

Entering Den Hang Back, we pass a laundry where a woman is washing in a sink. The look she gives us seems rather hostile, but on the other hand, she doesn’t drive us out. All the same, there’s no sign of a temple, so we retreat, only to be encouraged to go back in by a definitely smiling woman outside. Making it to the interior this time, we find ourselves in an informal sort of restaurant. Some jovial men offer us tea, but we decline, having had some at the merchant house. Several people in the restaurant point up a white iron spiral stair, so up we go…

…finding, at the top of the stairs, this:

and this:

the red horse again:

a shrine to Satan?

and, to the right, the temple proper, in a small, tall room. The photographs in no way do justice to the supersaturated, shiny, over-the-twinkly-topness of this coral-reef-like tabernacle to foreign gods:

I, at least, felt that had this been the religion into which I was born and raised, I might well have grown up devout.  I wonder sometimes whether Anglicans who convert to Catholicism don’t succumb to popery at least partly because of the bling factor.

Our senses are not sufficiently overwhelmed, however, to make them numb to the colour of Counterfeit Street, where shops sell ghost money for funerals, and other religious and festive paraphernalia:

This shop reminded me of a book I read as a child, about a girl and an old man who sold coloured paper lanterns. The girl couldn’t afford to buy a lantern, but eventually the man gave her a seed, which, when she planted it, grew a lantern tree:

Amongst all the “Hang” streets, there’s a Hang Manh. We don’t see a hanged man, but do see this tragic bear in a street of toy shops:

We find lunch in a row of street-food stalls up an alley. We have something with chicken and tomato — very tasty and very cheap. The young man next to us treats us to a great display of Chinese-style hawking and spitting under the table while we eat.

What lacks — to our minds — we notice here, are 7-11s. It’s hard to find a cold drink. People are selling bottles of this and that, but unrefrigerated. The most interesting identifiable food we see is weasel coffee: the beans are fed to weasels, and only roasted after they’ve made the journey through the weasel’s interior. Why a weasel, I have no idea. Perhaps simply because they’re cheap.

We had decided to go to Hanoi for a bit of quiet time. Stu needed to leave Thailand to renew his visa, and a friend had impressed me with descriptions of Hanoi’s old-world Frenchified elegance. I purchased a Lonely Planet, noted the part about bringing earplugs to insulate against the traffic noise, but didn’t imagine little old Hanoi could be as noisy as mighty Bangkok. I should have. When even LP advises earplugs, and takes pains to assure you that not every Vietnamese is trying to rip you off, you had better be on notice that you’re not heading for a stress-free vacation.

We take Air Asia because they’re cheap. Aircon too cold, no blankets. No free drinking water — but the kind steward brings me a cup of hot water, which both quenches my thirst and warmed me up.

At our hotel, the Nam Hai in the old quarter, we have a room decorated in Chinese style overlooking the street. I did bring the earplugs, and I’m glad. Hanoi is one of those cities where motorists — mostly motorcyclists here — honk their horns all the time, like a flock of migrating geese. Whatever the other faults of Bangkok traffic, Thai drivers are a quiet bunch, generally applying the horn only for good reason. I don’t know how a culture of perpetual honking develops, but I never want to take another holiday in a place thus afflicted — my nerves, dears, my delicate nerves; hold the chaise lounge under my nose and lay me down upon the smelling salts.

The bed is as hard as a tombstone. This is probably a Vietnamese thing. Thai beds tend towards the stony, too. But the pillows are soft. The shower is one of those whizz-bang computerised models that plays music and puffs ozone. I have fun pushing the buttons. The horns blast away until eleven and start up again at five.

At breakfast, the waitress says to me, “There’s a beautiful smell coming off your body. Are you wearing French perfume?” Well, I can’t imagine what the beautiful smell would be. My French perfume ran out weeks ago, but perhaps some of it lingers on my shirt. I suggest that it might be the hotel’s shampoo. “Can I smell your hair?”she asks. Sure, I say, why not? (As long as you do it quietly…) No, she says, it isn’t the shampoo. I am mysteriously fragrant. I tell her that I won’t smell so good by the end of a day walking around; right now Hanoi is several degrees celsius hotter than Bangkok.

Out we go to walk and sweat. Crossing roads is a challenge; basically, you have to play Frogger, which you also have to do in BKK, except that Thai drivers do more or less obey traffic lights and pay some sort of cursory attention to pedestrian crossings. In Hanoi — at least in the old city — it’s more of a free for all. We are assured that motorcyclists will try not to hit us. Yeah, right. Brakes and steering are for other people. Who needs them when you have a HORN? We see fellow roundeye tourists standing on street corners looking bewildered and defeated. With our basic training from Thailand, we manage ok, having only one close call with a motorbike.

We wander down streets lined with shops selling silk garments, knick knacks, antiques and paintings. The art galleries are interesting. There are a lot of them and there’s more of an international influence here than in Thailand. Some specialise in copies of well-known pictures; others sell original art. We go into one, but, as an employee shadows us silently at a distance of a few inches, we don’t stay very long. I am waiting for Frenchified graciousness to leap out at me waving a plate of madeleines and a copy of Chateaubriand’s memoirs. In vain. The architecture is interesting, though; Vietnamese houses are tall and narrow, often one room wide and three or four storeys high, ornate, and the ones here have both Asian and European influences — the effect is an interesting higgledy-piggledy collage.

We make our way to Hoan Kiem lake. On the way we pass a lovely banyan tree:

and after navigating a complex intersection arrive at the pretty lake. The building on the island is the Ngoc Son temple, dedicated to three religions, Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism:

The lake’s name mean’s “Lake of the Returned Sword” or “Lake of the Restored Sword”. Legend has it that emperor Le Loi, who had been given a magic sword called Heaven’s Will by the Golden Turtle God, which brought him victory in his revolt against the Chinese Ming Dynasty, handed it back to the god here. Critically endangered giant soft-shell turtles are said to live in the lake. A dead one is preserved in a room next to the temple.

Joss sticks burning outside the temple:

Pikes inside:

While we were there a priestess (Taoist?) was conducting a ceremony, chanting from a book and beating a small drum:

Offerings on the altar included beer:

This green guy took my fancy:

As did this red horse:

I am not sure whether the horse is the mount of the King of Hell — the green guy was also on that side of the temple, so it would make sense if that was the side of the goblins and ghoulies — the red horse, possessing extraordinary endurance, of revered Chinese general Quan Cong, or some other red horse of note. I’m still trying to find out. This is the sort of thing you miss when you don’t have a tour guide.

“You look like Britney Spears!” gushes the young man at the front desk of the Hotel Cara in Phnom Penh.
“It’s the hat, isn’t it?” I say hopefully. He nods. He’s lovely. All the staff here are. The hotel is excellent — small, comfortable, stylish, spotless, and inexpensive. Perfect pillows, too. It was recommended to me by Ross, an American businessman who I met in Bangkok. He works in Cambodia and lives in the hotel. Middle-aged, energetic, dressed in shorts and a black t-shirt, his eyes are fish-tank green, horizontal, and full of passion when he talks about Cambodia. With him is Pat, an Australian lady aged 84, who also resides in the hotel. Pat is what I would call old school — rather aristocratic, tough, adventurous, and razor sharp. If I want to be like her when I’m older I’ll have to shape up mentally, not just hang on to what I’ve got. Pat and Ross have decided that I must go and see Tuol Sleng prison, now a museum, and the mass graves of the killing field outside the city in order to appreciate the modern history of Cambodia.

I admit that I don’t know much about the war. Over lunch in a terrific restaurant, Ross gives me a precis. The first point that sticks in my mind is that the war in Cambodia was essentially a proxy war between Russia, backing Vietnam, and China, backing the Khmer Rouge. The second point is that most of the leaders of the Khmer Rouge were educated people, intellectuals from landowner or civil servant backgrounds who picked up communist ideas at university in France, and then — this is the part that seems to make no sense — turned into mass murderers, descending particularly on members of their own class in a bid to turn Cambodia into a Maoist agrarian peasant state in the name of self-sufficiency.

I go with Pat and her driver, Parak, in Parak’s 4WD, to Tuol Sleng, a former high school turned into a prison camp operated by Khan Khek Iew, where 17,000 people were imprisoned and tortured before they were taken to the killing fields and executed. There were only ten known survivors. Groups the Khmer Rouge arrested and brought to places like Tuol Sleng included people with connections to the former government, the educated, Buddhist monks, homosexuals, Christians, Muslims, ethnic Vietnamese and Chinese, and former urban dwellers. Urban populations were rounded up and taken to labor camps in the country. Parak, who lost his whole family, explains that these people were continually split up and moved from camp to camp to prevent them organising.

The rules at Tuol Sleng:

Inmates were chained to these beds. The metal box is a toilet.

Body of a prisoner:

Waterboarding table:

Inside the prison are boards covered with photographs of inmates. Some are shown before and after torture. Many are former Khmer Rouge members suspected of betraying the party. Some of these are very young. The Khmer Rouge used child soldiers. Pat tells me that children recruited into the army were required to kill their own families. I ask Pat what methods were used to recruit them. She seems irritated by the question, as if the answer were obvious. “When you’re poor and hungry, I don’t think it’s hard to understand,” she says. “Particularly if a man with a gun is telling you what to do.” It might be that simple.

Tuol Sleng certainly gave me pause for thought, but I couldn’t say I was horrified. We’ve all grown up on a daily news diet of human enormities, and this was just more of the same, including a room with glass cabinets full of skulls and paintings of torture by one of the surviving inmates. What I did find affecting were the photographs by prison photographer Nhem En. They are compelling pictures of individuals. Looking from one board to the next, you’re literally faced with the fact that every murder, every act of torture, rape and humiliation, is committed by one individual against another. Every one of Stalin’s famous statistics has a personal history, and so does every human being who strays off the path of humanity.

After Tuol Sleng, Parak drove us to the old Chinese cemetery that became the “Killing field” where prisoners were executed, often with a bludgeon or by having their throats cut with a palm branch to save bullets. The mass graves are depressions in the ground, filled with long grass and purple flowers. A few grave stones from the original cemetery can still be seen. Curiously, I find it has the usual peace of a graveyard. I don’t feel anything here, despite the prisoners’ clothing still lying visibly in the ground:

There is a glass pagoda full of skulls. Parak won’t go there. I go and have a look, but I still feel unaffected, perhaps because the skulls are the opposite of individual. The question “Why” hangs in the sunny midday air. Parak says he has asked many people the same question, and nobody can give him an adequate answer. He thinks the former king and president Norodom Sihanouk could tell him. Ross and Pat think that evil is not far from the surface in human nature, and it is hard to argue with that, or with the contention that power fed to a human being is like raw bloody meat fed to a dog; that man is the top predator on earth and, if he unlocks his own cage, sets himself free from self-imposed taming and removes himself from the reach of law and censure, he will more often than not turn into something which, if it had four legs, would need shooting dead.

There’s also the matter of grudges and revenge. The communists were suppressed by the government in the early 1960s. Prior to the Khmer Rouge gaining power, Khar Khek Iew was tortured in prison by Norodom Sihanouk’s police for engaging in communist activities. Another key figure, Khieu Samphan, was publicly beaten, stripped and photographed. When looking for reasons — not excuses, just causes — I don’t think the virulent power of the desire to get one’s own back and avenge humiliations can be underestimated. Chain it to the mob mentality that arises in situations of political and economic conflict and you might have at least part of the recipe for mass violence.

“Communism doesn’t work because it has to be enforced by totalitarian means, and totalitarianism doesn’t go away,” says Ross when we meet up again in the afternoon. Most mature societies, he says, are looking for an optimum balance between socialism and capitalism. Gung-ho capitalists who would strip away all social services risk creating an angry underclass with nothing to lose. Those unable to see the moral necessity of social welfare should still be able to see its practical necessity.

I finish my trip to Phnom Penh with a quick look around the National Museum, an attractive building housing mainly statuary removed, for its own safety, from temples at Angkor and elsewhere. Unfortunately photography is not allowed. There’s something Egyptian about the streamlined, solid elegance of many of the figures and their full-lipped, serene faces. There is an astonishingly beautiful Lokeshvara, a form of the bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara. I can’t help thinking that if there really was a deity of compassion it would look just like this. (And there is a charming one with a horse’s head, who reminds me of Forage. It turns out he is the prophesied 10th avatar of Vishnu.)

Leaving the airport I buy a block of Dagobah lavender and blueberry dark chocolate. It’s delicious. I eat some of it for dinner on the plane. My taxi driver in Bangkok is twitching, making funny noises, talking to himself and applying the brake with alarming jerks. I suspect yaba has something to do with it. Stuck in the usual traffic jam where the tollway reaches Sukhumvit he stretches and yawns mightily. “Tired?” I ask. He says he needs chocolate. I wonder if he will like lavender chocolate, but I needn’t worry, he does. It really is very good.

The bus to Siem Reap (the tourist town near Angkor Wat) is nearly full. I have an ebullient person in the seat next to me - a young Englishman of partly Greek background (my guess, which I later learn is right). His name is Freddy, let’s say, and he is very talkative. Luckily his talk is interesting and often funny. He tells me he used to be a hippy and gives a rundown of all the drugs he’s done. He says magic mushrooms are disgusting to eat. He describes a holiday in Morocco where the Bedouin tour guide who took their group out into the Sahara on camels demanded extra money to take them back to the oasis town from which they had set out. He says the blokes in the group were ready to give in but the women refused to pay for quite a long time. He complains a little about feminists travelling in packs.

I suggest that women are sick of being pissed upon in general and are accustomed to standing up for ourselves against unreasonable men, and that perhaps the women were annoyed that the men of their own tribe did not show a bit more of the old school spirit. Anyway, after my one brief and awful trip to Morocco, I would not be going with any Bedouin to any desert at any price. I agree with Freddy that in the end they were probably sensible to pay up - it only came to a few pounds for each person in the group.

After the Morocco story, Freddy gives a fascinating rundown on the state of football hooliganism on the Continent. In Poland, he says, the fights are highly organised and take place in forests, sometimes with paramedics on hand. There are videos on Youtube - search Polish forest fights - like this one - though some nanny person has rated it 18+, so that you’ll have to be registered to watch it. I can’t find any that aren’t 18-locked. If you’re like me and you refuse to register, simply imagine a horde of Polish thugs bashing each other up in a lovely pine wood on the thin pretext of football. Some guys just love to fight, says Freddy. I daresay he is right. But where are they when you need a strong bloke to beat some honesty into a camel driver?

He tells me how he and some mates wheeled an abandoned piano into their shared house at university. Then it’s time for lunch, at a corner hotel somewhere. There’s a choice of caramelised potato and banana, or fried insects. I am craving salt. I try one of the smaller grasshoppers(?). The waitress shows me how to pull off the sharp lower rear legs. The other trick is not to look at the grasshopper(?) as you put it in your mouth. It’s warm, salty and crunchy with a faint meaty flavour. I’ve eaten yuckier snack foods. I buy a bag. Freddy samples one. He says it’s all right, but he isn’t too enamoured. Besides, he’s a vegetarian. Three American girls are disgusted.

Eating bugs (1) - the antici…pation, a.k.a about to suck cockroach:

Eating bugs (2) - the delicate crunch:

Eating bugs (3) - the salty zing:

I doze off after lunch, not really sleeping since the volume of the Thai martial arts movie on the TV forbids it, wake up in time to talk some more with Freddy, and finally arrive at Siem Reap. A friend of Sam’s is waiting with a tuk-tuk. He doesn’t know the way to the hotel and doesn’t want to call for directions. Maybe he doesn’t have a phone. We make it eventually. My reservation hasn’t been recorded, but there’s a room, so all’s well.

The following two days are taken up with the secret mission. I eat cold bugs and leftover happy herb pizza the next day, and the day after I wake up with a nasty stomach. A gin and tonic at the bar before I go settles it down, and I head back to Phnom Penh in a bus cold enough to be a morgue. This time a silent Cambodian man is next to me and the movie involves Chinese vampires smoking opium, and ghosts, and zombies. I mean, what’s a junkie vampire film without zombies?

Next up: History lessons

I could have sworn Air Asia used to serve proper meals, even on their short flights. Now they have stale cruddy sandwiches that you have to pay for, just like Austrian Airlines, and they’re charging for checked in baggage. These little stinginesses seem to be harbingers of inevitable fare hikes as the oil price rises. Anyway, I only have a cabin bag on this trip.

Phnom Penh international airport is small and hassle free. Phnom Penh is at the confluence of the Mekong, Tonle Sap and Bassac rivers. The city is named after an old woman in the late 14th century who, legend has it, found five Buddha statues in a nook within a tree and had a hill (phnom) built to house them, so that the city’s name means “Penh’s Hill”. I take a tuk-tuk into town. The road is good but dusty. There are plenty of signs of development along the way and the road swarms with motorbikes. Phnom Penh is a city - a sprawling town, really, at the moment - getting onto its feet. May it have better town planners than Bangkok.

Learning that I caome from Australia, my cheerful driver, Sam, does the usual “G’day mate”. His accent is unusually good. He says he used to work with Australians. I have a morning to fill in before I have to catch the bus to Siem Reap. Sam suggests a short tour. While I prefer exploring on my own, I decide I’d rather have a driver than foot it around in the heat and dust. In any case, by the number of tuk-tuks and motorbike taxis hanging around hoping for customers, I realise that if I get out and wander I won’t get a moment’s peace.

I decide to leave the royal palace and national museum for when I get back. The present king, Norodom Sihamoni, was a classical dance instructor, choreographer and cultural ambassador in Paris before he was called back to be king. As we drive past the palace, Sam explains that the king is unmarried and might be “a bit different”. But it doesn’t matter if he has no heirs, since a council chooses the monarch. I ask Sam about getting an express boat to or from Siem Reap. He says the Mekong is too low and there are no boats at the moment, so bang goes that idea.

I want to have a bite at Happy Herb’s Pizza on the Tonle Sap waterfront. Ganja is a traditional ingredient in Khmer cooking. It isn’t legal in Cambodia, but it must be somewhat tolerated. The guy who takes my order asks discreetly if I’d like to smoke a joint. I say no, the pizza will be fine. The pizza tastes good, but I can’t feel any effect. I guess they only waved the ganja jar over it, which was pretty much what I expected. (Later, however, a friend tells me that sometimes they smear the pizza with hash paste. This happened to him and he ended up missing a flight because he couldn’t get out of bed. Maybe the kitchen made the call to not give the lone, patently clueless female traveller a knockout dose. If so, I’m grateful.)

Next stop is the Russian Market, which has a section for locals and a section selling silk, handcrafts and fake antiques for tourists. In the local meat section the vendors, mostly women, squat inside wooden booths and chop the meat on wooden boards. The tourist section is a pain because - par for the course in tourists markets - no sooner does your eye light on something you might vaguely be interested in before a chorus of “Madame, madame, you look, you buy,” starts up, and many things that you don’t want at all are thrust in front of your glazing eyes. I end up buying a fake antique tobacco pipe (white china with two blue dragons) for a few dollars from a pleasant lady who gives me time to look at her wares. I ask her if it’s actually usable, but she doesn’t know. Probably not. You can get these pipes in Bangkok, too, but the asking price is several dollars cheaper here.

Sam drives me up to Wat Phnom, where I see –

a drum:

a shrine to the genie or spirit Preah Chau, popular with Chinese and Vietnamese worshippers:

a monkey:

…searching for the jewel in the heart of the bucket:

some kids playing with a motorbike:

Down the bottom of the temple are a few beggars and trinket sellers. As I wait to cross the road, two or three guys on motorbikes ask if I needed a ride. Unlike in Bangkok, the motorbike taxis don’t wear safety/identifying vests, so that there’s no way of telling whether the guy is actually a taxi driver. Sam brings the tuk-tuk back and drives me to the bus. All in all, my impression of Phnom Penh from this first half day is that it’s far from Mos Eisley vileness, but still a bit of a wild west town — a place to go if you like frontiers. (Later this will be amended to “a place to go if you like frontiers with great, cheap restaurants.”)

The 300k ride to Siem Reap in an airconditioned bus was $10. The bus almost had all mod cons — just not quite:

Next up: an extrovert, and a culinary rubicon crossed.

Off to Cambodia this weekend - secret mission, then a look-see at Phnom Penh. I’ve heard reports ranging from “a wretched hive of scum and villainy” to “cool place” to “the new Prague” (as in, sexy, yet cheap, since Prague is no longer the latter). It looks like a cool place. Will report.

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.

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…)