East Asia 2023: Part Four. Siem Reap, Cambodia
11/10/23 Siem Reap
I have a confession. We weren’t planning to go to Kuala Lumpur at all, and the only reason we did was because the cheapest flight from Da Nang to Siem Reap was £180pp sans baggage, whereas DN-KL-SR was £90 all in. So, let’s go to Malaysia, why not? But then, on the day we left London, Air Asia changed the KL-SR flight from 6pm to 6am. This would have meant an extra night in KL and a half day yawning through Angkor. So I cancelled the flight and got my money back for that, but not for the baggage which cost as much as the flight, which they get to keep, because that’s how the super-rich ‘earn’ their money. Air Asia joins my black list along with TGI Friday, Barclaycard, B&Q and the London Borough of Bromley. I rebooked through Vietjet and paid a fortune in non-refundable baggage fees, before learning that hold luggage was included in the price.
KL departure annexe C is gargantuous, reasonably-priced, empty and actually quite nice. Ho Chi Minh has one security guy re-processing a queue of 500 transferees and Siem Reap airport looks like a golf club and has jaw-dropping levels of bureaucracy… snore… I’m even boring myself.
First impressions of Siem Reap? Well, it’s very flat, the roads are wide and their names are numbers and it all looks new, apart from the shanty-town bits. The cab driver ends each sentence with the word ‘Steve,’ which is the only part of the conversation I understand.
Our Airbnb is a disappointment. It’s a hotel for one thing, which I kinda knew, and they’ve given us a brown suite with no balcony that feels like it’s in a basement. We’re the only ones staying there. The caretaker manager is a lovely guy, but I don’t think he knows what he’s supposed to be doing, and I certainly don’t. His suggestion that there’s nothing to do in the area except eat snake in a pavement eatery turns out to be accurate and, after a 2km round trip to a 7/11 we take the inevitable tuk tuk into town. Our driver is Seven, which is neither how his name is spelled or pronounced, who speaks decent English and looks like a youngish Charles Bronson. Waving away payment for a single fare he insists that he’ll pick us up later, thus confirming his status as our favourite (and only) tuk tuk driver so far.
The best thing that can be said about the famous Pub Street is that it’s not as heinous as Hanoi’s Beer Street, although that may be because there’s hardly anyone in Siem Reap right now. We choose a restaurant at random and, in order to continue the theme of new country-bad first impression, they put chicken in Claire’s fish amok.
We buy an ice cream off some little children who take my $10 note and give me a wad of Cambodian riel in change. The heavens open and we seek sanctuary in a cocktail bar and, at Eleven, we call Seven.
12/10/23 Angkor
Wake up in the middle of the night and it seems like an extension of my dream in which I'm in a floating bedroom that randomly moves to different floors of a shopping mall. I honestly have no idea where I am. After ten minutes I realise that if it’s Thursday this must be Siem Reap.
Happily, the driver for the day is our friend Seven. Two inadvertently frozen cappuccinos later we have the enjoyable first 20 minutes of a tuk tuk ride. First up is Ta Prohm. Whoa! This is one of the minor temples? Seriously? Anywhere else this would be a destination. If Angkor Wat didn’t exist you’d fly half way across the world just to see this place, the strangling figs growing upon the ruins only adding to the magnificence. Shame that all the heads of the statues have been lopped off.
Bayon Temple is a Hindu ‘temple mountain’ and, oh my days, it’s incredible! Monkeys potter around eating ice cream. We have a nice lunch in a pop-up restaurant in a market, then Angkor Wat itself.
Very disappointing.
Not really! It’s amazing. It’s a km walk to the main complex, but oh what a walk. Trouble is, stuffed with lok lak and fried rice, it’s 32c and 80% humidity and, in the words of Thucydides: ‘men began to drop out of the march, complaining they could go no further and that they would rather die where they now sat.’ I might have used that quote in my book.
Angkor is quite symmetrical so if you see one side you’ve seen them all. But when you walk through its uncrowded stoas there are fine reliefs of the battles between various Hindu gods and devils. It’s not busy and you can hear the distant dulcet tones of Buddhist chanting that turns out to be a strimmer.
Tripping over Chinese tourists taking selfies, a big black cloud come, yonder on the horizon, stopped at the mighty river, sucked the damn thing dry. Temperature reduces by 10c for a few minutes.
Seven’s got a new born who has a hospital appointment, so he defers us to his tuk tuk ‘brother’ Yantai, which is not how his name is spelled or pronounced. Back to the hotel and we’re given a much better suite with a large balcony. The bedroom has a legion of dead flies by the window, cockroaches in the bathroom and the only things you can watch on the huge TV are Al-Jazeera and a fireplace simulation, but I wasn’t expecting perfection. Have beer, a swim in the nice rooftop pool and a shower in that order. A magnificent double rainbow heralds the sunset.
To Pub Street through a flood thanks to another of Seven’s brothers whose name I don’t bother to mis-learn. It may have been Eight. Went to the bar Cath Shutt used to own when it was the only pub on Pub Street, which prides itself on being the loudest in the neighbourhood, until the over-enthusiastic ragga makes our ears bleed.
The finest wood-fired pizza restaurant in Siem Reap, according to the sign, manages to get a vegetarian order wrong twice - the first with pepperoni, the second with ham. It’s supposed to have a home-made sauce, but that could be a typo.
We go to another restaurant where it's clear that pizza isn't the food you should be ordering in Siem Reap.
13/10/23 Angkor/Siem Reap
Is it possible to see too many Cambodian temples? No!! Say I. Well, possibly. Seven picks us up at eight and we go to Preah Khan, Neak Poan, Ta Som, East Mebon and Pre Rup. I’d tell you all about them but there’s no point as you probably went 20-30 years ago.
Oh, all right then. Preah Khan has a modest facade, nobody is there and it goes on forever. There are no ‘way to visit’ signs and, eschewing the boring follow-the-way-you-came rule we venture into the jungle Lara Croft style. We get lost and go out the wrong exit. Seven finds us easily enough.
Neak Poon is on an island in a lake/moat/loat. The crossing is spectacular but, because this is a good place to take selfies, it’s crowded with Chinese tourists. Tiny, tiny temple. See a snake in a tree.
Ta Som is a much more impressive complex and empty.
Most of the temples round here date from the late 12th century, but the last two - East Mebon and Pre Rup - are two hundred years earlier, spectacularly tall, less jungly and exclusively Hindu who back then, judging by the steps, were people with long legs and tiny feet.
My pre-conception was that Angkor Wat is one large temple complex and the only one in the area, but Angkor isn’t even the biggest complex here, and there are hundreds of them.
Share a giant catfish for lunch, deep fried and served in ‘three-flavoured sauce.’ Delicious. We watch a spectacular rain storm from the balcony. To be honest, we've seen enough temples today, so we skip the last two.
The Khmer empire flourished between 802 and 1431 and, at its greatest extent ruled most of Indochina. Since then, Cambodia’s been royally screwed by just about everyone. The French taxed the peasants into starvation, the Japanese occupied during WW2 and did… well, you can guess. The Americans carpet bombed it, despite it being neutral, which led to the rise of the Khmer Rouge who murdered a quarter of the population for acts such as wearing glasses, knowing foreign words, having been abroad or not rounding up enough other people to murder. The Vietnamese invaded and installed a puppet government that exists to this day, a hereditary dictatorship like North Korea that only this year banned all opposition in their general election - propped up by China. Seven whispers this to us, even though there’s nobody around. What happens to the money they get from visas and Angkor passes? he asks rhetorically. Not a penny spent on renovating the temples - that all comes from India, charities and foreign benefactors.
Seven blames the Thais for the headless statues, but look into it and it’s everyone from Prince Sinahouk to Pol Pot, the Vietnamese, Thai criminal gangs, the Cambodian government - and all these treasures, the little Buddha heads and the huge Shivas, cut expertly at night under the supposed watch of the broke guards, end up in the private collections of the super-rich through art dealers like British Douglas Latchford. Pol Pot destroyed 95% of the Buddhist temples, but most of the beheadings have happened since his time. It’s still happening today to the heads they’ve rescued, restored and replaced. It’s a miracle that they’ve got anything left, but they have, and how. One can only imagine how it used to be.
The economy is ruined, all the stuff they sell in the night market is crap imported from China, Thailand and Vietnam and the government steals everything. Of course, they’re proud to call themselves Cambodians, but the lovely people here deserve better. They’re just trying to earn a living and their government is not giving them a chance. Many are forced to enter Thailand illegally to find work. In a big supermarket, the only Cambodian produce is lumped together on a single shelving rack. It's not that they don't produce anything - you can see evidence of that everywhere - but the tourists don't have a chance to buy it and there are few exports. Even the tuk-tuk drivers are thwarted as most tourists are carted around in large coaches by monopolistic Chinese tour companies.
Seven’s in his early forties and he’s never been to a large supermarket before. We buy Twining’s tea bags, kampot pepper and beer. Seven tells us that you can win a car if you find a lucky ring pull. We promise we’ll give it to him.
Back at the hotel they’ve done our huge bag of laundry for $10 and ironed everything, including my socks and handkerchiefs. I can’t look at it, knowing it’ll soon be stuffed into every corner of my suitcase. Up on the roof, the security camera alerts them to swimmers and they come up to put cushions on the lounge chairs, even though we don’t want them and it’s raining, to protect their 4-star rating which they got by bribing an official pre-Covid.
Feel guilty going for a relatively expensive meal. $30 per head, normal or plant-based tasting menu, but the food is just extraordinary. The vegan menu is probably better than the meat and fish one. The krek soup with duck breast, mangosteen, foraged red tree ants in a tamarind and basil broth is exceptional, but could have been more anty.
An early night. Two humvees full of Phnom Penh mafia-types have arrived and they’re having simultaneous karaoke parties on the floors directly above and below us.
14/10/23 Siem Reap to Bangkok
It’s a measure of how relaxed we’ve become in Cambodia that we’re doing a full morning tour with an early afternoon flight to catch. We’re going to the further away temples.
The road is terrible, by which I mean truly horrendous - there aren’t enough words for bad in the thesaurus to describe it. If you were in a monster truck with coil springs, generously enclosed in bubble wrap, sitting upon a memory foam mattress, you’d complain bitterly about the bumps. Imagine doing it in a tuk tuk. My gut was rumbling. The only road maintenance guy I see is banging earth into a pothole with a spade. The flooded bits are the worst as you can’t see the horrors that lie beneath the water. One whole hour of this.
Banteay Srai is a small but beautiful temple in a nicely landscaped garden and would have been serene had it not been for someone commentating on a horse race through a megaphone, or at least that’s what it sounds like.
Banteay Samre is our 11th Cambodian temple and very impressive, but I’m so tired I don’t even have the energy to sweat. My shoes lose their soul.
Part of my wad of Cambodian riel goes to a landmine-crippled band of which, unfortunately, there’s one at every temple.
On the way back there are traffic jams. Either a festival is going on or Saturday lunch is a big thing round here - everyone is cooking spatchcocked chickens, whole pigs and big bubbling cauldrons of who-knows-what by the roadside. It detracts from the state of the road.
Saying goodbye to lovely Seven at the very clean and deserted Siem Reap Golf Club we fly to Bangkok.
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