Today we cover the classics at Siem Reap. Even driving up the road to Angkor Wat raises the hairs on the back of your neck: it’s iconic and it doesn’t disappoint. Unfortunately, it’s also a mecca for everyone else in Siem Reap (1m visitors per year) so there’s a fair few tourists around, including some sizable coach parties. We learn today that the Koreans more or less do their own thing (own guided tours, Korean reps, their own hotels and overpriced shops) and the Vietnamese aren’t particularly well-liked either (the temples are leased to a private Vietnamese company for just US$7m per year, and we end up pulling off the road several times to let through VIP Vietnamese coaches). It’s kind of a weird southeast Asian hierarchy made more bizarre for us by the fact the Cambodians seemed low-down in the pecking order yet were BY FAR the most likable and friendly.
Angkor Wat is colossal compared to most of the other temples – the moat alone is 200m wide and 5km round. We cross the ‘rainbow’ to get to the outer temple – the 3 gates are again iconic, and look magnificent. We head through to the main area and it’s only as we get through do we realise the true scale of one of the most photographed buildings in the world – it’s very big indeed! The two libraries here are huge and in exceptional condition. A causeway leads to the temple itself – sadly (for us) restoration work is taking place so there is scaffolding and netting over large areas of the front of the temple – this threatens to spoil photos but Sip is very clued-up and, like all the other temples, leads us to places that maximise the view of the temples while minimising man-made intrusions! The carvings inside the temple are genuinely gobsmacking – huge in scale and detailed in their vision. You need a guide to, well, guide you through the background to the stories and legends – otherwise all you’re doing is photographing carvings with no context. We head to the central tower, and it’s busy – it feels like everyone is here! The numbers climbing to the top are strictly controlled which is good, and there’s a (still steep) wooden staircase to the top which replaces the hellishly steep stone staircases that are now out-of-bounds due to tourist accidents! We climb to the top (Linda LOVED this bit, but not quite as much as coming down!) and the views over Angkor Wat are exceptional – it’s well worth it. We drop back down then walk round the outside. It’s truly an amazing building, an iconic monument that actually delivers on its promise. We head back to the front, then head off for lunch. This needs to be mentioned as we went to an amazing Khmer restaurant and had fantastic noodle soup. We’ve never really heard much about Khmer food before, but it’s truly fantastic, better than Thai or Vietnamese food, the best thing we’ve had in a long while.
Straight after lunch we head towards Tongle Sap, a huge lake outside Siem Reap which is fed by the Tongle Sap river and is part of the Mekong Delta – this waterway stretches all the way up to Laos and down through Vietnam to the sea. We’re heading to the lake to hire a boat to take us out to a floating village, Chong Khneas. Tongle Sap – the lake – is home to around 80,000 people who live permanently on the water. The vast majority of these people are Vietnamese – they arrived here during the Vietnam war and have never returned to their home country. Oddly, the Cambodian national census doesn’t count any Vietnamese or Thai people, so at 96% Khmer is the most ethnically non-diverse country in southeast Asia – the fact that it contains 12m Khmer, 5m Vietnamese and more than 1m Thais seems to have escaped those who perform the census. The journey to the lake is striking – the countryside in this part of Cambodia is utterly amazing, but we’re also heading further from the city and hence towards the poorer parts of the country. This is obvious from the quality of housing – mostly stilted here, it varies from quality concrete-and-wood buildings to little more than shacks with corrugated roofs. The kids look happy playing in the streets but you know malnutrition is probably not far away (I sit here writing this drinking a beer and feeling somewhat guilty...)
We hire a boat and head out onto the water. The boats are basic but functional – there are much larger boats for the big groups of tourists, but this feels a bit more real, and by hiring a local boat we’re contributing to the local community. The water is busy – given the floating villages all around there are many people who see this as their lifeblood and rightly so. We head out towards the lake proper. We pass through the first village and it’s enlightening – just like the ride to the lake, there are a variety of floating houses, some large and beautiful, some little more than floating shacks. Given the vegetation there are obvious boatways, some congested some not – we head down one of the former and incur the wrath of a boat owner when we scrape alongside here boat trying to avoid a few rowers.
It is certainly an educational trip and an eye-opener to how other people live – this is definitely not the decadent west. It is also quite amazing to pass a number of boats that have TVs, perhaps also explained by the few boats that have generators on board that are charging the car batteries to power the TVs! We are surrounded by a number of the boats that quickly appear with a child on board with a python around their neck ‘one photo one dollar’ – we decline!
We head out in to the open water of the lake so Sip can explain some of the history. We notice a young child in a boat getting into what can only be described as a large aluminium washing bowl and start to paddle his way towards us, we assume this will be another photo op, but he is somewhat crestfallen when our boatman starts the engine short of him getting to us - you can almost sense his deflation!
We carry on round to the next floating village – seeing similar housing and working conditions, many of the families make their living from fishing the lake and selling the fish to the city. We park up at the ‘crocodile farm’, the animals are caught and again sold for food – not something we would readily choose to visit, but all part of the experience. Vin climbs to a vantage point to take some pictures and it becomes apparent that we are being surrounded by the long boats. Sip advises that this is common if large Vietnamese tourist boats moor here, the locals all come along as they can communicate better. We head back to the port, it’s been a very moving experience, a kind of beautiful chaos.
Mid-afternoon brings Angkor Thom, the largest of the cities – this place housed over a million people back when London could barely scrape 50,000 together, though you’d never know it as there are no remnants of where the commoners lived – only the gods could live in stone buildings, everyone else made do with wood, which tends to have a slightly shorter lifespan... This place is huge, really, you enter one of the gates (which are scaled for elephants not big tourist coaches, so the tourists have to decant to tuk tuks – ha ha!) and you’ve still got quite a distance to reach anywhere. The first temple we head to is Bayon. This one is a real crowd-pleaser, one of the best temples at Angkor and our guide’s favourite and we can see why. The site was only cleared a century ago, but the place looks utterly ancient. It’s the only temple that’s dedicated to both Hinduism and Buddhism (half and half), and it has three tiers and 49 towers, all of which have 4 faces. It looks amazing, particularly in the late afternoon light. The carvings inside are very good, but climbing to the top reveals a very impressive place. It’s undergoing restoration which limits the photo opportunities, but Sip finds some decent spots, even one where Linda can go nose-to-nose with Buddha! A great place, truly impressive.
Next we move to the Terrace of Elephants, a low-level structure some 300m long that has several hundred elephant carvings on it. We also see opposite the ‘jail cells’ that were used for the city’s more wealthy residents! We then move onto the terrace of the leper king, a restored section of the temple dating back to the 13th century. From there, we drive out to the gate, and view the sun setting over the moat while tuk tuks drive backwards and forwards through the impressive gate itself. We also see cows swimming across the moat which is more amusing than it should be – though not as amusing as the 3 live pigs we see strapped upside down on top of a moped on their way to market (Linda thought they were dead and their legs were flailing in the wind – bless!!)
Evening brings beers, curry and tuk tuks, but mostly midges and flies - damn the cloud and humidity! An early night beckons due to a 04.00 start to see the sunrise over Angkor Wat...
