It was with a certain amount of trepidation that we returned to Siem Reap on the 13th. Our goal: visit a couple of outlying temples and then move on. We visited Ta Prohm, Angkor Tom, Angkor Wat, Phnom Bakheng and Bayon last time we were in town in 2011, so it was time to see something a little less common.
We teamed up with Gou, our driver, who I suspect overcharged us, but we certainly got more than we bargained for from our 8.5 hrs with him. Our day started at 4:30 and we were in the tuk tuk outside the (rather swish) Golden Banana Guesthouse by 4:40, heading out on the 40ish minute drive to Bakong temple to watch the sunrise. Much to our dismay, heavy rain started about 20 minutes after we set off. After a brief conference about whether to turn back or keep going, Gou pulled the fabric down on the side of the tuk tuk, ditched his shirt in the back and ploughed on. Within 5 minutes, we had driven out the other side of the rain and the roads were dry – we’d made the right choice.
We pulled up to the temple grounds in pitch darkness, with no idea where to even start walking. Gou pointed us in the right direction like we were children, then we set off through the opening in the wall and I promptly led Rich the wrong way. Oops! Backtracking, we managed to find a path up some steps and we made our way around the temple pool and down the main “road” in silence. Climbing the steep steps to the top tier of the temple and choosing where I wanted to sit and wait for the sun to rise, I was aware of the absolute stillness surrounding the temple and its grounds. There wasn’t another soul around. Ten minutes or more later, one man came quietly up the steps and joined us without speaking. The three of us looked to the eastern horizon for signs of light. Fifteen minutes before the sun began its climb, there was the most amazing change in the sound around the temple. The forest, once silent, came to life with the buzz of cicadas, starting quietly on our right and growing in volume as the sound quickly spread through the woods around the temple boundary behind us and on around to our left, continuing the swell until its final, extended crescendo when the sun broke over the horizon. We looked at one another as soon as the sound began, bewildered by both its progress and the overwhelming volume as it grew. Nature’s orchestra at work.
The sunrise itself was quite the anti-climax, which is fine – because of the rain, I suspected this might end up being the case. As it was, the sky lightened through endless shades of blue, adding light to and revealing the details of Bakong temple’s stone lions and elephants. We walked around the tiers for a few minutes, taking time to admire the Khmer ingenuity, before starting the walk back to the tuk tuk.
We had a slightly confusing conversation prior to leaving the guesthouse about admission to Bakong. It sounded like you could go for sunrise and not have to pay admission, so that was good news to us. When we arrived, though, Gou explained that if we see a ticket collector on our way out, we should just explain that we forgot our ticket at the guesthouse. Hmm…
We saw a ticket collector. He wanted our tickets. Trouble. Turns out that we’d snuck in, so now we had to work our way out. There was some explaining, a meeting with his boss, a meeting with Gou, lots of polite Khmer conversation, and we were given permission to leave. Phew. We felt exceptionally guilty after leaving, thinking we’d cheated the locals out of $40, until we were reminded later that night that the Khmer government has leased the entire Angkor complex to a Vietnamese corporation, meaning they’ve foolishly shafted themselves out of far more than the $40 we didn’t pay. The country welcomes two million visitors each year, and its safe to assume at least 90% of those will visit Angkor for at least one day, probably two. At $20 per day, times two, times two million (or 1.8 million)…. I think they sold themselves short by getting $1million per year for the lease.
After our Bakong adventure, we headed for breakfast of noodle soup and fried noodles at a menu-less Khmer restaurant in Gou’s home district, where we were joined by his brother and a friend, neither of whom spoke English but were happy to sit with us and have Gou make us pay for the table’s food and drinks (slightly odd). During breakfast, Gou explained that the market across the road wasn’t always a market; its original purpose was as a land mine storage hold, back in the 80s when the last of the Khmer Rouge soldiers mined the fields in a misguided attempt to make the Khmer people rebel against their government. Gou remembers a time when, as a child, he would play with deactivated mines in the streets of the village.
After our breakfast, we carried on to the temples of Beng Melea – the Lady’s Temple. While this temple is meant to be sacred to both the Chinese and the Japanese, you’d never know it; there’s nothing reverential about the way they parade through the ground by the bus load, snapping away as they go.
We chose this temple because of how interesting we found our visit to Ta Prohm (the temple made famous by Tomb Raider) last time and because two friends had been out to Beng Melea two years ago and described how interesting the grounds were – like Ta Prohm but better. Slow moving, oblivious Asian tourists aside, the grounds of Beng Melea did not disappoint.
The majority of the actual stupas are now in complete ruins, ancient carvings are overrun with moss, bad relief figures peek out under massive pieces of rubble, and pistachio-green lichen coats sections of the walls. The wooden walkway that you enter the grounds on makes the first few minutes feel like you’ve joined a cattle herd, but the grounds are large enough that it’s possible to sit by yourself and get a feel for the spirit of what came before. Rich and I did a little off-piste exploring using a makeshift walkway that we assume the groundskeepers must’ve laid down through a dark little alcove, and we found ourselves between the boundary walls and the exterior of the main temple surrounds. Silence. The crying baby, the chattering tourists, the children begging for tips (having done nothing, I might add – clearly, somebody gave them money for no reason and didn’t bother to explain what ‘tip’ means)… They were all gone. We had more than 20 minutes of serenity, cautiously and respectfully exploring the ruins before us, before any other tourists found us, and only four managed to do so in the 40 minutes that we spent wandering this section of the temple.
It was with heavy hearts that we re-joined the route taken by the bus load of Chinese tourists who were furthering the cycle of begging taking place inside Beng Melea. We watched as the tourists crowded around a small boy, who was clambering up a sheer stone face while completely naked. You’d have thought he was a circus monkey, based on the way they laughed and posed for photos with him clinging sombrely to the rock in the background. Then they began handing him packets of sweets, showing him how to open them and taking MORE photos of the poor child. While this was taking place, a group of young girls were charging tourists who took photos of them sitting on the rubble and a little boy ran through the crowd, charming small amounts of riel (currency) or sweets out of the people watching him, before running back to his mother to drop off his loot and setting off on his next circuit of the crowd. It was sickening to see the tourists mindlessly supporting this form of child labour. We turned our backs on the sideshow playing out in front of us and meandered back around the edges of the temple grounds to Gou and his tuk tuk.
Before the day was out, we would have met Gou’s son and his brother’s four children, shared several cans of beer, asked him plenty of questions about his experiences with starting over without a father after the end of Khmer Rouge rule, and stopped at a roadside papaya salad stall (my favourite – and Gou’s, too) for a $1 bag so large that we shared some on a plate and there was still enough in the bag to feed two people. Add to this the countless smiles, waves, and “arun so slays” (good mornings) that we exchanged with other passersby on our grand Angkor adventure, and you get some idea of just how full our morning was. By the time we got dropped back off at Golden Banana, we were tired and numb from our hours in the tuk tuk, and overwhelmed with memories of sights from the morning.
That evening, we ended up on an accidental mini-pub-crawl with Dennis and Jana, our new German friends who we had originally met on Koh Rong Samloem. We swapped Angkor tales over beers and margaritas on Pub Street, laughed our way through some awesome Khmer barbecue while we scared a waitress with our passionate gesticulating, then listened to some spectacular impromptu acoustic music over cocktails on our bed swing at The Old Wooden House, situated in a side alley in downtown Siem Reap in, wait for it… an old wooden house. On our way to The Old Wooden House, we had to cross back over the pedestrian bridge to get back to the centre of town and the guys were a few paces ahead of Jana and I. As we reached the opposite side of the river, a mother was stepping onto the bridge with her bicycle; her two year old daughter, all bright eyes and wildly unkempt, wispy hair, was perched comfortably between the handlebars. In one unforgettable, brief moment of unbearable cuteness, her daughter and I made eye contact and I watched as her eyes light up like the Las Vegas strip and she reached five tiny fingers out in my direction. Without breaking stride, I reached my hand out and we make contact, wiggling our fingertips against each other’s hands, and then she was gone. Jana and I were both left speechless by the unadulterated joy we saw all over this child’s face and, had the bridge not been so busy, I would’ve undoubtedly run back for a photo with this gorgeous little girl. As it is, I’ll have to settle for the memory, which continues to make me smile.
Next thing we know, it’s 1am, the Germans have a 7am airport deadline and we have all had enough drinks to make a real bed (and not one that swings, although ours seemed to spin later that night…) essential. We bid them a fond farewell, honoured that they’d chosen to spend the final night of the Cambodian part of their honeymoon with us, and we made our way home.
Morning was not my favourite time the next day, and it was with a foggy head and slightly queasy stomach that I set off with Rich for Le Tigre en Papier to do a cooking course. Channy, our chef, masterfully managed five clients with five different two-course menus (we all had pumpkin custard for dessert) and kept me entertained with her comments that Rich needed to do his slicing or kroeung more like mine, as well as her understated “boom”, used each time we added an ingredient to a pot. Emeril, eat your heart out! We sat down to a table full of so much food: both fresh and fried spring rolls, at least three different types of amok curry, a sour curry soup, green mango salad, and spicy shrimp salad. I actually felt guilty attempting to eat my share of it, and even had to take a doggy bag of my spicy shrimp salad back to the GB once I’d eaten so much I thought I was going to have to be rolled home. Despite my rocky start to the day, that was $13 exceptionally well spent. Looking forward to doing some more Cambodian cooking when I get home!
Our stay in Siem Reap was full of surprises. There have been so many changes to the city (the number of newly developed sections; the increase in the number of cars; the amount of neon on Pub Street) that part of me wonders: after all this change, where does the “real” Siem Reap now lie? Is it rapidly on its way to becoming another Sihanoukville – or has it done the equivalent already? I’m thankful that our “temple day” ended up being about so much more than temples. It helped to change my opinion that this pocket of the country has completely sold out to the almighty tourist dollar an showed that real life and real culture still exist outside the city limits.
Grateful for: unexpected interactions
