Cambodia
Today at Phnom Penh the Mekong merges with the Tonlé Sap River carrying water from the large central Cambodian lake of the same name; around which the great Khmer empire once had its capital - Angkor Thom. There has been an ebb and flow of competing cultures, ethnicities and religions across these plains from prehistoric times; as remnant language groups and ancient artefacts attest. This rich past, and its impact on the present, is the main source of interest to tourists.
In Phnom Penh we stayed at the Hotel Cambodiana, an edifice in ‘New Khmer Architecture’ style, complete with mock pagoda, stretching along the bank of the Tonlé Sap just at the point of its confluence with the Mekong. Although only completed in 1962, the Cambodiana’s short life is already steeped in blood. During the period of mass murder and genocide under the Khmer Rouge, it was used as a staging post to death for officials of the deposed Diem government; who were then executed at the nearby Olympic Stadium (where no Olympic games ever took place).
Cambodiana Hotel and Mekong Confluence (from our window)
Today the Cambodiana is fully renovated to erase this unfortunate start in life and boasts 4-5 star service. It was built as part of a Capital building exercise (along with the bloody Olympic Stadium) by King Norodom Sihanouk following the departure of the French in 1953 and is an easy, if furnace like, walking distance from the Silver Pagoda and Royal Palace. We found the hotel and its pool an oasis from the sweltering heat and, occasionally, to flee the constant harassment from entrepreneurs (and entrepreneurial beggars) that tourists suffer.
When coming or going guests have a choice of modes ranging from: walking; Tuk-Tuk; air-conditioned Toyota cab; or stretched limousine. We walked to local places, including an excellent tapas restaurant along the river. Otherwise around town we generally used the, always waiting, always offered, Tuk-Tuks. We never saw the limo used by anyone.
It is difficult to imagine anything as inappropriate as riding through Phnom Penh in a stretched limousine. While is possible to see the main tourist sites without leaving the relatively neat and clean central area of modern buildings and wealthy homes, a trip to outlying markets or just a kilometre or so outside the central area quickly descends into a world of narrow streets littered with rubbish and populated by the poor in conditions reminiscent of, but not as acute as, those in India (and without the cows and other feral livestock).
The Palace Precinct Phnom Penh
Our taxi driver from the airport had offered his services for a day trip to the main Khmer Rouge ‘killing fields’ graveyard and prison. On the appointed day he sent his ‘brother’ in a new unmarked Toyota for the ‘killing fields’ trip. The new driver’s English was passable and he doubled as a guide, having driven Australian business people in the past.
The most informative part of this trip was a visit to the S21 School taken over as a prison and now the Tuol Sleng Genocide museum. But the most harrowing experience was to the ‘killing fields’ at Choeung Ek were a memorial now contains thousands of skulls, bones and clothing, exhumed from over 57 mass burial sites, and where a guide explains the arbitrary murder of men, women and children – entire families by killers and young as 10 years old.
The leader of the Cambodian communist movement known as the Khmer Rouge was Saloth Sar, also known as ‘brother number one’. He took the name ‘Pol Pot’, from Politique potentielle, and was Prime Minister of Cambodia, renamed Democratic Kampuchea, from 1976–1979.
During his time in power, Pol Pot, and his fellow Paris educated conspirators and ideologues, abolished money and personal property and imposed a system of agrarian collectivization; forcing city dwellers to relocate to the countryside to work in collective farms and forced labour projects, with a goal of restarting civilization at ‘Year Zero’ (1975).
These ideas were forged during his early upbringing, from a privileged family and the exclusive Lycée Sisowath, to tertiary study in France and during his membership of the French Communist Party. He was heavily influenced by French left wing intellectuals as were several other Khmer Rouge leaders (all documented at S21). In this respect they resembled Nguyễn Sinh Cung (or Ái Quốc) known as Hồ Chí Minh (bringer of light); but of course Uncle Ho was far more worldly and pragmatic (probably a lot brighter) and consequently less doctrinaire (more about him later).
The combined effect of the Khmer Rouge execution of dissidents, intellectuals and city folk; the slave labour; the return to primitive farming methods; and malnutrition due to the resulting collapse of agriculture; was estimated at over two million deaths; around a fifth of the Cambodian population; with much higher rates among ethnic Chinese, Vietnamese and Muslims.
At S21 we saw the interrogation rooms (once classrooms) where intellectuals and dissidents were pointlessly tortured to confess their class guilt, capitalist sympathies or other ‘thought crimes’ before being put to death; straight out of the Spanish Inquisition or Orwell’s 1984.
S21 - the Tuol Sleng Genocide museum
An interesting photographic display juxtaposed images, taken by a member of a Swedish socialist group invited by the regime to see the great strides the country was making, with captions written then and today - in hindsight. Realising now that they were duped and shown only smiling faces of heroic peasant workers and a few selected older people it was interesting to see, even then, their questioning why the hospitals had no patients and were run by apparently untrained medical staff; the city was largely deserted; factory and farm machinery was wrecked or unused; and petrol stations lay in blackened ruins.
On the bright side, Cambodia is about to bring the remaining culprits to justice and it is hopefully in the past (they have also abolished the death penalty).
Tourism is now central to the Cambodian economy; the usual tourist trail beginning at Phnom Penh and travelling up to Siem Reap to visit the temples of Angkor. Angkor Wat is now the central icon on the Cambodian flag, acknowledging its status as the country’s main commercial attraction.
We had no particular plan for getting to Siem Reap. One option is to travel up the river. The Mekong is navigable by quite large, even palatial, boats across Cambodia, all the way down to the delta in Vietnam. But the Tonlé Sap becomes shallow and less navigable in the dry.
The hotel travel desk suggested that a bus would be less expensive than a cab and potentially safer for the longer trip so it was duly booked and we travelled overland to Siem Reap, sharing the heavily trafficked road with vehicle of every kind; past countless thatched stilt houses, local agriculture, and commerce. We quickly realised that ‘big is best’ as the bus spent most of the journey on the wrong side of the road, running anything smaller, including taxis, onto the margin or into the ditch; yielding only to oncoming trucks or other buses.
April is the driest and hottest month before the monsoon begins. 2010 is a particularly dry year; the rice paddies of Cambodia are scorched paddocks; the dams and waterholes like bomb craters with a floor of damp or cracked clay often littered with detritus.
From the bus (one of many empty ponds)
The country has not fully recovered from past political turmoil and civil war. Compared to China and Vietnam literacy is low (but considerably higher than in India); and there are lasting demographic differences, with low numbers of older people and more women than men. But population density is now less than a third of that of Vietnam and the people seem well fed, happy and healthy. Indeed the food everywhere seems plentiful with a wide variety of meats, fruit and vegetables, as well as the staple, rice; all excellent eating.
Angkor Thom fell to the Siamese early in the 15th century, and the Khmer withdrew to Phnom Penh, to retake the lost territory later. Near the lake of Tonlé Sap the tourist city of Siem Reap, 'Defeat of Siam', celebrates this and is all that lives of the early Khmer capital city. But in the sultry heat of the surrounding jungle, the ruined mausoleums and temples of imperial leaders, their worldly deeds engraved on the walls, are evidence of past glory and the power and aggression of the great Khmer kings of nearly a thousand years ago.
The greatest and best preserved of the mausoleums, used as a temple by later waves of Buddhist and Hindu arrivals, is Angkor Wat. Built to preserve the mortal remains and memory of the god-king Suryavarman II and glorify Vishnu, the god he represented on earth, the outer walls of the central building are carved with fine, once gilded, bas reliefs of Hindu epics interspersed with a record of his own conquests and the life of the court.
A vast outer wall is surrounded by a wide square moat over half a mile on a side, lined with tens of thousands of tonnes of imported sandstone. There are four concentric square buildings within this wall as well as two smaller temples. The five central towers are said to represent Mount Meru, home of the gods; the outer walls, the mountains enclosing the world; and the moat, the oceans beyond.
Angkor Wat: Within the wall the moat
I was impressed on several levels. The first being the scale of the place; over 5 million tons of sandstone had to be transported from a quarry about 40 km away; comparable to building the Great Pyramid in Egypt. Every stone was fitted exactly and smoothly to the next, without mortar, and almost every one is carved in some way. It is estimated that construction required many thousands of builders working continuously for nearly forty years.
Second was the graphic violence and barbarity depicted in the bas reliefs; and in other carvings near the entrances; clearly a warning to visitors. This underlines the absolute power of the king, his probable cruelty and the expansionist culture he ruled.
Third, is the diversion of economic resources to such a folly, based on an absolute confidence in an afterlife, and more than that, the parochial self-importance of the culture’s belief in a particular afterlife, one where the social status, power and wealth of a Khmer King was expected to be preserved for eternity. But this is the common folly of many ancient (and modern) rulers.
Finally, the primitiveness of the engineering denotes profound areas of naivety and parochialism. While they had metallurgy there is no evidence that they had access to contemporary engineering from India or China let alone Europe. Angkor Wat is contemporary with the great gothic cathedrals of 12th century Europe; where arches and flying buttresses swoop and support vast galleries hundreds of metres above the head. The Pantheon and aqueducts of Rome are nearly a thousand years older; and generally in better shape. Hagia Sophia in Istanbul is vastly more impressive architecturally and in engineering than the central structure at Angkor Wat, and was built four centuries earlier.
Notwithstanding the scale of the undertaking and the obvious skill of the craftsmen, the engineering consists of laying one stone on another. The widest un-columned, un-collapsed, roof spans less than five metres; it might have been designed by a child with blocks.
A Typical Roof Span around 3m
But despite the tomb being raided and ransacked, removing its gold and bronze, Angkor Wat is relatively well preserved; having been in more or less continuous use; and being protected from jungle encroachment by its moat. It is now under restoration in several areas to protect its carvings and its tourism value. Not so other smaller structures in the region.
Over a thousand smaller mausoleums and temples in the Angkor region are known to archaeologists, but less than a hundred of these remain recognisable, as more than a pile of rocks. The majority were long ago sacked for building materials; sunk into the rice paddies; or lost to the jungle or the rains of the monsoon. For example, the later Bayon temple commemorating Mahayana Buddhist, King Jayavarman VII is on a much smaller scale and in considerably worse shape than Angkor Wat.
Even more crumbling, but possibly the most photographed of all, is the Ta Prohm complex, also founded by Jayavarman VII as a Mahayana Buddhist monastery and university. This has been left much as it was when rediscovered in the jungle, with tree roots winding over the walls and among the fallen blocks.
Linga & Yoni – in museum (above) & ruined Ta Prohm (many trees like this)
Part of the damage is manmade, as one religion and empire successively overran the other. Hindu Shiva Linga and Yoni were destroyed; Shiva was replaced by Buddha and vice versa. Temples were demolished, tombs defiled, priests and kings were murdered, people displaced. And so it goes.
Except for the heat we had a very pleasant stay in Siem Reap, partly thanks to an excellent hotel around and overlooking a vast swimming pool and some very good restaurants. The city is entirely setup to service tourists but tourism is down and the numerous four and five star hotels are competitive for the remaining dollars. The US dollar is the dominant currency in Cambodia. In addition to some excellent finished hotels, there are dozens of partially built ones, apparently mothballed until the trade recovers.
Prince D'Angkor Hotel & Spa (from our balcony)
From Siem Reap we flew on; north east to Hanoi (in Northern Vietnam).