Outlying Temples
First off, I want to take this opportunity to wish my grandfather a happy birthday: Happy Birthday Granddad! The rest of this post is basically about my visits to some of the temple ruins that are slightly further out from the Angkor Wat / Angkor Thom area. I am saving the central temples for last.
Banteay Srei, Kbal Spean and Beng Melea
The Lonely Planet recommends that travelers combine their trip to these three sites into a single long day. In the description of each, it mentions that a driver is likely to charge extra to visit these temples given how much further afield they are. What they don’t mention is that Banteay Srei and Kbal Spean are over an hour North of Siam Reap and that Beng Melea is over an hour to the South. This makes combining the three sites a bit stupid really. It costs a lot more and huge amounts of time are spent driving from one site to the next. It would make much more sense to combine a trip to Beng Melea with a trip to the some of temples near Roulos. Hindsight is a great thing but I still had a great day.
Banteay Srei is one of the jewels of the Angkor site. It is one of the smaller temples, but nearly every inch of its unusual pinkish sandstone is covered with beautifully carvings. It really was very pretty. Unfortunately, as it is one of the highlights of a trip to Angkor, the site was very crowded even early in the day.
Kbal Spean was very different. It is not really a temple. In fact, it is basically a river and a waterfall. To get there, you have to walk up through the jungle for about 1.5 kilometres. As a result, it was much much quieter. In English, the Angkor era site is usually referred to as the River of the Thousand Lingas. A linga is a phallic representation of the Hindu god Shiva. I have seen lots of these in the museums and ruined temples that I have visited so far. It seems that the linga would usually be placed in a yoni (representing the female). Priests would then pour water over the linga which would flow down over it, into the yoni and out through a channel where the (now) holy water could be collected by worshipers.
Over a stretch of the Kbal Spean river of several hundred metres, the riverbed has been carved with hundreds and hundreds of lingas, along with linga-yoni motifs and representations of various Hindu gods. It is believed that the carvings were intended to make the water flowing down towards Angkor more fertile.
After visiting Kbal Spean, I settled into my remork for the two hour journey to Beng Melea. Beng Melea was stunning. The guidebook mentioned an easy route around the site as well as a ‘clambering route’. The Indiana Jones wannabe in me definitely wanted to head along the clambering route and after crossing the moat and walking along the long approach road, I set off to where I thought the route started from the diagram in the guidebook and started to climb up a pile of rubble. One of the guards soon spotted that I was heading the wrong way and started to guide me around: pointing out the safe places to clambers, the best sculptures and the places to take good photos.
It really was an amazing site. By far the best ruined temple experience I have had so far. Beng Melea was used as a set during the filming of Tomb Raider and you can see why. It is beautifully overgrown with huge trees climbing up through the stone work. Parts of the temple complex have collapsed into piles of rubble (that my guide and I clambered over), others still stand proud. It is a large site and I couldn’t stop myself snapping picture after picture of the beautiful dereliction and of nature starting to take over again. Eventually though, I was forced to stop as my camera ran out of juice. Whilst I couldn’t record any more of the site’s beauty, I was happy to walk and clamber around for ages. I just hope that the photos I managed to take turn out well.
On the way back to Siam Reap, we stopped off briefly at the Bakong, one of the Roulos group of temples, to see the sun set. I climbed up to the top of the pyramidal temple and watched with a bus full of Japanese tourists as the sun dipped over the horizon. It was a great end to the day.
To the Back of Beyond (and Back)
Yesterday, I went to Prasat Preah Vihear. Cambodia’s other UNESCO World Heritage Site is a temple complex built high up a hill on the border with Thailand. One of my guidebook’s editors declared it to be his highlight of the country. So I was pretty determined to get there. The only problem was that Prasat Preah Vihear is in the middle of nowhere and difficult to get to. Until very recently the Preah Vihear province as a whole didn’t have a single sealed road.
The receptionists at my hotel declared that it was impossible to get there independently and that I would need to join a tour. Only they weren’t sure if any tour groups would be going there. This only made me more determined to go. I wasn’t sure that I would be able to make it there and back in a day, so on Friday night I packed the essentials for an overnight stay in my day bag and planned to set off early the next morning.
I overslept a little but managed to make it away at a reasonable time taking a remork to the taxi station where I managed to get a seat in a share taxi to Sra Em. The share taxi kept stopping at markets to pick up or drop off fresh produce and passengers. It took forever but eventually I arrived in Sra Em: a tiny town at a T-junction of minor roads. I decided to have an early lunch and walked into the nearest restaurant. No-one spoke a word of English. It took a while but eventually I persuaded them that I wanted to eat and that rice and pork would be good. In fact, it was delicious: a very simple meal but delicious.
As I was eating, a moto driver with basic English approached and asked if I wanted to see the temple. We agreed a price for him to take me to Kor Muy from where I would need to take another moto up the hill to the Prasat Preah Vihear itself. Before we arrived in Kor Muy, he saw a police check point ahead and as he had no helmet on was unwilling to go further. Another moto driver was following close behind and so we pulled over and negotiated for that driver to take me the rest of the way up to the temple and back to Sra Em again.
The drive itself was pretty interesting. Shortly after Prasat Preah Vihear was recognised as a World Heritage Site in July 1998, a long running border dispute with Thailand (which claims the site is Thai) flared up again. The border crossing has been closed for over two years, shooting occasionally breaks out and both sides have been building up their military presence near the border. On the plus side, this has led the Cambodian government to use part of their military budget to start paving the road out to the temple. It is now paved all the way to the bottom of the hill and work is going on to take it all the way. All along the road, there are barracks with sandbagged machine gun nests and (poorly) camouflaged bunkers. Hidden away behind camouflage netting, you can see tanks and artillery pieces as you drive past and there are countless small groups of men in military fatigues standing around smoking. Just about every man I saw from the moment I arrived at Sra Em to the moment I left was wearing at least one piece of military clothing.
The drive up the hill was a fairly hairy experience. I’m not too happy sitting on the back of a moto at the best of times but this was worse than heading down the wrong side of a busy road during rush hour (an experience that I was to ‘enjoy’ later that day). We both had to get our weight as far forward as possible to stop the moto tumbling over backwards as the poor 100cc engine struggle up the ridiculously steep unpaved track. The driver had to stop several times to throw bottle after bottle of water onto the engine to cool it down… What was worse was the realisation that I would have to ride the moto back down again…
Still we made it. And it was worth it. The temple complex was beautiful. It runs 800m along a North-South axis. The so-called ‘monumental stairway’ takes you up to the first of a series of gopura gateways. Each gopura marks a shift in height and completely blocks sight of the next level which only becomes visible as you pass through the gateway. Each of the five ruined gopuras was separated by a long pathway and more steps. Eventually, you arrive at the ruined central sanctuary surrounded by two (remarkably intact) galleried courtyards. It really was very impressive, as were the views over North-Western Cambodia from the cliffs behind the sanctuary.
I probably spent an hour and a half visiting Prasat Preah Vihear but whilst there were a small number of Cambodian pilgrims / tourists, I only saw two other Westerners in all that time. My driver told me that there are usually only one or two tourists a day, so I guess that made it a busy day but compared to the crowds at Angkor it was amazingly quiet.
The journey back down the hill wasn’t too bad. The driver made me lean right back to keep the back wheel on the ground and as he applied the brakes to kept our speed under control. On the way back to Sra Em, he explained that I would have to wait until the next day to get a taxi back to Siam Reap. Whilst I was quite prepared to stay the night (especially as the complete lack of light pollution gives great views of the Milky Way), I was determined at the least to try. The moto driver took me to the taxi stand and spoke with the drivers for a while. Eventually, one of them offered to drive me back to Siam Reap for $30: expensive by Cambodian standards, but for about the price of black cab from my office to my flat, I was going to be driven for over 3 hours. I accepted.
Today, I’ve had a very quiet day. I’m heading out to see more ruined temples tomorrow.
