Day 458: To Bangkok

Today was a long day spent mostly in buses: 8 hours from Phnom Penh to the Poipet/Aranyaprathet border, an hour to get through the border formalities, and another five hours to Bangkok.

When we got into Thailand, I was amazed at how noticeable the difference between Cambodia and Thailand was. In Cambodia, the roads were rather bumpy and drivers were constantly honking their horns to make moto drivers move to the side. The roadsides were littered with plastic bags and other trash, and roadside settlements consisted of extremely simple wooden huts on stilts. In Thailand, then, the roads were a lot smoother and had more than one lane for much of the time. Nobody was honking horns, and the roadsides looked much cleaner. The houses also looked much more modern, and overall everything seemed much less dusty than in Cambodia. The same differences applied to the two border towns, Poipet and Aranyaprathet.

Considering what Cambodia has been through just a few decades ago - US bombing, civil war, genocide - it is no small wonder that it is less developed than Thailand. Isn't it strange what effects a rather imaginary line can have once it is considered a "border"?

When I arrived in Bangkok, it was already dark and the city with all its skyscrapers was lit up brightly and looked incredibly friendly and welcoming. The bus stopped at the Victory Monument, just one elevated walkway away from the BTS sky train.

As luck would have it, the hostel I booked was just a few stations away on the same BTS line, and so I got to enjoy a nighttime view of central Bangkok from an elevated position. I love cities with rail-based public transport!

Day 457: Sights in Phnom Penh

After the somewhat depressing day yesterday, I moved my attention to happier periods of Cambodia's history today.

First, I visited the National Museum, a building in Khmer-style architecture.

The museum houses many artifacts from temples of the Khmer empire as well as some objects from the subsequent centuries, but unfortunately photography was not allowed.

Towards the end of the exhibition halls, the museum showed a long documentary about the Cambodia of 1965 - the period after having gained independence from France, but before the Khmer Rouge's reign of terror. The documentary showed many aspects of life in Cambodia, and the impression it gave me was that of a relatively modern country, and a happy one.

One of the schools they showed in the film looked exactly like the Tuol Sleng high school - which was later turned into a torture prison by the Khmer Rouge. Even the athletic equipment they later used for torture was in the film. What an incredible development: from a happy place where children play sports to a place where innocents are tortured to unconsciousness.

The second sight I visited was the royal palace. About half of the royal palace is currently closed to visitors: the king-father Norodom Sihanouk died about three months ago, and every day people are coming in to pay their respects to him. That is why the grand entrance to the palace is decorated with a huge portrait of his, surrounded by black ribbons.

The part that is open includes the Silver Pagoda. The pagoda - again, no photography allowed inside - earned its name because the entire floor is made of silver tiles. Most of the floor is covered with carpets to prevent visitors from damaging it, but what is visible on the edges does indeed look rather grand.

The walls surrounding the huge courtyard were painted with lovely murals. Some are not very well preserved - this is one of the better parts:

The Silver Pagoda's terrace offered a nice view of this model of Angkor Wat. Amazing, isn't it?

The courtyard was decorated with hundreds of huge pots with plants and flowers, such as this lotus flower:

My overall impression of the palace is that it is an excellent example of Khmer architecture with its towers and multi-tiered roofs. It is conveniently embedded in an oasis of green in this otherwise rather dusty city. Only the best for the royals, right?

Day 456: Killing Fields and Genocide Museum

After two days in Phnom Penh preparing for a job interview, and doing the interview, today it was time to do some more sightseeing. Next to Angkor, the two places I visited today were on the top priority list for my visit to Cambodia - but unfortunately, they were no happy places. Instead, they told the history of one of Cambodia's darkest periods: the Pol Pot era.

Pol Pot and his communist Khmer Rouge ruled Cambodia for less than four years from 1975 to 1979. Within three days after they came to power in 1975, the Khmer Rouge drove all people out of the cities and forced them to work on collective farms in the countryside. This was motivated by a basic belief the Khmer Rouge held: farmers as the "base" people were the only worthy ones, while the "new people" - city dwellers, educated people and people with money - were all dangerous, potential traitors and enemies.

Consequently, the Khmer Rouge also banned personal possessions, money, and religion. In addition, they closed schools, and reduced the curricula to basic literacy and communist indoctrination.

During the rule of the Khmer Rouge, approximately 2 million people died - out of a population of 8 million. Many people were executed for political reasons. Pol Pot seemed to have been highly paranoid: the main target of his genocide were skilled people of all kinds: teachers, doctors, craftsmen, monks, intellectuals. Many others fell victim to starvation and illnesses. This also affected "new" people disproportionately because they were forced to do the hardest labor while their rice rations were the lowest. 

Just imagine what a devastating blow this is to a country's future when there is nobody left to educate the next generation!

Choeung Ek - also known as the Killing Fields - was a place outside of Phnom Penh where inmates from the Tuol Sleng prison (see further down for details) were brought to be executed.

The prisoners were told that they would be relocated to a new house to keep them quiet during the transport. When they arrived at Choeung Ek, they were perched in a dark house with a single room and then taken away one by one to be executed. People were not shot to death - bullets, as the audio guide explained, were expensive. No, they were forced to kneel in front of their graves and were then hacked to death with whatever agricultural tools were available.

From the prisoners' arrival at Choeung Ek to the execution of the last one, a diesel generator was roaring and loudspeakers blasted communist propaganda. This was done to make sure the prisoners didn't hear the others scream during their executions. Roaring generators and communist propaganda was the last thing the victims ever heard...

More than 100 mass graves have been found at Choeung Ek. The one in this picture was a particularly gruesome one: it contained the bodies of more than 100 women and children.

Right next to this mass grave stood a tree - the killing tree. When this tree was found in 1979, it was covered with blood, human hair, and bits of bone. As it turned out, the executioners used to grab babies by their feet and bash their heads and upper bodies against the tree until they were dead.

All of this was in perfect agreement with two of Pol Pot's proverbs: The first stated that it was better to kill an innocent by mistake than to leave an enemy alive by mistake. The second one said that in order to prevent future revenge, a traitor's entire family had to be eliminated.

Just from these two statements, you can see immediately what a sick regime the Khmer Rouge were. I think that many regimes - especially the ones that end up committing genocide - act upon the same principles, even if they don't state them as explicitly. Wikipedia has a long list of genocides in history - I had not realized that there were so many!

To commemorate the nearly 9.000 bodies exhumed from about 80 of the mass graves, a stupa was erected at Choeung Ek.

Inside the stupa, seven levels of glass cabinets display the skulls of the exhumed. On many of the skulls, you can see holes and cracks where they have been smashed by mostly blunt instruments.

The second site I visited was the former Tuol Sleng prison which has been turned into a genocide museum. The prison was housed in a former high school in Phnom Penh. Prisoners would be held here and interrogated here for a few months, and then, after having given full confessions of their "crimes", be transported to Choeung Ek for execution.

The open parts of the buildings were covered with barbed wire to keep the prisoners from committing suicide.

The Khmer Rouge were obsessed with documentation - gotta keep track of  all the enemies successfully eliminated - and so they took pictures of all the prisoners being brought to Tuol Sleng. Many of these pictures are now displayed in the museum. There are thousands of faces looking out at the visitors - men, women, and children alike, scared, angry, and confused. They all died at the hands of the Khmer Rouge - out of several thousand prisoners, only a handful survived Tuol Sleng.

The confessions that the Khmer Rouge wanted to obtain from the prisoners included details of their connections to various secret services such as the CIA or the KGB, and the names of other traitorous people that the prisoners knew about. Since the vast majority of the prisoners was innocent and didn't know any traitors, they were tortured - often to the point of unconsciousness. After weeks and months of torture, prisoners would finally start to invent all the details that the interrogators wanted to know, including lengthy lists of names (who probably ended up being the next set of inmates in Tuol Sleng).

When the Vietnamese came in 1979 to put an end to the Khmer Rouge, they found the bodies of bound and tortured prisoners, killed when the Khmer Rouge hastily abandoned the prison a few hours prior. This is what they found in one of the cells:

This cell was one of the bigger ones - reserved for Khmer Rouge cadre who became suspect. The other prisoners had tiny 1x2 meter cells without beds, toilets, or access to drinking water. This is one of the classrooms, outfitted with about 20 poorly constructed prison cells:

Unfortunately, nobody seems to have a really great idea as to how to prevent future atrocities of this kind. There is some research on genocide prevention - for example, have a look at Ervin Staub's website - but this same research also lists how the different ideas for prevention are often undermined by the economic and political interests of bystanders. Will humanity ever learn from their past mistakes?

Day 453: To Phnom Penh

A few days ago, I had done a calculation of the sights I wanted to see in Phnom Penh, the time required to get a Thai visa, and the time left on my Cambodian visa. The conclusion was that I had to continue on to Phnom Penh today, and leave the lovely Angkor Bodhi Tree Retreat and Meditation Center behind in Siem Reap. I had stayed there for more than three weeks, filling my days with stretching, yoga, meditation, and a fair share of relaxing. The progress I made with regard to my flexibility was absolutely astonishing - which confirms something I had learned earlier in my trip: it is all just a matter of hard work and (growth) mindset.

The bus ride was rather uneventful - almost all of the road to Phnom Penh is paved and in a fairly good condition. On the small stretch of unsealed road that we had to pass, I saw a scene that seemed almost surreal. The white dust from the street covered everything - plants, houses, etc. In addition, white fog caused by a vehicle in front of us obscured everything that was more than a few meters away. In the middle of all this whiteness, the only thing that was clearly visible was a young boy walking along the street. What an amazing sight!

A little later, we overtook a few trucks that sprayed the dusty road with water - very necessary in the dry season! Since I've been in Cambodia, I've seen about five drops of rain fall, so all the unsealed roads are extremely dusty by now. I shudder to think what condition they will be in in the rainy season...

In Phnom Penh, I was astounded by the contrast between rich and poor. On one side, there are people living in dusty bamboo hovels with neither running water nor any furniture except a few hammocks, and on the other side, there are super-modern, super-big, walled-in villas with big shiny SUVs and guards in front of the gate. I think I've never seen this stark a contrast in all of my travels.

Day 446: The Real Cambodia™

Today the owner of my guesthouse took me on a "motorbike mystery tour" to the countryside surrounding Siem Reap. The tour is designed to give an insight into the real Cambodia - how people outside of the tourist madness in Siem Reap really live.

Our first stop after about 45 minutes on dusty dirt roads was a Buddhist temple. The monks, having heard our motorbike approach, all went into hiding - according to my guide, this is what they always do. They don't seem to be of the talkative sort at this temple. Which really didn't surprise my all that much once the motorbike's engine had been turned off: there was such a profound silence around the pagoda, broken only by insects and the occasional rooster, that I can't condemn the monks for wanting to keep it.

One of the temple's buildings had bullet holes all over - remains from the Pol Pot era, without doubt. Another had this lovely carved lintel which I found was quite similar to the lintels on display in the Angkor National Museum.

A third of the buildings was covered with extremely bright paintings - there must have been a surplus of neon colors somewhere ;-)

The temple was surrounded by the typical landscape in this part of Cambodia: rice fields as far as the eye can see...

... water-filled fields with lotus flowers (the stems of which are a popular vegetable), and water buffaloes grazing in recently harvested fields:

We also passed several villages, all with different building styles and levels of wealth and cleanliness. The inhabitants of this village, for example, seem to be very afraid of evil spirits. As a result, every house has at least one scarecrow standing in front of it to keep the spirits away. The scarecrows are all quite realistic: they have the correct height, wear human clothes and shoes, and even have faces of some sort. This picture shows a pair of these scarecrows:

From a small hill, we had a good view of villages in the area. Many of the villages are built on stilts, like in this picture:

Since it is dry season right now, the stilts seem to be there for no purpose at all. A closer look, however, reveals that the water marks left by previous floods reach well up the stilts, four meters or more above the ground.

Dry season also has another effect: many of the roads in the countryside are not paved, but dirt roads in various states of repair. The roads reveal the color of the earth, which is a yellowish-brown in most cases. Some of the roads are bright red, however, and this red dust settles on everything - coloring even the roadside plants:

Being in the vicinity of Angkor Wat, we also came upon some temple ruins. This one was allegedly built as a trial run for Angkor Wat:

On the way back, I managed this shot of a gas station:

Can't see the gas station? Well, have a closer look. In the middle of the picture, below the right umbrella, you can see a display of bottles. These bottles are filled with petrol, each holding one liter. Gas stations of this kind are everywhere in and around Siem Reap, to the extent that it is rather rare to see someone use the western-style gas stations on the national road in and out of Siem Reap. That's Cambodia!

Day 445: Angkor National Museum

The Angkor National Museum is one of two places where artifacts from the Angkor Archaeological Park have been brought for safekeeping (the other one is the National Museum in Phnom Penh, or so I hear). After my three visits to the temples, I completed my Angkor experience with a visit to the museum today.

The museum was really quite fancy, with many video screens, well-made displays and good explanations. Unfortunately, it was really crowded: mostly by big tour groups, who were mostly Japanese. As a result, all the videos played in Japanese, not in English, and so I got to watch maybe one out of ten.

Photography was prohibited in all indoor areas, so the only visual impression I can leave you with is one of the few exhibits that stood in an outside corridor:

This is quite representative for the entire museum, however: there were statues upon statues of male and female deities, apsaras, animals, and so on. Especially statues of deities and apsaras are rarely to be seen in the temples themselves anymore - small wonder when they've all been collected for the museum.

Day 440: Angkor Thom

For my third visit to the Angkor Archaeological Park, I decided to visit temples in and around the ancient capital city Angkor Thom. The first temple I went to was Phnom Bakheng. Phnom Bakheng is a very popular spot to watch the sunset (I'm not exactly sure why - there are no temples to see in the direction in which the sun sets...). Since the temple is on everybody's list for the late afternoon, it was nearly deserted in the morning.

There is lots of reconstruction and conservation work going on at Phnom Bakheng (at many of the other temples, too, but Phnom Bakheng seems to be the biggest effort right now). Over much of the area at the base of the temple, neatly numbered stones are waiting for the day when they will be put together again.

The tool for putting them back together? Two modern cranes. Carrying the stones up the steep stairs - even the wooden staircases built on top of the original ones are very steep at Phnom Bakheng - would come close to a suicide mission.

The view from the top of Phnom Bakheng is great: jungle as far as the eye can see, interrupted only by a hazy vision of Angkor Wat a few kilometers away.

When I left Phnom Bakheng to enter Angkor Thom, I encountered this: a big traffic jam at the southern gate, caused by the fact that there's only a single lane going through the gate.

With my bicycle, I jumped straight ahead to the front of the queue and laughed a bit at all the tourists having to wait in their buses... sometimes there's just nothing better than a bit of schadenfreude, isn't there? ;-)

The next day, I heard that there are plans to extend the Siem Reap airport. The airport currently has the capacity to bring in 2 million tourists per year. The plan is to extend this to 15 million. Now, seeing the traffic jams constantly forming at Angkor Thom's south gate, I wonder: how will they deal with all the additional traffic?

Besides all the temples, Angkor Thom has another attraction: monkeys! They are used to humans - no doubt because of the occasional banana they steal from tourists - so they hang around calmly even when they are carrying very young baby monkeys.

I found it very cute to observe how they were looking after the baby, and also how they were taking care of each other by eating insects off of each other's furs.

But - back to the archaeological attractions. Bayon is the biggest and most important temple inside Angkor Thom. From afar, it looks like a big and slightly unordered pile of stones, especially when seen at angles that are less favorable than the one in this picture:

When you get closer, however, the pile of stones turns out to be an elaborately decorated pile, consisting of more than 50 towers, each adorned with a huge face on each of its four sides. There are a total of 216 of these faces in Bayon, all of them two meters or more in height. Very impressive!

Along the base of the temple there is another gallery of bas-relief carvings, similar to the one in Angkor Wat. Reality and the descriptions in my travel guide failed to converge, however: I just couldn't  correlate what I was seeing with what I was reading. I wouldn't be surprised if the travel guide's description matched some other temple instead of Bayon ;-)

One part of the carvings depicted marine life such as turtles, fish, and water plants:

What I found interesting to note throughout Angkor was the use of motives from Hinduism and Buddhism. The early Khmer kings all followed Hinduism, and consequently the temples were dedicated to Shiva or Vishnu or Brahma, and were full of Hindu mythology. Then Buddhism snuck in, and for a while Buddha statues co-existed with Lingas and Shiva statues. Finally, Buddhism took over as the sole religion and new temples carried only Buddhist imagery. Phnom Bakheng, for example, was a Hindu temple, while Bayon was a Buddhist one.

The next temple in Angkor Thom was Baphuon - much less grand than Bayon, but interesting to climb nevertheless.

The temple's top offered an amazing view of the lower levels and the causeway leading to the temple. In earlier days, the temple may have been completely surrounded by water.

The final part of Angkor Thom that I visited was the central square and the buildings on its side. One of the sides is occupied by the Elephants Terrace - named that way for the elephants lining the staircases, I suppose. Apparently, the terrace was used by the king and other high-ranking persons to witness military parades taking place in the square. A parade with elephants, horses and chariots must have been quite a sight!

Day 439: Angkor: Big Circuit

On my second day at the Angkor Archaeological Park I decided to do the big circuit which consists of five temples that are a little further out than those on the small circuit. As on the first day, I rented a bicycle from my guesthouse and then set out to explore.

After a lovely bike ride passing rice fields and the occasional temple ruin, I stopped at Prasat Prerup. Like Angkor Wat, this one also has five towers: one at each corner and one in the middle. The middle tower is higher than the others, so that from every direction it appears as if there are three towers of equal height.

The next temple, East Mebon, was only about one kilometer from Prasat Prerup. East Mebon used to be located on an island in a huge artificial water reservoir. The reservoir dried up long ago, but Google Maps still shows the ex-reservoir in blue color - there's just no better way of confusing geeks ("By now, I should be seeing the lake... where's the damn lake? Am I on the right road at all?")

East Mebon is another temple with five towers on its highest platform. The height of this platform and the angle by which you ascend is slightly less than at the other temples, so it is actually possible to take a picture where all five of the towers are visible:

On one of the lower platforms, carved elephants are standing at the corners. Amazing how they still look like elephants after all these years, isn't it?

The next temple on the circuit was Ta Som. The temple layout reminded me of Banteay Kdei and Ta Phrom which I had seen on my first visit to Angkor - and there was another similarity to Ta Phrom: the eastern gate has been all but swallowed by a huge tree. I love how the trees grow out and over ancient buildings - the ultimate reminder that to the jungle, humans are just passing visitors.

The next temple, Neak Pean, consisted of a small sanctuary surrounded by a few artificial pools that used to have fountains, or at least water spouts. Only a viewing platform was accessible, which made for a very quick visit.

The last temple on the circuit was Preah Khan. Unlike the other temples I'd seen, this one consisted of a long succession of doorways and hallways. I'm not sure if the doorways used to actually be equipped with doors, but the visual effect without doors is without doubt superior.

Most walls in this temple, like in most others, are richly decorated. The Khmer empire must have had legions of dedicated stone carvers to accomplish all this! Just look at the detail in the carving of this tree, complete with small animals roaming around in it:

Preah Kahn is another temple where not all of the jungle has been cleared away. Next to the tree sitting on the wall, observe the elaborate fake windows decorating the length of the wall:

Day 437: Monk Blessing

Today, my guesthouse arranged for three monks to come visit. They would first give us a blessing, and then be available to chat about their lives as monks, Buddhism, and everything else we could think of asking.

The blessing - I had never received one before - was an interesting experience. They chanted for several minutes, sprinkled holy water around the room with a plant and tossed a few handfuls of small flowers into the room. At the end, we each received a bracelet (or rather, a piece of red woolen thread that only became a bracelet once it was tied around our wrists) to wish us good luck. I found it especially interesting that Buddhism also has the concept of 'holy water'.

During the chat, they explained that many monks in Cambodia are student monks - they study at high school or university level. It seems to be common for monks to stop being monks, for example when they go to support their family, or want to do a regular job after finishing university. (Since there are many rules that monks have to adhere to - they are not allowed to handle money, for example - regular jobs are somewhat difficult to do while they are still monks.)

Another thing I learned was that all schools in Cambodia cost money, from primary school all through university. In addition, there is no obligation to go to school, and so it all depends on the wealth and willingness of the parents if a child receives an education - or not.

One final bit that I found interesting concerned the status of women in Buddhism. I knew that monks aren't allowed to touch women. What was new for me was that Buddhist nuns are below the monks in the hierarchy and are therefore required to pay respect to monks - but not vice versa. Does this have a familiar ring? I wonder why on earth every single major religion considers women to be second-class citizens (if that). Seriously, how do religions expect me to respect them if they don't respect me?

Day 434: Angkor: Small Circuit

After almost an entire week in Siem Reap, today it was finally time for me to go see the reason for my stay here: the temples of Angkor. The Angkor Archaeological Park - and especially Angkor Wat, the biggest temple in the park - is another world heritage site that I discovered playing Civilization and have been wanting to see with my own eyes ever since.

What I hadn't realized, however, was how big the archaeological park is: it covers more than 50 square kilometers and contains countless temples. To see the site properly, you need at least three days (or more if you're a big fan of old temples lying in ruins). I got a three-day pass and planned to do both the small and big circuits as well as Angkor Thom, the ancient capital of the Khmer empire.

The temples of Angkor were built by various kings of the Khmer empire, roughly between the 9th and 13th centuries. My first stop on the small circuit was the biggest and most well-known of these temples: Angkor Wat, dating from the 12th century. This picture was taken from within the temple walls of Angkor Wat - just imagine how big the compound must be if the viewpoint is already well inside of it:

The amazing thing about Angkor Wat is that it doesn't only look great from a distance - many of its original decorations and bas-relief carvings have also been preserved. The carvings depict mythical stories, recount battles and tell tales of kings and wise men, all in great detail and with many, many individual figures. This is just a tiny example:

Once I exited the gallery with all the carvings towards the inside of the temple complex, I had a great view of the five inner towers (two of which are hidden behind the others in this picture). The middle tower is much higher than the two outer ones, but appears to be the same height because it is further back.

The original stairs leading up to the inside of the temple were very steep - I read somewhere that they designed them like this on purpose because progressing to the inner sanctum wasn't supposed to be easy. Today, as you can see on the left side of the picture above, there are more comfortable wooden staircases built on top of the original ones.

The most prevalent decoration in all of Angkor, not just Angkor Wat, are these celestial nymphs, called Apsaras. They are always smiling, always lightly clothed, and often dancing - and there are thousands of them!

I spent a good few hours in Angkor Wat, and then continued on the small circuit: I entered the ancient city of Angkor Thom through the south gate and went on to look at the east gate.

All of Angkor Thom's city gates are similar to this one, and certainly just as magnificent. It must have been a grand and imposing sight to arrive at Angkor Thom back in its day.

The next temple on the circuit was Ta Keo - tiny and relatively plain in comparison to Angkor Wat.

Just a little further was Ta Phrom - the temple known from the Tomb Raider movie. All of the temples of Angkor were more or less overgrown with jungle at some point in time, but at Ta Phrom the jungle has not been cleared away completely. As a result, trees grow right out of the temple walls, creating a unique atmosphere. While Lara Croft is the only visitor to the temple in the movie, reality is unfortunately very different: since Angkor is Cambodia's biggest tourist attraction, and Ta Phrom is one of the temples everybody seems to visit, the temple was really crowded. Even though I waited for quite a bit I found it impossible to get a shot of the temple plus tree roots without tourists posing for photos running into my shot.

All of the temple walls - and I do mean all of them - carry decorations of some sort. This is one of the better preserved parts:

Another impressive root resting on the temple - amazing what the jungle is capable of, isn't it?

The next temple on my list was Banteay Kdei. This one doesn't seem to be on everybody's must-see-list, which was a relief after the crowds at Ta Phrom.

I found a beautiful carving of two dancing Apsaras somewhere inside:

My last stop for the day was Prasat Kravan, the smallest temple I'd seen so far. This is all of it - no walls, no hidden towers, no passageways to explore. I found it quite refreshing after exploring four very extensive temples.

Prasat Kravan is also one of the oldest temples in the area, and the only one to use small red bricks instead of big stone slabs. The size of the bricks has an interesting effect on the decorations inside: