Of Lost Histories

Bayon Temple, Angkor Thom, Cambodia. There are 216 such heads in this one temple.The woman on the left gives a sense of the scale.

Until the events of the last few days, we had been vaguely regretting the decision to come to Southeast Asia. We hadn't felt properly challenged, hadn't felt that 'I can't believe we're here' feeling that we find essential to our way of travelling. The temples of Angkor in western Cambodia have gone a long way to set that right. 

You are probably familiar with images of Angkor Wat, the vast Hindu temple with its iconic three-domed silhouette, but Angkor Wat is just one of the many glories to be found near the city of Siem Reap. This was once the capital of a mighty empire, a city of a million people at a time when London had less than fifty thousand. An empire that, after overstretching itself into extinction, was swallowed up by the jungle. The temples of Angkor cover a huge area and, in the last two days, we have cycled fifty-odd kilometres visiting the various lichen-stained temples, monasteries and Buddhas. We've cycled down puddle-ridden lanes to discover walls and archways entangled in the jungle and clambered up crumbling pyramids to survey the stupas rising from the trees. In places, vast roots have ensnared the masonry like giant octopi, wrapping their thick tentacles around doorways and weather-worn carvings. We cycled through the monsoon rains and sheltered in ancient shrines that smelt of bats and incense or watched the brief washes of sun send giant serene Buddha faces into relief. It was utterly beautiful and made all our days of dissatisfaction melt in to meaninglessness. These are the kind of things you travel so many thousands of miles to see. 

Preah Khan, Angkor 

[My recent spate of tourist-bashing isn't quite over yet though. One middle-aged American was trying to frame a temple with his massively over-sized lens but couldn't quite cut out the poor grubby kids who were trying to peddle postcards and bracelets 'It's okay,' he said to his partner 'I can Photoshop the little sh*ts out later.' ]

Before arriving in Siem Reap, we'd spent a rather lovely week on the beach. I won't go into the details because talk of huts and beaches and glittering seas will bore you and quite possibly make you want to hurt me. The most story-worthy event of the week was when we signed up for a boat/snorkeling  trip to some islands. We were both terribly excited until Nic remembered that she hated both fish and boats. Instead of gliding smoothly over turquoise waters as I had imagined, the boat heaved over a choppy sea and we got thoroughly soaked by a sudden rainstorm. We then stopped to snorkel but there was barely a fish to be seen, the masks leaked and I cut my foot by accidentally kicking a stack of corral (perhaps also contributing to the slow death of a delicate ecosystem).  It wasn't the best day of our trip and, with Nic swearing never to set foot on a boat again, we headed back to our beach hut to spend the remainder of the week doing bugger all. And a mighty fine bugger all it was too.

Nic thoroughly enjoys her day out.

Continuing this strange, reverse narrative, we now travel back in time and space to Phnom Penh. Cambodia’s capital is a massive grid of monsoon-stained concrete and fish-stinking markets, ravaged by wave after wave of tuk-tuks and scooters. When I remember it now I think of suicidal dashes across liquid traffic while breathing the smog of a thousand two-stroke engines. There are many phrases with which I could describe Phnom Penh most of them involving the word ‘hole’. 

Phnom Penh

However, Phnom Penh was also a serious, if hugely upsetting education. Just outside the city were the Killing Fields. It was here that the brutal Khmer Rouge regime murdered nearly 20,000 men, women and children. This of course was only a fraction of those murdered across the country between 1975 and 1979 (it has been estimated that 25% of Cambodians perished as a direct result of the regime’s actions). Among the victims were people who had been killed simply for ‘looking intelligent’, babies and children slaughtered because their father was a ‘dissident’ or simply a personal enemy of an officer. Because of the recent rains, the topsoil on the open graves had partly washed away to reveal fragments of bone and scraps of clothing. Looking around the warm, smiling faces of Cambodia today, it’s shocking to think that anyone over the age of 35 must have either been a victim or a perpetrator. It feels like Cambodia is in a similar place to post-Nazi Germany, wanting to know how it was that Cambodians came to murder Cambodians but unable to look the painfully recent truth straight in the eye. This is perhaps why they so often look back with pride to the glories of a thousand years ago and why everything from the money to national beer is emblazoned with a glorious image of Angkor Wat, hoping that their pride in the ancients can eclipse their more recent shame.  

S21, Phnom Penh. This was the prison/torture facility from where people were sent to the Killing Fields.