Cambodia

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English is spoken widely in the region, although there are some interesting translations. The other day I was requested by a sign to “Please put some things in the rubbish bin” I was mortified that I didn’t have anything to throw away. The weather forecast on our arrival in Siem Reap said 36 C, realfeel 38 C. I asked Mags for a realfeel later but she wasn’t amused.

Yes, we’re in Cambodia and, like all the other visitors, we’re here to explore Angkor, the centre of the Cambodian empire that ruled most of Indochina from the ninth to thirteenth century. Early starts every day here for the dual purpose of avoiding the hottest part of the day and the coach loads of tourists that set out a little later. First stop Ta Prohm Temple. This is famed for being overgrown with trees with roots growing out of, and over the walls. Angelina Jolie was filmed here in her role as Laura Croft.

Next up, Angkor Tom, or Great city, a focal point in Angkor and home to the royal palace. This is a massive site established in the twelfth century by King Jayavarman VII covering nine square kilometres. We visited the Bayon temple on the site, a mind boggling sandstone structure with thirty nine out of fifty four towers still standing, each representing one of the Cambodian regions at the time. Each tower is adorned with giant faces on each side. It’s a giant site and mobbed with tourists but large enough to cope without it feeling overcrowded.

 

We left the old city and headed to Tonle Sap Lake, the largest in Indochina. We drove to a diminished river feeding the lake where we transferred to a small boat, cruising through the fishing village of Kampong Phluk before reaching the lake. The Tonle Sap river drains the lake during the dry season meandering towards Phnom Penh where it merges with the Mekong. The Mekong swells during the wet season with melt water and monsoon rains and it actually pushes the Tonle Sap river back upwards causing the lake to swell to five times its dry season size. So the river runs in both directions depending on the time of year. It really is a large lake, even in the dry season, covering 2,500 square kilometers. It supports a population of two million people nearly all of whom live from fishing. The Cambodians told us that around seventy percent of these are Vietnamese who remained after the war (technically illegally).

 

It floods every year here, and the locals have devised a brilliant idea – they build their houses on stilts. Radical I know, but perhaps we can learn from this and apply it in the Thames valley. There’s a twelve metre difference between the dry season and the flood in the village. This makes the houses look like giant cranes in the dry season.

Next day we started with a visit to Banteay Srei temple, dedicated to Shiva and the Hindu religion built with high quality pink sandstone. The carvings are wonderfully preserved as a result and the detail is fantastic, even after a thousand years.

We’d booked a hike up a jungle mountain before we flew out, but on the day with the realfeel at 40C we were having second thoughts. Well, we sweated out a few gallons of accumulated toxins, but managed to enjoy ourselves in the beautiful countryside. We saw no animals, due largely to deforestation as most of the forest has been cleared for farming, and, as our guide explained, people were hungry during the Khmer Rouge period and the subsequent civil war. If it moved, it was eaten. There were tigers and elephants in this region but, alas, no more. We did hear but not see a gibbon and heard cicadas a plenty, a particular species sounding like an electric saw. The walk terminated at a sacred royal bathing site where hundreds of lingas have been carved into a river bed. The linga being a Hindu phallic symbol. Water flowing over these lingas is deemed to turn it into holy water.

We finished the day at Beng Mealea temple. This site has not been restored but allowed to collapse slowly with mother nature gradually taking over with trees sprouting up through the ruins. Its main claim to fame is as a forerunner to Angkor Wat, built first with a similar design but on a smaller scale – a kind of baby Angkor Wat.

Our final day and we’ve saved the best till last, the daddy of all the temples, Angkor Wat. We rose at 5a.m. to catch the sunrise over the temple. This early start doesn’t guarantee a jump on the other tourists as everyone is doing the same thing. Walking over the concourse approaching the temple was like London Bridge at rush hour. Most of us gathered at the left inner moat that still had some water after the dry season waiting for the sun to appear, looking like paparazzi at the Oscars. The site itself is incredibly impressive, three of the five large lotus like towers visible as you approach providing the world famous image. There are three levels representing different layers of Hindu heaven, the higher as you ascend. The lower level is adorned with stone carvings on the walls depicting Hindu religious stories covering 800 metres in four galleries.

So it’s the end of our travels in Indochina and I think its fair to say that we are a little templed out, but we’ve enjoyed every minute. Next stop Australia and, at the risk of offending my Aussie friends, perhaps a little less culture but more R&R.

Vietnam: After Hanoi

We drove east for four hours to Halong Bay, home to two thousand limestone islands in the gulf of Tonkin.

We boarded our cruise and made for a fishing village nestled in the shelter of several islands. There are a number of these communities dotted around the gulf that sprung up as places to service the fisherman but gradually ended up as permanent communities. All the dwellings are built on plastic drums lashed together with wooden beams to provide a floating platform. On this is built a usually modest dwelling of wood topped with corrugated iron. The one we visited had about seventy abodes, a meeting place and a school that was built with money donated from Kambala School, Sydney.

Mags’ new policy this trip is to say yes to everything. This is how I came to be standing on deck at 7a.m. for a lesson in Tai Chi. We managed remarkably well with the warm up moves but there was lots of creaking and groaning as the stretching increased, and then we were soon tottering and flailing all over the place as the pace increased. Must have looked hilarious, the instructor barely able to keep a straight face. We warmed down with a climb up one of the tiny limestone islands. Tiny, but still five hundred steps to the top where the view from the observation tower was worth the effort.

Another short flight to Hue in central Vietnam, pronounced Whey with a light Geordie accent.

Another city tour that took in the impressive Citadel, and a three walled fortress and dwelling for the kings of the Nguyen dynasty from 1802 to 1945. A quick stop at a monastery after a short river cruise where a monk who burnt himself to death in Saigon as a protest to the governments restrictions on religious freedom in 1963. They have strangely kept and preserved the Austin car that he used to travel to Saigon. We also stopped at the tomb of Emperor Khai Dinh where ten thousand workers died in constructing it, many from Malaria.

We spent a few bizarre hours in a Zen Buddhist retreat. A home built recently by a wealthy businesswoman from Saigon who retired here. She receives a few visitors now and donates the money to good causes. It was a beautiful, immaculate house built with iron wood, a dark, incredibly durable and beautiful material. It has four buildings forming a square around an ornamental rectangular pond. We had a pleasant vegetarian lunch provided mainly from their own gardens, and joined our host in some quiet meditation slowly doing laps of the quadrant with our hands coated and massaged with a mixture of banana honey, yogurt and herbs. I don’t know what Mags was meditating on, but all I could think of is what a sight we must all look.

 

We indulged ourselves in a three day stop at a beach resort in Hoi An, bordering a long stretch of golden sands looking out over the South China sea. We spent a half day in the town which was a major trading port in the seventeenth century and has a well preserved old quarter where motor vehicles are excluded, so making it a pleasant change to stroll around without being beeped at incessantly by motorbike riders.

I’ve observed that the further south we travel, the country feels less and less communist. And in central Vietnam, the natives are born capitalists. Just pause at a shop front and the proprietor or shop assistant well pounce, maneuver you into a half nelson and not release you until you’ve made a purchase. Consequently, there’s all sorts of tat now being shipped back to our place.

Another short flight to Saigon, now called Ho Chi Minh City, but still referred to by most Vietnamese by its former name. We stopped on route from the Airport at Cu Chi tunnels. This is area famed in Vietnam for resisting the US in what is known here as the American war. The VC built miles and miles of tunnels underground that they used as shelters, living quarters, armories and a means of escape from the Marines and a way of outflanking them. It really was humbling to walk through a battle field where so many people had lost their lives and to see the huge hollowed out craters created from bombs dropped by B52s. We entered a short thirty metre section of one tunnel and had to squat low to proceed along it. It was very small and uncomfortable, my shoulders touching the sides of the walls. To spend hours and days down there would have been tortuous. Only one night in Saigon. Shouldn’t that be Bangkok? Anyway, enough time for a quick photo opportunity at two impressive structures built by the French; the post office and the cathedral, a derivative of the famous Notre Dam in Paris - and for Mags to enter into a lively debate with a local politician in the hotel bar. Lucky to escape imprisonment there.

We continued south to the Mekong delta where the mighty river spreads out into countless waterways, like the back of an old man’s hand, before finally emptying into the South China Sea. Here we visited a brick factory by boat where the clay from the river is shaped, dried and fired in kilns for days. The kilns are heated by burning rice husks and the resulting smoke hangs heavy over the surrounding area. On route to the next stop we changed transport to bicycle. Mags was a little apprehensive about this as it’s many years since we cycled; Mags reckoned it was thirty five years since she was last on to wheels. But anyway, it’s literally like riding a bike, and we were soon wobbling our way along the narrow lanes of the local villages – although most of the locals we passed couldn’t help smiling or laughing. 

After 20 minutes we came to a typical village where we chatted with a veteran from the Cambodian war with the Khmer Rouge. He spent five years at the front and, unlike most of his compatriots, came back alive and in one piece. The war started in ’79 , only four years after the American war, and lasted until 1989. We also visited a coconut factory, the area being famous for this fruit, and known colloquially as the coconut region. Every part of this incredible tree is used. There’s the juice, the flesh that is used to make milk, cream and oil, the outer husk is used to make mats, the inner shell is used as fuel, either directly or it is turned into charcoal. The leaves and trunks are used in building, and there’s even a coconut worm that lives inside the tree that is eaten as a delicacy. It’s very expensive, as you have to kill the tree to harvest it.

Next day, an early morning tour to the local floating market where farmers sell their produce wholesale on the river. Each boat ties a sample of what they are selling at the top of a large pole at the front of the boat. They stay at the market until they sell out, usually two or three days.

We pressed on by road further south to Chau Doc where a respected general who lived in the eighteenth century dreamed that a female deity told him that she was on the mountain and that if he would seek her she would keep the region safe. Well, being a general, he didn’t climb the mountain personally, but sent some soldiers. The boys came back with the intelligence that they had found the lady goddess in the form of a stone but that she was too heavy to lift. (A neat way of avoiding the issue by the men, I thought). The general had another dream where the lady says to him that she can only be brought down off the mountain by nine female virgins. As Mags said “We virgins always get the hard work”. Anyway, said virgins were rounded up and made their way upto the mountain. (No doubt escorted by the soldiers now frantically looking for a rock resembling a women so as not to disappoint the general). The lady was duly found and brought down to the village and installed in a temple. She is there today looking remarkably like a painted sculpture. We arrived on a holy day and, it being a Saturday, there were thousands of Vietnamese people all jostling to enter the temple and pay their respects to the Goddess. This site doesn’t attract many foreign visitors and we found ourselves quite an attraction. There was a real carnival atmosphere with street vendors everywhere and people clearly having a party. Inside the temple there were several signs in Vietnamese. Mags asked our guide to translate. They were the dos and don’ts of the temple, the “not allowed”. One stated “No superstition” Mags observed “But its all superstition, isn’t it?” Possibly not the wisest comment considering we were surrounded by the faithful, but thankfully only our guide spoke English and he misunderstood. “Exactly. The people pray for good luck, fortune, health and happiness but they are supposed to be just giving thanks to the Goddess for peace.”

Alas, our journey in Vietnam ends – and yes, the spring roles are sensational.