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.

Laos

We were startled to discover that our reputation had preceded us on our first night in Laos at our hotel when we ordered a bottle of wine with dinner. “I’m sorry sir but this is the last bottle of this wine that we have. Do you still want to order it?”

Entering Laos was very entertaining. Although we could see Laos from our hotel, we had to drive for an hour south to cross over the river at the new bridge. Exiting Thailand on one side of the river was fairly straightforward, but entering Laos was a lesson in patience. First, you have to queue to hand in your passport and forms filled in in triplicate. There are six immigration officials behind the glass who work on the passports in turn, presumably each performing a different function. Eventually the chap at the end holds up a passport to the waiting throng and calls out a name. This usually takes a few attempts as not all of the nationalities come easily to him. The passport holder then approaches him to pay the appropriate visa fee to reclaim his or her passport with said visa. The fee for the visa depends on where you come from – 30 USD for Eastern Europe, 35$ USD for Western Europe and the United States, and for some unknown reason, 42 USD if you are from Canada. Not sure what the Canadians ever did to upset Laos but there it is. This is not a quick process so you just have to roll with it and wait. All the officials are laughing and smiling the whole time clearly enjoying themselves.

Anyway, certainly no stress and before too long we were through and had been transferred to our boat for our cruise down the Mekong river to Luang Prabang. There was about thirty of us motoring down river in a Na Va, roughly translated as long narrow boat (or dragon boat) which I think neatly sums it up. We were arranged around tables laterally across the boat, eight people in wicker chairs around a table. All very comfortable. The tourists were split roughly equally into French speakers and English speakers and there was a guide for each group. The Mekong runs from Tibet to Vietnam over four thousand kms. We travelled down a short 300 km stretch entirely inside Laos although we had Thailand on the right bank and Laos on the left for the first hour. 

We stopped at a couple of riverside villages along route. People living very simple lives in self made bamboo huts farming a few crops, rice in the wet season and peanuts and sweet potatoes in the dry. They keep chickens, pigs and ducks that run around the village under the houses that are on stilts – very free range. They also farm water buffalo that are regularly seen on the riverbank.  One of the villages had a thriving hand made scarf cottage industry, all made by the women of the village on hand looms. Mags bought a few dozen.

A couple of our fellow passengers asked the guide if the villagers operated a cooperative for their produce. On hearing that they didn’t asserted loudly “Oh they’re doing it all wrong. They’d get a much better price if they formed a cooperative. We had great success in India with it, didn’t we darling?”  The villagers have been doing this for hundreds of years and they’d taken all of five minutes before telling them how to live.

 

We arrived in Luang Prababg two days later thoroughly relaxed. This ‘city’ was once the capital of Laos and is famous for its temples, monasteries and monks. You really can’t escape Buddha in this part of the world and Luang Prabang is Buddha central, also known as temple city with over fifty temples serving a population of only fifty thousand.

We started very early to catch the ceremony where the townsfolk offer alms to the monks at dawn. Hundreds of monks, resplendent in the orange robes, walk in a single file down a street crammed with temples where mostly old knotted women seated or kneeling on the pavement give each monk a small portion of sticky rice. The monks collect the rice and share this out as their breakfast. Some of the monks are incredibly young, just boys really. We were informed that novices can begin from the age of nine. All male Buddhists are expected to serve some time as monks. Here in Laos, the custom provides a means for poor rural families to provide an education for their older children as the trainee monks are taught English, French, Maths and the sciences as well as Buddhism.

  

Our tour then took us from temple to temple where we marveled at the decorative art work and craftsmanship. I found it really interesting as I’d never been inside a Buddhist temple before and knew very little about the religion. We also visited the ex Royal Palace where the beautiful rooms were filled with presents from around the world. The USA had sent Lincoln cars and rocks brought back from the moon. Australia had sent a boomerang (and yes its still there). The UK appears to have sent nothing. The Japanese had sent some stunning coloured glass that local craftsmen had used to create intricate and beautiful murals on the walls.

We made friends on the cruise with a lovely couple from Henley who share our love of wine and a mutual dislike for condescending tourists. Wandering the streets of Luang Prabang looking for something to eat, we bumped into them at the Tamarind restaurant and joined them for dinner. Well, this ended up being quite messy but I think they were to blame. No, honestly. We did justice to a very fine Laotian meal that included barbequed buffalo and steamed river fish before repairing to a nearby bar to put the world to rights, again!

I’ve never been in a city before where the road users are so polite. The primary mode of transport is by motorbike with whole families sometimes hanging precariously on. Not many people use helmets so, on the face of it, it looks really dangerous but everyone drives so slowly and considerately. Well, a lot of these vehicles probably can’t go over 15 mph. So in the end I think it’s probably very safe. I didn’t hear anyone beep his or her horn the whole time we were there.

A very short hop south by plane to Vientiane, the capital. A much larger city with around seven hundred thousand inhabitants but still relatively small and laid back and with a compact city centre that is easily negotiated on foot. I say easily, in that you don’t have to walk far, but the pavements are used for parking cars and motorbikes so you have to walk on the road. We arrived in the afternoon and went exploring but it was hot and dusty and we soon felt in need of refreshment. We found a wine bar and had a couple of beers while the obese French proprietor fussed over his accounts smoking Gauloises, and an English charlatan ex-pat preached to a gullible American backpacker. Next day we had the obligatory half-day city tour with several more temples and a visit the Putuxai, a strange copy of the arc de triumph in Paris that somehow ended up being adorned with Hindu gods.

 

We’re so relaxed that our brains are definitely in neutral now. While we were at the airport waiting for our flight to Hanoi, Mags said

“I can’t believe I’ve been bitten by a mosquito here.”

“What, in South East Asia?” I replied.

“No, you idiot, here” pointing to her wrist ,and we both burst out laughing. We’re regressing into childhood alarmingly quickly.