Trevor & Jonathans Cruise & Trip to the Far East and Australia 2016

Day 30 - Wednesday June 8th 2016 - Siem Reap, Cambodia

We both woke up before the alarm again, knowing that you have to be up and don’t want to miss anything has that effect on the human psyche, you just no.

We were both through the bathroom and had eaten breakfast and still had an hour before our pick up time of 0900.

Today we were on another day trip out, a booked excursion that we had booked online in Gran Canaria. We were off to visit the Angkor World Heritage site of temples often referred to as Angkor Wat.

Our guide was already waiting for us up in reception when we got there, he had been told a pick up time of 08:00 whereas all paperwork clearly said 09:00. With no harm done we headed off in our Lexus four wheel drive out of the hotel and into the city and onto Angkor.
Driving out the short distance to Angkor, the town did not give out any

secrets or suggest what may be laying behind the main drag road. From the backseat of the car it all looked relatively modern and sparse, as we made our way along to the ticket office (a really swanky centre where you get your tickets from to go into the Angkor site, they even photograph you and print this onto your ticket and inspect it at every temple you visit) we could see hotel after hotel, hotel building site, new cafes, restaurants, this place is expanding. Of course the new does sit next to the old with metal huts and makeshift roadside cabins, tuc tuc scooters running around the place and roadside fruit and vegetable sellers, even the odd cow.

As you drive further away from the city, down tree lined roads its quite shocking to find you are here, it’s such a short distance from the city itself, on its doorstep, literally.

Our first temple was to be Angkor Wat, the largest of all the temple complexes we would see today and the most complete…. our heads were about to be blown off at the scale and uniqueness of this place, but we did not know that just yet.

To get to the temple you have to cross a moat that goes around the whole temple complex itself, it’s about 50 metres wide and that takes you to one of the four gates into Angkor. Now I’d think that most people have seen photos or a television programme on these temples or at the very least watched the film Tomb Raider? Well we are here to tell you that they do nothing to capture the sheer scale of the sights on offer here, they really don’t.

Angkor is the largest historically religious monument in the world. Once you cross the moat you have to enter via one of the gates, either north, south, west or east. We entered via the east and the gate house was easily enough to blow you away. The buildings are a mix of sandstone and lava stone but in reality they look like granite, grey and black hues with only a faint few clues to the actual sandstone they are made of. These gates then have protective walls that join all of the gates together like a castle. Outside of the moat you have the jungle that had to be cleared from the monuments when they were rediscovered by the French and put onto the worlds stage once more. Monkeys cross the pathways around you, their babies hanging from their stomachs as they go about their business. We were told that tourists come up and feed them there five star breakfasts from the nearby hotels so they are pretty tame.

So back to the temple. The weird thing is that you can walk all over this world heritage site, something that feels a bit strange. Getting up to the gate house is quite a feat as the stairs are really shallow and very steep and highly polished after all the years of people going up and down them. We are talking about a complex that was built in the 12th century so that’s a mighty long time (900 years). The gate entrance is highly decorated as you would expect, this temple was built to pay homage to the King and he wanted all his subjects that visited him here to feel his power and his majesty. The temple was originally built as a Hindu temple but by the time it was finished it had converted to a Buddhist temple (not that it was actually ever finished but we are only talking about the decoration). Stepping into the gate house the decoration all disappears but you do see the clever construction, all by hand of heavy stone supported roof structures, stone lintels and buttresses, really incredible architecture and again all over 900 years old.

As you step through the gate house you get your first view of the temple, and it really is huge and so complete. The design is mimicked by all the other temples, an outer wall with more gate houses, a courtyard running all the way around the inner building, a colonnade of corridors that run in a rectangle complete with floor to ceiling carvings of scenes between the gods and wars. Climbing more steps that takes you into the inner courtyard of stone, heavily detailed stone walls and the third inner temple. The staircase up to this level is really steep and you can’t climb on the stone instead they have replaced it with wooden stairs (more like a ladder) that you climb up.

When you get to the top you have a middle temple that divides the overall rectangle into four, some of the smaller rectangles are pools, some are prayer yards. The whole of this top level is again surrounded by colonnade that gives you access to amazing views over the whole site, its huge!

We were apparently really lucky that the site was relatively quiet, we had heard stories of thousands and thousands of tourists crawling all over the place but that was not our experience. We could comfortably take photographs without other people in them and the small queue to get up to the top level really only took about three minutes to get through.

We were travelling at the beginning of the rainy season but today was to remain dry, how lucky are we? No crowds, no queues and a great guide.

I could talk about the temples, the history, the carvings…. go on and on but all I really need to say is that being here felt like a real privilege. Whoever though that we would ever get to travel to Cambodia? That we would ever get to see these incredible buildings and that we would still be allowed to trample all over them? These feelings and more were running around our head as we just tried to take it all in, understand what we were looking at, just trying to make some kind of sense of it all. This was only the first of three temples that we would be visiting today but we already felt spoilt.

We walked from the east to west, entry and exit. Outside of the main temple you have other structures, temples, lakes and the perimeter wall becomes more visible. As we crossed the moat to leave the temple and meet up with our driver once more we were inundated with children selling postcards for a dollar etc. All the guides and our hotel told us not to buy anything as they need to be encouraged to go to school, if they make a living out of selling then they will never go and Cambodia won’t change so we did as told although sometimes that was quite tough. These kids could be quite demanding and sometimes funny……just a tiny bit like India all over again.

Back in the car we drove round to our second stop of the day, The south Gate of Angkor Thom. Now this is actually a gate into what was a city (Angkor Thom), again over a moat but that bridge that crosses it is lined with statues on either side all carrying a segment of a mythical serpent. Some of these statutes were headless or nose less, some full of bullet holes a reminder of the awful war here in Cambodia that saw the lives lost of too many people. A war that is only just in the past.

The gatehouse here had an impressive top, Buddha faces faced out on all sides, all in various states of disrepair. Once through the gate we proceeded along the road for quite a white before we arrived at our next port of call The Bayon Temple. This was the temple of another king, built right in the centre of the city of Angkor Thom. Much of the city has been destroyed, but this temple, the palace and a few other temples still exist inside the cast city walls. The defining feature of this temple compare to Angkor Wat are the towers of faces just like at the gate to the city. Buddha faces stare out from pillars, out towards the jungle, out over what would have been the city. Its layout is similar in that there are three levels but this temple is a lot more compact.

It was ongoing restoration to one side of the facia whilst we were there. The sites here in Angkor are littered with stone everywhere. It must be the worlds most complicated and largest jigsaw puzzle ever at at this temple it was an Italian team of archaeologists that were trying to put parts back together again. As you go around the different sites you see that archaeologists from all around the world come here to help try and restore or make sense of what is found here…. that work will never end judging by the scale of what we saw.

We once again clambered around the temple, you can’t really call them ruins as they really are remarkably still intact, in and out of doorways, corridor’s, around the third floor of a temple that had stood for 900 plus years, amazing to think we could do that still…..I’m sure it will change.

It was now mid-day and it was time to leave the temples behind for an hour and head for some lunch (prearranged). Our guide and driver took us off to a place seemingly in the middle of nowhere, down a dusty path but it seemed to be the place that all guides took their charges. We had a set meal, a mighty five dishes, all really tasty but just far too much food for the temperature and our appetites. We had a soup that looked like it had many weeds and garden greens floating around in it. It was seasoned with all sorts of spices and chilli (always a winner with us) and we cleared the bowls. Next up was a mango salad followed by pan fried fish in a peanut and chilli sauce with some chicken in chilli and a sweet and sour sauce all washed down with some fresh mango. It was all excellent despite all the flies buzzing around the place, we sat there constantly waving our arms about like demented fools trying to move the flies on.

We got back into the car and headed off to our last and probably our best temple of the day, The Ta Prohm Temple.

This temple was actually built for the mother of the king that the Angkor Wat temple was built for but it is unique because of what the forces of nature have done to it. Locally (and indeed around the world) they call this temple by a much simpler name, The Tree Temple. That is because out of all the temples this in the one where nature has taken hold of the stone structures and claimed them for their own. It’s a lot more decayed and littered with stone than the others but somehow that just adds to its ambiance and mystery. So it’s called the tree temple because it physically has trees growing out of it, through it, in it, around it and its amazing! As the stone that the temple is built from is so thick the roots of the trees can’t penetrate it so they grow externally all around the temple looking for ways into the ground. Seriously, some of the trees grow on top of the walls, their trunks splitting in half at the base as the roots grow down either side again reaching for the earth. It’s an unearthly site, like science fiction that nature can do this.

The other thing about this temple is that is almost feels unsafe to walk around, things feel unbalanced, precarious as if the whole thing could fall down at any time yet here we are crawling and walking through its nooks and cranny’s, exploring its magic. The argument could be that if it can stand the forces of nature then surely it can stand the forces of man……let’s just say that the health and safety officers around the world would never EVER let this happen anywhere else and to be honest I think that in our lifetime it will stop. We both felt extremely privileged to be here and to take this all in.

So that was our day in the temples over, if we had wanted to we could of waited around for another four hours to watch the sunset over Angkor but in this heat that’s a tall ask of anyone so we chose to go back to the hotel and its air conditioning and pool for a while.

It goes without saying that we took hundreds of photographs this morning, it was one of those photograph every second places because it is like nothing else you have ever seen and you want to make sure that you capture every single moment.

We have seen a serious amount of monuments on this trip, histories from across the ages and I never thought that Petra in Jordan could be topped. In a way it still hasn’t but it’s not just the temples here in Cambodia that make it magical and mystical it’s the place, the Asian culture, the people the settings and the way you can engage with it all…. simply a life moment that we won’t forget, we are blessed.

So where do you go from here, how do you end a day like that? Well after some time back in our hotel we got changed and headed off into SIem Reap town itself on a $3 tuc tuc ride.

The town itself is all new, all built in the last 15 years or so and that shows in the architecture. As we said before they are still building now and in another decade I wonder what it will look like if it carries on with this rate of change. Our destination was a place called ‘Pub Street’. Yes, really, they have a place called pub street after all the beauty of the temples you end up in a tourist nightmare of bars and restaurants and night markets all selling knock of gear. I’m probably being a little harsh there, but they are certainly not playing to their heritage around here, it’s all western and Coca-Cola signs and hamburgers and tacos.

We walked around some of the market stalls, eyeing up all the fake goods and tourist t-shirts with Cambodia emblazoned across them. You can buy a draught glass of the local beer here (Angkor) for 50 cents a glass and food is cheap as chips as well and there is plenty of places to choose from. We eventually settled on a little restaurant down a narrow alleyway and ordered a local dish, amok, which is a curry dish cooked in a banana leaf but steamed to cook it. We had the sampler menu so ours came in four little banana leaf bowls with fish, prawn, pork and chicken. It was absolutely delicious, very Thai tasting with the use of sweet spices and coconut to cook with. By the end we were both stuffed!

We got a tuc tuc back to the hotel and visited the club lounge for our rations of free G&T, smuggling out a few waters and a baileys nightcap for Trevor when we left.

It’s another day where I have to end it by saying AMAZING…. just incredible, what a life memory to have, how lucky we are, how unbelievable it is that we are here and getting to see this. What a life……night all, we go to bed tonight feeling very blessed!