HAPPY NEW YEAR, 2012!

A VERY MERRY CHRISTMAS TO EVERYONE!

Facade of Angkor Wat, drawing by Henri Mouhot

Last  week, we went to Siem Reap, Cambodia. I’d long wanted to visit (and climb) the Angkor Wat. The first time I read about the ancient Khmer kingdom of Angkor was when I was twelve. I think it was a newspaper article on Henri Mouhot and his ‘discovery’ of Angkor Wat that got my attention. The way Mouhot and the nineteenth century Royal Geographical Society seemed to encourage the perception that Mouhot had ‘discovered’ this ‘lost’ civilisation certainly captured my imagination! Of course, Angkor was  never lost: the local Khmers and other Western explorers were well aware of it. Still, Mouhot did me a favour by firing my imagination (I was avidly reading adventure and sci-fi books then). But in the ensuing years, what with the troublesome distractions of having to grow up etc., plus Pol Pot’s murderous rampage through the killing fields of Kampuchea, in the 1970s, the spirit of adventure was very much curbed in me. But finally, in a bid to throw everything to the wind, I decided this was the year to do Cambodia! And I was glad I did it!

Cambodia is a very poor country. Siem Reap, for all its tourist attractions, is still poor in the main. A few individuals are extremely rich, but most Cambodians are poor farming folk. But Cambodians are good-natured and friendly. In Siem Reap, at least, the streets are safe for tourists, the locals are helpful, though sometimes very insistent that you should buy their goods or rent their tuk tuks. But they’re never overly-pushy or aggressive.

We had a great tour guide called Sam, and a driver whose name got transliterated to John. Sam and John took us to do the tourist rounds of the Silk Farm, the Artisan’s Village, the Museum, and Tonle Sap, the freshwater lake. This year, the floods were particularly bad, and so Tonle Sap is quite swollen, even now. But for me, the great incontestable highlight was Angkor Thom (the city complex) and Angkor Wat (the Buddhist temple built by Suryavarman II in the twelfth century). I mean, talk about fulfilling childhood dreams!

Angkor Wat is the most well-preserved of all the Angkorian temples. All the temples showed a distinct Cambodian style of architecture and art, with lots of Indian influence. And I must say, for all that they are ruins, essentially, they are hauntingly beautiful. Henri Mouhot found it difficult to believe that the Khmers actually built the city complex, and dated it (mistakenly) to the time of the Romans. But the Angkorian kingdom ranged from the eighth to the fourteenth centuries. And it was indeed built by the Khmers. The refinement of the many carvings and murals (bas relief) is remarkable–really, I can only rave about it all–and the splendour of the scene from the many towers of each temple (some still climbable, even to the very top) has to be seen to be truly appreciated and understood. Of course, we walked the length and breadth of the Angkor Wat, after we had traipsed through Bayon, Baphoun, and ‘Lara Croft’s temple’. I thought that climbing up to the topmost tower of the Angkor Wat would be difficult for me because of its height, and also the steep gradient of the steps. For some reason, the ancients liked steep stairs … some were practically vertical! But I did it anyway. And it wasn’t so bad: the original stairs that the ancient monks and kings would have bounced up and down from are off limits to visitors now. So we got a kinder set of stairs courtesy of the Cambodian government … with railings too, for flabby and unfit tourists to hang onto for dear life. I hear the monks still bounce up and down … it must be the vegetarian diet …  And for the first time ever, I didn’t get vertigo! A personal milestone here!

All I can say from my trip is that I am going again. It was the ancient history and legacy of the Southeast Asian Khmers that made such an impact on me. The Cambodians’ early history is interlinked with the history of many Southeast Asian countries, including Malaya. I remembered the stuff I had to learn in History class about the Funan (Nokor Phnom in Khmer) and Chenla empires, and how they were connected to the Sumatran Srivijaya empire that took in the Malay Peninsula too, along with other Southeast Asian countries. I guess, in a sense, it was an eye opener how similar we were, and how tied we were to one another by ancient cultures (Indian–Hinduism and Buddhism) and language (Sanskrit).

Foodwise, we were very at home with Khmer food. It’s like Thai food, but not as spicy. Lemongrass and basil feature quite a bit in the local cuisine. There’s always Chinese food to resort to as well, and Siem Reap abounds with Korean restaurants, not to mention the fusion food restaurants available. In the end, there was a sense of similarity about Cambodia, and yet an essential uniqueness, a difference too. As they say, “same, same–but different”.

The travel bug has truly bitten: travelitis, and more particularly, Cambodia-itis has set in, quite badly. The one thing we have to say to our new Cambodian friends is not leah sen heuy (goodbye!) but suwas’dei (hello!)–and certainly, aw kuhn (thank you).

PS. There’s this little inconvenience … the weather is unbelievably HOT!!!