Beuk
met us at our hotel for yet another early start. Today he is in his
new guide’s uniform, blue trousers and an uncomfortable hot shirt
made from thick material. A patch on the side shows him to be an
official guide. Some of the other guides are also in their new togs
but not all. It seems to be a new rule that is coming in but I don’t
think it’s been well received by the guides themselves. The shirts
are expensive to buy and being hot I doubt they will take off.
Our first stop was at a travel agent in town to sort out our
flights to Malaysia. We had considered going overland through the
north of Cambodia and into Thailand. That would be a long day or two
of minibuses, tuk tuks, taxi’s and then either the bus or the train
down to Kuala Lumpur. It’s certainly do-able but not the nicest
sounding of trips so we have opted to fly instead, assuming that we
could get sensibly priced flights, which we did.
In terms of temple sites our plan for today was to visit
Angkor Wat, the biggest and most famous of all of the temples in the
area. We had driven past it yesterday and it is a huge and
impressive site. The Wat is surrounded by a water filled moat which
is more than 30m across. The reflection of the temple plays on the
water’s surface creating an even more magical and mystical feeling
than you get from simply looking at the temple itself. The site is
simply awe inspiring. To think that this was all created hundreds of
years ago and without the benefit of modern lifting equipment is
staggering. They must have had thousands of people working on the
site at any one time, hauling huge blocks of stone and then carving
and decorating them with intricate patterns.
Around the outside of the Wat is a covered cloister. The
ceiling tiles are still intact and below these on the inside would
have been ornately decorated wooden panels. Beuk showed us where
either time or money ran out on the temple and where craftsmen had
not made it round to carve and decorate some of the walls. Shrines
were frequent and with the upcoming religious feast day the statues
have all been dressed in bright colours and fresh offerings are on
display.
At one stage we came across an old sage who tells your fortune
… for a donation! Beuk went first and then I followed. The fortune
teller has a small book made of thick sheets of paper that are
stitched together with thick string. You put the book on your head
and then put a small stick in between the pages wherever you want
to. The sage then reads the text on that page and that is your
fortune. It seems that everyone has three goes per donation so if
you don’t like the first story you can get an alternative. Beuk’s
fortune wasn’t great and I think he used all three lives and still
didn’t get a great ending. My luck was better and I struck gold on
my first turn. My tale was that when I was born my parents gave me
up for adoption. I was adopted by a very wealthy family and have had
untold riches and will lead a very happy life. Good for me!
The whole of the Angkor site and the surrounding area was a
key battlefield during the time of the Khmer Rouge, Pol Pot and the
subsequent occupation by Vietnam. No respect was shown because these
were religious buildings, they simply made a good base to hide in
and to attack the enemy. Beuk showed us many places during the days
we spent with him where the resulting bullet holes can be seen, many
still with bullets wedged into the stonework. He also shared with us
some of his personal experiences of growing up during these war
years.
There was no education and people simply had to work all day
every day no matter how young, old, healthy or frail they were. The
concept of being an individual human being with your own identity
was wiped out. Everything was focussed on communal living, cooking,
eating. Marriages were dictated by the party and everyone lived in
fear - fear of being informed upon, fear of being caught eating food
you had smuggled and cooked for yourself, fear of doing anything a
party official may take a dislike to. The picture he painted was
very bleak and also very humbling. It was another case of us both
realising how lucky we have been to have grown up in Western Europe
at the time we did. You could sense how ingrained the fear had been
and how it must have shaped his character to an extent because even
now he was looking around him and watching other people as he spoke.
The film, The Killing Fields, is pretty harrowing but I don’t
think it really captures the essence of how much normal day to day
family life was destroyed. Family ties and loyalties were eradicated
and an individual’s life really did cease to exist. They were
reduced down to living in primitive conditions with survival being a
daily challenge. Fortunately for Beuk and his family they were
country people and were not considered to be so intellectual that
they would be a danger. Many people who lived in towns and cities
became victims simply by virtue of that fact. The cities were
emptied and the people were sent to live and work in the fields. The
peasants, the noble hard workers, became the dominant force in
people’s lives.
Beuk’s entire family survived this period of Cambodia’s
history and he is now working hard to ensure that his children (a
boy and a girl) have a better life. With no formal education to
speak of he has taught himself English, which he speaks very well,
and has learnt the history of the Angkor sites to become a qualified
guide. It also sounds like he’s dabbled at a few different jobs
before settling on his current life having worked as a tuk tuk
driver and also running his own restaurant for a while. You could
sit and listen to his stories for hours but we didn’t have time on
our side and needed to get going around Angkor Wat.
From the outer cloister you cross an open inner courtyard and
then come to a further inner cloister. Here the walls are highly
decorated with carvings of scenes from the Hindu epics of the
Ramayana and Mahabarata. One of the characteristics of the temples
around Angkor is that Hindu, Buddhist and other religious
iconography is all mixed in together. The carvings were extensive
revealing many tales if you had someone with you who could point
them out to you and translate them.
Angkor Wat is a really complex site with many different
interconnecting passages and rooms. I’m sure that if you get an
aerial view the site is square and has been subdivided into equal
but interconnecting quarters. In turn each of these has also been
subdivided so that you get a complex network of quadrangles and
courtyards that have symmetry but all overlap and interconnect
leading up to the main central square which is a huge building
representing Mount Mehru, the centre of the Hindu universe.
Beuk cleverly left us to scale “Mount Mehru” on our own. It
was a very steep building, the sides of which were at a 70 degree
angle. Only the stairs on one side had a hand rail to steady
yourself as you go and it was a bit of a hairy climb, worth it
though for the views from the top. From here you can see out over
the jungle landscape below seeing Angkor Wat and other temple sites
stretching out beneath you. The worst part was coming back down. The
slope is that steep that you can only really see the steps when you
are right on top of them. It was a definite case of easing down
backwards and not looking down to the bottom until you got there.
At Angkor Wat, as elsewhere there were orange robed monks
wandering around on their own or in small groups and we would often
come across some just sitting around inside. They created the sense
with us that we were just interlopers while they really belonged
here. As ever they made some good pictures but as with many in Asia
they too now ask for payment. Lunch at one of the nearby tourist
restaurants gave us chance to cool down and rest and enabled Beuk to
catch up with his colleagues.
The first venue for our afternoon was Preah Khan. Whereas
Angkor Wat was grand and still largely intact Preah Khan has only
comparatively recently been wrestled back from the jungle. You can
see and walk through the complex now with no trouble but in many
places trees have grown up and around the walls of the buildings and
they are now intrinsic to the stability of the ruins. It makes for a
darker and more mysterious temple experience but was also a sad
sight to see. As Beuk guided us around the site we came across
people making more preparations for the imminent feast day. Preah
Khan has special importance and the Cambodian King will be here to
say prayers and make offerings to the gods. Preparations were
ongoing with lights being strung up among the ruins and a steady
supply of plates of different offerings being brought into the
temple.
By this stage we had all reached saturation point for the day
and Beuk looked relieved when we said that we didn’t want to see
another 4 temples. As we made our way back into town we drove along
the massive eastern baray, a huge former reservoir. It has now been
turned back to agriculture and open land and trees and termite
mounds dotted the landscape. Beuk pointed more temples out to us as
we drove and we stopped briefly at Preah Rup, a small temple again
designed to resemble Mount Mehru. Many people come here to watch the
sun set but the prospect of waiting an hour or more didn’t appeal
much to us so we enjoyed the view for a while before Beuk dropped us
back at our hotel where we had a quiet night enjoying the cool of
the air con.
