My joyful journey on the scam bus from Bangkok to the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh brought me to the town of Siem Reip, the main jump-off point for the two million visitors every year who come to marvel at the nearby temple complex of Angkor.
Now a Unesco World Heritage Site, the ruins of Angkor were once the centre of a Khmer empire that had its heyday from the ninth to the 15th century, when it was abandoned to the jungle in the wake of a Thai invasion.
The size and complexity of the ancient city, the largest preindustrial metropolis in the world, is simply mind-boggling. It had an urban sprawl of 400 square miles – four times larger than the second best of its generation, the Mayan city of Tikal in Guatemala – and contained over one thousand temples built around its implausibly big centrepiece of Angkor Wat, the world’s largest religious monument.
The ruins might still be lost today had they not been re-discovered by happenstance in the late 19th century when a team of French archaeologists came across them, choked in creeping vegetation.
Personally I’m not one for temples. In fact, I find it hard to get excited about churches, cathedrals or striking pieces of architecture of any kind. I normally eschew large inanimate objects in favour of using the people of the countries I visit as my source of knowledge, culture and entertainment.
The Khmer people, however, have a very special relationship with the Angkor ruins. Right now, their country is at an extremely low ebb and is struggling with everything from domineering neighbours encroaching on their territory, western paedophiles arriving to use the country’s lawlessness and poverty as a means of getting to its children, and the aftermath of the Khmer Rouge regime that systematically sought to wipe out all knowledge and culture from its territory.
But while the country may be weak, and more-or-less at the mercy of outside influences, the ruins of Angkor stand as an inarguable demonstration that things were not always this way – the Khmer people were once the world’s strongest and most advanced. And Angkor acts as more than a symbol of a time long gone; it is looked on as proof that it is in the Khmers to be strong again.
As a result, symbols of the ruins are emblazoned on almost everything one can find here. There’s a picture of Angkor Wat on their national flag and on their money, and every second guesthouse, hotel or restaurant has some reference to the complex in its name. The country’s extremely drinkable national beer is called Angkor, and there’s even a rip-off version called Anchor.
So, given that I was in a town just up the road from the place, foregoing a visit – despite my lack of interest in buildings – was out of the question.
MANY OF THE predominantly American foreigners staying in my gangster-run guesthouse – some of whom were planning to spend a full week exploring the ruins – were enthusiastic about the apparently ‘spectacular’ sunrise one can witness from Angkor Wat.
I foolishly allowed myself to be carried along with this notion, and informed one of the guesthouse guides, a teenage lady-killer called Jay (the same one who had taken me to the war museum earlier that day), that I wanted to leave for the ruins at 5am and explore like the other tourists.
“Go at 5am?” he spluttered, with eyebrows raised and a look that said ‘And I thought you were cool.
’ As it happened, I got up before dawn and met Jay outside under a cloud-covered sky that quite clearly meant there would be no breath-taking sunrise visible on that particular morning. “8am?” I said to Jay, who nodded with tired relief, and we trudged back to bed.
After a couple more hours in the scratcher, we were on our way, hurtling down the dirt tracks Cambodians lovingly refer to as roads on a motorbike that didn’t come with helmets. After 20 minutes of defying death, we jumped off at the pay point – at which, interestingly, only foreigners had to pay. Personally I thought this was perfectly sensible. It was the Khmers’ ancestors who had built the damn thing, after all. However, the thought of the uproar such a notion would bring about in Ireland if only foreigners had to pay to go to our museums and historical sites, while the Irish were allowed in free, did make me chuckle.
I paid my dues and hopped on the bike again for a 10-minute ride through a dense forest that suddenly opened up onto what was, literally, the most stunning sight I’ve come across since I stumbled on an all-girl international beach volleyball match between Brazil and Argentina while on holiday in Cuba. It really was that beautiful…
