The agony and ecstasy of Cambodia

Cambodia can be easy on the eye, the stomach and the wallet, but it’s the earthy and gritty things about the country that take hold of the senses.

Be it stubbing your toe on a 900-year-old stone block in the stunning Angkor Wat temple, or walking over still blood-stained floors of a Pol Pot torture relic, this ancient kingdom demands your attention.

Extreme poverty is never far away. Little tykes rush up to you with live pythons around their necks, asking for $US1 in exchange for a photo.

Seamstresses work away under poor lighting at the back of markets to produce garments that might sell for a mere couple of dollars. And living on a tiny houseboat in a fetid estuary is seen as a viable option for some families.

Yet in the Angkor city of Siem Reap, there are no fewer than 12 five-star hotels affording every comfort the cashed-up tourist demands, along with stylish restaurants with sumptuous recipes on the menu.

The rich and the poor, visitors and locals, mix together on the teeming streets of the two biggest cities.

Mostly, visitors come to see the vast temple complex of Angkor, one of the great cities of the world throughout its heyday from the ninth to the 15th centuries, spanning an amazing 400 sq km of northern Cambodia.

Hitting your head on a chunk of Angkor is not hard. Neither is stubbing your toe. It’s a tactile place and much of it is neither board-walked or protected from roaming tourists. Parts of it are roped off because they are unsafe and because pillaging of ancient artifacts has, at least until recently, been a curse.

But 1.7 million people visited last year and that figure is climbing.

Angkor Wat, the most famous of the temples, appears something of a tropical melange of the Palace of Versailles and the Vatican museum.

It’s advisable to be a little fit and tropical sun-hardy before taking it on. A 250-metre causeway must be traversed to get to the main temple, passing through huge grounds that still hold minor sandstone constructions and must have been breathtaking in their day.

Angkor Wat was built to reflect a semblance of the universe. The vast 200m-wide moat around it defines the seven seas, the causeway is the rainbow providing admittance and its five towers are five great mountains.

The central tower is meant to be ascended, providing the stairway to the peak of the universe. Beware though, its steps are intended to match the way up a steep mountain.

Physical exertions aside, the architecture, statuary and bas-reliefs found within Angkor Wat are marvellous. They provide a ready insight into the lives of those who once lived here.

As with the bas-reliefs in other temples, such as Angkor Thom, these sandstone wall carvings tell stories of great moments in the reigns of the Jayavarman and Suryavarman rulers, in the heart of the ancient “land of cardamoms and mangoes” as the Angkor world was known.

Through 600 years of abandonment, the temples have become overgrown, sometimes spectacularly, by gigantic forest trees.

A stunning 41km from Angkor Wat but still in the same complex is the Banteay Srey temple. This Hindu shrine to the god Shiva holds some of the most beautiful bas-reliefs and ornate architecture of all and they are in excellent condition.

In Siem Reap as in Phnom Penh, the excellent cuisine of this country, featuring limes, tasty salad vegetables and subtle herbs and spices, is on display in restaurants and hotels abound.

The splendour of Angkor is in extreme contrast to the other principal tourist attraction in Cambodia, the relics of Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge – the so-called Killing Fields.

Pol Pot, or Brother Number One, led a bizarre and brutal attempt to re-start civilisation through an agrarian socialist concept under which he emptied the cities and put everyone to work tilling the fields.

The result was mass starvation, torture and killings that left perhaps two million people dead between 1975 and 1979 when the Vietnamese army ousted them.

The horror of what happened can be seen at the Tuol Sleng security prison, or S21 as it became known.

The blood stains remain on the floors of the cells where individuals were restrained, starved and tortured to death.

Many were taken to a killing field a few kilometres outside town to be slaughtered.

Today this killing field – there were hundreds of others across the country – houses what is known as the Choeung Ek Memorial, a tower that includes the bones and clothes of many of the victims, as a reminder of what happened there.

Source - Khmer HotNews Post