This is a rather uncelubrious way to describe our first visit to the Angkor complex of temples. So I will tell you first that the temples themselves are huge, intricate and atmospheric.
Then I will tell you that M is trying to kill me.
We have hired 'White Bikes', our two dollars each duly going to charity, the previous evening and we hop on to them early in the morning and set off. I am slightly fearful of riding along the busier roads, with their crazy road rules and such terrifying practices as riding motorbikes contraflow, pulling out suddenly without looking and opening car doors onto passing traffic, also without looking. In the end though, M, mindful of this, has found a route which brings us to the temple area on relatively quiet roads. We cycle along, it's still early so it's not too hot yet and it's lovely cycling along in the dust with the palms overhead. Cambodia is quieter than Vietnam, you can escape the road noise quickly, and the relative slow pace of life becomes more apparent as we move further out if town. You don't need to go far though, and less than five minutes into our road I am happily jolting along, enjoying the countryside.
Getting a temple pass which allows us seven visits to temples in the area is surprisingly easy and we barely have to queue before we are off again.
I try not to look too much at Angkor Wat as we pass it. We have been told it will be at its best later in the day when the sun faces it. I get a brief impression of its size, though its facade is now a little too well known from the front of guide books to retain much in the way of surprise.
We stop briefly to buy some sticky rice served in bamboo, which is slightly sweet and full of energising goodness, and then continue with our tour.
Essentially we tour around the temple complex, which is huge, looking at temples on our route. We are leaving Angkor Wat itself for its own special trip. We stop to look around, climb up, tramp over and generally 'do' at least six temples, each of which we spend at least forty five minutes at.
The temples are huge ruins. The size of them is a point of awe, as is the intricacy of the various relief carvings within them. They are incredibly well preserved. Often they include stone stops leading up to higher levels, pyramid style and often there are further carvings and amazing views from the top. I conquer my fear of heights temporarily and follow M up to the top.
It's very hot and there is little shade around the temples themselves, though cycling between them is shady and creates a much appreciated breeze. By the time we are just half way through our "short" tour it is already about one o clock (we left home at eight) and I am sweltering and beginning to have some sympathy with a tourist who we overhear saying to her guide,
"Do we have to do ALL the temples? It's just, all the temples look the same. Could we just do the main ones?"
I would never suggest that they all looked the same, particularly to a Cambodian, for whom the temples hold deep religious significance, but they are similar in style, at least superficially. And whilst I am beginning to feel a real discomfort from the heat, dust, crowds and heights, despite hat, sunglasses, quiet patches and newfound bravado, M, I can see, is in his element. WE definitely DO have to see all the temples. I blink the sweat out of my eyes and try to focus.
Looking at the temples, amid crowds of shrieking baseball capped tourists, I am a little disappointed by my own reaction.
"You will never be prepared for the Angkor temples" says an enthusiastic blogger we looked up the day before, "and you will never want to leave them."
I want a shower, yet more water and some shade and I am ashamed that I don't have a big emotional reaction. I can see that the temples are big, which is awe inspiring, well preserved, despite being ruins, which is, if you stretch it a bit in your mind, a little bit magical, and beautifully carved, which is impressive. But it's hard to conjure up the right atmosphere.
If I stand still and stare, for example at the huge stone face of a Buddha, it's detail enhanced by miss and jungle greenery growing in its crevices and I listen to the intense hum of the jungle, caused by a deafening chorus of some formidable species of tropical cricket, I can just catch, for a moment, the eerie wonder of the place, its stillness and its age and I can approximate what it might be like to discover it, alone in the heat of the jungle.
It's only a moment, because at every opportunity tourists are shouting to each other in varying languages, usually about what angle they look best in a photo, gathering cheesily around carvings, with maniacal grins, and tramping about in tiny fluorescent shorts and vest tops, despite various entreatments both around the site and in guide books to dress respectfully and keep quiet.
I know. It sounds like snobbery. And it is. For someone who professes to be open abs accepting if all sorts of cultures, I show very little mercy to other tourists.
In certain places, however, it is easier to feel the atmosphere. In one temple a huge tree straddles part of the wall of the temple, its roots forming part of its trunk and stretching up high above our heads before the roots join and the branches begin. In another trees have simply grown out of the walls themselves, roots spreading and probing their way into the gaps in the building, or through the stones themselves. They augment, rather than destroy the look of the temples, reinforcing the weight of time and the sense of mystery. In these temples, it's like discovering another world. I like the idea that when humans abandoned these structures, they were claimed by the trees. They became the property of the jungle.
When we get to the last temple I am ready to drop. Everything aches and I feel bitten, sunburned and dizzy under my hat. It's one of the more enjoyable endurance tests I've taken, but by now, quite definitely is one.
A child approaches us. We have become used to being shouted at by Cambodian market sellers at the temples, entreating us to buy water, dresses, food or trinkets before we even climb off our bikes, adding their cries,
"Water! Lady, some water for you?"
"Sir, you buy something to eat?"
"You want trouser?"
"You want shirt?"
Even, from one enterprising driver, noting perhaps my bedraggled appearance, "you want tuk tuk?"
We haven't been approached quite this forcefully before though. We are the only people at this temple entrance, due largely to our die hard approach to temple viewing, it being late in the day, and the fact that this turns out to be the back entrance.
We are mobbed immediately and our bikes surrounded so that we enter into a bewildering swirl if "no thankyou", "no really I don't want it", "no. Thank you but no" which falls on deaf ears. We more or less fight our way off the bikes and through the entrance, where most of our assailants give up and fall away.
Apart from one. I have seen child beggars, fleetingly, though never been directly approached by one, but this child is, at least superficially, selling something. She follows us nearly all the way to the temple, which is a long walk.
"You buy this?" It is, first a fridge magnet and then later, rosary beads.
"You buy for one dollar. One dollar. Sir, you buy?"
We say no.
"OK, two. You buy two for one dollar. One dollar. Two."
This continues until she is literally offering us ten sets of rosary beads for one dollar. She is very young. Her voice still lisps a little. She is barefoot.
When she finally realises we will not buy she stops, says "one dollar" one more time with a tragic sulky edge to her voice which, on another child, might be employed after being told they couldn't have a sweet, or that it is time for bed. I will never forget the look on her face as we left her. I cannot tell you what I felt like. We have been told not to buy from children because it perpetuates their usage as beggars and street sellers. She should be playing. Or in school. There is a real problem with this sort of employment if children in Cambodia, generally by their parents and through poverty rather than cruelty, and there are organisations which seem to help. Even so, she sticks in my mind. She would have sold us all her stock out of sheer desperation.
When we leave that temple we are mobbed again, but she is gone. Other children crowd around us instead selling much the same items.
"You give me candy" demands one child, "or chewing gum. Or a cookie."
We have none of these items and this child tears our heart strings a bit less. But if she lived in the America she seems to so love the products of, she too, would be in school. Nursing a latent diabetes or some sort of childhood obesity issue. Or at the least, tooth decay.
We leave the children, and a piece of our complacency, behind and begin our cycle back. It's slow going. M is fresh as a daisy but I am exhausted, dried out and half dead.
We trawl back into town, drop the bikes back and plod home. I have a long shower, a beer and a chat with A outside in our leafy garden. M makes us a noodle soup. We eat. We climb into bed. The 'short' route has taken us from eight until six.
Just before we fall asleep M says,
"Shall we do the long route next time?"
No comments:
Post a Comment