Cambodia
Over Chinese New Year we opted out of the bashing drums and men leaping about in dragon costumes, not to mention feverish pig-face eating and the chaos of the sales on Orchard Road, to go to Cambodia.
Can’t say I knew much about Cambodia beforehand, apart from that Angkor Wat is there, there was a nasty bloke called Pol Pot and there was a Blue Peter appeal for it when I was about 8.
We left the flat at 3.30 in the morning, and met up with a bleary eyed Jane and Stephen. For some reason I was a bit hysterical with the excitement to the extent that my fellow travellers didn’t want to sit next to me in the airport. We travelled Jet Star, which is the Asia equivalent of Easy Jet but with less leg-room, so that your face is about 2 inches away from the back of the seat in front, and you have to dislocate your knees to avoid your legs seizing up and developing gangrene during the 2 hour flight.
Siem Reap airport in Cambodia is a place of extremes. It is without doubt one of the most beautiful, designer, zen buildings of modern times, with soaring roofs and statues and pools and views over the countryside. The bureaucracy however is Byzantine in its complexity and developed mainly around the need for this very airport to solve Cambodia’s unemployment problem single-handed.
Firstly you fill in some forms. So far so good – I have never yet encountered a third world country which doesn’t have a passion verging on spiritual reverence for forms. Then you stand in a queue to hand in your passport. The queue takes quite a while. Then you stand in a holding bay as the chaps all lined up behind the desk take it in turns to check your passport and hand it on to the next bloke. Then a team of three pick up the passport, look at it again, and read out your name to collect it. As Andy and I are jinxed in airports, ours came out last even though we were within the first few people to hand it in.
Then you stand in another queue and this is where the fun really starts, because these queues lead up to passport control, and the booths are staffed by men in peaked caps, a sure sign of trouble. Whichever queue Andy and I chose inevitably came to a screeching halt, either through computer break-down or peaked-cap man wandering off for a cup of tea. We’d move to another queue, whereupon queue #1 would leap into action and the new queue would mysteriously abandon all signs of activity.
When we finally approached peaked-cap man, he waved at us dismissively and pointed to an alternative queue. In these situations it is always best to adopt the 3 step strategy – 1) feign incomprehension, 2) make some random hand gestures and 3) go into “British Empire voice” mode. Not that the last one ever works, just that I seem to go into it when forced to queue pointlessly for hours at a time. Like once in Mumbai airport, when after finding myself still queuing at 2.30am having arrived at the airport at midnight, and the baggage bloke asked me to open my bag for inspection, I promptly lost it and stomped up, opened my bag and dramatically removed every single item, declaring “look, there is my book, here are my pants, here is some mosquito repellent etc” for the best part of 20 minutes. Amazingly I wasn’t arrested. In this case, step 2 was successful and we were admitted to the booth so that peaked-cap could stamp our passports and forms 14 TIMES.
Finally allowed out of the airport, we had a fantastic few days. Angkor Wat is amazing, and you are allowed to clamber all over it, which surely won’t be allowed in a few years when the health & safety police arrive. The big temples do suffer from Japanese coach trip infestations, with 40 identicially dressed tourists taking it in turns to stand in front of the allocated view and do V signs in front of it, but they are still quite magical and we managed avoid the worst of the crowds.
In the smaller temples with less obviously impressive things to see, you can be the only people there – at one point Jane, Andy and I were all perched at the top of our very own temples next to eachother in the forest, with all the bird noises and ancient trees, and butterflies drifting past. We went to one temple which is 60km away from the main complex, right in the forest and next to a village in the middle of nowhere. It’s so serene, with the forest noises and the cows in the fields and a man playing the flute outside that it’s like something out of an old Indian painting – quite amazing.
We also did a bit of off-roading to visit a floating village we’d read was interesting. We set off in a slightly sad tourist minibus, drove a while, then onto a track and through a village, slap bang through the Sunday market, then came to a halt. The driver gestured to 4 teenage boys lounging around on mopeds. What? We all stared at him (it was too hot to compute anything fast) and Stephen could be heard faintly crying “why can’t we go in the bus…?”. But no, it was on the back of the mopeds and 5km (allegedly) to the river. I got on mine and evil-knievel Cambodian boy, anxious to prove his masculinity, immediately roared off into the distance, leaving the others still standing around back at the bus. I wondered whether to be alarmed then realised I was twice his size and could probably have him if necessary.
At first it was very picturesque and I was thinking smugly ‘look at me, it’s 9am on a Sunday and here I am in Cambodia zipping along past rice paddies and palm trees’. Then we got to the sandy river bed section, and it got a bit more hairy. Then onto the muddy road that was mashed up in the rainy season by a WW1 tank type vehicle, and it was positively alarming. And still no sign of the others. Needing to dismount at one point to get over a particularly large crevice, my legs were stuff and I plonked the inside of my right leg on the exhaust, which hurt. When we finally arrived at the river, evil-knievel rubbed some toothpaste on it which was thoughtful if not quite the recommended treatment.
We walked the plank over the mud into our boat, which was decked out in nice cushioned chairs, and travelled down the river past fishermen, houses on 30ft stilts, crocodiles in bamboo cages, kids running up and down ladders in and out of the houses and all sorts of curiosities. It was like being on another planet. At the end of the trip we walked through the village and chatted to the kids about the usual stuff – the capital of England being London – that sort of thing.
Cambodians generally have to be the smiliest people on earth. Sometimes if you look at someone in the street they can seem quite stern, but smile and they smile back straightaway, as though they are unbelievably happy to have bumped into you. Gives you faith in the human race! For people who have absolutely bugger all, and who as a country have been through so much, to give us gawping tourists with our silly clothes and big cameras so much warmth, is quite amazing and moving.
I can see why Angelina adopted one of the kids – they’re so lovely. In the end the only child I brought back was my own food baby, still lodged in my stomach and likely to stay there for a few weeks.
Singapore seems a bit plasticky and functional after Cambodia, but we got through the airport in 6 minutes, so there are some consolations. And there are still processions and people eating pig-face, so we haven’t altogether missed out.
Jo 23 February 2007
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I am in La Paz in Bolivia for my last afternoon before flying back to sunny England and this really made me laugh. Cambodia sounds really interesting. Looking forward to catching up with you both soon. X
Yvette Skelly # Feb 25