The wars fought putatively about contending ideologies seem so remote now, as I finally arrived in this country of friendly, gentle people, which was so ravaged starting 39 years ago in 1975 and continuing through the Vietnamese invasion that overthrew the Khmer Rouge regime in 1977. Over half a million people were killed, and around a million driven from their homes in Phnom Penh into the countryside. It was the most radical attempt at social transformation any Communist government ever tried, including Mao's Great Leap Forward. The Khmer Rouge and their leader Pol Pot abolished money, markets and private property. They closed schools, universites and monastaries. They shut down the postal system, abolished publishing, and put rigid controls on freedom of movement and exchanges of information. They also tried to curtail personal adornment and leisure activities. This pervasive national trauma is remembered in Siem Reap, home of the Angkor Wat and a major center of international tourism, with a monument to the "killing fields" on the grounds of a prominent Buddhist monastary. It's not large, but it's chilling. Towards the rear of a courtyard flanked by stupas and memorials to honored monks, there stands, 12-feet high, a glass-walled container of bones, with skulls piled up on one side.
Nearby are two storyboards of photographs of the Khmer Rouge--working in fields, practicing their shooting, eating together, including several images with Pol Pot.
The gentle Cambodians speak freely of this time, and they'll tell you if they lost relatives. The young guides that just start telling you history in the Angkor Wat complex, or, as in my case, took it upon himself to show me a better vantage point to photograph the sunrise over the Angkor Wat towers, will have lost a grandfather to the genocide.
There's also a War Museum, tucked away about a kilometer off the main highway to the airport, where rows of tanks, armored personal carriers, and howitzers remind us of the organized violence that ravaged this country, first in the Khmer Rouge takeover and then during the Vietnamese invasion that ended the Khmer Rouge regime. Manufactured in the USSR and some in China, these damaged, rusting hulks have become surreal sculptures, monuments not just to the folly of killing, but also to the fear, anguish, and suffering of those forced to operate these vehicles and who doubtless died in them when they sustained the damage that we see today.
Interior of armored personnel carrier, above.
Rocket launcher.
Ditch made by a land mine.
I remember that during this painful bloodletting it was said that the Khmer Rouge respected the Angkor Wat complex and left it alone. Actually, from what I saw today, there was a great deal of uncontrolled looting from 1975 until 1985, leaving galleries that had housed rows of life-size sculptures, empty except for three or four fragments of them. I found much less sculpture and carving than I had been led to believe was there, based on the photo books of the site by Kenro Izu and Marc Riboud. There is, of course, a considerable amount of carving in both low and high relief. But there are entire temples without any, and walls and walls of major temples empty of it. So I leave Angkor with a very different perspective than my expectations had prepared me for.
This said, the scale of Angkor, one of Richard Halliburton's main Marvels, is astonishing, the number of temples impressive, and after three exhausting days visiting a total of eight temples, three of them stood out as worth the entire experience, and the one actually called Angkor Wat, whose towers appear on the Cambodian flag, was not one of them.
To start with the most impressive...but first a note on logistics.
I arrived at the Siem Reap airport by myself on Monday afternoon.
After passing through immigration and buying my visa for $20, I was presented with the choice of a taxi to my hotel for $7, or a motor scooter for $2. Since I was by myself with little luggage, I took the motor scooter, driven by a lovely young man named Dara. He explained that he had to give back the $2 to the airport, and that he only made money by being hired out afterwards. I was only too happy to engage him, since there was no way of seeing the Angkor complex without some transportation. The temples are miles from the ticket sales center, and miles from each other. He would ferry me around for $15 a day, a very reasonable amount.
So after registering at the V & A Hotel, run by an Australian named Andy Davison and his Cambodian wife Vallet and a staff of young Cambodians, we drove off to the first temple on the itinerary recommended in the guidebook, Ta Prohm. On the way we passed people selling gasoline out of 55-gallon drums with a glass measuring container on top, leading to a hose, from which the gas was dispensed through a funnel into the tank of the motor scooter. Dara told me a scooter could go 40 km. on a liter of gas. There were a lot of these impromptu gas stations along the way.
We stopped at the ticket sales complex, and I bought my 3-day ticket for $40. They were very strict about checking them numerous times along the route. The temples of the Angkor complex were built between the 9th and early 13th Centuriesa dedicated to the Hindu gods. They were later rededicated to Buddhism. The best known of the builder kings was Jayavarman VII, who commissioned the Bayon and Ta Prohm in the late 12th and early 13th Centuries. The main hospital in Siem Reap is named after him. The Angkor Wat itself was built by his predecessor King Suryavarman II in the early 12th Century.
After about 20 minutes of driving we arrived at the parking area for Ta Prohm. Then I had to walk about another quarter mile before the ruin actually began.
Extravagant, gigantesque, out of proportion, mind-boggling--these are the adjectives that come to mind when describing the banyan trees of Ta Prohm, the one temple complex at Angkor that was left in its "natural" state. From the brilliant photo books mentioned above I had gotten the impression that this was the mode everywhere, but it's not. Most of the huge Angkor complex--including the Angkor Thom city that contains the central Bayon temple, the Baphuon, the Phimeanakas and the Terrace of the Leper King, and Angkor Wat itself--contain no integrated trees as you find a Ta Prohm. Only Preah Khan, northeast of Angkor Thom, has some banyan trees integrated with the ruins, but far fewer and less dramatic than those at Ta Prohm.
Since I visited Ta Prohm first my expectations were high for the rest. The giant roots, often a foot or more in diameter, snake along the ruin for 20 feet, and then abruptly descend for another six to 10 feet before stopping on the ground. Or they spread out like a frozen waterfall over the stone surface, then scatter in different directions. Or they send out prodigious fins, vertically and horizontally ondulating, partitioning the ground around the trunk. And in all cases a trunk rises from the ruins to tower another 60 feet in the air. The ruins serve aesthetically to frame the hypertrophied trees, which would be noteworthy enough growing on their own, as they frequently do at Angkor.
But at Ta Prohm they collect crowds of astonished onlookers, who photograph themselves and each other, predictably holding up peace signs, or in some exceptional cases launching into dance poses. One woman from a Chinese group did that, and I was as delighted as her friends were. I also met a couple from Brazil in which the woman was dressed as a fashion model. She let me pose her in a doorway, and I photographed her with their camera. She subsequently friended me on Facebook, and I met them again at the airport as I was leaving Siem Reap.
The following morning Dara was back at 8 am, as agreed, only this time he was driving a tuk-tuk, a covered carriage open on the sides, attached to a motor scooter, and which barely goes above 35 km/hour. We headed straight for the popular favorite temple, the Bayon, with its ubiquitous huge faces and multiple terraces. When we got there around 9 am, it was already taken over by tour groups. The challenge, of course, is to photograph the architecture and sculpture with as few tourists as possible. This involves some patience and tolerance for frustrations, as you frame a shot, only to have some cell-phone camera toting guy in a chartreuse day-glo vest waltz into it. But it can be done. And the tourists themselves provide amusing subject matter when captured in provocative configurations.
Some women were dressed in period garb and invited people to pose with them.
A young woman, Anne, from Danemark, who was photographing with a Pentax film camera and a single 50mm lens--just like Cartier-Bresson in the 30s.
There were elaborate bas-relief carvings.
There was also a wall of carved stones that had not been able to be fitted--or puzzled--together.
One other temple, Preah Khan, had a few trees like Ta Prohm, and that was interesting. The others were certainly impressive structures, with multiple levels, steep stairways, and commanding views, but they do not reward the visitor the way Ta Prohm does. Yes, there were interesting carvings at the Terrace of the Leper King and fascinatig bas-reliefs at Angor Wat itself. But I found myself straining to complete a photographic account of these places, not really inspired by what I was seeing after Ta Prohm. There were some amazing trees near these temples, however.
Carvings on the Terrace of the Leper King.
Climbing the Baphuon.
Some exceptional trees in the Angkor Thom area.
Among the many souvenir vendors and outdoor restaurants colonizing the area immediately to the east of the Angkor Thom area was a stand featuring heavily romanticized paintings of the temples. I had passed a number of these art stands on the road to the complex, and I was curious to see them up close. Of course, they turned the temples into pure kitsch, liked painted movie posters of the 30s.
I actually preferred the refrigerator magnets, which were truer to the originals.
Barbara arrived on the morning of my second day and saw as much as she needed to see of Angkor that day. That evening we decided to explore the downtown and found, to our amazement, a scene nearly as lively and as boozy as Bourbon Street in New Orleans--without the music and strip joints. It was on Pub Street, and there was the Angkor What?, a bar that claimed to be "dedicated to irresponsible drinking since 1998." Its decor was in grafitti overlay, and they offered a free t-shirt if you ordered two "buckets" of booze at the same time. Barbara couldn't pass this up, so she ordered a Cuba libre and a gin and tonic. Both came in large bowls containing about 5 drinks each, with five straws. I tasted them; they were pretty strong.
She managed to drink about a third of them, while I had my club soda and we waited for an open-air table to open up across the street where we had seen some exceptional barbecue. When a table became free I went over to hold it down, while she worked on her drinks. She couldn't take them with her, so she left them, but she did get the t-shirt and a pleasant buzz. She ordered two king prawns the size of small lobsters, and I had the beef barbecue, which was delicious. We hired a tuk-tuk back to the hotel for $3 and gave him five.
The following day, our last in Siem Reap, was my sunrise day. Dara came at 4:50 am, and we were off to the Angkor Wat complex itself, with its iconic towers, arriving well before sunrise at about 5:30. Crowds were already pouring in at that hour. It had rained over night, and the puddles offered great reflections. I set up my tripod to get them on the approach causeway over the moat, and as I approached the gateway, a young man came up to me and offered to show me the best places to photograph the sunrise--inside the gate. He became my willy-nilly guide to the Angkor Wat complex, and I appreciated his guidance in showing me where the best sunrise photos could be taken, and pointing out the carvings inside.
We were flying out at 6:20 pm, and we checked out of our hotel at 11:45. I proposed going downtown--I wanted to try the fish-foot nibble, which I had seen the previous night when we went out to eat. You put your feet into a large fish tank, and a school of a hundred or more tropical fish nibble off your dead skin. Barbara said she had gotten rid of a skin cancer on her foot that way. So we had our driver take us down there; I put my bare feet into a tank, and the tickling was too much.
So I put it into the tank with the smaller fish. This one was OK. A pair of young women from California came by and did the same, and when I asked them what their favorite temple was, expecting Ta Prohm, they said Banteay Srei. I hadn't heard of it, but it looked quite interesting, and we had the time to go there--37 km away, and an hour each way and an hour there. So off we went in Dara's Tuk-tuk.
Though Banteay Srei means "citadel of the women," this name was added later, probably in response to the large number of carved female figures. It was actually a temple devoted to the Hindu god Shiva, built in the 10th Century, and from which Andre Malraux famously stole some carvings in 1923, was arrested and forced to return them. There is no tower, so no steps to climb. It is small, consisting of a number of buildings of sandstone which had acquired different colors over the centuries. But the carvings! They are intricate and exquisite. No wonder it was the favorite of the women we met downtown. The carvings filled the surfaces of these modest buildings with a number of Hindu motifs, and, like the other temples, they did repeat throughout. Unfortunately, the central area of the buildings was roped off as of 2003, I was told, since tourists could not be prevented from touching the carvings, which added oil to the sandstone, damaging it. But with my telephoto lens I easily focused in on surfaces I couldn't see very well.
On our way back we passed another outlying temple and stopped to visit it. This was Pre Rup, and it had extremely steep stone steps. The Baphuon in Angkor Thom has similar steps, but a wooden stairway with much more gentle steps was installed over it. Here in this remote temple no such effort was made, but I made it up the 40 of them to the terrace, where some very damaged carvings of standing figures flanking a number of doorways, were visible and in very different states of repair.
Looking down very steep stairway at Pre Rup.
I finished my visit in 15 minutes and was back in the tuk-tuk. It was 4 pm, and we would get back to the hotel by 4:30, in time for a very brief visit to the War Museum on the way to the airport.
I described the War Museum above. Our prop plane took off at 6:25 and we were back at our hotel in Ho Chi Minh City by 8:30.
Nearby are two storyboards of photographs of the Khmer Rouge--working in fields, practicing their shooting, eating together, including several images with Pol Pot.
The gentle Cambodians speak freely of this time, and they'll tell you if they lost relatives. The young guides that just start telling you history in the Angkor Wat complex, or, as in my case, took it upon himself to show me a better vantage point to photograph the sunrise over the Angkor Wat towers, will have lost a grandfather to the genocide.
There's also a War Museum, tucked away about a kilometer off the main highway to the airport, where rows of tanks, armored personal carriers, and howitzers remind us of the organized violence that ravaged this country, first in the Khmer Rouge takeover and then during the Vietnamese invasion that ended the Khmer Rouge regime. Manufactured in the USSR and some in China, these damaged, rusting hulks have become surreal sculptures, monuments not just to the folly of killing, but also to the fear, anguish, and suffering of those forced to operate these vehicles and who doubtless died in them when they sustained the damage that we see today.
Rocket launcher.
Ditch made by a land mine.
I remember that during this painful bloodletting it was said that the Khmer Rouge respected the Angkor Wat complex and left it alone. Actually, from what I saw today, there was a great deal of uncontrolled looting from 1975 until 1985, leaving galleries that had housed rows of life-size sculptures, empty except for three or four fragments of them. I found much less sculpture and carving than I had been led to believe was there, based on the photo books of the site by Kenro Izu and Marc Riboud. There is, of course, a considerable amount of carving in both low and high relief. But there are entire temples without any, and walls and walls of major temples empty of it. So I leave Angkor with a very different perspective than my expectations had prepared me for.
This said, the scale of Angkor, one of Richard Halliburton's main Marvels, is astonishing, the number of temples impressive, and after three exhausting days visiting a total of eight temples, three of them stood out as worth the entire experience, and the one actually called Angkor Wat, whose towers appear on the Cambodian flag, was not one of them.
To start with the most impressive...but first a note on logistics.
I arrived at the Siem Reap airport by myself on Monday afternoon.
After passing through immigration and buying my visa for $20, I was presented with the choice of a taxi to my hotel for $7, or a motor scooter for $2. Since I was by myself with little luggage, I took the motor scooter, driven by a lovely young man named Dara. He explained that he had to give back the $2 to the airport, and that he only made money by being hired out afterwards. I was only too happy to engage him, since there was no way of seeing the Angkor complex without some transportation. The temples are miles from the ticket sales center, and miles from each other. He would ferry me around for $15 a day, a very reasonable amount.
So after registering at the V & A Hotel, run by an Australian named Andy Davison and his Cambodian wife Vallet and a staff of young Cambodians, we drove off to the first temple on the itinerary recommended in the guidebook, Ta Prohm. On the way we passed people selling gasoline out of 55-gallon drums with a glass measuring container on top, leading to a hose, from which the gas was dispensed through a funnel into the tank of the motor scooter. Dara told me a scooter could go 40 km. on a liter of gas. There were a lot of these impromptu gas stations along the way.
We stopped at the ticket sales complex, and I bought my 3-day ticket for $40. They were very strict about checking them numerous times along the route. The temples of the Angkor complex were built between the 9th and early 13th Centuriesa dedicated to the Hindu gods. They were later rededicated to Buddhism. The best known of the builder kings was Jayavarman VII, who commissioned the Bayon and Ta Prohm in the late 12th and early 13th Centuries. The main hospital in Siem Reap is named after him. The Angkor Wat itself was built by his predecessor King Suryavarman II in the early 12th Century.
After about 20 minutes of driving we arrived at the parking area for Ta Prohm. Then I had to walk about another quarter mile before the ruin actually began.
Extravagant, gigantesque, out of proportion, mind-boggling--these are the adjectives that come to mind when describing the banyan trees of Ta Prohm, the one temple complex at Angkor that was left in its "natural" state. From the brilliant photo books mentioned above I had gotten the impression that this was the mode everywhere, but it's not. Most of the huge Angkor complex--including the Angkor Thom city that contains the central Bayon temple, the Baphuon, the Phimeanakas and the Terrace of the Leper King, and Angkor Wat itself--contain no integrated trees as you find a Ta Prohm. Only Preah Khan, northeast of Angkor Thom, has some banyan trees integrated with the ruins, but far fewer and less dramatic than those at Ta Prohm.
Since I visited Ta Prohm first my expectations were high for the rest. The giant roots, often a foot or more in diameter, snake along the ruin for 20 feet, and then abruptly descend for another six to 10 feet before stopping on the ground. Or they spread out like a frozen waterfall over the stone surface, then scatter in different directions. Or they send out prodigious fins, vertically and horizontally ondulating, partitioning the ground around the trunk. And in all cases a trunk rises from the ruins to tower another 60 feet in the air. The ruins serve aesthetically to frame the hypertrophied trees, which would be noteworthy enough growing on their own, as they frequently do at Angkor.
But at Ta Prohm they collect crowds of astonished onlookers, who photograph themselves and each other, predictably holding up peace signs, or in some exceptional cases launching into dance poses. One woman from a Chinese group did that, and I was as delighted as her friends were. I also met a couple from Brazil in which the woman was dressed as a fashion model. She let me pose her in a doorway, and I photographed her with their camera. She subsequently friended me on Facebook, and I met them again at the airport as I was leaving Siem Reap.
The following morning Dara was back at 8 am, as agreed, only this time he was driving a tuk-tuk, a covered carriage open on the sides, attached to a motor scooter, and which barely goes above 35 km/hour. We headed straight for the popular favorite temple, the Bayon, with its ubiquitous huge faces and multiple terraces. When we got there around 9 am, it was already taken over by tour groups. The challenge, of course, is to photograph the architecture and sculpture with as few tourists as possible. This involves some patience and tolerance for frustrations, as you frame a shot, only to have some cell-phone camera toting guy in a chartreuse day-glo vest waltz into it. But it can be done. And the tourists themselves provide amusing subject matter when captured in provocative configurations.
Some women were dressed in period garb and invited people to pose with them.
A young woman, Anne, from Danemark, who was photographing with a Pentax film camera and a single 50mm lens--just like Cartier-Bresson in the 30s.
There were elaborate bas-relief carvings.
There was also a wall of carved stones that had not been able to be fitted--or puzzled--together.
One other temple, Preah Khan, had a few trees like Ta Prohm, and that was interesting. The others were certainly impressive structures, with multiple levels, steep stairways, and commanding views, but they do not reward the visitor the way Ta Prohm does. Yes, there were interesting carvings at the Terrace of the Leper King and fascinatig bas-reliefs at Angor Wat itself. But I found myself straining to complete a photographic account of these places, not really inspired by what I was seeing after Ta Prohm. There were some amazing trees near these temples, however.
Carvings on the Terrace of the Leper King.
Climbing the Baphuon.
I actually preferred the refrigerator magnets, which were truer to the originals.
Barbara arrived on the morning of my second day and saw as much as she needed to see of Angkor that day. That evening we decided to explore the downtown and found, to our amazement, a scene nearly as lively and as boozy as Bourbon Street in New Orleans--without the music and strip joints. It was on Pub Street, and there was the Angkor What?, a bar that claimed to be "dedicated to irresponsible drinking since 1998." Its decor was in grafitti overlay, and they offered a free t-shirt if you ordered two "buckets" of booze at the same time. Barbara couldn't pass this up, so she ordered a Cuba libre and a gin and tonic. Both came in large bowls containing about 5 drinks each, with five straws. I tasted them; they were pretty strong.
She managed to drink about a third of them, while I had my club soda and we waited for an open-air table to open up across the street where we had seen some exceptional barbecue. When a table became free I went over to hold it down, while she worked on her drinks. She couldn't take them with her, so she left them, but she did get the t-shirt and a pleasant buzz. She ordered two king prawns the size of small lobsters, and I had the beef barbecue, which was delicious. We hired a tuk-tuk back to the hotel for $3 and gave him five.
The following day, our last in Siem Reap, was my sunrise day. Dara came at 4:50 am, and we were off to the Angkor Wat complex itself, with its iconic towers, arriving well before sunrise at about 5:30. Crowds were already pouring in at that hour. It had rained over night, and the puddles offered great reflections. I set up my tripod to get them on the approach causeway over the moat, and as I approached the gateway, a young man came up to me and offered to show me the best places to photograph the sunrise--inside the gate. He became my willy-nilly guide to the Angkor Wat complex, and I appreciated his guidance in showing me where the best sunrise photos could be taken, and pointing out the carvings inside.
We were flying out at 6:20 pm, and we checked out of our hotel at 11:45. I proposed going downtown--I wanted to try the fish-foot nibble, which I had seen the previous night when we went out to eat. You put your feet into a large fish tank, and a school of a hundred or more tropical fish nibble off your dead skin. Barbara said she had gotten rid of a skin cancer on her foot that way. So we had our driver take us down there; I put my bare feet into a tank, and the tickling was too much.
So I put it into the tank with the smaller fish. This one was OK. A pair of young women from California came by and did the same, and when I asked them what their favorite temple was, expecting Ta Prohm, they said Banteay Srei. I hadn't heard of it, but it looked quite interesting, and we had the time to go there--37 km away, and an hour each way and an hour there. So off we went in Dara's Tuk-tuk.
Though Banteay Srei means "citadel of the women," this name was added later, probably in response to the large number of carved female figures. It was actually a temple devoted to the Hindu god Shiva, built in the 10th Century, and from which Andre Malraux famously stole some carvings in 1923, was arrested and forced to return them. There is no tower, so no steps to climb. It is small, consisting of a number of buildings of sandstone which had acquired different colors over the centuries. But the carvings! They are intricate and exquisite. No wonder it was the favorite of the women we met downtown. The carvings filled the surfaces of these modest buildings with a number of Hindu motifs, and, like the other temples, they did repeat throughout. Unfortunately, the central area of the buildings was roped off as of 2003, I was told, since tourists could not be prevented from touching the carvings, which added oil to the sandstone, damaging it. But with my telephoto lens I easily focused in on surfaces I couldn't see very well.
On our way back we passed another outlying temple and stopped to visit it. This was Pre Rup, and it had extremely steep stone steps. The Baphuon in Angkor Thom has similar steps, but a wooden stairway with much more gentle steps was installed over it. Here in this remote temple no such effort was made, but I made it up the 40 of them to the terrace, where some very damaged carvings of standing figures flanking a number of doorways, were visible and in very different states of repair.
Looking down very steep stairway at Pre Rup.
I finished my visit in 15 minutes and was back in the tuk-tuk. It was 4 pm, and we would get back to the hotel by 4:30, in time for a very brief visit to the War Museum on the way to the airport.
I described the War Museum above. Our prop plane took off at 6:25 and we were back at our hotel in Ho Chi Minh City by 8:30.
