My joyful journey on the scam bus from Bangkok to Cambodian capital Phnom Penh brought me to the town of Siem Reip; the main jump off point for the two million annual visitors who come to marvel at the nearby UNESCO World Heritage Site of Angkor. The ruined complex was the centre of a Khmer empire that had its hay day from the 9th 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 mind-boggling. It had an urban sprawl of 400 square miles and contained over one thousand temples built around its implausibly big centre piece of Angkor Wat; the world’s largest religious monument. The city was bigger than the urban area taken up by Dublin city, Dun Laoghaire Rathdown, and Dublin South county combined (for those of you in Ireland). It was also four times larger than the second best of its generation; the Mayan city of Tikal in Guatemala. The ruins were essentially re-discovered by the outside world when a team of French archaeologists came across them, choked in creeping vegetation, in the late 19th century.
Personally, I’m not one for temples. 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 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. The country is weak and more-or-less at the mercy of the often nefarious attentions of outsiders. The ruins however, stand as an inarguable demonstration of the fact 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.
A lot of the predominantly American foreigners staying in my gangster-run guesthouse, many of whom were planning on spending a full week exploring the ruins, enthusiastically told me about how spectacular a sunrise at Angkor Wat was. I foolishly allowed myself to be carried along with this notion and informed one of the guesthouse guides, a teenage lady killer called Jay who had taken me to a war museum earlier that day, that I wanted to get up at 5am to get started on a day looking at the ruins 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 said there would be no breath-taking sunrise visible on that particular morning. I said “8am?”, Jay nodded with tired relief and we both trudged back to bed.
After a couple more hours in the scratcher we spent 20 minutes rushing down the dirt tracks Cambodians lovingly refer to as roads on a motorbike that didn’t come with helmets. 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 after all who had built the damn thing. The uproar such a notion would bring about in Ireland however, 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.
After paying we had another 10 minutes on the bike through a forest before it opened up onto what was, literally, the most stunning sight I’ve come across since stumbling past an all-girl international beach volleyball match between Brazil and Argentina while on holiday in Cuba.
