Although not usually one for temples and the like, I spent a full day happily wandering around the vast ruins of Angkor in north-western Cambodia, oohhing and aahhing with the rest of the international contingent and snapping away with my camera like I knew what I was doing. The first main attraction was the ornate, five-towered main temple of Angkor Wat, which was ringed by a vast, green moat traversable by a stone walk way that cut straight through an outer wall and right up to the five towers at its centre. The visual impact provided by the immense structure and its reflection that bounced off the lake-like ring of water around it was considerable on approach, but even more so up close. Practically every stone in the whole almost endless building had been lovingly hand carved by ludicrously talented long-dead masons. Lavish depictions of the Hindu God Vishnu churning the sea of milk leapt from the walls and ceilings and ancient battles played themselves out on either side of 200 metre long walk ways.
I left the main Angkor Wat wondering if it could beat and the Bayon temple, a short bumpy motorbike ride away, did just that. The Bayon looked modest in comparison to Angkor Wat at first but as I made my way towards its pyramid-like centre, I started to notice huge, car-sized faces smiling at me from the stone. It was like a magic eye picture – at first there’s nothing discernible until you look closely and incredible images start leaping out at you. 15th Century European style stone carving was all goblins, gargoyles, sour-faced saints and dying Jesuses but the big, life-like faces at Bayon grin back at the people gazing up at them.
The Ta Prohm temple was my final stop off at the ruined complex and again, it proved to be quite something. It was yet to be restored and the creeping jungle was well on the way to enveloping it completely. Metre thick vines crept around its columns and through its hallways creating a man Vs nature type display so implausibly spectacular that it appeared to belong on a movie set rather than in the real world. This was a view shared by the makers of the famed Tomb Raider film, which stared a gun-toting Angelina Jolie, and much of the movie was shot within Bayon’s walls.
The complex itself was well worth a look, but the most interesting thing about a wander around the Angkor ruins was the way ingenious if impoverished Khmer people use the temples to make a living. While much of the entry fee is sucked into a black hole of corruption and Vietnamese-owned companies, there are still dollars to be made by those with the capacity to charm money out of western pockets. When you arrive at the ruins you are met with bands of Khmer kids selling snacks, water, postcards and hand-made braclets – and they have it down to a fine art. Although often met with rude and dismissive foreigners who can sometimes forget they are dealing with hungry children and that they are guests in someone else’s country, the children ignore the brush-offs, keep smiling and skip onto the next potential customer.
One particularly persuasive young guy, whose cheerfully optimistic outlook shone through both his dire economic circumstances and a nasty facial birth defect he had been lumbered with, convinced me to choose his mother’s eatery out of a string of basic outdoor café’s which ran along one side of Angkor Wat’s moat. While he scurried off to get me a menu, a girl of about six wandered up to my table carrying a box of bracelets made out of woven bamboo strips. Given her age and the fact that her sales pitch initially consisted of smiling at me and waiting for a response, I came to the hasty conclusion that she probably didn’t speak any English. I shook my head in the negative, on account of the fact that I was OK for bamboo bracelets, but she wasn’t deterred.
“Where you from?” she eventually asked.
“I’m from Ireland,” I answered, feeling sure she wouldn’t have heard of it.
“Ah! Conas atá tú?” she chirped, smiling ever more broadly.
I glanced around, expecting to see Jeremy Beetle hiding behind a palm tree, before looking back to the kid. “Tá me go maith. Agus tú féin?”
I sat there stunned as the exchange continued through the full range basic conversational questions and answers as Gaeilge (I’m fine, what is your name etc) and finished with her counting from one to ten in my obscure native tongue. I was astounded; this metre-tall, barefoot Khmer kid had better Irish than a fair chunk of the Irish populace. She informed me that she and her other hawkers learned off a few basic questions and answers, as well as how to count, in as many languages as they could knowing it would impress the tourists into making a purchase. Feeling sure that this particular tale, i.e. the one about the time I came across an impoverished Cambodian child beggar who could speak Irish, meant I was obliged to whip out my video camera and get her to repeat the feat on film. She was happy to oblige and so, I walked away with video evidence to back up my new anecdote and a fetching bamboo bracelet.
