Source: The Stuff
Last updated 14/09/201
Jo McCarroll
OVERGROWN: An ancient tree grows through an even more ancient building in Angkor Thom, which gained modern fame as a location in the Tomb Raider movie
Jo McCarroll
FUTURE HOPE: Despite a tragic modern history, Cambodia's people remain upliftingly positive and friendly; these children are on a roadside in Angkor Ban
Reuters
Cambodia's famous Angkor Wat temple is seen at sunrise.
Asia
The ruins of Angkor Wat were famously discovered by the French explorer, Henri Mouhot, in the mid-19th century. The word "discovered" is used rather loosely here, of course - at the time the lost naturalist stumbled upon the ruins, Khmer people were happily living among them - but Mouhot's descriptions of the vast size, soaring towers and elaborate carvings certainly put Cambodia on the gentleman explorer's to-do list and Angkor Wat remains firmly on the bucket list of modern-day adventurers.
I visited the ruins in the final days of an expedition of my own; a 550 kilometre, 11-day trip along the Mekong Delta, from southern Vietnam to Cambodia's Siam Reap, travelling on a riverboat, the Cruiseco Adventurer.
Cruising is a surprisingly effective way to see life on the Mekong Delta. Much of life in the riverside communities takes place on the river itself - the Mekong provides food, drinking water, irrigation, entertainment and a key transport route for the local people.
So from the moment we board the Adventurer in My Tho, a port town just out of Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon), there are other boats around us, tiny fishing sampans, larger trading boats which whole families live in (often with a television dish attached to the roof) and flat dredges loaded with river sand.
We get off the boat a lot, too, every day decanting onto smaller long boats for at least one "excursion" (cruise ship speak for an off-the-boat activity). Cruiseco prides itself on the calibre of its excursions; the company's owner, Steve Lloyd, who joins us for the first half of our trip, still sources a lot of them himself and looks for ways to connect tourists with genuine family businesses and real cottage industries.
In Vietnam we visit a factory where eight members of one family make candy from coconut milk - we eat a piece that's still warm (it's quite nice, like a coconut-flavoured soft toffee). They turn out 8000 pieces a day, each one wrapped by hand.
We see the woman who makes rice paper at work, effortlessly creating one translucent sheet after another. One of my fellow passengers is prevailed upon to try to make paper. She is rubbish. The rice-paper maker laughs and says something to our Vietnamese guide, Thinh. She is 46, he translates, and has been doing this job for 35 years.
At the same place we are given a shot of snake wine - yes, that is simply wine in which a cobra has been macerating. Snake wine (and what I extrapolate must be scorpion wine, lizard wine and baby crocodile wine) is available for sale. "Snake wine is very good for you," says Thinh, translating for the winemaker. "It makes you like a cobra in the night." Then the family patriarch grins at us toothlessly and makes an upward gesture with his forearm which needs no translation at all.
In Sa Dec that afternoon we walk through the food market beside the river, where locals buy fresh fruit, veges, fish and meat. There are eels, still alive in shallow bowls, and snakehead and elephant ear fish, both famous Mekong delicacies.
There are frogs, some of which are still alive, some of which have already been skinned, and some of which, I realise rather squeamishly, are both alive and skinned at the same time. There are the carcasses of Mekong kangaroo, aka the delta rats. "We do not eat the city rat, for it is very dirty," Thinh says. "But the delta rat, it is very clean."
We visit the town of Cai Be where floating markets have been held since the 19th century. Cai Be translates as floating timber and is a reference to the wooden trading boats. Wholesalers moor up and flog fruit and vegetables to smaller traders in their more manoeuverable wooden sampans with painted eyes on the front to scare away attacking sea monsters.
The markets take place in the shadow of a vast cathedral built by French settlers in the 1930s. French rule ended in both Cambodia and Vietnam in 1954, but their influence can still be seen everywhere, from the tall narrow colonial-style buildings and riverside promenades to the excellent baguettes for sale at roadside stalls, alongside fried crickets and tarantulas. And in the Catholic religion which is still evident in the south of Vietnam.
"Along here is still very Catholic," Thinh says with a shrug. "We mainly earn our living by farming. And if you are a farmer it pays to have a very strong belief in God."
Eventually the Adventurer crosses the border into Cambodia. In the centre of the country's capital, Phnom Penh, we moor up for the night. Tourism is a rapidly growing industry in the self-styled Kingdom of Wonder: Last year Cambodia had 4 million foreign visitors, up from around a million 10 years ago, and they expect to welcome more than 8 million a year by 2020.
And the visitors are already changing the destination. Just a few years ago, our new guide - a Cambodian called Sokun - tells me, there were three bars beside the river. Now there are dozens, most of which have a sign in the window advertising for English-speaking staff.
We visit one of the most venerable of them, the Foreign Correspondents Club, opened by a British lawyer 20-odd years ago immediately after a tentative ceasefire was declared, which bought an end to years of bloody fighting in Cambodia. The lawyer, Steve Hayward, is said to have run into a couple of soldiers in the United Nations advance party, who told him that in just a few months there would be 20,000 UN peacekeepers arriving in Phnom Penh, each one with a per diem of US$100.
Realising this was something of a business opportunity, he founded the Foreign Correspondents Club or FCC, so named because it was a base for diplomats, expats and (of course) the many reporters covering Pol Pot's final stand.
Phnom Penh is where the Cambodian king, Norodom Sihamoni, lives in an elaborate complex of buildings known (unsurprisingly) as the Royal Palace. About half of the area, the bit in which Sihamoni actually resides, is off limits, but you can visit the Temple of the Emerald Buddha, commonly referred to as the Silver Pagoda because of the 5329 pure silver tiles that make up its floor, and wander through the stables where the queen's elephant used to be housed (the royals stopped using elephants a while ago, Sokun tells me, they decided a limousine was an easier way to get around).
Throngs of international visitors are taking selfies in front of the 304-metre mural that decorates the temple compound's walls, painted in 1903, which tells the life story of King Rama, whose wife, Sita, is abducted by the demon king, Ravana, at which point Rama joins forces with an army of monkey soldiers to win her back (that Pixar movie practically writes itself).
The murals are damaged at the top, Sokun tells us, because the roof collapsed during the Cambodian civil war, the three years, eight months and 20 days between 1975 and 1979 that the country was under the rule of Pol Pot and his army of boy soldiers. For much of that time, Cambodia's previous king, His Majesty Norodom Sihanouk, lived under house arrest in this very palace.
It is that dictator's bloody legacy that accounts for the other major, albeit sombre, tourist attractions in this city. Just 16km southwest of Phnom Penh are the so-called Killing Fields, one of 388 sites which the Khmer Rogue used for mass slaughter, where an estimated 20,000 men, women and children were executed and buried in 129 mass graves.
The Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, housed in what used to be the prison known as S21 and before that was a high school, is right in the centre of town. More than 17,000 prisoners passed through S21 over the course of the civil war and the history books record that only seven adults survived (one of whom, Chum Mey, now 84, is selling his autobiography at the gate when we visit).
This is recent history and so many of the Cambodians we meet tell us their own stories from that time. In Siam Reap, our tour guide, Bunrith, was 4 years old when Pol Pot seized power. His father, a government soldier, was killed immediately. His sister died of starvation and his mother died some years later of what Bunrith describes simply as "excessive suffering".
Sokun, who was born during the period and grew up in one of the floating villages near Kampong Cham - "I was a fish boy," he tells me, "I used to swim to school"- lost all of his uncles and aunts. As a 14-year-old boy, he had his own AK-47 to defend his family from attack by Khmer Rogue soldiers.
That is not to say the Cambodians we meet are not positive; they are, extremely so. In fact, they are often upliftingly so.
We visit a school where we donate pens and exercise books (school in Cambodia is free but not compulsory and the cost of the school materials is prohibitive for many) and the pupils sing a rousing chorus of If You Are Happy And You Know It for us.
We stop at a monastery where we are blessed by monks, and two Buddhist nuns, aged 84 and 90, are hugely amused by how fat some of the cruise ship passengers are (they keep poking the more rotund members of our party in the tummy and then dissolving into laughter, while one of them grabs hold of my breasts and honks on them repeatedly).
We get a chance to wander around Angkor Ban Six, where the local farmers and fishermen sleep in houses on stilts but spend most of the daylight hours they are at home in the cool space underneath the house.
Because the river is high, we disembark the Adventurer in Kampong Cham and travel by bus to Siem Reap, the gateway to the Unesco World Heritage site of the Angkor Archaeological Park.
Stretching over 400 square kilometres, the area includes the ruins of many temples built between the ninth and 15th century, including the Bayon Temple, with its 216 carved faces of Buddha, every one different; and Angkor Thom, where the trees grow through the walls, built in the late 12th century by King Jayavarman VII and which owes most of its visitors to the fact that Angelina Jolie filmed several scenes of Lara Croft: Tomb Raider there.
And then there is that bucket-list worthy Angkor Wat, which we visit at sunset, where we are awed by its size and grandeur, like (I imagine) the 19th-century Mouhot must have been.
Now I do not claim that my journey parallels Mouhot's own travels in absolutely every particular. I am not sure if 19th-century Frenchmen went in for karaoke, for instance, which was a big part of several evenings on the Adventurer.
Mouhot wrote in his diaries that he was worried his little dog would be stepped on by an elephant or eaten by a wild tiger while he explored the tributaries of the Mekong River and I can honestly say these things did not concern me at all.
But like Mouhot, I have been amazed by some of the places I have seen and people I have met. Like him, I have been on an extraordinary adventure.
The writer travelled as a guest of Cruiseco.
FACT FILE
The Cruiseco Adventurer's 11-night itineraries start from either Ho Chi Minh City or Siem Reap. Tours includes two nights at the Hotel Caravelle in Ho Chi Minh City, seven nights on the riverboat the Cruiseco Adventurer, and two nights at Raffles Hotel D'Angkor in Siem Reap. The cruise runs between July and April but the optimal time to go in terms of the water and weather conditions is between September and November. New Zealand passengers can expect to pay $2925 (on a twin-share basis) for most departures through to March 2015. These prices do not include flights. But most meals are included as is beer, soft drinks and local spirits. Wine is available with lunch and dinner. The Cruiseco Adventurer has a capacity of 60 passengers in 30 staterooms. All cabins have polished timber floors, en-suite facilities, floor-to-ceiling French windows, a private balcony, and a private seating area with outdoor furniture. Additionally, the ship offers two suites and two deluxe suites; both of which have a separate living area and a sofa bed. More information cruising.com.au
- Sunday Star Times
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