Siem Reap -- Part II (Angkor Wat)

hey everyone, sorry for the lag in the posts.... ive been waiting for skeelow to sack up and write an entry or two, but i realize now what a pipedream that really is. so, from this point on, this is my travel blog; there are many like it, but this one is mine.

where did we leave off? the first night in siem reap, right?

so the next morning after our harrowing journey, we were none too pleased to be in the kingdom of cambodia. from what we could tell, the country was full of scam artists and prostitutes. the night before, there had been several tuk-tuk drivers clamoring for our american money. we didnt know this at the time, but the way it works in cambodia when you hire a driver is that he stays with you for the whole day, no matter what. of course, you can pay a guy a dollar to take you pretty much anywhere, and the drivers are very good at haggling, but in the end, a dollar per roundtrip journey is about the going rate for anything. if the dude waits for like 4 hours for you to shop or get a massage or whatever, you might toss him another buck or two.

(side note: i'm just now realizing that you guys may not know what a tuk-tuk is. a tuk-tuk is an open air carriage type thing that is towed behind a motorcycle. they come in basically two flavors: big tuk-tuks, which seat upwards of 6 people, and small tuk-tuks, which can handle about 4 people (uncomfortably). the ones in thailand and pretty posh: enclosed and clean, basically. the ones in cambodia and a bit more ghetto. each tuk-tuk driver buys his tuk-tuk and is responsible for gasoline and maintenance. we found out from our friend joe, the tuk-tuk driver in phnom penh, that you can buy a small tuk-tuk for about $400 and a big one for about $700. these prices include the moto as well. there is no better way to travel the streets than in your own personal tuk-tuk. you can tell the driver to go anywhere you want to go, and stop wherever you want. you can also ask him for more abstract things, like "take us to the best local spot around" or "roll us a spliff", and those requests are usually fulfilled, and then some. more on this when we get to phnom penh.)

so this dude named roza gave us a ride from the one guesthouse where the bus dropped us off to the one we eventually decided to stay at. he then wanted to know when we were going to wake up because he wanted to be the guy to take us to see the magnificent temples of angkor wat. we basically told him to beat it.

the next morning, after sleeping until about noon, who do we see having a beer with papa skee? none other than our friend roza parks. he had just come by and had somehow convinced papa skee that we had asked him to take us around for the day. by the time we got downstairs, we had no choice but to go with him. i mean, papa skee had already invested several beers into him, and we figured that he was as good a driver as any we would find off the street.

after a solid breakfast (the khmers do a damn good western breakfast, by the way), we headed off in roza's tuk-tuk to angkor wat.

a little about angkor wat: this place is the crown jewel of khmer culture. it is basically the only thing they have to hold onto and be proud of. it was built in the 9th, 10th, and 11th centuries under the rule of a stable buddhist regime that dominated the region in that time. successive kings added and altered the carvings and monuments throughout the site to their own whimsy. as a result, there are both buddhist and hindu symbols that exist together in the temple.

angkor wat is among the seven ancient wonders of the world and, along with the pyramids in egypt, are among the only ones that still exist today. in the late 1970's the temples fell into ruin when, after an unsuccessful campaign in vietnam, the united states pursued the viet cong into the neighboring regions of laos and cambodia, carpetbombed indiscriminately, and subsequently pulled out without a thought to the safety of the citizens. as a result, both countries remain on
the united nations' least developed country list and should be there for a long time, regardless of what happens.

what's sad about the whole thing is that when america pulled out of vietnam in 1975, they left a trail of ruin in that country and the neighboring states. this instability allowed warlords and faux maoists to run amok. this is how the khmer rouge rose to power. pol pot and his cronies, backed by the maoists in china, instituted a systematic "cleansing" of the khmer people similar to the cultural revolution that occured in china just a decade before. in china, intellectuals and high-ranking officials were rounded up by fervent young people, bitten by the bug of communism, and sent to labor camps where they were "reeducated" into becoming good comrades. the mission of all of this was to create a generation of citizens who resembled thoughtless peasants, proletariat that could not resist the will of the government.

mao failed in his attempt to reeducate the chinese people, but this did not stop him from backing a similar campaign in cambodia. what the khmer rouge did to control the masses was to lie to them: they told them that the americans were done with vietnam and were headed to cambodia. they told the citizens to flee the cities into the mountains. those who would not go were executed. by the time the cambodian people figured out that they had been lied to, it was too late. the government was already committing genocide. women, children and the elderly were not spared. the executions were the most brutal imaginable. to save bullets, oftentimes, they would bludgeon the victims to death. by the end of this horrific 4 year period, the khmer rouge was indiscriminately killing people who spoke a foreign language, wore glasses, could read and write, and anyone who opposed their actions. the citizens were rounded up into torture camps, similar to what the nazis did in Auschwitz and Dachau. they tortured everyone and then they executed them. most of the victims were buried in mass graves. in this time, symbols of khmer culture, angkor wat being the most famous, were desecrated and even destroyed.

the international community, including the US, the UN, and every other governing body stood by and watched the slaughter, doing nothing. it was the viet cong, our sworn enemies, that finally overthrew the khmer rouge and liberated the cambodian people. the great irony of angkor wat is that the vietnamese forced the cambodians to lease the property to them for 90 years in payment for their rescue. so now, when you go to angkor wat and pay your $20, that money goes directly to the vietnamese. this will be the case until 2070.

i know that was a lot to digest, but i thought that it would be important for you all to know this information as we delve further into cambodia. it is essential to understanding the psyche of the people in the country today. i have more history to drop on you, but i will save it for a more relevant topic -- probably the killing fields entry when we move onto phnom penh.

and now, angkor wat. really, if you guys dont know what the temples look like, please look them up. we really dont have the ability to post any photos because i lost my camera and skeelow is averse to taking pictures. as a result, this will be a wall of text. i will try to be as descriptive as possible.

when you get to angkor wat, you can tell that they really jazzed it up in recent years for international tourists. all around the entrance, there are adorable little kids who speak perfect english who try to sell you bracelets and books and all sorts of other shit you dont need. but these kids are pros; they have mastered the art of haggling. almost inevitably, you buy something from them.....unless you're skeelow. papa skee was really taken by these kids. their spirit was uplifting to us and even though they were probably orphans who lived in open-air huts, like most of the cambodian people, they were laughing and playing, just like normal american kids.

after clearing this minor obstacle, we were free to wander among the magnificent temples. as you walk in, there is a river with an ancient bridge over it that you have to cross to get to the main ruins. off in the distance, you see the main angkor wat temple. it looks just like it does in the pictures: four equal spires surrounding a much larger, central spire. if you look at the cambodian flag, you can see a cartoony version of the temple directly in the center, in white.

as you approach the larger temple, you begin to make out the intricate carvings that adorn the entire facade of the building. the whole temple is carved out of this soft sandstone and the carvings are of great skill and precision. it is almost unbelievable that these carvings and even the temples themselves have been standing as is for nearly a millennium.

most of the carvings are of hindu or buddhist gods. some of them depict the great angkor kings, riding war elephants, leading their people to victory. there are statues of buddha throughout the site. visitors are expected to pay their respects to these statues by lighting up some incense, bowing their heads 3 times, and donating a little bit of money to the temple. it's really a beautiful experience and it makes you realize just how proud the culture is. there are khmer people that make great pilgrimages to angkor wat. some of these people are very old and very poor. there are also buddhist monks in their traditional orange saris all around. the monks are extremely peaceful and seem to be very at peace with themselves, if that makes any sense. they walk at their own pace, pray at their own pace, and basically live their lives as buddha would. it's truly amazing to watch them. they are like a little oasis of good among a sea of evil: they take in orphans and teach them english (this is why those little kids were so good at haggling, by the way). without the monks, cambodia would be a very different place.

after taking numerous pictures and soaking in to majesty of the whole place, we ventured out beyond the main temple. there was this path that ran along a wooded area that was filled with friendly monkeys. this was trippy: the monkeys would rummage for food together in the forest and you could see and hear them moving among the leaves. great droves of them ran right by us without even noticing us. as we moved on, we got to this run down temple with a small buddha inside. by this point, we were the only people around. as we went in, the monkeys followed us. they climbed all over the temple walls and seemed to be extremely fascinated with the buddha statue. it was here that we had several close encounters with the simian kind. basically, we had to defer to the monkeys because some of them seemed to be offering to scratch our eyes out. again, this was a great photo op for us.

after we were done seeing the main temple, roza took us to two other ones before we decided to call it a day. one of them was called bayon temple. it was shaped completely differently from angkor wat, but it was no less cool. it is known as the temple of 1000 faces, i think. all along the spires, there were giant, distinct faces of great buddhist figures. it kind of reminded me of those big figurines that they have on easter island, except that these ones were bigger and built right into the temple walls. there were a lot of japanese tourists here.

the second place we went to was this aztec-style pyramid thing that was much smaller than the other temples. what was cool about this one was that there was a sign that read, 'climb at your own risk', which basically, for skeelow and i, was an invitation to climb to the top. the stairs were super-steep. we had to use our hands and basically free climb to the top. halfway up, i looked down and decided that if i fell, i would probably die. no sweat; we made it to the top and took some photos. below, papa skee was being swarmed by kids. god knows how much shit he bought. at the top of this temple, there was a little place to pray with incense and a lighter. what was cool about it was that we could tell that not a lot of people had made the long climb to the top, as we had. we lit us some incense, did our little routine, drank some beer that we toted up with us, and called it a day.

after the temples, roza took us to a traditional khmer barbeque spot. we drank pitchers of tiger beer and ate some damn good steak (and tripe, which i made skeelow eat, by the way ... told him it tasted good and that i would tell him what i was after he had tried it... needless to say, it kinda tastes like crap and skeelow was none too pleased after he found out what it was. for those of you who dont know, tripe is a fancy shmancy way to say "cow intestines".) roza told us that he was from a poor village near the thai border and that he sent all of his money home to his family so they could eat. this made us feel like a bunch of assholes for telling him to beat it the night before.

roza told us that he knew about a sweet spot for us to go to party. we decided to get traditional khmer massages first. he took us to several spots that we super shady until we got to this one spot with this german guy sitting outside of it. he said that it was the bomb, so we decided to go in.

(mini side note: the way it works in cambodia and most of southeast asia is when you ask your driver to take you somewhere, he takes you to his buddy's spot where he gets a cut of the action. oftentimes, these places are sketchy. you need to be assertive to protect yourself.)

the massage was interesting. as snooty americans, we refused to be massaged in the same room with each other. in retrospect, this was stupid. i mean, who the fuck cares, right? but i guess some of us were harboring thoughts of extra perks after the massage. i'll leave the rest to your imagination.

the first thing they do when you sit down is give you some tea. the next thing that happens is that the girl breaks out a wash basin and washes your feet with soap. after this, you are led into a different room where the masseuse is. mine was an old khmer woman who didnt speak a lick of english. im assuming skeelow and papa skee had better looking masseuses, but i cant be sure. the massage was interesting. a lot of knees and cracking. they work each limb thoroughly but seem to neglect the back and neck, which is weird. they also dont really use a lot of oil. we were asked to strip down to our chonies and there were no shenanigans afterwards.

after our massages, we headed to roza's bar. it turned out to be exactly what we were not looking for: a strip club full of cambodian hookers and nasty white expats. needless to say, it was a bit out of place in a country where there is literally nothing -- not farms, not rubble, nothing -- outside of the cities. this time, we told roza to beat it for real and had him take us to the main drag by the river. we paid him $15 and sent him along on his merry way. he seemed to be a bit disappointed, but we had had enough by this point and just wanted to chill and have a beer.

the bar district in siem reap was pretty western and developed. there were white people everywhere. this one bar had perhaps the worst cover band that ive ever seen in my life bleeting out tracy chapman covers. it seemed that anyone was allowed to go up and take the mic. papa skee sat and had some beers while skeelow hunted for cheaper drinks and the local 24-7 (a 7-11 rip). he ended up buying a disgusting pint of thai whiskey for about $2 and actually drank some of it out of a glass at the bar before abandoning the bottle behind the tire of a car. (when we went back to get it so we could give it to our tuk-tuk driver, it was gone.)

it was over these beers that papa skee and i decided that we were going to alter our plans for the trip. originally, we were going to spend a week in the thai islands before he left. these plans were somewhat set in stone because of his schedule. he told me that he was smitten by cambodia, that he had had no idea what to expect, but now that he was here, it was like he was seeing life for the first time. he loved the culture, the people, and the affordability of everything. it was here that we decided that we were going to forgo the islands for sihanoukville, the lone beach city in cambodia. we had heard wonderful things about the place from jae lee, who is totally a very cereal guy (so cereal, he's cheerios), so we knew that the place would be legit. papa skee was all for the idea of scaling back our plans and right then and there, i knew that he had become a backpacker, just like us. he was curious and he wanted to see more. we would not be disappointed by this decision at all.

we agreed that we would head over to phnom penh, the capitol city, for a couple of days and then we would go to the cambodian coast to sihanoukville (what a fucking name, by the way....we were already calling it "the ville"). we could hardly wait. siem reap was cool and angkor wat was amazing, but we would be going off the beaten path, into parts unknown. by the end of our conversation, we were quivering with anticipation of what was to come next.