Angkor Wat (Cambodia)

March 08, 2021

Angkor Wat (Cambodia)

From my diary (May 2010)

Most visitors get to Siem Reap by air. A comfortable way to get to this Cambodian town, alright. But they miss a less trodden part of Cambodia, they miss a little bit of an adventure, the opportunity to experience something of the real country, and they miss the journey. To get to Siem Reap from the Thai town of Aranyaprathet (near the border with Cambodia), which I reach after a four-hour bus ride from Khorat, I have to cross the border on foot, an interesting affair.

As soon as I am off the bus, a young Cambodian approaches me and walks me to the border, which looks like a scene from an American Western, dusty, teeming with people coming and going with their rucksacks, bags and handcarts, utter confusion. I try to divine where I need to go to get my entry visa, when the Cambodian guides me to an office belonging to a travel company that is clearly not the customs office. I tell the young man I wish to go to the customs office, that I do not wish to pay for a private service, but he insists, saying it is just the same, the same price. In the end I yield, partly because there are a couple of other tourists waiting there. I later discover that I actually did pay more, but apparently the Cambodian police also inflates fees, which means that in one place or the other it would have really amounted to the same. After that the young man, who will not leave me alone, tries to convince me to buy a ticket for a bus to Siem Reap, which sounds exorbitant, and so I refuse. Then it is the turn of the agency dealing with my visa to offer me transport for a slightly lower price. In the end, to keep things simple, I cave in. As it so happens, it turns out to not have been a bad decision as, going by what other travelers tell me later, at the bus station in Poipet – on the other side of the border – instead of selling you a bus ticket they try to get you into a shared taxi. Ah well. In Western terms, it never converts to big money.

On the other side of the border, I get on my bus to Siem Reap, and watch a landscape fly by that is wilder than the one left behind in Thailand and also much poorer: there are few cars on the road, the houses on either side of it are simple wooden huts, and the people – who move around on foot, bicycle or motorbike – are in simple clothes, many barefooted, especially the children. About four hours after setting off, I finally reach Siem Reap.

On my first day here, I try to reach Angkor Wat by bicycle, a six-kilometre ride, but because of heavy rain and difficulties in finding my way through the secondary roads crossing the forest, I arrive too late. Never mind. On days two and three, I make arrangements with Sarath to take me around Angkor in his remorque-moto, or tuk-tuk as they are known in Thailand and elsewhere. Sarath is a pleasant man, who works as a tuk-tuk driver by day and performs as a musician in the evenings. Kind and smiling, he, too, like so many other Cambodians, has a dark personal story from the past of which, at some point, he shares with me an episode. During Pol Pot’s regime, when Sarath was only twelve, one day the Khmer Rouge came to his house to get his father. Sarath and his mother, as they watched his father being dragged away to certain death (for those who were arrested never came back), could not even cry, or they too would have been killed. And Sarath’s father was but one of the 1.5–2 million Cambodians who were killed for no reason, other than the cruel and futile one in the twisted mind of the Khmer Rouge. Sarath added that this was only one among countless violations he had to witness during those four years, and that it would take hours for him to tell me about the brutalities carried out by the Khmer Rouge in those dark days...