Angkor Wat!
Trip Start
Jun 06, 2006
1
46
62
Trip End
Dec 01, 2006
Siem Reap, Cambodia
Saturday, September 23, 2006
The next day was our grand trip to Angkor Wat (And also my 29th birthday). We got a three day pass (40 USD per person) and headed off to see the great temple. It really is stunning! Quite a fabulous complex with such intricate carvings. The entrance of it reminded Stan of the Taj Mahal as there is a similarity in the approach to the main complex with a grand gate and then gardens on each side of the main pathway. Unfortunately, due to the history of this country and thanks also to mother nature, the place is in pretty bad shape. There has been a lot of theft and the restoration that has been done is of very poor quality. The management of the site leaves a lot to be desired. And it still serves as a temple for Buddhists! The rain didn't help either so I think I will have to come back some day (hopefully with my dear historian friend, Anu) to appreciate the place in it's full glory.
I liked Angkor Thom better as it is has more character to it and is an entire city. Plus, we had managed to get a guide for the day. They are normally arranged by the hotel you are staying in and cost us 20 bucks for the day. Mr. Huen wasn't a very good guide as his English was very difficult to understand but he was a lovely person. It also helps if you have a pre arranged deal with a Tuk tuk driver to take you around for the day. As we were walking back the previous day from Angkor Wat, we bumped into Mr. Sovanne who brought us back for a very fair price of 3 dollars. (The Tuk tuk driver on our journey there had charged us 5 bucks!) So we roped him in for the next two days as well and were quite happy to have done so. His English was also very limited but again he was such a nice person that it was a pleasure to have him take us around. (It was 12 bucks to be taken around the whole day around Angkor Thom and it's neighbouring temples and 20 bucks to be taken to Banteay Sriep as that is quite far away.)
The interesting part about Mr. Huyen and Sovanne was that they were both trying to get married. (Not to each other though!) In Cambodia, the tradition is that if a man wants to marry a woman then he must provide a lump sum to the woman's family at the time of marriage. And it is the man, not the man's family that must do so and it's quite a considerable sum. 1500 and 2000 USD is what I was quoted by my two sources. Coming from India, where the onus of providing money to the groom (at the time of marriage in the form of dowry) lies on the bride's family, I was quite surprised by this. As Stan mentioned in his blog, there are quite a few characteristics and traits that Cambodia shares with India, so I wonder where this custom came from.
Mr. Sovanne is already engaged as he seems to be capable of delivering his promise, Mr. Huyen however is having some trouble in coming up with the desired amount. He comes from a very poor background and his family can not help out much even if they would like to. I hope his guide skills improve so that he can attain a happily married life!
Coming back to Angkor Thom, the complex is huge and there is just so much to see and learn about that it all boggles you quite a bit. Since we have the Rough Guide to all of South East Asia, there is limited information in it. So having the guide helped. The weather however was not helpful. It was so muggy that it became almost unbearable at times. I'm sorry but I don't remember all the details of all the temples that I visited that day. It was a case of information overload and half the time I was just trying to understand where I was myself. They were all beautiful though. (I will try to list all the names I remember while uploading the photographs.)
My favourite place was Ta Prohm, which is where a constant battle between stone and wood is being raged and I think that the wood is winning in most places. However, stone now has man on it's side (and even the Archaelogical Society of India is chipping in it's resources) to restore the place. Phnom Bakeng where you go for the sunset views was very crowded and quite a disappointment as it was very cloudy and you could barely even see Angkor Wat. So in the end we didn't even bother going for the sunrise. (Turned out that it was a wise decision as we met an Irish chap later who told us that he had gone and didn't see much as it was too cloudy.)
The one aspect of Angkor architecture that fascinated me the most was the use of steep steps. They really made them very steep. Our guide said that it was because the king would be on top and so when anyone climbed they would have their head low and all fours on the ground. A bit of obligatory or enforced bowing I presume. So what about when the king climbed? I presume he had to climb and was not carried up. I guess he would be bowing to God. It's so great to be in the complex and just try and imagine what it must have been like in all it's glory. It's something I felt in Macchu Picchu as well.
On the way to Angkor Wat, there is a Kantha Bopha children's hospital that never failed to catch my attention. All over town and right outside the hospital, there are posters announcing a classical music concert by Beatocello that is held on Friday and Saturday evenings at the hospital. The performance is given by Dr. Beat Richner and is free. (http://www.beatocello.com/) Stan and I were quite excited about it and went to see it on Saturday. Unfortunately, it was cancelled as Dr. Richner had to go to Switzerland. Feeling quite disappointed we ended up at the FCC for dinner and far too many drinks.
The next day after another excursion at the temples, we stopped at the hospital on the way back as I wanted to find out more about the hospital and also donate blood. The hospital is free for everyone and has helped many Cambodian children in their hour of need. There was a huge crowd waiting outside on Sunday evening for an appointment with the doctor on Monday morning. Most of them will spend the night on the footpath outside the hospital as they can not afford accommodation and probably don't want to lose their place in the line. There are only three children's hospitals in Cambodia and people come to this one from very far away places.
The hospital has been expanded tremendously based on the donations that it has received over the years. If you do not have money to donate, then you can always donate your blood as it is not readily available. Khmer people due to cultural reasons are not very keen on donating blood. So Stan and I chipped in (Stan was donating blood for the first time) and spent our afternoon bleeding into a bag. It is something that I would urge every backpacker to do while they are there. It only takes half an hour of your time and is very safe to do so. My only regret is not seeing Dr. Richner in action!
Post script -
I met up with a friend of mine who also works in the development sector and happens to be working in the South East Asia region. His agency has been dealing with Dr. Richner for quite a while now. I had an interesting discussion with him about the children's hospital and Dr. Richner's work and have changed my perspective slightly on the hospital.
I was aware that the hospital was private but since it treated the patients for free I did not think much about it. Keeping in mind a larger perspective of the health system in Cambodia, it is important for medical facilities to be sustinable and owned publicly. The future of the hospital and it's funding should not depend solely on the personality and conections of the one person. Further, this very crucial medical facility should not be alienated from the state medical facilities and be a stand alone project. It will be more time consuming and far more difficult to work with an inefficient government system but that is the way capacities of local people are built and societies move forward. Dependance on donations from philanthropists and estabilishing an elite institution will not help empower the local people. Yes, in the short term it provides them an important serivice but there is a larger goal of a self sustained publicly owned health system that would serve the needs of the people better.
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Amitabh Ghosh on Angkor Wat
I found Amitabh Ghosh's description of Angkor Wat absolutely fascinating so am posting it here.At the same time i feel a little guilty - because it is a very small part of his writing on Angkor Wat and therefore incomplete, but still a little long. Hope you enjoy it
'From the minute I first entered Angkor Wat I found myself awash in stories. I was puzzled by this in the beginning, but now, looking back, several months later, it seems to me that there was something inevitable in it it. For above all Angkor Wat is a monument to the power of the story.
This is true in a perfectly literal sense: with every step a visitor takes in this immense twelfth- century Cambodia temple he finds himself moving counters in a gigantic abacus of story -telling. The device is a vast one - it is said to be the largest single religious edifice in the world - and it provides its own setting as well as a cast of galactic dimension. The setting is Mt. Meru, the sacred mountain of ancient Indian myth, whose seven carefully graded tiers provide the blue print for the temple's form. The cast is the entire pantheon of gods, deities, sages and prophets with which that cosmos is peopled.
But no story, no matter how loftily cosmic, is ever entirely free of its origins: as with all the best stories, this one too is partly an autobiography, an allegory about its own authorship. The chief protagonists in this instance are such imperial figures as King Suryavarman II, who was mainly responsible for building Angkor Wat, and Jayavarman VII, the megalomaniacal ruler who ruined his empire in trying to create the nearby complex of Angkor Thom. ..
Images of Angkor Wat are so common in Cambodia, so inescapable that after a while they become an assault upon the visitor's senses; the visual equivalent of radio-music played on public loudspeakers...
Most of all Angkor Wat belongs on flags - flags of the country and flags of political parties. Cambodia has been torn between factions for decades; no country on earth has witnessed more bitter or more violent political strife. Yet, although the country's flag has changed with every new regime over the last forty years, there has always been one constant in its design: it has never ceased to bear an image of Angkor....
Flags, uniforms, banks, airlines, beer: it isn't hard to predict yet unrealised continuation of the series - cigarettes, shaving cream, fertilisers, personal computers, assault rifles and so on...
...For in this century many other parts of the world have seen their present technologially and symbolically superseded by the relics of their past. But in Cambodia the process went further than elsewhere. For an entire generation of Cambodians, including politicians as different in ideology as Prince Sihanouk, Son Sann and Pol Pot, Angkor Wat became a symbol of the modernising nation state. It became the opposite of itself: an icon that represented a break with the past - a token of the country's belonging, not within the medieval, but rather the contemporary world.
Thus, the beer, banks, air lines and of course, flags.'