Cambodia: The SE Asia ‘Can’t Leave Your Self Behind’ Guide

From A to B – Getting Around

There are no trains currently running in Cambodia so it’s buses for getting around.  The roads in Cambodia are much quieter than neighbouring Vietnam and Thailand, a reflection on the relative prosperity of the average Cambodian.  Socio-economics aside however this is a relief when crossing from Vietnam as the din of a million car horns disappears and a strange hush takes hold. 

Tuk tuks are a good option in towns and you won’t walk for long before you’re offered your hundredth tuk tuk ride of the day.  Tiring as this may be do try to smile and say no politely. Even better, say yes.

Again, mopeds are an option for bombing around towns and out into the countryside.  As ever, take it easy as the roads in Cambodia are often poor and medical facilities, particularly good ones, are few and far between.

Getting to Thailand from Siem Reap is covered in the introductory post to these mini-guides.

Where the Magic Probably Won’t Happen – Sleeping

Bloom Garden Guesthouse, Siem Reap: a really super guesthouse this one.  Run by the charming and chatty Diana, a Singaporean expat, she takes the running of this place seriously.  She seems to like the company of guests and this is a sure sign of a passionate hotelier.  The guesthouse is a little out of town, but they offer bikes to guests free of charge, and a tuk tuk ride is only a couple of USD.  Breakfast is good, the Wi-Fi is fast, and they are eager to help.  The tastefully designed bedrooms come with air con and a fan, and have good bathrooms. 

Nmm nmm nmm – Eating and Drinking

Toucan, Crab Market, Kep: The crab market in Kep is a ramshackle collection of waterfront huts, and this place, stumbled upon by chance, was a delight.  Helen has just leaned over my shoulder and said, simply, ‘stuffed crab’.  She’s right, of course, you don’t argue with my wife when it comes to food.  The stuffed crab was indeed excellent, as were the plate of prawns, ordered off menu, served with a butter and pepper dip.

Yacht club, Kep: This place seems out of place in Kep, a moneyed bastion in a town that was decimated by the Khmer Rouge in living memory.  But it has very friendly staff, good value cocktails during happy hour, and an excellent menu.  The prawn, cream cheese and jalepeno poppers were a favourite.  It is also the best place in Kep to watch the sunset.  With a mojito.  And a beer chaser.

Soria Maria, Tapas, Siem Reap: this place does a ‘dish for a dollar deal’ on a Wednesday night, and is an expat favourite.  Not least because all the drinks are also a dollar.  We grazed on an impressive array of tapas choices, eventually dragging ourselves out, bloated and drunk, but only $20 USD worse off.

Other stuff

Rabbit Island, just off Kep

This is a good day or overnight trip.  Rabbit Island is a 45 minute boat ride from Kep, the return trip giving you plenty of change from $15 USD.  The beach itself is lovely, with some ramshackle wooden bungalows set back from the beach.  Ladies offer good value massages on the beach.  I had two.

Angkor temples, Siem Reap

You can’t really go to Cambodia and not see the temples.  I’ve written about them in a previous post, so will keep this to practicalities.

We were in Siem Reap for three days and spent just one morning at the temples.  This, for us, was enough, but you could easily spend more time there.  For two of our three days we hired a tuk tuk driver by the name of Vantha, and his magnificent chariot that he had christened Black Wolf.  A diminutive and delightful young man he drove us around for two straight days, always returning to a pre-agreed pick up point bang on time.  He was enterprising and educated and had memorised the temple guide book, in a second language remember, taking pride in sharing his detailed knowledge with us as we toured the different temple sites.  We agreed on a day rate of $15 USD.  I gave him $20 on both days. 

I can’t think of a better way of touring the temples than like this, and would urge anyone to seek out a similar arrangement.

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The spectres of spirituality

Cambodia – Kep and Siem Reap

I’m not a very spiritual person.  That was my conclusion during our visit to the Angkor temples in Siem Reap, Cambodia.  I see wonder, and I would like to see it more, but processing and understanding this wonder has never had a spiritual dimension for me.  The truth is that I don’t, or perhaps can’t, really understand what ‘spiritual’ actually means – is it a faith in something grander, something extra-human, without the baggage of a religion?  I just don’t know.  It’s a filter on my existence that I just don’t have.

I pondered these questions of spirituality, and many others (are people on group tours really as bored as they look? Will the parents of that brat actually mind if I clip him around the head when I walk past him?) as we picked our way through the temples, playing dodge the photographer.  Whilst I can marvel at the incredible architecture, and try to extract from the stone an understanding of what these walls have seen over the many centuries, I simply can’t feel anything greater, or higher, or more profound.  These temples are the largest religious site in the world and have, over the centuries, been a home for animism, Hinduism and Buddhism so it seemed appropriate to think about spirituality, and to think about what truths and insights could be revealed.  It seemed funny to me that a collection of physical edifices could, over the years, be the site of worship for different religions, religions that all stake their own claim to universal truth.  And perhaps that’s the deeply ironic moment of profundity for the non-spiritualist - the great paradox of universal truth.  The game of celestial tag that goes on and underpins the building of civilisations that says ‘I have the truth, no I have it, no I’ve got it now, and this time it’s really real’.  A universal truth is, by definition, unequivocal and the same for all humanity, and yet time and again spiritualists, and the front man of an organised religion, claim conflicting versions of this truth.  If these walls could speak I suspect they may wearily sigh and say ‘would you lot just bloody well make up your mind’?

So there was no epiphany for me at the temples.  There was humidity, a million whirrs from camera shots, and there were people, lots of them.  Take enough photos and perhaps your experience becomes greater, the millions of pixels laughing in the face of transience and ephemerality.   Slumping into the back of the tuk-tuk (named ‘Black Wolf’ and painstaking hand decorated with gold paper) our driver, Vantha, turned expectedly and said ‘where next’?  Back to the guesthouse we said, the dawn start catching up with us, an extra urgency added by the discovery that yes, parents do mind if you clip their child around the head.  I jest, didn’t touch the kid.  Just whispered that this was the location of child sacrifice and that young spirits still roamed the corridors looking for children to take into the afterlife, especially ones that whinge.  

It was, in fact, the burnt out shells of once grand waterfront houses in Kep, on the southern coast of Cambodia, that made a far deeper impression on me than the temples of Siem Reap.  They spoke of the, still relatively recent, atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge, the devastation wreaked on this down-at-luck nation.  And it was the faces of the Cambodian people I met, of a similar age, who were children during the atrocities.  I was not bold or confident enough to ask them of their past, or enquire about their families, for fear of opening up a past that they were maybe trying to forget.  Fascinated though I was there lingered the unsettling prospect of being a voyeur, a passing and nosy voyeur, on their private grief.   

If there are spirits that roam this nation then it is in these places one sees them most, not in the architecture of millennia-old temples.  And if there are universal truths then they speak of the barbarity at the core of the human condition, but also the capacity for forgiveness, for rebuilding, and for walking on into the future to leave the past behind.

Spirituality helps many to process, interpret and understand these truths.  Not me though – I don’t understand them, perhaps never will, but trying to understand is, perhaps, the end in itself.         

L: Angkor Wat at dawn, the brochure shot.  R: the reality of unwashed hordes.

Panorama with a ghostly presence at the centre.