Cambodia 1 – The Jungle takes Over

Squeezing only a brief 2 weeks to see Cambodia has been mistake, as I am discovering now.

We land in Siem Reap for 3 days. Angkor Wat is part of our reason to be here, the other part, is to catch up with my lovely friend and Millie’s godmother Shunmay. She lives part of her life here in Cambodia as a paediatrician and researcher and I think has flown up here specially to see us, though she pops into the Angkor Children’s Hospital for a meeting, to justify coming here.

It’s super hot so a guest house with a pool seems vital here. We check into the pre-booked Golden Banana (this has been a vital change to travelling without kids, wanting the certainty of arriving somewhere and knowing that you don’t need to trawl the streets). It’s in the heart of town.

We decide to limit our temple visits to only three of the more interesting sites and keep them brief and see them early, to avoid the intense heat of the midday sun-and to enjoy the pool in the afternoons, though there are a lot of groans from the children who are bored, bored, bored! That’s before we have even set off!

The enormity of this Hindu temple and the vast area it covers is quite extraordinary. To put the size of this place and its importance into perspective, while London had a population of 55,000, in the 12 th Century, Angkor Wat had a population of over a million. It reminds me of Hampi in India. Angkor Wat is famous for the jungle which permeates through the temples threatening to take it over, Gabriel and Jemima watched Tomb Raider, all filmed here in Ankor Wat, to prepare them them for what they are about to see, though of course my plan backfires as it’s nothing like the real thing and of course as there is no Angelina in her tiny little shorts crawling around, so they are a bit disappointed.

Our guest house is run by a tiny diminutive Cambodian man. He leaves some blurb in our room about his story and the ethics of the guest house. Ten of his brothers and sisters died horrifically at the hands of the Khmer Rouge, including his mum and dad. Orphaned at the age of five, he headed to New Zealand under an adoption scheme, where he was brought up. Then in 2003  he came back to his homeland and created this lovely guest house. He mentions that during our stay in Cambodia there will be no doubt that we will sit next to, at some point or other, be it on a bus, or a restaurant, both a victim and a perpetrator of that evil war. Never before have I seen a country’s terrible recent past so in the present time. The horrors and scale of Pol Pots’ regime, pales other wars and regimes into insignificance, (with the exception of North Korea). It is unimaginable that the regime turfed out all the inhabitants of the cities and force-marched the  people from the cities into inadequately prepared countryside to work like ants in the rice fields. With nowwhere to go and not enough food to feed the population.

We go to see the Phare Circus in the evening. With a pile of cardboard boxes, some simple costumes and 2 live musicians, they movingly and very imaginatively tell a personal Cambodian story magically, through mime, movement, art and dance of a personal story.  It is very subtly done.

We are keen not to expose the children to too much of the detail of what happened under Pol Pot.

Siem Reap seems very commercial and touristy and there are hoards of people here, so we are glad to be here only a short time.

We bus down to Phnom Penh to catch another glimpse of Shunmay.  The road is unexpectedly bad and untarmacked – we feel shaken in our bones when we arrive. It’s also an incredibly boring and flat landscape after Laos, though fascinating none the less to see the houses on stilts, the hammocks swinging in the shade, the conical hatted men and women picking rice, the oxen and carts.

Phnom Penh has a great ‘I could live here’ feel to it. It’s fun. We catch up again with Nicola and Shunmay who treat us to night-time poolside drinks in their swanky roof-top hotel.  “Can’t we come and stay here?” say the kids, rather enviously. It is lovely. Then we tuk-tuk off to a local place for fabulous Cambodian BBQ food. It’s buzzing with people. This is the best meal we have had in 4 months!

Mark braves himself and heads off to “The Killing Fields” while I tuck into Jon Swain’s ‘The River of Time’, to educate myself about Cambodia.