Sunday Night 8 February 2015
Singapore

I am tucked into bed at the Crowne Plaza Changi Airport Hotel in Singapore, right inside the main terminal of this amazing ultra-modern, efficient and very busy airport. After another buffet breakfast and a fond farewell to the Angkor Village Hotel, it was a brief two-hour flight back to Singapore from Siem Reap.  The youngish man who pushed my wheelchair at the Singapore Airport is the first helper who has ever absolutely and resolutely refused to take any money for the service.  What a nice final touch to the trip.

There is so much to tell about my adventures in Cambodia and I am sure words cannot do justice to all that I have witnessed (and tasted). I know it will take several postings just to give a brief idea.

Friday 6 February 2015
Siem Reap

Today I enjoy a small-group (11 people) tour with an excellent guide to explore a few of the ruins of the ancient Angkor Kingdom. Angkor Wat, the most famous and largest of the temples--indeed the largest religious-purposed building in the world--is just a small part of the larger community that at its height, around 1100 AD, was home to over one million people.  It's a 15-minute drive by minibus from the hotel to the ruins, and we will be reboarding the bus to take us from one temple to another (each is much too far to walk, even though there is considerable shade and a cool breeze in the temples themselves). 

We begin the tour at the West Gate (actually the back door) of Angkor Wat, since it is the best time of day for photographs from this side. Without a guide I probably would have gone to the main gate and had the sun in my eyes all day, when they weren't glued to a guide book!  We spend about 90 minutes exploring various parts of the temple, most of which remains in the conditions in which it was found. There is major restoration work at some of the other temples, but Angkor Wat itself has fortunately been left alone.  The walls surroundng the temple are mostly gone, although the gates remain, as does the large moat on all sides.  

Angkor Wat

At our next stop, Angkor Thom (meaning Angkor City), the walls remain but there is only one major building left inside the huge community. The Bayon was built a few years after Angkor Wat, and contains the most beautiful and important wall carvings, relating the history of warfare between the poeple of Angkor and the surrounding tribes.  Most of the temples have a mixed religious history, berginning as Buddhist and then changing to Hindu as the values of the kings changed--sometimes changing back again to Buddhist.  As is always the case with religions, each succeeding generation tried to obliterate the monuments of the previous one, so there are many headless Buddha statues and truncated male lingua (the phallic symbol of Hinduism).  We visit a third temple before lunch at a local restaurant withint the historic area.

The Bayon

Soldier Attacked by Crocodile

After lunch we board the bus again to take us to the "jungle temple," most fascinating because of the way huge trees have taken root and spread through the walls of the buildings, binding with the stone in rhythms of strangulation and sustenance.  

The fifth and final temple of the day is the oldest, built of brick rather than the limestone blocks of the other temples.  By now it is 4pm and our guide gives us the option of remaining at the last temple to watch the sunset, which is supposedly magnificent, but we all elect not to wait the two hours and he takes us back to our respective hotels. 

Although there has been a good deal of painful walking, the most difficult aspect of today's touring for me has been the climbing (or choosing not to climb) extremely steep and long staircases (with very high risers) to reach the highest levels of the temples.  I make it to the top of three of them, but at the other two I call it quits at level two and let the younger folk rush on.  The difficulty for me is not the physcial nature of the climb, but my limited depth perception, which makes the stairs very scary indeed. 

Besides giving us an excllent overview and interesting details about each of the temples we have seen, our guide, who was a young man during the time of Pol Port and the Killing Fields, also gives us some idea of what it was like to live and what it took to survive those years (every Cambodian can recite exactly how many days Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge were in power).  I will try to give some sense of that horror in the next blog entry.  But I have gained a true respect for how the Cambodians have risen from the bones of their national tragedy--and a new respect for Angelina Jolie, who is a national hero here, for her adoption of a Cambodian orphan and her efforts to help the nation.  And, of course, the Cambodians remember well that it was Princess Diana who first brought the world's attention to the plight of the survivors of those hellish two and a half years.