The ''most scenic boat trip in Cambodia"

...is that which goes from Battambang to Siem Reap via Tonle Sap lake, according to the Lonely Planet.

So when I woke up at 6 am this morning, it seemed sensible to take the opportunity to switch my bus ticket for a boat ticket.


Things seemed promising when, after only half an hour, I saw two kingfishers and some other unfamiliar streamlined and brightly coloured predatory birds. That was it, really, except for a fat grey pelican. Egrets you can see anywhere.

It would take a lot for me to recommend a 9h boat trip down a muddy river - much, much more to take 4 days heading up the Mekong to Laos (the main competition), but this was dullsville.

Trip stats: The bus takes 4h and costs $5. The boat 9h and costs $19, so it should be at least 6 times as good to break even.
It was rubbish.

However, it costs $30 to go from Siem Reap by boat for 2h to see the floating villages on  Tonle Sap. So these we saw for $11 cheaper. So not as rubbish as all that.

Lunch (included): one stale baguette. 

Arse status: sorer than after cycling around Angkor .

Tomorrow's activity: cycling around Angkor.  

Battambang, Cambodia

Bouldering / climbing routes alert!

 

About 15km s.w. of Battambang town is a limestone outcrop - Phnom Sampeau - home of a wat, a pagoda or two, and the infamous killing cave used by killers to kill people in the killing time of the Khmer Rouge.

There is some decent bouldering / soloing near the pagoda (pic credit cambodiaadventures.blogspot.com - I owe you one guys)


Down to the right of the pagoda is a perfect little 10m face, on the r of the path as you ascend. On its lhs is a big drop, but on the rhs you can do a boulder traverse at 1m, a VS 5a (Unidentified Fruit-like Object, 10m) up pockets to a groove and capping overhang taken on the L, and a HS 4b (Run Chicken Run, 7m) up pockets to a slab, so take yer boots and chalk bag people.

FA's JHB yesterday.

Around here, you can also do fun stuff like ride the bamboo train, hire motor bikes, check out yet more Khmer ruins, and marvel at the scenery. Hot and dusty though it may be.

Angkor management

I might never come back, so I devised a scheme to see as much as poss in 4 days, building up to the Big Three of Ta Phrom, the Bayon and Angkor Wat this afternoon. They were the most crowded by miles, so it worked well.

Trip computer says:

Bike: 80 km, walking: 20 km, tuk-tuk: 120 km 
Camera status: on charge every night
Arse condition: sore 

Monuments: about 30 or so, of which:

Pyramids: several, some quite like Mayan ones (I suppose there are only so many ways to build a pyramid)
Buddhist monasteries: several
Temples: several
City gates, terraces, walls, reservoirs and shrines: several
Steps up and down: 1000's

Vendors and hawkers negotiates: 100's
Sites with no people:1
 
Apparently there are 9 architectural styles at Angkor, spanning the 600 years of its inhabitation, of which 5 seem to me to be easily distinguishable. 

Four pm was good timing to poke about Angkor Wat then catch the sunset. It's amazing the Wat is still there - pyramids don't fall down when struck by lightening or earthquakes, but a 699 foot  high pineapple? Shiva has mercy.
Off to Battambang tomorrow, - everyone here calls it Bottombung, which at least makes it easy to remember.

Tonle Sap Lake

This huge lake (about the size of Cheshire) lies to the south of Siem Reap in NW Cambodia, and is a phenomenon.  

The e in Tonle has an acute accent, which is not available in this blog's HTML. Apologies all.

The lake is, in a sense, tidal - the tide comes in once a year. When the Mekong (the world's 12 largest river, pub quiz goers) is in spate, all the meltwater and rains that swell it from its origins in the Tibetan plateau cause the water level to rise higher than Tonle Sap. This causes Tonle Sap river, which meets the Mekong in Phnom Penh, to flow backwards and fill the lake from about July to Sept (which, coincidentally, is also the wet season). At this time, all the surrounding shore, including many paddy fields, floods over. Villages would also flood over, were they not built on stilts or floating on the lake itself. 

Fishing goes on almost year-round, and there are many  wetland birds unique to the area.

Tonle Sap lake. Thanks NASA for the pic. You guys don't need any cash from me, but let me know if you're thinking of legal action.

What this meant for Angkor

The massive irrigation system that supported Angkor Thom and the other sites in the Angkor area, with their enormous reservoirs and intricate hydraulic systems, depended on the annual cycle of rising waters. It may very well be that the sites were abandoned because of a failure in the annual replenishment of Tonle Sap, leading to a failure in the rice harvest.

Nobody seems to have proposed the opposite theory, that the area may have flooded for an unduly long period. We will probably never know the truth.

There is bouldering in Cambodia

Bulbous boulders of hard sandstone litter the path up to the 'spectacularly carved riverbed' at Kbal Spean, deep in the jungle about 40 km NW of Siem Reap. 

Good slabs, pockets, inset pebbles, and edges abound. Watch this space. Keep the chalk down though, or you'll get told off by the wardens, who take an admirably ethical stance on use of the white stuff.

Angkor 

Today I overcame my loathing of road cycling, and undertook the 26k loop (plus 7k there and back) of the Big Circuit of the Ankgor archaeological park. On a 20-year old Chinese ladies bike (rental $2/day) with 3 gears and a pink basket on the front. All the decent bikes had gone. The pink basket met with ridicule on several occasions, but - ha! - made the bike dead easy to find at all the stops.

The Angkor site is massive. I spent 2 days here on my first time out in SE Asia, but there are so many sites to see it was 4pm today (day 2) before I looped back into the walled city of Angkor Thom at the north gate, and eventually recognised stuff I'd covered last time. Still, I had one massive pyramid I'd previously neglected, to keep me busy. This was interesting because a) it's massive, and b) its western 2nd tier was rebuilt in the form of a massive reclining Buddha in the 15th century, long after the rest of Angkor was abandoned.

Among this melange of archaeological sites there are trends emerging, but I'm not going to try and summarize them just yet. One major problem is the names - they just all seem so similar and it's hard to make them stick. Might have to learn some Khmer. One thing though: the earlier temples have Sanskrit inscriptions, and tend to be Hindu (obviously an Indian influence), while the later structures include labyrinthine Buddhist monasteries, dating from a switch in religious allegiance after Angkor Thom was invaded and sacked by marauding (I love that word) attackers from what is now Vietnam. The Khmer won the place back, rebuilt, and built some more massive temples etc, with a Buddhist theme. 

The whole complex has several massive (and dozens of smaller) rectangular terraced reservoirs, and it's thought that this water storage system was crucial to the power base, agriculture, and economy - and when it began to fail, so did the city. So, the fall of the Khmer civilisation doesn't seem to have much in common with that of the contemporary Mayan one, despite a very similar structure of competing city-states. I suppose we in the West did all this in about 500 BC in Greece. Then Rome too, got to be quite big before it collapsed. Which wouldn't matter much for us in 2013 if that dithering Emperor Constantine hadn't converted to Christianity in 312. Nice one Const.

Still, the best is yet to come: I bought a 3 day pass and have 1 day left for the most famous stuff - Angkor Wat itself, the Bayon, and the Indiana Jones/Lara Croft-invoking Ta Prohm. 

Kbal Spean

The carved riverbed is pretty good too. Dozens of lingams and several yonis carved into the bedrock, symbolic of the creative sexual power of holy water (blessed by submerged carvings of Brahma) that spills form the waterfall below.

Multiculturalism began a long time ago in Asia, and here you can see carvings of Shiva (Hindu god of destruction) sitting right in the middle of a group of admiring Buddhas (human person of, erm, hardly any destruction at all really).

Banteay Srei

Shiva is the most popular god in these parts (though Brahma gets a look in, and Vishnu is Top God at Angkor Wat) and the excellent, intricate temple at Banteay Sreai is devoted to him. The carvings here are said to be the most exquisits and delicate in SE Asia, which seems about right. Its hard to see how they can have remained in such good condition over the centuries, unless these are restored versions - either way, it's top notch. 

Thanks Wikipedia for the pics (donation in the post guys. Keep up the good work).


Shiva rides a bull, and dances with a sword whenever he fancies a bit of demolition. He's quite a dancer. Here, presumably, Khmers prayed for the destruction of various enemies and annoyances.


If I were a praying man, I might have thrown my tuppence in for the destruction of the Catholic Church, Islam, N Korean gov't, seats of Bishops in the House of Lords (in the 21st century in the UK? eh??), Eric Pickles' parliamentary constituency majority, faith schools, The X Factor, homeopathic 'remedy' companies, News Corporation, the Premier League's board of directors, Robinson's brewery in Stockport, and that horrible building at the bottom of Hibel Road by Tesco's Roundabout in Macclesfield. But I'm not.   

The Centre of the Universe

As every Hindu knows, the centre of the universe is a mountain, Mt Meru. The gods very much prefer the cooler climate up there. 

Vishnu, the creator, lives there along with the others, but by definition, most of his work is done.  Brahma gets on with the ticking-over stuff, the day-to-day drudgery, sometimes injecting a bit of a magical spark to proceedings, such as a birth or harvest. Shiva works on the chaos and of mayhem side of things.

We in the West think we know about the centre of the universe. If not where it is, what it is - that is to say, nothing much, at least at the moment. Maybe a bit of cosmic wind. We know that, billions of years ago, it might have been a very different place comprising a massive singularity. Or maybe not.

Despite this, we western humans, theist and atheist alike, cling to two traditional belief systems: females think they are the centre of the universe (well fair enough: they do all the procreation and most of the work); while males, less sure of themselves, know there's a centre of the universe somewhere - but aren't sure if it's the pub, crag, hill, garden shed, fishing pond, golf club or football stadium. In more pagan times, we worshipped the sun from stone circles, which were probably built by men while women did more important stuff. Though we can't be sure whether the ancients were truly heliocentric, they were on to something a long time before Galileo was given a hard time by the purple-clad paedo mafia.      

So, I was in this bar in Phnom Penh

...and I got chatting to this weird-looking, skinny guy (a bit like an even paler David Bowie). One quarter Japanese, one quarter Khmer, half English.

He reckoned he had 5 kids, 2 of them with his current Cambodian wife. He got sacked from the local Ministry for refusing to kow-tow to his superiors in the hierarchy (Buddhists can be shit people too, as we've seen), and is now a teacher. Gets up at 5 AM to start work. 

He reckoned too that, years ago, he used to run the Comedy Store off Leicester Square, where he procured coke or speed for most of the top comedians (I'll let you guess which comedian chose what drug). Late nights, he used to hang out with them at the Groucho Club, where his brother, a top record producer also used to go.

I said I'd been to the Comedy Store, and Paul Merton was in the audience. More showbiz talk ensued. I asked him if he knew my brother Pete  from doing the lighting rigs in theatre-land (hi Pete, if you're reading). He needed a physical description. Tall guy, beard, with (then) a pony tail. He scratched his head. 

OK, I said, what about Alexei Sayle - you must have met him? 

Blank.

"You know - fat bastard in a tight suit?'' 

Blank.

It was only later, walking home, that I had a moment of realisation (thanks Viz) - the Man In the Pub, Cambodia's most well-informed conversationalist, was actually Aldridge Prior, Hopeless Liar.

Belated Thailand (and Onward Travel) Summary

OK son this is me writing my diary. I was in Tonsai from 13 to 26 Jan.  Xmas eve was a big party night for the Caucasian component (for want of a better collective phrase). I spent Xmas morning waiting at an ATM in Railay, for the guys who fill the machine with cash every Tuesday. I worked out I must have left my Visa card in there a few days before, and when they showed up at about 1 pm there indeed it was, along with about 20 others left by halfwits like me. The ATMs in Thailand give you your money before ejecting your card, so it happens a lot. I saved myself a lot of hassle by waiting around for those 4 hours, and as Christmas mornings go it wasn't as boring as Dec 25 1991 (cold cous-cous in the Algerian desert). Serves me right for choosing a thoroughly Atheist Dec 25th.

Did about 25 routes at Tonsai and Railey, which doesn't sound much now I look at it, but they included a 6c onsight and a 5-pitch 6b (Big Wave, which was absolutely brilliant - near vertical for 120m then overhanging for the last 15m. Out there, maaaan). Great day at Eagle Wall too. Had a good stint both on the climbing and partying front, with some good people - especially Jay and Hayley from Brisbane. In fact Aussie climbers seem to be everywhere - and weirdly, none of them seem to have ever gone to Arapiles, one of the best crags in the world. I have, so I'm the expert here, move aside Bruce.

Unfortunately, I caught a bit of a bug (the Lurg? always hard to tell on holiday) and decided to rest up on Koh Lanta, where I wouldn't be tempted to climb. Its a very boring island when it comes to night life, but you can go poking around biking, caving and snorkeling there, and on its smaller and wilder southern islets (e.g. Koh Mook - scene of the remarkable Emerald Cave. You swim through this completely dark sea cave and emerge by a little inland beach encircled by limestone cliffs). Things went from bad to worse when I got a very bad bout of food poisoning - the second so far, both of which have put me to bed rather than welded me to the toilet (is this an age thing? The horror). I blame either veggie fried rice, or a mango shake (definitely not the salmon mouse).

By the time I'd got my head straight I had to think of the best and quickest way of leaving the country to renew my visa, which would have expired on New Year's Day (a national holiday when you can forget about getting any bureaucracy done).  Couldn't face overlanding to the Malaysian border and back, so jumped on a plane in Trang (an even more boring place to spend an evening than Koh Lanta).
 
Man cannot live on mangoes and pineapples alone, however delicious they may be. Thus, a City Hit seemed in order. I arrived in Phnom Penh on New Year's Day, which is as good a time as any to arrive anywhere. All was good. Seriously nice room in a good friendly travellers' area, and not an insect in sight after getting used to dousing myself in chemicals in bamboo bungalows for 3 weeks. ''Sounds like things might start cooking around here later....the party atmo is building up...''

So, giving Cambodia another chance, as everyone I've met seems to have liked it here. The Plan: a circular route to Siem Reap (and have another poke about Angkor Wat) and Battambang. Should take about a week. The natives seem friendly enough.

Phnom Penh, Cambodia

The place

I didn't know what to expect. This is a very attractive city, with its wide riverside street lined by restaurants and bars on one side and a long promenade on the other. The exemplary National Museum and the golden-roofed Royal Palace are a stone's throw away. You can walk from this area, passing though the markets and old Colonial style streets, to a Wat on top of the only hill in town, thereby strolling through the whole city centre in a couple of hours.

The people are very friendly and like to laugh a lot. It's now a boom town, not as big as Bangkok, nor as mad as Hanoi, nor as smelly as Penang. The King just died, and the Royal Palace is closed to visitors. which is a minor inconvenience for the tourists, of whom there are plenty - though few of them are Brits.

If you want to keep this image of Phnom Penh, read no further.

Cambodia has its problems, so the locals say. They don't just mean the death of the King, and I'm left unsure about how much they include the lingering effects of events several decades ago (see Footnote.for more history).

Before I start on all of the Dark Stuff, I should mention that Cambodia is a Buddhist country. Again.

Genocide museums

A short distance from Phnom Penh's centre is the S-21 detention centre, used to torture and murder 20,000 people between 1975 and 1979, when Cambodia was a communist country. Only 7 of those prisoners were alive when the city was liberated by Vietnamese and rebel Cambodian troops in 1979. If you come to Phnom Penh you feel almost obliged to go to S-21, which is a school building much like any other constructed in the 60s or early 70s. A bit like the school I went to, but a bit bigger, more urban. Two of those 7 prisoners were there, in person this morning when I went to S-21, which is now a museum of genocide. There were scores of similar torture centres across the country.

In case you're wondering why anyone would go to such a place on New Year's Day, it's actually Jan 2nd here.

Erm, yesterday I went another museum, 15km out of town - the killing fields. Or rather, just one of dozens of killing fields spread about the land. This is now a peaceful cemetery, and although there is a modern stupa (think pagoda) piled with skulls, forming the centrepiece of an otherwise unremarkable area. There are a few semi-gruesome reminders of events here, laid out in the grassy landscape.

All this is rather difficult to take in. Looking at Phnom Penh today, you would never guess that this genocide happened as little as 35 years ago. A bland statement, but what can you say.

Which leads into a rather rather sombre What Afterlife column. I'm going to attempt to connect a few themes here, and if it seems tenuous let me say I'm not the first to have a go.  

What Afterlife 

An occasional look at our species' ludicrous belief systems and what they have to offer if you're about to pop your clogs.

Part 19: Communism

Christopher Hitchens has managed, in his incredibly effective diatribe against religion 'God is not Great' (ahem, 'reviewed' below) to make a reasonable case that communism should be viewed not as a political system so much as a religion. This seems at first to be stretching things, but when you consider the parallels (mass belief, centralised power, unverifiable claims and creeds, rejection and defamation of all other religious beliefs), it's quite a helpful way of thinking about how, under the name of communism, such barbaric acts of genocide and mass torture were carried out by ordinary people against their fellow citizens. Substitute the State for the Church, and the head of the Party for the Archbishop, Pope, Imam, Llama or whoever, and there's your system.

In some ways the communist State was (is) like a vengeful God. In Communist countries, life itself could or can be forfeit to the State for any reason the State chose or chooses. As Hitchens points out, an extreme form of religious insanity is still with us, in communist North Korea, where the Head of State (Kim Il Sung, despite being dead) is also a God. North Korea is a cheerless concrete 'workers paradise', just about the worst country on the planet in which to be alive in 2013 - even counting Scotland. (I think that's the only joke in today's blog - sorry everybody.)

In communism, all the people are devoted to the State. There is no afterlife in Communism.

Footnote

So what happened here in Cambodia? In his early years, Pol Pot, a failed student educated in Paris, returned to Cambodia as a Communist Party member and school teacher. In 1975, as head of the Communist Party in Cambodia, he became head of state as the old regime was toppled by the Khmer Rouge, effectively becoming dictator.

Now comes the Inquisition. Money was abolished. Education was abolished. The rural peasants were held up as examples of the cause of collective food production, while all other skills or trades were considered worthless. Within 3 days the cities and towns had been emptied, all the townsfolk being evacuated to the countryside to work on the land, effectively as slaves.  All the teachers and professionals were arrested, along with their families. If you were taken to S-21, or any of the other security centres, you were tortured until you confessed. It didn't matter whether you were innocent - no-one was 'innocent', no-one was released. When you confessed you were killed, or taken to a killing field where you were executed and your body dumped in a mass grave.

Between 1975 and 1979, 3 million people, almost 1/4 of the Cambodian population, were killed under the Pol Pot regime. There is, conspicuously, no mention of ethnicity or religious motive - it was, it seems, pure 'class cleansing', though nobody here seems to use the phrase. Children, babies. the lot. It's hard to think about this in any sensible way at all, you just have to accept that in a regime of terror, fear and under threat of death, people will torture and kill whoever they are told to torture and kill. There was this ideology called Communism that became a religion, and it poisoned everything. Prior to 1075, and again now, Cambodia was a Buddhist country. 

Does Buddhism poison everything? I'm not sure about Hitchens' view, he dodges the issue a bit in God is not Great (as Dawkins does in The God Delusion) - they are way off their home turf, and they admit it. In any case, Buddhism claims no god. But, it does seem very strange that genocide of this sort could have happened here. Buddhists are normally very tolerant people, you know. 

All of which leads, I hope...

into a quick Two Line Review of the Hitchens book, which I read a few weeks ago when I was back in Thailand.

God is not Great ( How Religion Poisons Everything) by Christopher Hitchens *****

Picks up where mere atheism (and even the scorn of Dawkins) leaves off - with a scholarly dissection and condemnation of the texts, claims, and indeed crimes of organised religion - thus Hitchens invents 'anti-theism'. It's almost too easy to for him to fight these beliefs on on their own terms - he's  totally devastating, and, where he allows himself to lighten up, very funny too.