The Angkor Temples, Siem Reap and Battambang

The Angkor temples in north-west Cambodia are the county’s most famous landmark and tourist attraction. Built by the Khmer Kings between 9th and 13th Centuries who at that time ruled much of South-East Asia, the hundreds of temples range in scale from nondescript piles of brick rubble scattered through rice fields to magnificent structures including Angkor Wat, the largest religious building ever constructed, and are spread over tens of square miles.

In most cases, the temples were the religious centres of large walled cities which would at their height have housed the Royal Court and tens of thousands of people. In the intervening centuries the wooden residential and administrative buildings have vanished, swallowed up by the trees, leaving behind just the central temples and the vast outlying city walls as testament to their scale.

The temples are built of a mixture of brick, laterite and sandstone and were all designed to represent the Hindu cosmology, with a central tower representing Mount Meru, home of the gods; smaller towers representing the continents; and a surrounding moat, representing the oceans beyond. This common plan brings some similarity to the temples, yet they are also remarkably distinct. At some the towers are set out in a row; others are pyramidal in shape rising like a mountain out of the flat Cambodian landscape; while others are sprawling structures with multiple concentric chambers and passageways to explore and get lost in.


What is most impressive and beautiful about the temples is the way that they combine enormous scale and grand design with delicate and detailed carvings and bas-reliefs depicting religious figures and stories, the Khmer kings victorious in battle, scenes from everyday life and floral motifs.



We were joined on this leg of the trip by Henry, Kieran’s old housemate and university friend who now lives in Singapore, and his girlfriend Vila who joined us for a week. With them, we spent several days exploring the temples, cycling between them along quiet country roads. With most of that area of Cambodia wooded, the temples sometimes appear, almost without warning, round a bend in the road. Sometimes their scale and fantastic preservation was staggering; at other times the smaller, semi-collapsed structures looked just like a folly in an English stately garden. Although Angkor Wat itself and two of the other most famous temples were crowded with tourists, we were pleased to find that most of the outlying temples were quiet and relatively empty, so that we could wander often with almost no one else around.

The town nearest the temples is Siem Reap. A decade ago when Kieran first visited Cambodia, Siem Reap was little more than a dusty provincial town with a handful of backpacker hostels. Now it’s become the busiest, most Westernised and tourist place we’ve visited with countless hotels catering to all budgets, and wall to wall restaurants, bars and boutique shops. Yet despite its enormous and rapid growth Siem Reap remains an extremely pleasant place to spend time and relax after a dusty day at the temples and we enjoyed basing ourselves there, taking advantage of the delicious restaurants, hotel pools and another fabulous old colonial bar, this time set in the former Governor’s mansion.


Travelling by boat has been such an enjoyable way of getting about Cambodia that we happily opted for an eight hour boat trip from Siem Reap to Battambang rather than a shorter bus journey. It didn’t look promising at the start as our overloaded boat rocked precariously about on the enormous Tonle Sap lake. However the lake soon gave way to a shallow river lined with tall grasses and trees and floating villages, with small children splashing about by the banks. Perching on the outer rim of the boat (providing much needed leg room) we passed the journey enjoyably meandering up the river.


Battambang is the fourth most visited tourist destination In Cambodia but as the average tourist’s length of stay in the country is only five and a half days (with most tourists viewing the country as an add-on to a trip to Thailand or Vietnam) it sees few tourists. This has retained its small town relaxed atmosphere, along with some of the best-preserved colonial architecture in the country. We spent an enjoyable few days kayaking and swimming along the river, wine tasting at Cambodia’s only winery (the wine was excellent, the brandy less so) and visiting Phnom Sampeau, a complex of Buddhist temples set on a hilly limestone outcrop. Harrowingly this was also the site of some notorious “killing caves” where the Khmer Rouge bludgeoned hundreds of people to death before throwing them down into the caves.


We also took a ride on the ingenious local bamboo train, the most unusual train journey we’ve taken. Locals use the old railway line which runs from Phnom Penh to the Thai border to make short journeys around Battambang. Each train consist of a three metre-long wooden frame covered with slats of light bamboo that rest on two barbell-like bogies connected to a six horsepower engine with a fan belt attached to a fly wheel on the axel. They manage to pick quite a speed, and feel even faster so close to the tracks, and it’s an exhilarating, if a little scary, experience to hurtle along the track on a sheet of bamboo with nothing to hold on to! The train line is due to be upgraded shortly which whilst good economically for the area will sadly probably mean the end of the bamboo train.

Phnom Penh

We crossed the border into Cambodia in one the most pleasant ways imaginable: a leisurely boat ride up the Mekong from the Vietnamese Mekong Delta region that took us to the very heart of Phnom Penh. The city’s romantic position on the confluence of the Mekong and Ton Le Sap rivers combined with the beautiful old French colonial buildings, glittering pagodas, ornate Khmer architecture, wide boulevards and open green spaces and largely traffic free roads (at least by Asian standards) make Phnom Penh one of the most appealing cities we’ve been to. We visited it twice: when we arrived in Cambodia and again when we returned from the north-east of the country.

As with the other land borders we’ve crossed, we were struck on entering Cambodia by how immediately it differed from Vietnam. There are of course many similarities between the two: the landscape, the French colonial influence, the bustling street life and profusion of people. Yet as apparent were the differences: the conical hats that were so ubiquitous in Vietnam changed to kramas, (the checked scarves Cambodians use to keep the sun and dust off their heads); poverty is more evident in Cambodia, with more beggars than we’ve seen elsewhere on this trip; yet despite feeling generally poorer there are far more cars and 4x4s in Cambodia and motorbikes no longer dominate the roads as they did in Vietnam; and life seems to operate at a slower and more relaxed pace.


Phnom Penh is remarkably low rise for a capital city, with most buildings only one to three storeys high and only one high rise tower in the city (though this appears to be changing with large construction projects underway). Architecturally the city is a happy mix of French colonial, neo-classical, traditional Khmer and modern concrete buildings. The heart of Phnom Penh is the bustling riverfront area, where one bank of the Ton Le Sap is lined with hotels, bars, restaurants, tuk-tuks (motorbike towed carriages), beggars and amputee book sellers. Luckily the opposite bank of the river has not yet been developed and we spent several evenings watching sunset over the river and open countryside beyond from the terrace of the Foreign Correspondents Club, a fabulous art deco bar where we could almost pretend we were travelling in the “golden age” of tourism in Indochina. While the colonial era may have ended there seems a lingering expat population comprising numerous UN, NGO and aid agency workers.


The most spectacular structure on the riverfront is the Royal Palace, comprised of numerous richly decorated buildings set in immense ornamental gardens. The buildings are designed in the distinctive Khmer style, with high, steeply pitched and curling roofs supported by slender columns and topped by tall thin spires. The roofs are tiled in bright orange and green, with the tips lavishly decorated in gold. Like the temples we’ve seen around the country, the Royal buildings are all comprised of a single large room lifted above the ground on an enormous solid platform. Built in 1866 it has been occupied almost continuously by the Kings of Cambodia, and much of the complex remains the Royal residence.


The National Museum housed one of the most beautiful collections of art we’ve visited. While the Museum itself is built in the same modern Khmer style as the nearby Royal Palace, the fabulous collection of Hindu and Buddhist sculpture it holds was produced during the Angkor era and is evidence of the great ancient Khmer civilisation which dominated South East Asia between the 9th and 14th Centuries. Although Buddhism came to Cambodia with Hinduism in the early Angkorian Period it was initially subordinate to it, and only became the official religion of Cambodia during the 13th Century. Since then all Cambodian men, including the King, have traditionally spent a year of their life as a monk. Most monks were disrobed during the Khmer Rouge period (1975-79) and many of the temples were destroyed, but today Buddhism is again the state religion and plays a large part in daily life. Wat Ounalom, the centre of Cambodian Buddhism, is just behind the Royal Palace and we frequently saw young monks clothed in bright yellow or orange robes wandering the streets of the capital.

Looking at Phnom Penh now it’s hard to imagine the horrors the people of Cambodia experienced just over 30 years ago under the extreme communist Khmer Rouge regime, when an estimated two million Cambodians (over one in four of the population) were killed. The Khmer Rouge took control of the country in 1975 after five years of civil war and embarked on a process of social restructuring, more radical than the world had ever seen. Their aim was to take the country back to “Year Zero” by creating a peasant dominated agrarian society with no money, mechanisation or intellectual life. In a bid to destroy the old ‘exploitive society’ of the towns and cities, they evacuated Phnom Penh within just five days of seizing power. This led to an exodus of two million people into the countryside leaving the capital looted, destroyed and empty for the entirety of the Khmer Rouge’s 3 year and 8 month rule. Video footage we saw of the evacuation and the empty city left behind was heartbreaking.


Tuol Sleng, or S21, is the most harrowing reminder we saw of the suffering unleashed by the Khmer Rouge. This former high school turned prison (photo above) became the largest detention and torture centre in Cambodia and held over 17,000 people of whom only seven were still alive when the Vietnamese liberated the city in 1979. The prison is all the more chilling as on the surface it seems so ordinary and peaceful and simply like the school it once was: there are still blackboards on some of the classroom walls, gardens with exercise frames and shady palm trees. However once inside you see the classrooms are divided into solitary confinement cells, or into interrogation rooms equipped with iron beds and iron shackles. Outside the play frames were used as gallows to suspend prisoners by their feet and torture them. Like the Nazis, the Khmer Rouge kept meticulous records of those held in the camp and classroom after classroom contains hundreds of devastating pictures of those who were detained and later killed, often taken both before and after torture. The museum’s final display focused on the long overdue trial that has now started of four former Khmer Rouge leaders, who’d lived freely for many years – at great anger to many Cambodians. Whilst stopping short of the sort of “truth and reconciliation process” seen in South Africa and Liberia, the trials represent an effort to reconcile the country and its recent past, although it remains to be seen whether the process will keep up with the ageing Khmer Rouge leaders, two of whom have already died in custody.

North-East Cambodia: Ratanakiri and Kratie

Ratanakiri is Cambodia’s most remote province, wedged into the far north-east of the country between the Laos and Vietnamese borders and left isolated from the rest of the country by bad unsurfaced roads. It’s a beautiful region of thick (though sadly rapidly shrinking) jungle, rivers and waterfalls, and of bright red soil that now – in the dry season – left everything coated in a layer of red dust. It took us a slow, bumpy ten hour bus journey to get there from Phnom Penh, but once there we had a fantastic time exploring some of rural Cambodia.

A short bicycle ride outside Ban Lung, the sleepy provincial capital, is Boeng Yeak Lom, a secluded and perfectly circular bright blue lake set inside an extinct volcanic crater. The area is managed by the local community who’ve thankfully refused to allow any buildings within site of the lake so it remains wonderfully quiet, with the upper slopes of the crater densely covered in trees that run all the way to the water. A handful of wooden piers jut out into the lake, providing easy access to the water and lovely sunbathing spots, and we spent two lovely afternoons going for long swims in the warm and crystal clear water, enjoying the tranquillity of the setting.


Another day we set out by bicycle to explore some of the countryside around town. All the way we followed dusty tracks and so came back happy, tired, and entirely covered in the red dust. We ate a picnic lunch and swam at a secluded pool beneath a pretty waterfall, before going for an elephant ride through the jungle. We sat on a small platform on the elephant’s back while the mahout sat on its neck and signalled which way it should walk by pushing on the backs of its ears (though it seemed that the elephant very much dictated our route!). The elephant itself was just as they appear in cartoons, with wonderful floppy ears, coarse wrinkled skin and amazingly long black eye-lashes, and with its slow gait we were rocked on our platform much like being on a small boat.


For four days we went trekking into the jungle north of Ban Lung. We were accompanied by Sarith, our English speaking guide, Sap, a local Kachok man who knew the forest, and Sap’s 19-year old brother-in-law Sara who was hoping to train to become a guide. (It was slightly unsettling to realise that we were closer in age to Sap, a father of eight and grandfather or two who’d served as a child soldier under the Khmer Rouge, than we were to Sara who seemed so much more of our generation.) All three were unfailingly friendly and good company, and spending a few days with them helped give us a small insight into what life must be life amongst the indigenous minorities in this area of Cambodia.


The trek took us from Sap’s village (itself a couple of hours by road and boat from Ban Lung) first through dry paddy fields and scrubby secondary forest used by villagers for their shifting cultivation and then on into the more beautiful primary forest. The vegetation varied from dense thickets that looked (and sometimes felt) completely impenetrable, to more open areas of large, smooth trunked trees. We walked for about six hours a day, with Sap picking, and at times hacking, a route for us through the vegetation. It was enjoyable but tough going and we quickly became coated in sweat and covered in plant debris and small insects that dropped onto us.

Each night we camped near a river, providing water for cooking and a place for us to swim and wash off the sweat and dirt of the day. Our food was a diet of rice and vegetables supplemented by fish that Sarith and Sara caught, and by various fruit and leaves collected along the way. We were continually impressed by the speed all three of our companions could get a fire going, and by Sap’s skill at fashioning implements from bamboo: a pestel and mortar to prepare food, a pot to cook it in, a rack to grill fish, a spatula to stir food, chopsticks to eat with, as well as playthings like a working toy gun. At night we slept in hammocks, which proved far more comfortable than we’d feared, and from where we could listen to the frogs croaking and other sounds of the jungle and watch the stars and moon above us.


The final night we stayed in Sap’s village. There, as elsewhere in Ratanakiri, all the houses were entirely built of wood set on stilts to protect them from snakes, insects and the wet season rains, as well as providing a shady storage area underneath the house. The village was set in a beautiful clearing surrounded on three sides by jungle and on the fourth by a wide river. That evening we were privileged to be invited to a celebration at the house of one of Sap’s sons, who was shortly going to move back to Sap’s house. We arrived to find about 20 children sitting watching karaoke videos in mesmerised silence – perhaps we wondered, because almost no one in the village spoke or read Khmer and so were unable to read or sing the lyrics. Shortly after the generator was switched off, the children sent to bed, and the adults gathered around a large ceramic jar of weak rice. To bless the occasion it was necessary for them to summon the spirits of their ancestors, and to do this they held bamboo straws and chanted for several minutes, after which people took turns to drink in pairs from the jar using long bamboo straws, while the others present talked quietly sitting in the semi-darkness.


We broke our journey back to Phnom Penh by stopping for a couple of days in Kratie, a small town on the banks of the Mekong. Famous within Cambodia for producing krolan (sticky rice and beans, served inside bamboo) and nehm (raw spiced river fish) which are sold around the country, the town’s main draw for tourists are the fresh water Irrawaddy dolphins which can often be spotted nearby. The dolphins live in four deep water pools between Kratie and the Laos border, but in the past decade as a consequence of pollution, fishing and loss of habitat, numbers have fallen from around 1000 to just 70, making them one of the most endangered mammals on Earth. We spent several enjoyable hours cycling some of the quiet roads along the banks of the Mekong, including exploring an island still without cars where the main form of transport seemed to be ox-cart, and took a small rowing boat out into the river to look for the dolphins, and felt very fortunate and privileged to spend an hour watching several of these beautiful animals in their natural habitat.