ANGKOR. Day 5-6 – For 15 minutes I had one of the world’s most-visited ruins to myself. While the crowds outside snapped sunrise photos of Angkor Wat’s lotus-bud towers I snuck into the temple’s inner sanctum. My footsteps alone echoed through stone corridors lavished by Hindu deities and magnificent bas-reliefs glorifying the 12th-century King Suryavarman II. As sun rays sliced through the jungle, I briefly connected with the spirituality Angkor Wat was built to convey. As Angkor receives so many visitors, I’d hatched a plan to circumvent the hordes so I could enjoy moments of quieter reflection. I’d cycled pre-dawn from nearby Siem Reap, glad to stretch my legs after the previous day’s crossing into western Cambodia. With the freedom of my hired bike I could go as I pleased.
At 7.30am, the cicadas revving like chainsaws, I reached the popular mid-12th-century Ta Phrom temple in near solitude. It is much photographed because of the great dipterocarpus tree roots that throttle and tilt its stonework, reminiscent of how Frenchman Henri Mouhot found Angkor on rediscovering it in 1860. Thereafter I stopped at temples not on tour-bus schedules, such as magnificent red-laterite Pre Rup. I enjoyed lunch alfresco at an open-air restaurant, preferring its fried rice to its ‘fried sparrows’. I reached late-i2th-century Angkor Thom, city of King Suryavarman VII, just as the tour-buses hightailed it back to Siem Reap for lunch.
This allowed me to enjoy its structures, decorated with elephants and totem pole-like facades of human faces, in peace. It was just me and some local children, who danced in the dust devils whipped-up by the withering heat of the stone city’s courtyard. By late afternoon burgeoning crowds had accumulated for sunset viewing from the hilltop Phnom Bakheng temple. Instead, I cycled back to a near-deserted Angkor Wat to watch it smoulder crimson in the lowering sun, bringing an end to my alternative day of Angkorian exploration.
PHNOM PENH. Day 7-8 – The morning boat from Siem Reap arrived in Phnom Penh near the Mekong-facing Foreign Correspondents Club (FCC). I checked into this atmospheric hotel with its famous rooftop bar where expats and visitors mingle for cocktails. Appropriately, given my day ahead, FCC’s balcony was where war photographer Al Rockoff (played by John Malkovich in The Killing Fields) recorded the arrival of Pol Pot’s murderous Khmer Rouge, who reigned from 1975 to 1979. I agreed a fee of $20 with tuk-tuk driver Peou-Dam for him to take me around. We went first to Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, where the Khmer Rouge interned political prisoners and tortured them into confessing to being saboteurs or CLA agents.
Twenty thousand souls passed through this former school; the classrooms remain partitioned into bleak cells. The tragic photographs of victims and their forced testaments make for moving viewing. Some 45 minutes away is Choeung-Ek, one of 300 Cambodian killing fields where Pol Pot’s victims were bludgeoned to death and cast into mass graves. If the self-guided audio-tour – narrated by a survivor – is harrowing, the 9,000 skulls of victims stacked inside a stupa left me numb.
Peou-Dam was a teenager during this period. He was sent to a labour camp and lost seven family members. “I left my little sister to go and find food. When I returned, she had disappeared forever.” He was crying now. Back at FCC, I sat overlooking the Mekong promenade. It was thronging with happy families and couples. It was inspiring to see to how far Cambodia’s come from those dark days, just a generation ago.
