by Janice Booth
I’ve just eaten the last of my Vietnamese peanut brittle, savouring each sweet, sticky mouthful. I’d watched it being stirred in a massive iron wok above a fire of rice husks, then poured into heavy trays, pressed flat and scored into sticks as it cooled. The smell of smoke, hot metal and bubbling palm sugar filled the long shed where it was made.
The holiday had begun in Cambodia, at Siem Reap, where my father had visited Angkor Wat in 1933. As a child I’d been entranced by his photos of the great temples and particularly their friezes: full of little carved faces with enchanting upward-tilted smiles. I’d always promised myself a trip, and this year the imminent doubling of my travel insurance (I’ve just turned 70) was the nudge I needed.
From London I stopped overnight in Bangkok, at the 3-star Miracle Hometel Suvarnabhumi. Strangely, there was a price list in my room for anyone wanting to buy the furnishings: for example bed-sheets 550 baht, ashtray 60 baht, ‘cloth hanger male’ and ‘cloth hanger female’ 150 baht. The hotel was comfortable and convenient – until my morning wake-up call didn’t materialise and I had a serious scramble to catch the shuttle back to the airport. However, I was so happy to be finally heading for Angkor Wat that it didn’t matter: I loved everyone and everything. The love dissipated slightly when the pilot announced that heavy rain might prevent our landing at Siem Reap, but after we’d circled a few times the clouds parted and down we went. A driver from my guesthouse was waiting and gave me my first of many big Cambodian smiles.
Temple tourism has turned Siem Reap into a large, busy town and the drive in from the airport doesn’t offer much excitement, but once we started twisting among little side-streets it livened up. Small houses and shops jostled together and cyclists festooned with bags and packages wobbled their way through muddy puddles. From the website www.angkorhotels.org I’d picked the Angkor Discover Inn at US$22 a night and it was ideal: peaceful and relatively new, traditionally built, with simple wooden rooms set back from the road in a shady garden. I fixed transport to the temples for the next day and then launched into Siem Reap and its cheery tuk-tuks (motorbike rickshaws). The ride to the central market took ten minutes; returning to the guesthouse in the dark took 45 as the driver didn’t know the town! ‘No plobrem!’ he kept reassuring me as he dismounted to ask yet another stall-holder for directions and then ‘No far’ as he chugged off on the next wild-goose-chase. It’s a measure of Siem Reap that I never felt anxious. ‘Tank you! Tank you!’ he beamed, when we finally arrived and I paid him.
The temples are astounding: their scale and quantity, the colossal work involved, the volume of carving, and the meticulous details of daily life – for example a man blowing the embers of a fire to life, dogs, cockfighting, women with children, fishing, and even a turtle biting a man’s backside. Military scenes abound, as do elephants – which, interestingly, have knees, whereas in early carvings in English churches they mostly don’t. Our sculptors had never seen one! The swarms of brightly dressed children hawking their postcards, scarves, bracelets and other souvenirs amid the massive stonework reminded me of butterflies fluttering against the trunk of some venerable oak. In fact many temples still have big trees rooted among their walls, as they did when Europeans first saw them in the 19th century. John Keeble’s Tales from theTemples (VISA 48) gives some good descriptions and background. Towering Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom, absolute treasure-houses of carvings, date from the 12th/13th centuries, not so far in time from the building of our own great cathedrals: on opposite sides of the globe, builders and stone-workers were exhibiting similar skills, devotion, and loving attention to detail.
Sixty years after enjoying my father’s photos I was still captivated by the faces, whether smiling shyly in the friezes or scanning the landscape with huge, ancient eyes from the temple towers. I’d brought some of the photos with me and people stroked them lovingly, spotting the changes and murmuring nostalgically about the past. I showed them to gardeners, guides, policemen, stallholders, local families, tuk-tuk drivers – and got big Cambodian smiles in return.
A taxi-drive out to a remote temple, Beng Melea, took me through the countryside: paddy fields stretching into the distance, and scattered wayside hamlets where the occasional stall of fruit or vegetables had been set up to catch passing traffic. The houses, mostly wooden, were built on stilts, giving them a useful extra living/storage area underneath. A ladder or thin staircase led up to the rooms. Scrawny dogs dozed, children played, and men sat repairing rusty bits of machinery.
I’m deliberately not talking politics in this piece, but my involvement with Rwanda’s tourism for the past decade made comparisons interesting. Two tiny countries, Cambodia with amazing temples and Rwanda with mountain gorillas, both rebuilding their tourism after genocide, both needing to diversify their attractions so that tourists stay longer: so far, very similar. The difference is that at least 5% of Rwanda’s tourist income from the national parks goes directly to finance small, rural enterprises, and practicalities like village water tanks. No-one could tell me of similar investment in Cambodia – and it’s needed. With around two million tourists in 2008, even a very small percentage of the temple fee (US$20 per day, $40 for 3 days, $60 for a week) could have achieved a lot.
Beforehand I’d also booked an eight-day riverboat cruise with Pandaw Cruises (see www.pandaw.com), down the Tonle Sap River and Mekong Delta to Ho Chi Minh City, preceded by two more days in Siem Reap. Now it was time to leave my guesthouse and hook up to Pandaw – and to a huge treat. Tourist numbers were low, so they’d decided to upgrade my hotel to the gorgeous Raffles Grand Hotel d’Angkor, supreme among Siem Reap hotels since 1933. Wow! Not at all my usual style, but I gulped bravely and adjusted to the deluxe bedroom, huge squashy bed, large swimming pool and delightful, friendly staff.
I loved Siem Reap, not just the amazing temples but also strolling and people-watching. The centre of town has plenty of Asian charm, the market is lively and there’s a pleasant tree-lined walk along the river. I found friendliness everywhere. There’s certainly poverty but also a sense of energy, of people doing their best to recover from the past and get on with their lives. I’ve seen the same in Rwanda. But now my riverboat was waiting and I had to leave.
The boat – the Tonle Pandaw – takes 60-odd passengers but there were just 16 of us: Aussies, Danish, Dutch, American and me, the only Briton. We piled into a coach for a four-hour drive to reach her. It poured the whole way – far too wet to stop and explore Skoun, the ‘spider capital’ where women sell crunchy roasted spiders from stalls beside the road. The Tonle Pandaw was moored alongside a muddy bank on the Tonle Sap River, to the amusement of locals whose homes were only a few yards away. I don’t do cruising normally but this was very laid back: no dressing up, no Captain’s table, no impressing the Jones-hyphen-Joneses. My tiny cabin was comfortable and the top deck gave wonderful views of the river as it gradually widened and grew busier. Small local craft with croaky outboard motors buzzed about among container barges and dredgers, and traditional canoes drifted gently by. Houses and temples peered out from the trees along the bank. We passed islands, some of them large enough to support small villages and farms. Other ‘villages’ floated on the river: ramshackle collections of houseboats containing homes, shops, markets, bars and workshops. Some of the homes had deep cages directly beneath them, for fish farming.
Most of each day was spent ashore, exploring. We visited towns, villages, markets, temples, and inevitably craft workshops. That’s where I bought my peanut brittle: they also made wonderful pop-rice (like popcorn but with rice grains popping and bouncing in a bed of red-hot sand) and carvings from local stone and wood. Once we strolled through paddy fields where villagers were busily transplanting rice seedlings. In Phnom Penh (where we rode in cyclo rickshaws) we went to the Royal Palace, still magnificent despite the looting of 60% of its treasures during Pol Pot’s era. I bought myself some traditional fisherman’s trousers in the Old Market; the stallholder and I had no common language but gestures go a long way! That night a sudden storm whipped up the river and waves splashed against my cabin’s porthole. One Khmer island village, Koh Deak Chor, had been visited by cruise passengers only once before so tourists were still a novelty. Villagers led us along the leafy paths to see their ‘cottage industry’ of making rice-flour noodles, much in demand on the mainland, as well as their breeding pens of tiny pink piglets. Their ‘shop’ was a woman on a bicycle, pedalling and peddling her load of vegetables, fish and meat. A child came running in from the paddy field to show us a bird’s nest she’d just found.
Then we crossed into Vietnam and very subtly the atmosphere changed: slightly brisker, slightly brasher, slightly more cosmopolitan – but the smiles were no less warm. Chau Doc was a bustling, lively town, with a huge street market selling all kinds of fish, meat and vegetables as well as snails, crabs, snakes, toads and crayfish – many of them still alive. Cu Lao Gian Island had a sad government-run home for old women, where we left little gifts of the free toiletries from our cabins and whatever else we didn’t need. In Sadec, we visited the ornate former home of Huyn Thuy Le, lover of French novelist Marguerite Duras. Then a final bus from My Tho took us to frenetic Ho Chi Minh City. I went straight to the airport for my flight to Singapore, where I had just enough time for a swim in Changi airport’s rooftop pool before continuing to London. My first trip to Asia was over.
But look – there’s just one small crumb of peanut brittle left in the packet...
First published in VISA 87 (Oct 2009)
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