Ancient to Modern: From Angkor Wat to KL and Beyond (Ryan)

Right, it's about high time we rounded up this lengthy tale. I don't think it'll all happen in one post, but we'll have it all written down for you soon enough. At least Tim's last photo post reassured you we hadn't all died in some horrible accident somewhere in Cambodge. Yes, we are all still here, have made it home and are reacclimatising to the way of life in our homeland. Before I start I'll just apologise for being so useless and not posting this until a week and a half after getting back to England. I know a fair few people maintain a keen interest in this site and I really owed it to those people to write this update sooner. As I say, sorry for that, and I hope you enjoy this post now it's finally being written.

So, Siem Reap. As Tim said, things at the bus station were pretty hectic and the man with the rubber hose was definitely earning his keep, not that the drivers seem to mind him in the slightest. Our guesthouse was actually very nice and not the worst place for Tim to have been bed-ridden. It had a rooftop restauraunt and free internet and all like that, as well as a pack of tuk-tuk drivers waiting to take you wherever you wanted. Also, on our first day staying there, I bumped into a rather nice bloke called Tim who happens to be going to the same college as me in Oxford this October. Not the first place you expect to meet someone going to your Uni, let alone college, but then I suppose stranger things have happened.

Cut to the next morning, waking up as I did after predictably little sleep but probably just about sober, we met our drivers at around five in the morning, half an hour later than we'd arranged, and headed off to chase the sunrise. The road to Angkor Wat was alive with cars, minibuses and tuk-tuks just like ours, all temple-fiends making the pilgrimage to Angkor Wat for that perfect sunrise photo. As it happens the sunrise was somewhat cloudy and the light not the best for that crowning holiday snap everyone was searching for. Nonetheless, we got a few long-shots for the scrapbook and headed into the main complex. It was huge, built on a scale such as I'd never seen. From the massive gardens out front, on which the fair-sized ante-temples look insignificant, to the inside, where the inner courtyard surrounds the five-spired main section, the whole thing is simply over-awing. Once at the doors into the courtyard, after walking along the path that bisects the huge green area out front, you see that to get to the five towers you have to climb a great flight of stairs and that just puts you at the bottom of the towers themselves, which stand, preserved in almost all their original glory, hand-carved and dominant, above your head. To think that the temple itself was built in the 11th or 12th century and is still standing in such marvellous condition is quite simply mind-boggling.

After our visit to the main temple we grabbed some breakfast, which upset my none-too-delicate stomach a little, and proceeded to Bayon, where almost every stone pillar has had a face carved into it. It was oddly overrun with moss, not something we found to have happened at the other temples, and was not quite as tall as many others, but nonetheless very impressive to walk around and again very old. Once we'd arsed around there for long enough and hugged a few of the faces and whatnot we proceeded to another pair of temples, the names of which I don't recall but which were fairly small and not quite on a par with the others. Following those two we climbed to the very top of another of Angkor's most famous temples, Ta Keo. It's around 40m high and the top was dominated not by moss, vines, or even ancient epigraphs of myth and mystery, but by Japanese tourists. We've got a photo to prove it! It was like a 40m anthill that had just spewed out tens of wee Asian folk with glasses and tiny cameras.

After that spectacle in mass tourism we climbed down, reboarded the tuk-tuks and headed to Ta Phrom, a temple pulled apart by the jungle and Hindus at various times in its life. Still it stands, at least for the most part, an example of the awesome power of nature over stone. Several trees on the site are over two hundred years old and have literally over time torn the stone apart. Some scenes from Tomb Raider, not sure which one of the movies, were filmed at this temple, apparently. I'll have to watch the movies again. Then again, maybe it'd be better to live in blissful ignorance. By this time of day - around 10am and we'd been up since four - it was both inevitable that there would be a good deal more fellow snappers ambling around in great tour parties, and also that we would be becoming quite tired of wandering around gawking at the ruins. Don't get me wrong, they were lovely, very impressive, but there is only so much one can take, especially on limited sleep and in blisteringly hot weather. After paying for a guided tour of Ta Phrom, on which we got to learn a little about some of the carvings, which used to be Buddhas but which were centuries ago scratched out by marauding Hindus and replaced with Hindu deities instead, and the great old trees that had pulled some of the place to pieces, we hit the road back to the guesthouse.

I generally don't remember the rest of our stay in Siem Reap being all that eventful. With Tim laid up and on medication, which had been one of our missions, namely getting him to a doctor to be provided with said medication, it didn't seem right to go out too much. We did go back to the temples the following day after waking at a far more sensible hour and got some nice shots in good light of Angkor Wat itself, but neglected all of the other temples we had visited on the previous day. The rest of the time was spent relaxing and, for Tim, recuperating with his course of antibiotics. Shaun and I did go and give up half a pint of our blood at an international blood clinic on our last day, which we felt was pretty noble and all for a good cause and all like that. Never found out if my sample was actually usable, but let's hope so. There was an outbreak of Dengue Fever at the time of our visit, so it was urgently needed.

On 15th July we flew from Siem Reap, which has a very nice airport, in case anyone was interested, likely so because Siem Reap has one of the highest concentrations of massive five-star hotels probably in the world, to Kuala Lumpur. Needless to say, it was a heck of a contrast. Cambodia, where two miles outside the cities the houses turn to wood and the roads to caking mud, versus Malaysia, where fast-food was back on the dinner menu, no one seemed to be going poor, and where you navigate the capital not in a rusty old carriage tied to the back of a moped, but on an ultra-modern air-conditioned SkyTrain. Shopping malls were our occupation in KL. Never mind the centuries of history and the beautiful Muslim architecture; we went to the mall almost every day and watched movies and shopped and wandered around. When we weren't doing that, we found a couple of handily located internet cafes where we could sit and play online games for hours at a time for peanuts. Safe to say that by this point on our trip the culture had been forgotten. Oddly enough, going to these places was probably one of the best ways to absorb the way of life. The real people in Malaysia don't go to the tourist sites and embark on two-hour walking tours of the city; they go to the mall and kids go to the internet cafes to play games, because they can't at home. So, that's what we did. We were staying in Chinatown, which was an experience in itself, and though the bustle of the city was slightly odd compared to Cambodia, we quickly acclimatised, got the hang of the SkyTrain and generally chilled out whilst making plans for the next few weeks. In the end, we decided to skip most of Malaysia and head straight to the Perhentian Islands, near the Thai border. Why go to the other, lesser, islands, we figured, when we could just go straight to Malaysia's best? So, that's where we went next. Our cutting out of some places in Malaysia might also have something to do with the fact that we wanted to go to the Project Trust volunteers' last night out in Bangkok, but more of that later.

The main thing of note that we did in Kuala Lumpur was to go to the top of the Petronas Towers, those two massive glass structures joined together by a 146m-high bridge that you'd see if you watched Entrapment. The view from the bridge was pretty spectacular and even more so because we very nearly didn't get to see it. The first day we went to try to go up the towers all the tickets had already been sold, the second day they weren't running any trips, because it was a Monday, of course, and the third day we arrived at a fairly sensible time and the place was mobbed. Thankfully a very nice Spanish lady had three tickets more than she needed and gave them to the three depressed-looking English lads at the very back of a very long ticket queue. It's all rather well-oiled, this whole tower-ascending enterprise, in that you go up at a very specific time after watching a video for a given period, then you have your wander around on the bridge and then shoot back down to the ground floor. Efficiency was something we hadn't really witnessed in a long time, so it had more of an impact on us than it should have.

Other than our wee trip up to the top of those towers, it's fair to say we didn't do much in Kuala Lumpur. We did, though, whilst sitting late one night in a McDonalds, decide to head to the Perhentian Islands as soon as we could.

The journey was pretty straight-forward. Malaysia has a very good bus service, which stretches out to pretty much everywhere from Kuala Lumpur, so getting to Kota Bharu, where we had to stay one night before we could catch the early ferry, was pretty straightforward. Admittedly, we arrived at a crazy hour in the morning, which left us a bit tired for a while, but we'd become so accustomed to oddly timed journeys that it barely affected us. We managed to get a few hours sleep at a hostel in the town, before being picked up for taxi transfer to Kuala Besut, where we'd get our boat. Happily enough, it turned out to be a very fast boat journey, on a boat that cut through the waves rather than lazily cruising up and down the crests and troughs and inducing sea-sickness of the third kind.

Now, the Perhentians. After a search for accommodation that took us right from one end of the main beach on the smaller of the two islands, all the way to the other end, in the searing midday heat, we began our chilling out phase. Our main pursuits on these gorgeous islands, of which we regrettably have very few photos, none that do the place justice, were scuba diving, snorkelling and sober nights out. The first of those three was magnificent. We hadn't been diving for months, not since Koh Tao, so to get back into a wet-suit and be leaping into the warm, tropical sea again was wonderful. Shaun and I completed our Advanced Open Water courses, whilst Tim, regrettably, was forced to abstain because he was on antibiotics. Still, me and Shaun continued unabashed. We did a buoyancy dive, to perfect the technique of using our breathing to control our level in the water; a fish identification dive, where we were supposed to be surveying the different schools of fish but basically just swam around in awe of the whole scene; a navigation dive, which is easier than it sounds; a deep dive, on which the visibility was terrible and we saw nothing, and, best of all, a wreck dive. The conditions for our diving the wreck, an old sugar-carrying cargo vessel that sank whilst taking supplies to the larger island, were perfect. The relatively low visibility gave the great looming structure a very eerie feel, whilst the fact that it lay on it's side and the amount of coral and barnacle life made the whole experience quite surreal. We managed to catch some small bamboo sharks sleeping beneath the massive cargo doors a few metres away and saw some massive fish and large schools of smaller ones, at one point ravenously devouring an unfortunate jellyfish.

If you ever get to see pictures of the islands (I'd suggest Google images), then you'll understand why these islands are my personal favourite. In Thailand the islands are typically quite large and have a road network of some description and shops and houses; on the Perhentians the strip of beach melts into tropical jungle on one side and runs down into the crystal clear, temperate sea on the other. The days were so good and the place so stunning and idyllic that we didn't even mind going out at nights and being sober. This was because we were normally diving the next day and, more importantly, alcohol on the islands was just as, if not more, expensive that it was on the mainland. That, and we knew we'd be doing a fair bit of drinking back in Thailand, so a break wouldn't exactly hurt.

So after several days in paradise, we headed back to the mainland in much the same fashion as we had come, back to Kota Bharu, where we caught a cab to the border, a minibus to Hat Yai in Thailand, where we spent one night before boarding a sleeper train back up to Bangkok. The sleeper train was rather interesting and another new experience. At around eight o'clock, so a few hours into the journey, a jolly fat Thai man wandered down the carriage and turned the two adjacent seats into one fair-sized bed and then pulled down a top bunk from where the overhead baggage compartments normally are. All in all a very good use of space, if you ask me. After some slightly dodgy food sold to us by roaming vendors in the aisles and a reasonable nights sleep, considering we were on a train, we pulled into a busy, humid Hualamphong Station at about 7am, ready for another day back in Bangkok and the infamous Khao San Road.

Some more photos (Tim)

The view through the mist from Boko Hill Station, with the sea in the distance.


Boko Palace - reminds me of the house from 'The Shining'.


The inside of the creepy Boko Palace - wet, dreary and desolate.


The waterfall in Boko Hill Station.


Our jeep, broken again. We stand around whilst the driver tries to fix it.


The 'road' we took through the mountainous jungle. You can see why the jeep got nackered.


Ryan and the Welsh guy walking home through the jungle after our jeep finally died.


Our snake, being cleaned for the insicion. I decided not to put any grizzly photos on here.


Ryan about to eat a snake heart. Mmmm...


Us proposing a toast to strength, fertility and good health with a shot of snake blood whisky.


Ryan and Windy (our (drunk) tuk-tuk driver).


Angkor ruins (I was in bed with an infection this day, so I can't write very good captions for the Angkor Wat photos).


Angkor ruins.


Ryan....and some Angkor ruins.


Ryan and Tracy infront of Angkor Wat.


Tracy infront of Angkor Wat.


Angkor ruins.


The Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia - the tallest buildings in the world.


The Petronas Towers by night.

Jungles, beaches and snakes (Tim)

The bridge wasn't properly constructed outside Kampot town so the bus dropped us off early, leaving us dependent on the crowd of touts gathered to receive us. We went with the guy who could speak the most English, who happened to represent the guesthouse we wanted to stay at anyway. The building was old and cavernous, but cheap and so ideal. Kampot is a quiet town that we visited to take a tour up to the top of a nature reserve jungle mountain thing, but when we tried to book it through the guesthouse they told us that they wouldn't be running the tour the next day because the group that had tried to go today had got stuck in the rain and mud and had to turn back. We had to decide whether we were going to wait for a day or two for the rain to clear up (bearing in mind that it was the wet season, so we might have been waiting for a while and Kampot isn't really the most interesting place to while away a few days) or move on. The decision was made, after a brief discussion, to stay the night and get a bus the next day to the Cambodian coast. When we went to book our tickets at the guesthouse they told us that the trip was back on because they'd found a sturdier vehicle than the run-down, sad looking minibus outside, that could handle the roads.

That night we went out to a Sri-Lankan restaurant, and since we were the only customers the owner of the place talked to us for a while about how he'd previously worked in another Sri-Lankan restaurant down the road, but then set up his own and invented the dishes we were eating and were they nice? Yes, you won't find them anywhere else. He was a fairly endearing man, but we really just wanted to eat.
We had to rise early the following morning to start the trip, and after a hurried breakfast, piled into a 4x4 jeep along with a couple of other intrepid adventurers going on the trip. Normal Cambodian roads are in a dismal state - the standard practice of driving is to use whichever side of the road has the least holes, and on some occasions to go completely off the road to avoid crater-size gaps. It says a lot about the state of the mountain road we went on that day to say that it was far, far below the usual Cambodian standard. Sitting on small benches in the back of the pickup, I had to hold on tight to just stay on, a bit what I imagine a bucking-bronco to be like (and this was with the full suspension of a vehicle designed for offroading). Instead of building a road, I think they just decided to string together some of the country's worst potholes, fill them with rainwater and mud and call it a good job. After about 3 hours navigating these ups and downs (mostly ups, since it was a mountain), passing through quite dense jungle, we reached the first stop of the day. This was a villa where the King of Cambodia visited when on holiday around 50 years ago (before all the bad business with the Khmer Rouge). The building was mostly open, like a pavilion and overlooked the drop of the mountain. Through the mist that enshrouded the building the sea was just visible in the distance and when the wind happened to blow, Phu Quoc Island of Vietnam could be seen as a murky spec. The view itself explained why the King had his holiday home built there. A lot of time has passed since then, and you can see this in the disrepair of the building and the graffiti on the walls, If you used your imagination though, you could picture ornamental furniture and exquisite furnishings, all of the King's guests sat at a large table whilst being served course after course of the rarest and most expensive foods. The image of the Khmer Rouge clearing the place out and keeping stores of ammunition and guns there came just as easily.

It was another couple of hours in the jeep until the next stop-off point, but before we could get there, we hit a particularly nasty hole and something went 'crack' rather loudly, and then "rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr" as we continued for a couple of metres before rolling to a stop. The driver and guide jumped out of the front with looks on their faces that weren't exactly reassuring. The wheel was bent at a squiff angle, the way that a broken leg might. "I think it's the axle that's bent," advised a large American guy (who's name was Oak). The driver fetched a large toolkit from the back, jacked up the vehicle and began to expect the damage, whilst we got out and watched them work, discussing how long it'd take to walk back down (about 4 or 5 hours, I guessed). After 10 minutes, they found that the problem was that the suspension spring above the wheel had slipped (not that the axle had bent, luckily enough) and that it just had to be manoeuvred into place again, which involved levering the wheel with a plank of wood whilst doing something else (I wish I knew more about cars). 5 minutes later it was good to go again and we were on the road once more.

After an hour we reached the main attraction of the day - Boko Palace, an ex-casino, ex-hotel, with eeriness to match the house from The Shining or The Haunting. It was a huge derelict stone and brick building, the windows of which had long ago been removed. A thick layer of mist hung over the site and surrounding mountain-top plane, increasing the feeling of remoteness. When we pulled up in the jeep we were only a couple of metres from the building, but it appeared to us as a dark shadow in the bleak white. Just outside the entrance was a sign saying "No Sleeping", but I think you'd have to be seriously crazy or on 'Most Haunted' to want to spend the night. We wondered around the dark, wet and very creepy corridors whilst our guide prepared lunch, always pretty careful not to stray too far from each other.

As we ate, the guide explained to us the history of the place - before the era of Pol Pot, the building used to be a hotel and casino, where the rich came to spend their money (I assume the place was better furnished back then). There is a large 300m cliff unfortunately placed behind the hotel, where the occasional gambler who had just blown all his earnings jumped to his death. Then it was taken over by the Khmer Rouge, where the cliff was convenient for the disposal of any un-ideologically sound Cambodians. Even now, people still go there to end their lives by jumping off - the most recent being the previous year. Every December, Cambodians from all over the country make the tedious trip to the top of the mountain for a large New Years Eve party that is held in the derelict building. At the last party two people shot and killed each other (as a result of some drunken dispute about the headlights of a car) and several other people were injured by shooting, not to mention injuries received from the building itself (in many places water covers the floor, making it slippery). Would make for an interesting night, if you lived to see the New Year.

After eating, we had some more time to explore the labyrinth of corridors contained within the hotel. A thick layer of grime has built up on the walls over the years and many people who have visited have written messages and drawn pictures by wiping away the dirt. This gives the impression of the cells in a mental institution where the patient has gone mad and written on the walls (again, like The Shining). We took the opportunity to make the most of the eery nature of the house to make a few Blair-Witch style videos on my camera. In one, Ryan is the unseen beast and Shaun and I are the victims-on-camera. We ran away for a while, until Shaun slipped over in that water I was talking about and got absolutely soaked (the camera just managed to pick that up) and then Ryan came out and poured a bottle of water over his head, which made it look a bit like he was melting. The end result was actually quite scary/funny to watch.

The next stop was a large church on a hilltop about 300m away from the Boko Palace. The Cambodian Army used this as a base in fighting the Khmer Rouge in Boko, and a shootout between them (with the Khmer Rouge in the Palace) lasted 3 years. A short way from the church was an anti-aircraft gun that was also used at the time. The last place we visited that day was a large waterfall (the suspension spring slipped once more on our way there, requiring us to all get off and the guys to jimmy it back into place). We walked to the waterfall, which was actually fairly impressive - not as big as some we saw in Laos and Thailand, but really wide and powerful. It was getting late by this point, so after a while we decided to go home. This was easier said than done. A little after we started back, the spring slipped again but proved more difficult than before to fix. As a temporary remedy to the problem, the driver tied a piece of string and a spanner to something or other to keep it in place. This bit of improvisation proved to work quite well and we got a long way down the mountain before we hit a particularly bad hole and the string snapped (the spanner fell off long ago). This time it sounded worse than before..it took the guys much longer to 'fix' it, and a short while later it happened again. After 20 minutes it was clear we were going to have to walk (pushing the jeep every once in a while so it could coast down, all the while making a really bad grating sound). This only worked so long, until they decided to abandon the jeep altogether - it was a lost cause (until someone could come back the next day and tow it down). After a while walking, a jeep passed us with a Cambodian family inside. They stopped and offered us a lift, although there was only room for a couple of us (there were 12 in total). The two guides jumped straight in ("We'll get help, we'll get help"..hmm) and a couple of the other people on the trip, including Shaun and Tracy. This left Ryan, a middle-aged French man, a Welsh man named Andy (I think), Oak and I. By this time it was getting very dark very quickly, which was not only quite scary, being in a jungle on a mountain in Cambodia (where tigers, bears and snakes are common at night), it was also becoming increasingly difficult to see where the road was, and more importantly, where the road wasn't. The French guy was not as nimble as the rest of us and had quite bad eye site so stumbled over a couple of times, almost straining his hands and feet but luckily not as I have no idea how we would have got down then. Every time he fell I was trying to recollect my scout training of how to fashion a stretcher out of tree branches and a t-shirt. It wasn't so bad once our eyes got used to the dark..we heard some lizards and saw a few fireflies lighting up the night. After about an hour and a half we encountered an open-back truck about to pass us and managed to hail it down. The front cab was full and in the back was a collection of logs, petrol barrels, water canisters (that sort of thing) that we climbed on top to get a lift down. All of us got on, apart from Oak (despite the fact that there was more than enough room, if only he perched upon a barrel or something). Instead, he ran along behind the truck in quite a comical way - it reminded me of the t-rex chasing jeep scene in Jurassic Park. It was totally unnecessary..I think we later agreed he had a bit of a hero complex - wanting to get back unaided all by himself. Near the bottom the minivan of our guesthouse (the one that hadn't made it the previous day) was coming to find us and so we thanked the truck drivers and got in (this was a bit more comfortable) and after waiting a few minutes for Oak to catch up, we sped home - exhausted but pretty happy to be heading shower-wards. After cleaning we went out to get some food with (the guy I think is called) Andy and his girlfriend, and a Taiwanese guy also on the trip to discuss the events of the day.

The morning after we hired a taxi to drive the 70(ish)km to Sinhoukville - a place equivocal to Nahtrang in Vietnam..a few bars by the sea open till late and not much to do during the day. After all that tourism and adventure this set-up was ideal. We spent a few days relaxing and not really doing much of interest, but on the last night we wanted to try out the Cambodian tradition of eating snake at a place called (conveniently, we thought) "Snake House". We grabbed some motorbike taxis, but on getting to the restaurant found that the place wasn't called Snake House because they served snake, but because all around (and inside) the tables were snakes in tanks. Whilst still novel, this wasn't quite what we wanted. I asked if maybe they couldn't catch one and cook it up, but sadly they declined. Instead I had some pretty mundane chicken, which was quite an anticlimax.

The day after that we headed back to Phnom Penh to spend a few nights before going to Angkor Wat. I had an infection so spent the rest of that day and the next in bed. Ryan went with a tuk-tuk driver to get a new mp3 player as his broke, and happened to mention that we wanted to eat snake and coincidentally the driver used to work in a place that would cook some for us, so the guy took him to order 2 for later (at about $50 each). When we got to the restaurant (I'd say much posher than the places we're used to eating), a large number of waitresses swarmed us with beer menus until we ordered a couple whilst our snakes were caught from their box/tank. The manager asked us what liquor we wanted with the snake blood - whisky or wine, etc. etc. (settled with whisky as it was cheaper). We were told to go to the kitchen, where the first snake had it's head tied to a shelf (it was a cobra, I think) and one of the chefs was holding the tail of the snake to prevent it from wriggling. It was at this stage that we all started to feel quite guilty about paying to have snakes killed - like we would had we ordered beef and had to watch the cow get slaughtered. The chef started by slicing open the bottom half of the snake and pulling out some of the innards, to let the blood run into the jug with whisky in. After the snake had been drained, the head was cut off to finally kill it and the body taken away. A few moments later the chef offered us a small dish with the still-beating heart. Ryan took a part (it almost beat out of his hand) and swallowed it whole, drinking down a glass of the blood and whisky mix straight after (yum?). Shaun took the other part and did the same. We returned to our table and drank some shots of the blood and whisky (tasted like an alcoholic meaty broth..quite disgusting really as I don't like whisky) whilst talking to our tuk-tuk driver until they had got the other snake out, so we watched the whole grizzly process again. This time the heart was mine, so after poking it a bit I lifted the dish and swallowed the heart whole, as you're supposed to do. It wasn't really a pleasant feeling swallowing a ball of raw meat and it was strange to feel the heart still beating as it went down my throat into my stomach. It's traditionally believed in Cambodia that eating the heart and drinking the blood gives you strength, courage and fertility. I just felt a bit queasy. We sat and talked and drank some more until the dishes were brought out - a soup with sections of snake spine in and a salad with snake meat. We did all feel guilty so tried to eat as much as possible. The spine was quite a lot like fish with the amount of thin bones you had to strip the meat off, but tasted like something near chicken apart from the skin, which was slimy and not very nice. The salad was pretty good, but the snake meat tasted a lot more like seafood. By the time we'd finished, our tuk-tuk driver had had a few beers and was looking non-too sober, but he told us to "trust Windy" (for that was his nickname) and we didn't really have any other way of getting home so didn't have much of a choice. He did weave from side to side whilst driving, but that wasn't too far from the standard Cambodian style of driving and we got home safely, so all was well.

The next day we got a bus to Seam Reap, arriving at the bus station to see a massive crowd of tuk-tuk drivers wanting to take us (because if they can take you to your guesthouse then they can negotiate prices for day-trips to Angkor Wat, which is where their main business comes from) and a man who's soul job was to keep the drivers back by whipping them with a length of rubber tubing. We managed to find two good English speaking driver to take us to the guesthouse, and invariably organised for them to take us to the temples the next day.