Waterworld

Cambodia's Tonle Sap lake is South East Asia's biggest, and during the wet season it expands enormously as water backs up from the mighty Mekong near Phnom Penh, and covers a large proportion of central Cambodia. During the dry season the water drains out again and the lake shrinks to a fraction of the size. So the Tonle Sap river, which flows down to the Mekong, reverses its flow twice a year.

A lot of transport in Cambodia has traditionally been up and down the Tonle Sap river or across the Lake. If you want to go from Phnom Penh to Siem Reap or vice versa, you can do it by boat, but I gather it's slower, more crowded and less comfortable than the bus these days (the roads have been greatly improved of late). Lonely Planet still recommends the boat trip across the lake as a good way to travel between Siem Reap and Battambang.

I actually stuck with buses for all my Cambodia travel, and they all worked well. But I did visit the Lake on a day trip from Siem Reap, and got a feel for this Cambodian Waterworld. There's a floating village, called Chong Kneas, where they're all set up to show tourists around. It was towards the start of the dry season, and the lake was contracting, so the floating houses were in the process of being moved. They need to move them several times a year, many kilometres in fact, as the shoreline contracts and expands. 

So you see all this, and you see the floating markets in operation, and the crocodile farm, and you even get to visit a Catholic church and private Catholic school-orphanage. First though, they take you to a grocery store and tell you you need to take a gift of some food, as the school depends totally on such donations. It's probably legit, but how can you tell at the time? A 50kg bag of flour for $50 is suggested, then when you prevaricate, it comes down and down, till we settle for a $12 box of instant noodles. Off we go again on our boat ride, the gift is given, I'm introduced to the teacher and the class.

It turns out they're absorbed in a TV show though. It is Sunday, after all. No lessons today. No need for me to provide an English lesson. After a quick "Hello", they don't really want to know me!

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Cambodia's Lexus junketeers

I read that there are 50,000 Lexus cars in Phnom Penh alone, and I could see that this was probably about right. Yet Cambodia is dirt poor, so how could this be?

I saw a log jam of Lexuses outside the Central Markets. It was being shuffled around by a parking attendant to enable one of them to get out. A motor bike parked behind one was skittled when it got shuffled backwards into it. The worried looking motor bike owner came running over, but said nothing as he picked up his machine. You don't tangle with Lexus owners.

There are lots of stories about how luxury vehicle drivers, with all the right connexions, get off scott free when they are responsible for fatal accidents even, and they never get tickets for parking or any other traffic infringement.

I had another encounter with the Lexus army in the town of Kompong Thom, when I tried to book into the main hotel there (rooms with ensuite, TV & AC for $8). The nice receptionist kindly warned me that all the quiet rooms away from the karaoke room were taken, and suggested that if I didn't like loud music until 3am I might want to try their guesthouse next door (rooms with ensuite, TV & fan for $5). I took the guesthouse option and it was fine.

I saw later that the hotel was being used for a World Food Programme meeting of some sort, and was surrounded by Lexus and other big 4-wheel drives. I was told that the international aid machine in Cambodia had pretty well become a giant circus of junketeers, funnelling money into the country, but really just going to endless meetings and karaoke sessions, and providing well paid cushy jobs for members of the ruling party and their cronies. Nobody I spoke to thought any of the aid effort was doing a lot for ordinary Cambodians.

Cambodia is a multi-party democracy these days. The problem is that government hasn't changed hands for 30 years. The Cambodian Peoples Party has successfully used all the tricks in the book to hold onto power. The majority of the populace are uneducated rural folk, and their support is easily bought. Very little is actually done for the poor, while those with the connexions play karaoke and ride around in the Lexuses.

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Cambodian market scenes

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Taking silk in Cambodia

Budd Gibbons is an American Vietnam War veteran, who now lives in Cambodia with his Cambodian wife, and runs what he describes as his personal, private aid organisation. 

He used to work for a larger charity  which made and fitted artificial limbs to amputees. (There are lots of these around because of all the landmines). He observed though that many of the recipients would soon remove their prosthesis and go back to their former profession of begging. The attempt at aid had backfired, by reducing the recipient's earning power.

So now he and his wife own and operate the Santuk Silk Farm, a few kilometres out of Kompong Thom. They employ and train local women in the traditional craft of silk weaving. Like so many such traditional arts and crafts, it had died out during the Khmer Rouge years. Most of the silk is actually imported, but they have a silk farming demonstration set up, mulberry bushes, silk worms and all.

You can pick up any number of (probably imported) cheap silk scarves in Siem Reap and elsewhere, and the ones here are more expensive, but with the impeccable pedigree, the guaranteed high quality (I was assured), Budd's hospitality, and the experience of meeting the weavers themselves, I was delighted to purchase a few samples to give to Fenella, my own textile and fabric afficionado. 

To inspire his staff, whenever there's a sale Budd identifies the relevant weavers and gets them to pose with their creations. Keep up the good work, people.

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Now this is a light rail system!

The Cambodian railway network fell apart quite a while ago, and I inspected the relics of the old French-era repair sheds and rolling stock at Battambang station. The system is in fact being renovated bit by bit now, though not yet this particular section.

There is however one little passenger rail experience you can have here. It's a quirky, one-off tourist experience, and it's called the Bamboo Train. The wagons are literally just bamboo platforms, sitting atop two bogies, with a small petrol engine and fan belt drive. You bang and clank along the dreadfully out-of-true tracks for a few kilometres between two stations just out of Battambang, then come back again. It's a single track line, and lots of other tourists are doing it too, each with their own train and driver. 

So what happens when two trains meet? Easy. One gets dismantled, the other goes through, then back onto the tracks and off again.

There was some protocol about who gets to go through and who has to be dismantled, but I couldn't work it out. I tended to be getting out most of the time.

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Cambodian rural scenes

Tomb Raider temples

I only watched Tomb Raider after I got back from Cambodia, because I'd read about how several of the Angkor temples were used as locations in the film. It's total garbage of course, worse even than I'd expected. But it was interesting to see those great temples again. I'd visited most of them during my petit tour by remork-moto, or on my self-guided bicycle grand tour the next day.

 









Here's Lonely Planet's guide to Lara Croft's (Angelina Jolie's) adventures there:

"The Cambodia shoot opened at Phnom Bakheng, with Lara looking through binoculars for the mysterious temple. The baddies were already trying to break in through the east gate of Angkor Thom by pulling down a giant polystyrene apsara. Reunited with her custom Landrover, Lara made a few laps around Bayon before discovering a back way into the temple from Ta Prohm. After battling a living statue and dodging Daniel Craig (aka 007) by diving off the waterfall at Phnom Kulen, she emerged in a floating market in front of Angkor Wat, as you do. She came ashore here before borrowing a mobile phone from a local monk and venturing into the Gallery of a Thousand Buddhas, where she was healed by the abbot."

I visited about 30 of the Angkor temples over three days, and got a bit templed out. Lonely Planet says you don't actually get templed out, as the temples are all so different. But not to worry, it means I've left a few for next time.

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Angkor Wat

The temples of Angkor are among those World Heritage sites which leave you a little stunned and awestruck at first encounter. That first view of Angkor Wat, the biggest of them, is on a par with that first glimpse of the Taj Mahal, the Grand Canyon, Uluru, or the wilderness of Tasmania.

The sheer size of it gets you. It covers about 2 square kilometres, and the moat around it is 190m across - putting to shame that of any European castle. There are kilometres of passageways inside the inner and outer walls, all engraved with intricate carvings. It was built by 300,000 workers and 6000 elephants, about 900 years ago, when it is thought that Angkor may have been the world's biggest city.

I spent a couple of hours there on my first visit, to get a feel for the place before continuing my 'petit tour' of several of the other temples. Then in the afternoon, I finished up at the nearby hilltop temple from where people get to see it in warm sunset colours. A couple of days later, when my three-day $40 ticket was about to run out, I went back there for the whole afternoon. This is when I got my 'sunset reflections in the lily pond shots', along with dozens of other keen photographers that day.

Among the subjects frequently seen in the bas reliefs are the apsaras, the temple dancers. Here is one of the modern dance troupes with their new international recruit!

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Welcome to Phnom Penh 2

People often tell me they're not interested in politics. My standard response these days is that they may not be interested in politics, but politics is still interested in them (so watch out)!

Nowhere is this this illustrated better than in Cambodia. You visit the temples of Angkor to marvel at them, but also you visit the other must-see sights: the genocide memorials.

Cambodia put on one of the great all-time genocides in the late 1970s. Technically, there's some argument that it wan't a genocide, as it was aimed at political and economic classes, rather than ethnic or religious groups. But that doesn't help the 2 million or so who were butchered or who died following the forceable evacuation of the cities. Or those who endured chaos and poverty for many years afterwards.

Failed intellectual and psychopath Pol Pot, and his Khmer Rouge colleagues, decided in 1975 that Cambodia needed to go back to Year Zero. Teachers, intellectuals, and artists had to be got rid of. Zero sounds like a good place to start from, but without teachers, intellectuals and artists, you don't actually go anywhere useful. And Cambodia went nowhere for quite a while, except to yet more internal strife and suffering. (And amazingly, the western world, Australia included, continued to support the Khmer Rouge as the rightful holders of the country's UN seat, for many years after their forceful removal in 1979 by Vietnam.)

So in Phnom Penh you visit (mostly in stunned and respectful silence) the former torture prison of Tuol Sleng (S-21), with its meticulous photographic records of the victims, its torture equipment, and its wire mesh barriers to stop inmates jumping prematurely to their death. You go out to the nearby Killing Fields site at Choeung Ek, to see the remains of the mass graves, the piles of skulls and other bones, the bone fragments and items of clothing still protruding through the ground in places. You see the reminders of the cost-cutting technologies used to kill many - the tree against which children and babies were swung and smashed to death, and the palm trees with tough jagged leaf edges, which were used to cut people's throats.

Nobody has yet been brought to justice for any of this. Pol Pot died in 1988. 'Case 002' is the case currently being held by a joint Cambodian / international tribunal, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, against four of his leading henchpersons. One has been let off the hook because of declining mental capacity, and there are fears the other three will get to die before anything much happens with the case. 

Still not interested in politics?

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