The lily pond at Angkor Wat
Our guide was a small, businesslike woman, her official guide’s badge pinned to her utilitarian white shirt. Black jeans, running shoes and an oversized white sunhat completed the uniform. The Golden Banana had organized her and the accompanying tuk tuk for the day on our behalf. We climbed aboard, and sped away through the city and beyond through the sunny heat. At the gate, we paid our US $20 each, and had our pictures taken for the visa that would allow us entry to the site, and our excursion began.
starting our tour
Information about Angkor abounds, and so instead of information, none of which would be new, I can only provide my reactions, which might have been duplicated and echoed in others’ reactions, but are nonetheless new. Our guide was well-trained, and selected the most efficient route for a one-day visit to the site which one could easily spend days or even weeks exploring. So we went in via a side gate, along a long roadway where monkeys peeked out from the undergrowth of the patches of jungle. Keep your cameras close, or the monkeys wouldn’t hesitate to saunter up and make off with them.
Angkor Wat is a favorite place for wedding pictures
This flanking approach did allow the effect of the site to be perhaps a little less overwhelming than if we had approached it full frontally. The site has been there for centuries, and was at various times the seat of power in the region, the focus of the spread of Hinduism and Buddhism, off and on. The architecture is impressive and solid – heavy foundations upon which only slightly less heavy structures rise in a geometry of curves and straight lines that suggest both order and imagination. Elaborate epics are carved into the stonework along the extensive colonnades of all the buildings throughout the complex, full of historical and religious meaning. High civilization, lost to the outside world for centuries until a French archaeologist unearthed it. The painstaking work of preservation, restoration and uncovering now goes on thanks to grants and aid from many foreign countries – especially, it seems, Germany and Korea.
Our guide did a wonderful job of selecting our route, and choosing the particular sections of the complex we would visit. We finished off with a visit to a section that was being left, more or less, the way the jungle had reclaimed it, and where the movie Tomb Raider was shot. At this particular location, we approached this section of ruins along a wide dirt walkway overhung with trees, and accompanied by the deafening sound of cicadas that you can hear in the video below. Our guide was full of the history of the complex, but also full of the more recent history of Cambodia. She was from a rural family, as were most of the people who lived in Siem Riep – the city had been cleaned out during the rule of Khmer Rouge. Now, she was the only one in her family to have finished her education and who had risen to the dizzying position of tour guide, which brought with it an income that looked after her extended family. Her sister was also pursuing an education that would make her financially successful.
The unique sound of cicadas at Angkor Wat
We returned to our hotel via a different route, open country, and then into Siem Riep via the back way, it seemed. Along a quite, dusty and winding road next to the river, past houses and small restaurants and shops where, one imagined, the true locals dwelled and lived. On the opposite river bank, houses hung over the river on stilts, forming a sort of extended shanty town for a mile or two until the more solid structures of concrete replaced them. At the point where the ramshackle buildings petered out, the river banks were covered instead with scrub, or grass, or dirt, festooned with garbage and shreds of plastic.
At the hotel, we gave our guide a tip of about half her day’s wages – $10 – and retreated to our room and the poolside, still absorbing the power and history of Angkor Wat, and still fermenting the bubbling impressions of modern Siem Riep, its recent horror, and its climb out of despair into the blinking daylight of the new century.
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