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Travel Story - The temples of Angkor Wat

Tuk Tuks, Angelina Jolie and one bad-ass bull in Cambodia

Last November I arrived in Siem Reap, Cambodia, to visit the temples of Angkor Wat, the "City of Temples". I had just finished studying yoga in Thailand and only had seven days to spare before continuing my travels onto Hong Kong. The one-hour flight departing from Bangkok had sounded far more appealing than a 10-20 hour truck ride. I had heard one too many stories involving crammed vans, flailing children, flat tires, knee-deep mud and last-minute transfers onto trucks with bananas and chickens. Admittedly, motion sickness combined with claustrophobia is an issue for me, and during this leg of my journey "Bangkok Belly" parasites were enough of a challenge.

Flying into Siem Reap is like soaring over a big bowl of black bean and broccoli soup. Muddy water from Tonlé Sap Lake, particularly after monsoon season, engorges most of the land and trees surrounding the city and its sacred temples. The thought of a very heavy aircraft landing adjacent to such swampy ground was particularly daunting from my fish-bowl/window seat view. But upon our safe landing, hotel pushers eagerly lined the airport tarmac holding large signs with the names of various hotels.

One of the few obscure facts about Siem Reap that I armed myself with while in Canada was that Angelina Jolie, while filming Tomb Raider , stayed at a hotel called The Red Piano. So when my eye caught The Red Piano sign floating amidst the sea of hotel signs, the Vanity Fair Woman in me marched immediately towards the young man holding it. I thought I might be onto a great travel story, particularly for the girls back home: "So there I was, finding relief from the midday sun, drinking vodka and cran under the shadow of a ceiling fan at a hotel called The Red Piano, and who sits down next to me – Angelina Jolie on vacation with her publicist and Cambodian-adopted son. After several hours of heart to heart laughter and pinky swearing, I managed to convince Ange to collaborate her money and beauty with my… whatever, and the product of our happenstance meeting and shared compassion for the world inspired us to found the Save the Universe campaign…."

To my dismay, it was later revealed that Angelina hadn’t been around town for quite some time and had stopped only once at The Red Piano a few years ago, in between shoots and just for a ham sandwich. There’s a photo of her on the wall with the owner and that’s where the story ends.

My travel partner, Marissa, and I hired Mam, a 30-something Cambodian resident originally from Phenom Phen, as our guide. Renting a motorbike or bicycle to tour from wat (temple) to wat is the sweetest way to go. Gliding along the bumpy roads under the early-morning sun and whirl of cicadas is golden. But if you do rent or hop on the back of a motor taxi, make sure the driver or rental business provides a helmet for you. Motorcycle accidents are as common in South-East Asia as three year olds falling off their tricycles along the Valley Trail.

Angkor Wat is only one of over 100 wats. They cover about the same area as Manhattan. The temples were built between 800 and 1200 AD. Land mines once riddled the surrounding countryside during the genocidal terror led by Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge in the late 1970s, but the majority have since been de-activated and removed. Since 1992, many of the crumbling temples have undergone major restoration, after UNESCO claimed the area as an international heritage site. Tourism to these historic sites has dramatically increased over the past 10 years.

The temples that line the periphery of Angkor take about 30 minutes to get to, so I would advise that you travel via taxi or tuk-tuk. (Be sure to bring a scarf to protect your nose and mouth from dust). I made the mistake of riding to the farthest of the stone monuments – a three-hour round trip – on the back of a very skinny motorbike. By the end of the journey, my sacrum was forever changed, I was covered from head to toe in red dirt, I suffered from heat stroke and my Greta Garbo scarf/sunglasses look was clearly a fashion-over-function mistake. I should have worn an ice-packed sumo suit. Sure, it was fun… for five minutes… and then I just got sore, paranoid of falling off along the pot-holed road (helmet-less) and extremely cranky.

I spent three days with my travel buddy and four days on my own. Hiring a driver for around $15 US a day is a bit more expensive and less adventurous but it’s a good way to see the temples if you only have two or three days in Siem Reap or can’t take the heat for more than several hours. I was entirely templed-out by day five and befriended a tuk-tuk driver who, upon my request, drove me to the outskirts of the city to watch the sun set over the lush, electric-green rice fields. We did a bit of 4x4ing in our tuk-tuk along the red dirt roads and were fortunate enough to pass local farmers returning from the fields herding their cattle. Dry red earth kicked by us in their path. I received a few odd looks and was a tad embarrassed as I must have looked like the princess in her motorized pea, tuk-tuking along the rural roads in an area obviously not frequented by "temple goers".

My only moment of fear in Cambodia arrived during this particular adventure when our tuk-tuk was charged by a lone bull tied to a post at the side of the road. It was a good thing my new friend was fast on the clutch. Angry sharp horns were only a few feet away from ripping through my luxurious red velvet seat. Admittedly, I came quite close to soiling myself, but with God’s Speed we negotiated our way back to town and managed to not get bucked into the rice paddies.

It’s a good idea to buy an Angkor Wat guidebook for $1 or $2 US from one of the many children who rush your car/motorbike/bicycle with arm loads of books, scarves, wooden toys and Kodak film. Once I got used to the children’s uncanny Wall Street sensibility for selling simple goods and accepted that I couldn’t buy every single wooden flute from every child I found, sitting down and buying a group of them lunch was far more rational and fun.

Both the adults and children love to chat and are quite language savvy, a skill most likely motivated by the money that propels tourism. Still, their ability to converse between Khmer, French and English made this Canadian girl feel quite embarrassed by my own second language complacency.

The temples, although now consistently flooded with tourists, are some of the most magnificent structures that I have had the privilege to see. They have been built with the authority and vision set by their contemporaneous kings as well as the religious mindset of each century, alternatively Hinduism or Buddhism. Beyond the magnitude of the structures are the most detailed and passionately etched bas reliefs. I couldn’t stop tracing my fingers over these stone insets of dancing ladies and mythical creatures that line almost every pillar, hallway and façade, making the journey from entrance to exit a voyeuristic one through Angkorian history. The dark alcoves and hallways converge with shrines dedicated to Buddha, reek of incense, and are usually flanked by one or two monks asking for donations. Heavy stone archways, vaulted ceilings and ancient trees melt into one another as though they all derive from the same element.

Angkor Wat can be as haunting and as mystical as your imagination allows. On departure day, I managed to slide out of bed at 5 a.m. to watch the sunrise over Angkor, the grandest of the temples. Sure there were 400 other people sitting on the stone steps behind me who had the same idea, but the building orange crescendo of light over the dark towers commanded our utmost respect and collective silence – and gave me a serious case of the goose bumps.

The Cambodians that I met during my travels were some of the most joyful individuals I encountered. Friendly eyes and humble spirits were extremely welcoming virtues to stumble upon for this oft-lonely traveller, and for that I am forever grateful.