.
Angkor
Watt and Sigiriya
Siem
Reap
I remember, when I was a child, seeing a picture of
Angkor Watt. It conveyed the intrigue of a lost civilisation capable of great achievement.
I have lived through, arguably, the greatest period of achievement in human history:-quantum leaps in science and medicine (antibiotics) global political and social upheaval and realignment, (the cold war, the deconstruction of the Berlin wall and re-unification), space flight and the moon landing. These were real and tangible, but it is the elusive past on which I have been hooked all my life. As well, the future has always been an obsession with me. The writings of Arthur C Clarke, the only true visionary, have astounded and entertained me with the idea of what may lie around the next corner. I hope I live to see his prediction of the Space Elevator come true, hopefully in Sri Lanka, his original location.
I have lived through, arguably, the greatest period of achievement in human history:-quantum leaps in science and medicine (antibiotics) global political and social upheaval and realignment, (the cold war, the deconstruction of the Berlin wall and re-unification), space flight and the moon landing. These were real and tangible, but it is the elusive past on which I have been hooked all my life. As well, the future has always been an obsession with me. The writings of Arthur C Clarke, the only true visionary, have astounded and entertained me with the idea of what may lie around the next corner. I hope I live to see his prediction of the Space Elevator come true, hopefully in Sri Lanka, his original location.
That image of Angkor Watt never left me, burnt into my brain for the rest of my life. It was not until many years later that I learnt about Cambodia and Siem Reap, the city near the ruined temples.
I knew I would have to see Angkor Watt one day.
That day is here.
--oOo--
On the forward leg. the stay in KL is brief. I stay
in an airport hotel, and barely have time to acquire a local sim card before I’m
away again at 6:30 a.m. At least the sim will be one item I won’t have to worry
about on my return.
After crossing the coast, we pass over the largest lake in
S.E. Asia, Tonle Sap, just a few kilometres from Siem Reap. More about it later,
but the sight of the floating population intrigues me from the start.
On arrival, visas are provided complete with picture
(if you don’t know to have one on you) for a couple of dollars, but they must
be American.
I now have five days in Siem Reap organised through
Intrepid, for a most reasonable fee. I am met at the airport by a
representative and I take my first tuk-tuk ride, ever, to the hotel. Cars and
taxis are almost non-existent here, apparently. I am told later there are 1.5
million people in Siem Reap and 1 million registered tuk-tuks and motor bikes. The
first view of the city from the airport road is reassuring:- a wide avenue with views of neat buildings in
the French style, some new. As we get closer to the inner city this changes to
a strange mix of older rundown buildings, and new construction in the French
colonial style. I am reminded of Cairns in the 1970’s at the start of the
tourist boom, when much new accommodation appeared seemingly overnight all over
the city. But here, sometimes entire blocks of rubble seem to threaten, as if a
squad of soldiers could appear at any moment and drag people off to the killing
fields.
The next morning I meet my guide, and we are off to
Angkor Watt in a fancy Toyota, all six cylinders. Petrol is $1.60/l here. The
average weekly wage is about $10.00.
My guide was knowledgeable and had good English. I
have had little exposure to Hinduism and not much more to Buddhism, but she
helped maintain my fascination with the culture that was responsible for the
building of these centuries old structures, the entire day.
A favorite temple of mine and many others is Ta Prohm.
It has been left as found with overgrown vegetation and strangler fig trees covering
its ramparts. This is where a scene from Tomb Raider was filmed. I was told
Lara Croft sometimes makes an appearance and mixes with the tourists visiting
the temple. I didn’t believe a word of it, of course, until…there she was…and she
is quite as beautiful as they say.
The next day we travel by tuk-tuk down to the embarkation
point for a tour of the lake Tonle Lap.
The riverboats and the scenery evoke memories of
‘Apocalypse Now’. It’s not quite the Mekong, but for one mad moment I feel like
Marlon Brando.
I have to tell about a unique feature of the lake. It
drains into the Mekong delta, but is not fed, itself, by any large watercourse
directly. When the Mekong floods during the monsoon, Tonle Lap’s water level
rises many meters, flooding the surrounding plain. The trick is, the lake is higher
than the sea level at the delta. The hydraulic principals causing this phenomenon
are still not fully understood.
Some of the Australians are older, here for the
young Cambodians (I call them the ugly Australians), some are young couples (honeymooners?),
the wife seemingly clinging to her man as if he might disappear at any moment.
Single girls wander the streets, safely, albeit looking a little confused, and
the single Aussie males are laughing all the way….but the Cambodians, both male
and female, many with good English, just smile the smiles their beautiful faces seem to be made for. They
are friendly, but, with a quiet dignity, stay at arm’s length.
I take my hat off to them.
WTF? |
What do you call three monks on a motorbike? |
Finally I am off, back to KL. The city seems
stressed and tired, its people mostly without smiles. The Petronas Towers both
intimidates and beckons. I join the queue to take the lift to the top and I’m offered
a concessional admission price without even asking for it. The young man behind
the desk says, “You look old enough to qualify as a senior citizen”.
And
he smiles.
The overnight train to Singapore is cheap, but
basic. The food consists of sandwiches or vegetables and rice. The food is cold
and looks unhygienic:- “I’m sorry Sir, we have no microwave…because we have no
electricity” !
I
go to sleep hungry.
In Singapore I have booked one night in a hostel
before catching a Tiger Air flight to Sri Lanka. I am tired and challenged with
the need for rest and quiet, to wash clothes and sort out the backpack. I can’t
stand the thought of a dormitory, so I upgrade to a private room. My first
challenge as a backpacker of the world and I am found wanting.
The next day I have time before a late departure to
find some music stores. The first one I enter has the usual stuff, but I ask
the attendant, ‘have you heard of the Eastman guitar?’ to which he replies ‘I
don’t stock them, but come with me’. I follow him along corridors and around
corners to enter another shop, in which I can already see a couple of
Eastmans. I try them all out and
eventually put a deposit on one of them. I tell the guy there, ‘I will be back
in one week’.
--oOo--
Sri
Lanka
The island of Serendip (the old name for Sri Lanka)
is a lot bigger than first it seems, especially when you are trying to see it
all in just a few days. Touring by car is your only hope of accomplishing
anything, though the roads are good, but not up to Tasmanian standards. Though
Tassy is half as big again as Sri Lanka, touring Tassy is twice as easy, but
Sri Lanka is infinitely more beautiful, (sorry non-mainlanders). Serendip has
not gained its fabled status as the original Garden of Eden for nothing.
The evening flight to Colombo leaves late due to
mechanical problems with the aircraft. (I have heard this before, haven’t I
Tiger!) We arrive at 1.00 a.m. I half expect
the Sri Lankan connection to have given up and gone to bed, but I am met in the
arrivals by a driver for the tour company. His name is Madu. Over the next few
days I come to like and respect this young man greatly. His girlfriend is at
university studying accounting. She has exams this week. They talk incessantly
on the car phone, all day long as we drive out of the city to Sigiriya, up to
the highlands covered in tea, down to the most southern tip of Sri Lanka, and
back to Colombo. Madu seems compelled to ask me, over and over again “Are you
happy Sir?’. I threaten him with the
sack if he keeps calling me ‘Sir’, but the most he will compromise is to call
me ‘Mr John’. He earns $7.00 a day for all of this.
Petrol
in Sri Lanka costs, you guessed it, $1.60 /l.
Eventually we reach the top. The plateau seems
smaller than I expected, but, for me, being there is equal to standing on Everest.
I am on top of the world.
An unexpected (Serendipitous) experience at the Lion
rock.
Sigiriya is in the background |
Returning to ground level I am greeted by… the
elephant - and her mahout.
Though this
item is on the agenda, I have to negotiate yet another fee, and I loose,
terribly. Not on the price, (I reduce the ride from $30.00 down to $15.00) –
unknowingly I have agreed to the ‘long’ ride, i.e. 40- bloody- minutes on this
rolling ponderous pachyderm. My pelvis feels like it has split in two.
We arrive in Dambulla by mid-afternoon, where there
is more climbing to see the cave temple. I will never be this fit again. Overnight
we stay in a very posh resort in Dambulla. Unfortunately it is wasted on me. That
night I collapse, dead to the world.
Next morning
we have another early departure, for a very long day through the mountains and
Tea plantations of Sri Lanka to the southernmost part of paradise, the Yala
National park . This is home to the biggest concentration of leopards in the
world, including Africa.
By mid-morning we reach Kandy, and as the day
progresses we ascend into the high country where the air is noticeably cooler,
the mountains poking into the lower floating clouds. This is where I leave all
previous experience behind. There is nowhere else in the world that I have visited
that is anything like this. The snowy peaks of temperate Europe are dear to me,
as is the rolling Alpine regions of Australia…even north Queensland’s Atherton
Tablelands in winter, but this country gets the prize, the cigar and the whole
shooting match. That evening we stay in a B and B, overlooking Yala but still
high in the mountains.
Then the cry from Mardu:- “Mr. John! Leopard!
Leopard!”. There it is, just ahead but walking
nonchalantly towards us, twisting and turning through the thickets by the
roadside. His coat is a burnished orange, flaring in the setting sun like
flames from a blacksmith’s forge. We take twenty minutes quietly observing the
animal which seems to be, I think, ‘cautiously relaxed’ is a good description.
He passes us with just the merest of glances in our direction and the driver
puts the Landrover into reverse, following from a distance. Mardu encourages me to ‘move down to the back,
sit near the tailgate, Mr John!’. After a particularly baleful glare from the
beast, I decide against it, telling Mardu:- “Its ok for you sitting in the
front, but if he comes over the back, I’m the first one to get the" Kiss of the
Leopard!”.
If I HAD died then I would have done so in a state of ecstasy. But
tomorrow we had the longest drive of all:- back to Colombo via Bundalla lakes, host
to one of the most prolific bird congregations in the world.
Bundalla.
Not being terribly knowledgeable about
birds, I found lots of time to contemplate the quietness and solitude, as well
as observe herons, eagles and crocodiles. Kingfishers, kites and crocodiles.
Even some wild flamingos in the distance…and PLENTY of crocodile. They crossed
the road in front of us, they lay in roadside gullies, (“perhaps not a good
place to go weewee, Mr John!”).
And I thought northern Australia was bad!
Southernmost tip of Sri Lanka |
On the way back to Colombo I buy some sapphires for the
girls at home. In Sri Lanka a certificate of quality attesting to their
genuineness is a legal requirement. Back in Cambodia I inspected what looked
like some very nice gems, even a perfectly beautiful blue star sapphire, nearly
one whole carat, for only $170.00. In a way, I almost regret not buying it even
though it was probably fake. All the star sapphires in Sri Lanka paled in
comparison but cost three times the price.
We got to Colombo right on rush hour. Mardu desperately
tried to get out of going through the city at this nightmare time for traffic,
but I insisted, there was one more place we had to go. He tried his hardest to
talk me out of it, but then I pulled out the big gun…I pleaded. He gave in.
It was a special house for me and many others even though it’s resident had departed this earth some years ago. With the afternoon traffic to contend with, we had a bit of trouble even getting close to the street, but finding the house itself seemed almost impossible. Mardu said “we will find it, Mr John”. I should call him, ‘the bloodhound’, for Madu spies a door chime which I hadn’t even noticed, which he pushes. A voice answers in Sri Lankan. Mardu speeks briefly and then gestures to me.
I had thought to simply find the
famous man’s house, take my picture in front of it and leave; that was all I
had planned. But now I was talking to an anonymous voice, trying to explain my
decidedly odd mission. The answer was in English: “Oh that’s no trouble, there
is another gate to your left, I will unlock it, come inside and I will meet you”.
We did so, and all four of us climbed the stairs to
the most famous room on earth…well, to ME it was, more important than entering
Buckingham Palace and meeting royalty. I only wish this particular VIP was
still alive to greet us.
It was explained to us that it had been decided to
keep the room exactly as its owner had left it. I commented that as a shrine,
it was more important than St. Peters. Perhaps I got carried away a bit.
Next day Mardu picks me up for the short ride to the
airport. We say genuine goodbyes, I am going to remember him.
And so on to Singapore for a four day stop over, and
home. The last time I was in Singapore was in 1983. Thirty years has made a difference
I admit, but expensive cities are not for me, and it will not be included in this first installment
of my travel blog
Once I have topped up the coffers, god willing, I
still have a lot to see.
The Bucket List is alive and well.