Siem Reap

We were flying over Siem Reap around 1.30pm in our small Bangkok Airways Fokker plane. It looked like a town with two classes based upon the type of houses on the ground. One set of houses looked big, new with brightly colured roof tiles. The other houses were rickety wooden structures with tin roofs and on stilts. The entire area was full of rivers, streams, and large ponds which are man-made reservoirs created to support the city of Angkor. I then saw the majestic Angkor Wat and what a marvellous sight it was. Rising above the humid mists of mid-afternoon Cambodian sun, hidden until we were right above it, by the forests that had for hundreds of years veiled it from human eyes, and standing resplendent in its latterite structure was the edifice I'd wanted to see since my childhood days when I read it was the largest stone temple in the world.

We later learnt that the large modern structures were hotels catering to a million visitors who descend on Siem Reap annually on their pilgrimage to Angkor, while the others were habited by the local Khmers. Amita had cleverly got e-visas which prevented us from queuing in the stifling humid heat of the afternoon. The place was quite reminiscent of Calcutta as Khmer looked like Bengalis (Amita's observation as an objective non-Bengali) with flat faces, curly hair n swarthy colours. This was our introduction to the Khmer race - smallish, swarthy people with flat faces and much less almond slant to their eyes. It was an admixture of Negrito and Meditarranean and some Mongloid racial stocks.

The airport was tiny, much like Patna airport used to be in the seventies and eighties - where only two flights operated during the day - one to Calcutta and the other to Kathmandu. As soon as we entered it, had we exited it. There was a distinct difference between Bangkok and Siem Reap, or rather between Thai and Khmer people. Thais have been modernised and appear as self-confident people. This is perhaps due to a longish interaction with westerners and the process of acculturation that emerges out of such contact. It is also due to the country and its peoples in modern times (at least since the Burmese ransacked Ayuthaya in early 18th century AD) never been colonised by the western powers in Indo-China. There were the French in Vietnam and Cambodia and the English in Burma with the Chinese treating Laos as an outpost. Thailand acted fortuitously for its people and leaders, the buffer zone that kept two powerful forces separate - the English and the French. Cambodians on the other hand had not only been exploited by the French, who are any day a far worse colonising power than the English were, but they also endured firstly the killings in its northern reaches during the Vietnam war and therafter the Killing Fields of Khmer Rouge and the failed communist experiment of Pol Pot and his Maoist 'great leap' plan. These people were less certain, overly respectful and avoiding eye contact.

Our guide was waiting outside , a portly man who suddenly emerged from a motley crowd of tuk-tuk wallas, cabbies and other sundry people with a placard saying 'Sarkar and family'. 'Hello' he said and a mouthful of uneven teeth emerged in a broad smile. 'I'm your guide Sukun and this is your driver Ratha', pointing to a small man with no smile, who folded his hands in 'Suswasti'. He pronounced Ratha as 'Rota'. I asked if it meant a chariot in Khmer language. It did but had another meaning too - 'government', explained Sukun. We entered an ancient Mercedes people's carrier which must have been built in the 70s and seemed to be a relic of old James Bond movie. A cab drive from the airport into town is about $5 US. The Cambodians drive on the right side and we were soon moving slowly in a car with a poor air-conditioning system. It was quite evident that the car had seen better days. Its then that I noticed how few the number of cars there were on the roads. There was a motley crowd of people on tuk-tuks, the archetypal mode of transportation in south and south-east Asia, on feet and on cycles with a large carrier on the front handles, a relic of the Pol Pot days. The tuk-tuks of Siem Reap were very different from others I've seen elsewhere. These were a two-wheeled structure that was pulled around by mopeds!! These are most comfortable and airy and cost around $1-2 per person – you could squeeze in three to four people into one. A day-long trip to the Angkor temples and back would cost you anywhere around $30.

After checking in to Tara Angkor Hotel a four-star hotel newly constructed (Siem Reap has a new hotel sprining up every corner everyday of the year), we were welcomed by a wonderful drink served a wonderful way. It was palm juice in a glass with a straw made out of stem of lotus with a water lilly for garnishing. The staff were resplendent in chocholate brown dresses and the women wore a wonderful combination of shirt-top, a sarong wrapped around with a sash across their shoulders. We ate at the restaurant and having had a shower to driver away the sweat and tiredness, drove through the town.

Siem Reap is a wonderfully laid-back town, a reminder of how life was in millennia gone by. We met visitors who came and could never leave. The people are really friendly, much more so than the Thais, probably because alongside their niceness they are also quite shy and laugh embarrassingly. In fact we learnt that anger is not an emotion that they recognize and if someone shouts, they laugh, not to mock but in confusion. Strange for a people so abused by Commie lords in the seventies. The Siem Reap river flows through the town and one must definitely try out the local day and night market. Like most SE Asian towns, these are at different places. Then there’s the overpriced National Museum with entry tickets of $9 each and the Foreign Correspondents Club if you are missing European style, which we clearly weren’t. Finally, you could give the local Body massage a try – again a trade, which like in Bangkok, if almost always carried out by women. Funnily, we saw one tuk-tuk on the back of which was a poster saying ‘Body massage for men BY men. Free pick up from your hotels and free drop-offs’. Amita, who had warned me against any kind of massage, giggled and said she wouldn’t have any problems if I used the all-male one!

There are multiple eating places and my word Khmer food is absolutely gorgeous. Very little frying, lots of fermented stuff, and freshly cooked stuff on char-coal fires. The advent of gas stove has been delayed and except for hotels, no one has seen a microwave. In fact when Taksh ordered a lasagna at our 4-star hotel, the embarrassed looking manager came out after quite a while and apologized ‘Sorry sir, no lasagna, our microwave is not working today’. Our Panasonic microwave works many times a day but has not let us down in nearly 12 years of service. Alright, Mr Manager!

Later in the afternoon we took a ride on an ox-cart through the countryside. That's right - ox-cart. Its something I'd never done before despite coming from India, from where this mode of transportation arrived in Cambodia, or Kambuj kingdom as ancient India called it. It was the French who turned this into Cambodge which was distorted to Campuchea and from it Cambodia, a name that arrived only about a couple of decades ago. Due to the Indian influence, unlike other south-eastern countries, there were two oxes (rather than a single beast of burden as is the Chinese way) being yoked to a cart with large wooden wheels. Whilst this stil is visible in parts of rural India, it was surprising to see it in Cambodia. The countryside is very similar to the Bengals with lots of ponds, ducks, fish, palm trees, thatched roofs and people who are washed and clean. The facial features of the poeple could be easily found in India's north-east particularly in the state of Assam. In fact our guide Sukun said that the Khmer believe that they are the original inhabitants of an Indian state called 'Khameru'. Having established that we were Indians albeit travelling from England, he asked us if there was such a state in India. The word 'Kamrup' (ancient name for Assam) immediately sprang to mind and its quite possible that Kamrup has become distorted to Kamr and further into Khmer.
Kamrup lay just north-west of Kausambhi, ancient name for Burma.