Sunday, November 12, 2006

Culture Vulture

After the treks in the jungles of Northern Thailand and doing sod all on the beaches of the islands I have finally bitten the bullet and decided to throw myself into some culture and there's probably no better place to start than Cambodia. Having given myself a pretty strict time limit i'm not faffing around and on the one full day I spent in Siem Reap I took a TukTuk driver and headed for Angkor Wat. Angkor what I hear you ask! Well this is the biggest temple and group of temples in Cambodia and is the pride of this nation. Predominantly Hindu it also has temples for other faiths and gods including that Krisna bloke and a few of his pals. It looked pretty old but I can't remember when it was built and there are probably about 20 or 30 temples of differing sizes within a 20km kind of national temple park type place.

Having been boozing til 6am the night before Indiana Freel arrived about 12.30ish and set off to see the main building first. The approach is kind of scenic with a bridge leading you over the river towards the temple. Chinese people galore are snapping away frantically with their spanking new digital cameras which kind of pissed me off as I have now lost one and broken the replacement within 2 weeks. At this rate i'll be going through about 52 cameras! Anyway when I reached the temple I climbed up the pretty sheer face of it in true explorer style. They were sort of like little steps but once i'd got to the top I quickly regreted getting up there are started bricking it about how the fuck I was supposed to get down. Good views from up there though but in honesty all I could think about was getting down, and how the chubby 50 year old American bird had even managed to get up there herself! Eventually I spotted the escape, and the entrance by all accounts as there was one side with rails either side for you to get up and down. I'd only gone and rock climbed up the sheer side like some kind of nutter - did make me feel hard though! After that we went and looked at some other temples and saw baboon like monkeys running about the park and a brilliant sunset by Angkor Wat. You'll have to take my word for it as I failed to get any snaps.

Got lashed that evening with a couple of English girls and an Irishman and a few other English lads challenged me to a dance-off later on - the fools! The running man, chicken dance, the famous Freel shuffle and even a few break dancing moves had the crowd (of about 7) in raptures and although one of the lads did do a cracking swimmer manouevre it was really not much of a contest.

The next day I set off for Phnom Penh, Cambodias capital and home to the biggest rats I have ever seen in my life. I shit you not I saw a dead one as we arrived last night and had to properly hurdle it as I was walking along. Mind you i'm not surprised as the whole city is covered in shit. The bus journey should've taken 5 hours, that is until not one but 2 buses broke down en route and after summoning the worlds worst mechanic (he didn't understand when I asked for his City & Guilds certificate) he managed to break the bus even more. Eventually just as we were thinking we may have to camp out in the middle of rural Cambodia a local turned up in a minivan and made a fair few dollars giving us a lift the extra 80km into the city. We eventually arrived in his supercharged and overcharged van after 12 and a half hours on the road.

Today I went to see S21 and the Killing Fields. In short S21 is the jail used by the Khmer Rouge to torture and imprison anyone they didn't like. It used to be a primary school and they basically converted the classrooms into single cells, double cells and mass cells and it is a horrifically eery place. There are torture weapons all over the place and hundreds of skulls of the victims. Of the 17,000 people imprisoned here less than a dozen survived! The place gave me the shits and when I saw the old crucifix posts that they yanked these people onto to torture and read some of the stories from relatives of the dead it was truly shocking. And all this stuff happened in the last 25-30 years within most of our lifetimes.

To cheer myself up I headed to the happily named Killing Fields on the back of a moped with my driver Bambam (that's what it sounded like anyway). Unsurprisingly this didn't really lift my mood too much as this is a number of mass graves where people were brought to their slaughter, turning up on trucks and being executed upon arrival and tossed in a ditch. The memorial that has now been erected in the centre of the grounds holds thousands of skulls and remains of the people who were dug up from here once the Khmer reign was overthrown. I'd had my fill of grief for one day and left feeling very fortunate and in need of something lighter so I popped into a bar and watched the jocks whip Romania at rugby only to be told that the Argies had beaten England! please tell me Robinson has gone! All in all it's been a pretty depressing day and i'm now off to watch Spurs play Reading. Odds on they'll top off the day with defeat but I'm off to the beach tomorrow in South Cambodia for a bit of respite before heading into Vietnam and more war discoveries at the weekend.

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