Icon recommendations and photos from Cambodia 2004 (inevitable blather sorry) [updated]
syliasyliasylia has made some gorgeous user icons from The Chronicles of Narnia, House of Flying Daggers, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Battlestar Galactica here.
ginger001 has made 6 icons from the end of Anne of Green Gables: The Sequel which you can find here.
winterspel has been posting about Life on Mars. Her posts are here and here. My 'to watch / to read' list is massive so I am readng the posts but resisting the temptation (for now) to watch ;) She has also been posting about the BBC adaption of Charles Dickens' novel Bleak House. Episodes 1-3 are here and episodes 6-7 are here. I've just started watching but am also debating whether to read the book first - which is sitting next to me now :) [Amended: Episodes 4-5 are here. Ahem. Was just testing if anyone noticed ;)]
Pic spam of the wonderful Steven Mackintosh here. He was in Our Mutual Friend.
I just saw a lovely image at iynx's journal here which reminds me that I uploaded some photos from my 2004 trip to Cambodia to my scrapbook but never actually posted it to my journal. They're below the cut :)
Sorry I only meant to post the images but as I was posting them, I felt a bit nostalgic :) You can skip my blather and go straight to the photos down the bottom! :)
Arriving in Cambodia, you buy your visa at the airport. US dollars at the airport and they process it within minutes in a very matter-of-fact manner. US dollars take you all around Asia.
I spent 3 days in Phnom Penh and stayed at the house of a friend. I was very, very pampered there. I staggered out of the chaotic airport with my incredibly heavy backpack on my back as I blinked at the hordes of people swarming around me trying to convince me to hop in a car with them. He was already waiting for me at the airport though with his driver so within seconds I was in luxurious air-conditioned comfort :) The funny thing was that I'd asked him what he wanted me to bring him from Australia (he's an Aussie, too but from Melbourne) and all he wanted were caramel snows from Darrel Lea. :)
I brought them over - no easy task given the heat :)
My friend had a massive Gone With the Wind style house in the foreign compound section. A sweeping staircase, numerous rooms, 2 housekeepers, a driver and more security guards than I could count. We were also surrounded by high walls and barbed wire which was a little surreal. Fortunately it's actually not that dangerous and the security guards didn't have a great deal to do, in fact one of them acted as my driver to take me to the Choeung Ek Memorial - The Killing Fields. I will write a review of that film at some point because it's a film that makes me cry every time I watch it it's just so tragic and touching.
The Killing Fields are 15 km southwest of Phnom Penh. The drive there is amazing. In almost no time at all you leave the 'city' and go past very small, decript homes which have a large brown clay pot outside. The clay pot is a source of water for drinking and bathing.
The Killing Fields were a very sobering experience. From 17 April 17 1975 until 7 January 1979, the Khmer Rouge (i.e. Red Khmer) regime, led by Pol Pot controlled all of Cambodia. Under the Khmer Rouge regime the country was known as ‘Democratic Kampuchea.’ Although the reign of the Khmer Rouge was very short, during that time between one million and two and a half million Cambodians died. In particular, the Khmer Rouge targeted anyone with an education - teachers, doctors, students, lawyers. Cambodia was taken back to the year 'zero', time was to start again, Cambodia has never recovered.
Out of those that perished, some were killed outright by the regime, others died from disease, malnutrition, neglect and mistreatment. Many of the dead ended up in "killing fields" that are scattered across the country. These "killing fields" were places of execution and dumping grounds for dead bodies.
Before 1975, the memorial at Choeung Ek outside Phnom Penh used to be an orchard and a Chinese cemetery. During the Khmer Rouge regime it became one of the killing fields. More than 17,000 men, women and children died there - most of whom first suffered through interrogation, torture and deprivation in the S-21 Prison (Toul Sleng) in Phnom Penh.
I also visited the S-21 Toul Sleng Genocide Museum. Before 1975, it used to be a high school. When the Khmer Rouge came to power it was converted into the S-21 prison and interrogation facility. Inmates were tortured, sometimes over months, to extract confessions, after which they were executed at the killing fields of Choeung Ek. S-21 processed over 17,000 people, seven of whom survived.
The building is now a museum and you walk down corridors and into holding cells looking at remnants of that time. It's an eerie, bleak place that would be haunted by ghosts if you believed in that sort of thing. The prison kept very comprehensive records and one of the saddest things in the world is walking along the walls staring at the thousands and thousands of photos of victims staring out at you and knowing that they are all dead. I always find photographs mesmerising and I have to admit I spend a long time staring into the eyes of all of those people who were staring back at me - many of them very young.
The irony is that across from the museum is one of the most gorgeous and beautiful little cafes in all of Phnom Penh. It's a vegetarian cafe situated in a very leafy, soothing courtyard and it is one of the most restful places in the world.
My friend took me on a tour of the traditional markets (phsar) of Phnom Penh - as crowded and insane as markets anywhere in Asia. They contain curios, souvenirs and all sorts of strange foods and objects. I couldn't buy anything because I've lived and travelled around Asia so often that the allure of silk purposes and Asian knick knacks has almost completely disappeared :D I did manage to buy the entire Lord of the Rings set to sneakily give my friend as a thank you gift because he had been wanting to watch them :)
My friend took me to the Royal Palace and "Silver Pagoda". The Royal Palace was built in 1866 under the French protectorate and King Norodom, though many of the buildings in the complex were added over the following decades. You actually can't walk inside most of the buildings and what's beautiful is just to see the amazing architecture, high steps, beautiful gardens and intricate carvings and designs on the roof.
I was a little misled by a section in the Lonely Planet that told me to go and look at Wat Phnom which is a small hill crowned by an active wat (pagoda) which marks the legendary founding place of the Phnom Penh. My friend had to go to work so I asked his driver to leave me at Wat Phnom for an hour. The hill is very busy as there is a steady stream of people trekking up there to visit the shrines. There are also fortune tellers on top and many vendors, tourists and an elephant down the bottom. The problem is the whole thing could be seen in about 10 minutes so I spent the rest of the hour at the bottom of the hill just watching the world go by. People carrying baskets on their heads, inactive drivers sprawled on the ground resting and then I got besieged by monkeys who thought I had food :)
My friend took a few hours off work and took me to a little place outside Phnom Penh where they had a series of ruins. Here's a photo of 2 little girls outside Phnom Penh. As I was walking with my friend, they followed us their entire journey, trying to sell us drinks and when we stopped for a rest, they folded lotus flowers :)
In hindsight, I would have spent less time in Phnom Penh and more time in Siem Reap but there are some absolutely gorgeous little cafes and restaurants in Phnom Penh. Cambodian food is a much blander and simpler version of Thai and Vietnamese food - nice but not quite so tasty. The city is also quite underdeveloped but still crowded. Also to be perfectly honest, I'm not accustomed to being a pampered tourist! :) My friend wouldn't let me walk 2 steps down the road on my own - he was always at my side or would send his driver or security guard after me.
They kept telling me that it was too hot for me to walk around on my own, too dusty so even when I was only going a few metres, I found myself being driven!! Mosquitos love my blood and Cambodia mosquitos are evil. Normal repellent will not work in Cambodia, you are advised to use repellent that has 20% DEET which is extremely toxic. I bought the spray when I was in Hong Kong but of course I refuse to use DEET-based spray on my face so I was bitten on the eyelid and on the lip by mosquitos as I slept. That's dangerous because in Cambodia, I can't remember which way it goes, but I think it's the malaria mosquito during the day and the dengue fever mosquito during the night.
After that, at night I slept with the sheet over my head which probably made me look like a dead body. So I had breathing space, I put a cushion above my head to kind of lift the sheet away from my face :P
I took a small plane to Siem Reap which is where the Angkor ruins can be found inside a large national park area. The motorcycle drivers and taxis swarm you at the airport and it's very disconcerting. I wanted a taxi because I had a very large backpack but before I knew what was happening, I found myself perched on the back of motorcycle, my huge backpack also strapped onto the bike and we were off!!!! The road into Siem Reap is flanked with huge, tacky, Las Vegas-esque foreign hotels. I have no idea who stays there.
The days I was there, all of the luxury hotels in Siem Reap had shut down due to an employee strike. I was staying at a small French hotel tucked away in a little laneway. It was absolutely gorgeous - leafy courtyard and a room I had to enter by climbing stairs which resembled a very steep ladder - very difficult given my heavy backpack :) Inside, was a small but very old-fashioned looking room with a ceiling fan, furniture of dark brown wood and a very old French colonial style reminiscent of Vietnam.
After that I arranged to visit the ruins at Angkor. On the edges of the park, you buy an entry pass for 1-3 days depending on how long you wish to stay. I hired a man to take me on the back of his motor cycle :) What it means is that he drops you at each Angkor ruin and you wander around to your heart's content and return to your patient driver who then takes you to the next stop.
All of the ruins are nestled in the jungle:
It's actually impossible to take a bad photograph in the Angkor ruins. They look like something out of a Tolkien novel or some ancient world.
There are many broken shrines inside the ruins so there are frequently old people and little children sitting in the ruins to sell you incense:
The fact that the ruins are being consumed by the jungle is both tragic but adds the beauty as trees and vines emerge from the ruins or twine around the ruins giving them an unearthly almost organic appearance.
Sometimes the ruins take ages to climb - very steep stairs up, more and more stairs up and then stairs to return. Fortunately my driver was very patient :)
If you look closely you can see the mystical faces above:
Endless stairs .... Some people get templed out - whisked from one temple to another but I was fine because I brought a few Garth Nix novels with me and there was something absolutely gorgeous about sitting on the top of an ancient ruin at sunset with a good book.
The most famous ruin of all - Angkor Wat. Interestingly enough it wasn't my favourite ruin.
Nonetheless the corridors were beautiful:
These stairs look deceptively easy to climb but they're actually very scary - the incline is very sharp and the stairs are extremely small. I discovered that climbing up was easy - just don't look down and scramble up quickly. It's an almost vertical incline but for some reason going up is quite easy even though there are no handrails or handholds.
This was what I saw after I climbed up:
The problem was I realised that I couldn't climb down again. I actually had a very large panic attack because I knew that even though I'd climbed up, there was absolutely no way I could get down again - it was too steep, there were no hand holds or hand rails .....
I had visions of myself tumbling down to my death or being trapped for the rest of my life at the top of a tower at Angkor Wat :P I almost burst into tears I was so anxious!
Fortunately after wandering around, I discovered that I clearly was not the only person in that predicament and they had built a very dodgy and unreliable-looking handrail down one side of one of the towers so along with dozens of other terrified tourists, I made my very slow way down the tower. Climbing up had taken me 1 minute, going down took me 20 minutes it was so terrifying :)
One of the more remote ruins that I saw as the sun was rising. The high walls were guarded by stone elephants:
Again if you look you can see the faces in the stone:
More of the jungle devouring the ruins:
You can't see it in the photograph but this was a gorgeously long walkway to one set of ruins. On either side were all number of mythical beasts. I felt like I was in the seat of an Indiana Jones movie:
Here's a slightly closer shot of the entrance walkway. I would have loved to see it at the height of its glory:
After finally getting to the end of the walkway :)
You can use your imagination to think about what it might have looked like before. There was one of these gateways at the north, south, east and west. At one point I stumbled out of a doorway and realised that had come out the wrong exit and that instead of my driver and a carpark, I was standing on the edge of the jungle and couldn't see a human being for miles.
In terms of safety, there are still a very large number of unexploded land mines in Cambodia which cause horrific injuries to field workers and children. In terms of tourists though, as long as you stay on the tourist pathways and do not wander off into unexplored areas - there is no danger.
The areas in and around the ruins have been cleared of mines and there's something incredibly gorgeous about wandering around in the jungle among tangled and twisted trees and then suddenly happening upon intricate, mysterious ruins of the Angkor civilisation.
There's a wonderful passage in Lord of the Rings that goes as follows:
Standing there for a moment filled with dread Frodo became aware that a light was shining; he saw it glowing on Sam's face beside him. Turning towards it, he saw, beyond an arch of boughs, the road to Osgiliath running almost as straight as a stretched ribbon down, down, into the West. There, far away, beyond sad Gondor now overwhelmed in shade, the Sun was sinking, finding at last the hem of the great slow-rolling pall of cloud, and falling in an ominous fire towards the yet unsullied Sea. The brief glow fell upon a huge sitting figure, still and solemn as the great stone kings of Argonath. The years had gnawed it, and violent hands had maimed it. Its head was gone, and in its place was set in mockery a round rough-hewn stone, rudely painted by savage hands in the likeness of a grinning face with one large red eye in the midst of its forehead. Upon its knees and mighty chair, and all about the pedestal, were idle scrawls mixed with the foul symbols that the maggot-folk of Mordor used.
Suddenly, caught by the level beams, Frodo saw the old king's head: it was lying rolled away by the roadside. "Look, Sam!" he cried, startled into speech. "Look! The king has got a crown again!"
The eyes were hollow and the carven beard was broken, but about the high stern forehead there was a coronal of silver and gold. A trailing plant with flowers like small white stars had bound itself across the brows as if in reverence for the fallen king, and in the crevices of his stony hair yellow stonecrop gleamed.
"They cannot conquer for ever!" said Frodo. And then suddenly the brief glimpse was gone. The Sun dipped and vanished, and as if at the shuttering of a lamp, black night fell.
I kept thinking of that passage when looking at all the ruins - because that's really how it looked. I mentioned before that I thought that the Stone Forest in Yunnan Province looked like how I imagined Mordor would be. For me, the Angkor ruins in Siem Reap were like Ithilien with its vestiges of Gondorian architecture.
I'm really glad I went to Cambodia - so many of my Honkie friends didn't want me to go. They thought it was too dangerous. My family also didn't want me to go but it's impossibly beautiful and it's changing. It's becoming a very trendy destination particularly among Western backpackers, so I really wanted to go before it all changes. Also if anyone has seen the end of Wong Kar Wai's "In the mood for love", there is a gorgeous scene with Tony Leung in Angkor ................ *swoon* I'd screen cap it but my dvd is in storage. *shakes a fist at self* Updated: See below! Woohoo! Thanks firefly1984!]
That being said, Phnom Penh is one of the most boring airports in the world. :) I was shouting with glee (on the inside) when I got back to Australia because airports here have what I think they should have. Books in English (hee), lots of yummy snacks - chocolate, candy, biscuits ... snacks I actually want to eat! In a lot of airports in China, Vietnam and Cambodia, I don't expect books in English but there are just no good munchies. No chocolate or candy. Just strange piles of dried sausage, dried meat, green and brown lumps of plantlike substances which are their equivalent of snacks ..... :)
Updated: Thank you so much to firefly1984 for his screencaps of the final scene from the Wong Kar Wai film In the Mood for Love
This is the scene when Tony Leung's character goes to Angkor Wat .....
Before .... when people had a secret they did not want to share, the would climb a mountain. They would find a tree and carve a hole into it. And whisper the secret into the hole, then cover it over with mud. That way, nobody else would ever discover it ......
Absolutely haunting ....
ginger001 has made 6 icons from the end of Anne of Green Gables: The Sequel which you can find here.
winterspel has been posting about Life on Mars. Her posts are here and here. My 'to watch / to read' list is massive so I am readng the posts but resisting the temptation (for now) to watch ;) She has also been posting about the BBC adaption of Charles Dickens' novel Bleak House. Episodes 1-3 are here and episodes 6-7 are here. I've just started watching but am also debating whether to read the book first - which is sitting next to me now :) [Amended: Episodes 4-5 are here. Ahem. Was just testing if anyone noticed ;)]
Pic spam of the wonderful Steven Mackintosh here. He was in Our Mutual Friend.
I just saw a lovely image at iynx's journal here which reminds me that I uploaded some photos from my 2004 trip to Cambodia to my scrapbook but never actually posted it to my journal. They're below the cut :)
Sorry I only meant to post the images but as I was posting them, I felt a bit nostalgic :) You can skip my blather and go straight to the photos down the bottom! :)
Arriving in Cambodia, you buy your visa at the airport. US dollars at the airport and they process it within minutes in a very matter-of-fact manner. US dollars take you all around Asia.
I spent 3 days in Phnom Penh and stayed at the house of a friend. I was very, very pampered there. I staggered out of the chaotic airport with my incredibly heavy backpack on my back as I blinked at the hordes of people swarming around me trying to convince me to hop in a car with them. He was already waiting for me at the airport though with his driver so within seconds I was in luxurious air-conditioned comfort :) The funny thing was that I'd asked him what he wanted me to bring him from Australia (he's an Aussie, too but from Melbourne) and all he wanted were caramel snows from Darrel Lea. :)
I brought them over - no easy task given the heat :)
My friend had a massive Gone With the Wind style house in the foreign compound section. A sweeping staircase, numerous rooms, 2 housekeepers, a driver and more security guards than I could count. We were also surrounded by high walls and barbed wire which was a little surreal. Fortunately it's actually not that dangerous and the security guards didn't have a great deal to do, in fact one of them acted as my driver to take me to the Choeung Ek Memorial - The Killing Fields. I will write a review of that film at some point because it's a film that makes me cry every time I watch it it's just so tragic and touching.
The Killing Fields are 15 km southwest of Phnom Penh. The drive there is amazing. In almost no time at all you leave the 'city' and go past very small, decript homes which have a large brown clay pot outside. The clay pot is a source of water for drinking and bathing.
The Killing Fields were a very sobering experience. From 17 April 17 1975 until 7 January 1979, the Khmer Rouge (i.e. Red Khmer) regime, led by Pol Pot controlled all of Cambodia. Under the Khmer Rouge regime the country was known as ‘Democratic Kampuchea.’ Although the reign of the Khmer Rouge was very short, during that time between one million and two and a half million Cambodians died. In particular, the Khmer Rouge targeted anyone with an education - teachers, doctors, students, lawyers. Cambodia was taken back to the year 'zero', time was to start again, Cambodia has never recovered.
Out of those that perished, some were killed outright by the regime, others died from disease, malnutrition, neglect and mistreatment. Many of the dead ended up in "killing fields" that are scattered across the country. These "killing fields" were places of execution and dumping grounds for dead bodies.
Before 1975, the memorial at Choeung Ek outside Phnom Penh used to be an orchard and a Chinese cemetery. During the Khmer Rouge regime it became one of the killing fields. More than 17,000 men, women and children died there - most of whom first suffered through interrogation, torture and deprivation in the S-21 Prison (Toul Sleng) in Phnom Penh.
I also visited the S-21 Toul Sleng Genocide Museum. Before 1975, it used to be a high school. When the Khmer Rouge came to power it was converted into the S-21 prison and interrogation facility. Inmates were tortured, sometimes over months, to extract confessions, after which they were executed at the killing fields of Choeung Ek. S-21 processed over 17,000 people, seven of whom survived.
The building is now a museum and you walk down corridors and into holding cells looking at remnants of that time. It's an eerie, bleak place that would be haunted by ghosts if you believed in that sort of thing. The prison kept very comprehensive records and one of the saddest things in the world is walking along the walls staring at the thousands and thousands of photos of victims staring out at you and knowing that they are all dead. I always find photographs mesmerising and I have to admit I spend a long time staring into the eyes of all of those people who were staring back at me - many of them very young.
The irony is that across from the museum is one of the most gorgeous and beautiful little cafes in all of Phnom Penh. It's a vegetarian cafe situated in a very leafy, soothing courtyard and it is one of the most restful places in the world.
My friend took me on a tour of the traditional markets (phsar) of Phnom Penh - as crowded and insane as markets anywhere in Asia. They contain curios, souvenirs and all sorts of strange foods and objects. I couldn't buy anything because I've lived and travelled around Asia so often that the allure of silk purposes and Asian knick knacks has almost completely disappeared :D I did manage to buy the entire Lord of the Rings set to sneakily give my friend as a thank you gift because he had been wanting to watch them :)
My friend took me to the Royal Palace and "Silver Pagoda". The Royal Palace was built in 1866 under the French protectorate and King Norodom, though many of the buildings in the complex were added over the following decades. You actually can't walk inside most of the buildings and what's beautiful is just to see the amazing architecture, high steps, beautiful gardens and intricate carvings and designs on the roof.
I was a little misled by a section in the Lonely Planet that told me to go and look at Wat Phnom which is a small hill crowned by an active wat (pagoda) which marks the legendary founding place of the Phnom Penh. My friend had to go to work so I asked his driver to leave me at Wat Phnom for an hour. The hill is very busy as there is a steady stream of people trekking up there to visit the shrines. There are also fortune tellers on top and many vendors, tourists and an elephant down the bottom. The problem is the whole thing could be seen in about 10 minutes so I spent the rest of the hour at the bottom of the hill just watching the world go by. People carrying baskets on their heads, inactive drivers sprawled on the ground resting and then I got besieged by monkeys who thought I had food :)
My friend took a few hours off work and took me to a little place outside Phnom Penh where they had a series of ruins. Here's a photo of 2 little girls outside Phnom Penh. As I was walking with my friend, they followed us their entire journey, trying to sell us drinks and when we stopped for a rest, they folded lotus flowers :)
In hindsight, I would have spent less time in Phnom Penh and more time in Siem Reap but there are some absolutely gorgeous little cafes and restaurants in Phnom Penh. Cambodian food is a much blander and simpler version of Thai and Vietnamese food - nice but not quite so tasty. The city is also quite underdeveloped but still crowded. Also to be perfectly honest, I'm not accustomed to being a pampered tourist! :) My friend wouldn't let me walk 2 steps down the road on my own - he was always at my side or would send his driver or security guard after me.
They kept telling me that it was too hot for me to walk around on my own, too dusty so even when I was only going a few metres, I found myself being driven!! Mosquitos love my blood and Cambodia mosquitos are evil. Normal repellent will not work in Cambodia, you are advised to use repellent that has 20% DEET which is extremely toxic. I bought the spray when I was in Hong Kong but of course I refuse to use DEET-based spray on my face so I was bitten on the eyelid and on the lip by mosquitos as I slept. That's dangerous because in Cambodia, I can't remember which way it goes, but I think it's the malaria mosquito during the day and the dengue fever mosquito during the night.
After that, at night I slept with the sheet over my head which probably made me look like a dead body. So I had breathing space, I put a cushion above my head to kind of lift the sheet away from my face :P
I took a small plane to Siem Reap which is where the Angkor ruins can be found inside a large national park area. The motorcycle drivers and taxis swarm you at the airport and it's very disconcerting. I wanted a taxi because I had a very large backpack but before I knew what was happening, I found myself perched on the back of motorcycle, my huge backpack also strapped onto the bike and we were off!!!! The road into Siem Reap is flanked with huge, tacky, Las Vegas-esque foreign hotels. I have no idea who stays there.
The days I was there, all of the luxury hotels in Siem Reap had shut down due to an employee strike. I was staying at a small French hotel tucked away in a little laneway. It was absolutely gorgeous - leafy courtyard and a room I had to enter by climbing stairs which resembled a very steep ladder - very difficult given my heavy backpack :) Inside, was a small but very old-fashioned looking room with a ceiling fan, furniture of dark brown wood and a very old French colonial style reminiscent of Vietnam.
After that I arranged to visit the ruins at Angkor. On the edges of the park, you buy an entry pass for 1-3 days depending on how long you wish to stay. I hired a man to take me on the back of his motor cycle :) What it means is that he drops you at each Angkor ruin and you wander around to your heart's content and return to your patient driver who then takes you to the next stop.
All of the ruins are nestled in the jungle:
It's actually impossible to take a bad photograph in the Angkor ruins. They look like something out of a Tolkien novel or some ancient world.
There are many broken shrines inside the ruins so there are frequently old people and little children sitting in the ruins to sell you incense:
The fact that the ruins are being consumed by the jungle is both tragic but adds the beauty as trees and vines emerge from the ruins or twine around the ruins giving them an unearthly almost organic appearance.
Sometimes the ruins take ages to climb - very steep stairs up, more and more stairs up and then stairs to return. Fortunately my driver was very patient :)
If you look closely you can see the mystical faces above:
Endless stairs .... Some people get templed out - whisked from one temple to another but I was fine because I brought a few Garth Nix novels with me and there was something absolutely gorgeous about sitting on the top of an ancient ruin at sunset with a good book.
The most famous ruin of all - Angkor Wat. Interestingly enough it wasn't my favourite ruin.
Nonetheless the corridors were beautiful:
These stairs look deceptively easy to climb but they're actually very scary - the incline is very sharp and the stairs are extremely small. I discovered that climbing up was easy - just don't look down and scramble up quickly. It's an almost vertical incline but for some reason going up is quite easy even though there are no handrails or handholds.
This was what I saw after I climbed up:
The problem was I realised that I couldn't climb down again. I actually had a very large panic attack because I knew that even though I'd climbed up, there was absolutely no way I could get down again - it was too steep, there were no hand holds or hand rails .....
I had visions of myself tumbling down to my death or being trapped for the rest of my life at the top of a tower at Angkor Wat :P I almost burst into tears I was so anxious!
Fortunately after wandering around, I discovered that I clearly was not the only person in that predicament and they had built a very dodgy and unreliable-looking handrail down one side of one of the towers so along with dozens of other terrified tourists, I made my very slow way down the tower. Climbing up had taken me 1 minute, going down took me 20 minutes it was so terrifying :)
One of the more remote ruins that I saw as the sun was rising. The high walls were guarded by stone elephants:
Again if you look you can see the faces in the stone:
More of the jungle devouring the ruins:
You can't see it in the photograph but this was a gorgeously long walkway to one set of ruins. On either side were all number of mythical beasts. I felt like I was in the seat of an Indiana Jones movie:
Here's a slightly closer shot of the entrance walkway. I would have loved to see it at the height of its glory:
After finally getting to the end of the walkway :)
You can use your imagination to think about what it might have looked like before. There was one of these gateways at the north, south, east and west. At one point I stumbled out of a doorway and realised that had come out the wrong exit and that instead of my driver and a carpark, I was standing on the edge of the jungle and couldn't see a human being for miles.
In terms of safety, there are still a very large number of unexploded land mines in Cambodia which cause horrific injuries to field workers and children. In terms of tourists though, as long as you stay on the tourist pathways and do not wander off into unexplored areas - there is no danger.
The areas in and around the ruins have been cleared of mines and there's something incredibly gorgeous about wandering around in the jungle among tangled and twisted trees and then suddenly happening upon intricate, mysterious ruins of the Angkor civilisation.
There's a wonderful passage in Lord of the Rings that goes as follows:
Standing there for a moment filled with dread Frodo became aware that a light was shining; he saw it glowing on Sam's face beside him. Turning towards it, he saw, beyond an arch of boughs, the road to Osgiliath running almost as straight as a stretched ribbon down, down, into the West. There, far away, beyond sad Gondor now overwhelmed in shade, the Sun was sinking, finding at last the hem of the great slow-rolling pall of cloud, and falling in an ominous fire towards the yet unsullied Sea. The brief glow fell upon a huge sitting figure, still and solemn as the great stone kings of Argonath. The years had gnawed it, and violent hands had maimed it. Its head was gone, and in its place was set in mockery a round rough-hewn stone, rudely painted by savage hands in the likeness of a grinning face with one large red eye in the midst of its forehead. Upon its knees and mighty chair, and all about the pedestal, were idle scrawls mixed with the foul symbols that the maggot-folk of Mordor used.
Suddenly, caught by the level beams, Frodo saw the old king's head: it was lying rolled away by the roadside. "Look, Sam!" he cried, startled into speech. "Look! The king has got a crown again!"
The eyes were hollow and the carven beard was broken, but about the high stern forehead there was a coronal of silver and gold. A trailing plant with flowers like small white stars had bound itself across the brows as if in reverence for the fallen king, and in the crevices of his stony hair yellow stonecrop gleamed.
"They cannot conquer for ever!" said Frodo. And then suddenly the brief glimpse was gone. The Sun dipped and vanished, and as if at the shuttering of a lamp, black night fell.
I kept thinking of that passage when looking at all the ruins - because that's really how it looked. I mentioned before that I thought that the Stone Forest in Yunnan Province looked like how I imagined Mordor would be. For me, the Angkor ruins in Siem Reap were like Ithilien with its vestiges of Gondorian architecture.
I'm really glad I went to Cambodia - so many of my Honkie friends didn't want me to go. They thought it was too dangerous. My family also didn't want me to go but it's impossibly beautiful and it's changing. It's becoming a very trendy destination particularly among Western backpackers, so I really wanted to go before it all changes. Also if anyone has seen the end of Wong Kar Wai's "In the mood for love", there is a gorgeous scene with Tony Leung in Angkor ................ *swoon* I'd screen cap it but my dvd is in storage. *shakes a fist at self* Updated: See below! Woohoo! Thanks firefly1984!]
That being said, Phnom Penh is one of the most boring airports in the world. :) I was shouting with glee (on the inside) when I got back to Australia because airports here have what I think they should have. Books in English (hee), lots of yummy snacks - chocolate, candy, biscuits ... snacks I actually want to eat! In a lot of airports in China, Vietnam and Cambodia, I don't expect books in English but there are just no good munchies. No chocolate or candy. Just strange piles of dried sausage, dried meat, green and brown lumps of plantlike substances which are their equivalent of snacks ..... :)
Updated: Thank you so much to firefly1984 for his screencaps of the final scene from the Wong Kar Wai film In the Mood for Love
This is the scene when Tony Leung's character goes to Angkor Wat .....
Before .... when people had a secret they did not want to share, the would climb a mountain. They would find a tree and carve a hole into it. And whisper the secret into the hole, then cover it over with mud. That way, nobody else would ever discover it ......
Absolutely haunting ....