The Travelling Life of Silvan Colani
March 2008 - Cambodia
After a few hectic weeks in Hong Kong, it is always nice to be back in South East Asia – and Cambodia in particular remains one of my favorite destinations. Friendly people, a laid-back pace, tropical climate and some of the best temples in the world!
With direct flights to Siem Reap (i.e. Angkor Wat) from different parts of Asia, many tourists these days by-pass Cambodia’s capital city entirely, but I strongly recommend a stop-over in Phnom Penh. Its four major sights may be limited and two are rather depressing (the not-so-cheerful Tuol Sleng torture museum and the Killing Fields), but the Royal Palace and the Silver Pagoda offer one of the most charming sights in the region. Go early in the morning (gates open at 7:30am) before the first tour bus arrives and you have the whole palace grounds to yourself! A very serene experience indeed!
Lunch, dinner or drinks at the FCC also remain a ‘must do’ item on any Asian itinerary. And then there are some excellent – and very cheap – French restaurants in town. In terms of accommodation, Phnom Penh has also come a long way and we stayed at The Pavilion, a smart boutique hotel in a former royal residence, just behind the palace.
But the real reason to visit this country of 14 million remains of course Angkor – the City of Kings, capital of the Khmer empire, built by successive rulers over 600 years from the 9th to the 14th century. It is hard to imagine now – given its remote and forbidding jungle setting – but in its heydays the city of Angkor was populated by over a million people and was undoubtedly a major metropolis in its day. To see it reduced to the ruins it is now makes you wonder what Hong Kong will look like in a few centuries…
I haven’t been back to Angkor since 2001 and with two million visitors recorded last year I was curious to see whether its magic had been lost in a sea of tourists. On the negative side, there’s certainly been a massive construction boom with hotels sprouting up all along the road from the airport – some ugly, some very ugly and some plain tasteless. Luckily, there are a few gems left and we stayed at one of them: La Residence d’ Angkor. However, it’s not cheap and you’ll spend the equivalent of the country’s annual per capita GDP if you stay for a week!
Despite all the new hotels and increase in arrivals, the temples of Angkor have not lost any of their majestic appeal. You simply need to time your visit to avoid the big crowds. We told as much to our guide and he shuffled the program around so that we found ourselves alone on many of the smaller temples and managed to quietly enjoy the mystical atmosphere of a late afternoon in the ruins of Ta Prohm, the famously unrestored Buddhist temple left overgrown by the jungle.
By getting up early the next morning we also got to enjoy the famous South Gate of Angkor Thom and the 216 smiling stone faces at the Bayon in relative peace and quiet. The only place where you’ll never be alone is of course Angkor Wat itself, national symbol of Cambodia and one of the most awe-inspiring sights anywhere in the world. Built in the early 12th century by an army of 300,000 workers, it was commissioned by Suryavarman II in reverence of the Hindu deity Vishnu, its five symmetrical towers representing the holy Mt. Meru.
On my last visit there, you could still climb to the top spire to peacefully enjoy a magnificent sunset over the jungle canopy. These days, however, the top is closed off and it gets a bit crowded further down. But you can easily get away from it all by walking around the side of the temple and wait for the crowds to disappear for the obligatory sunset view from Bakheng hill while you have the entire monument to yourself in the glorious afternoon sun.
Thanks to the tourist and building boom, evenings in Siem Reap these days are much livelier than before with plenty of new bars and restaurants along the imaginatively named Bar Street. Most of the places are actually very tastefully done as they cater to a more up market crowd. But Cambodian prices are still a bargain by any standards and we enjoyed some excellent Khmer dishes and a couple of cold Angkor Beers for less than US$ 15 at the Red Piano.
Angkor versus Anchor
For a while I got confused by the two national brews: Angkor Beer and Anchor Beer. Angkor is obviously the real deal – “my country, my beer” as they proudly proclaim – but Anchor is equally tasty but clearly a smart phonetic copy of the original.
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Next morning we flew back to Phnom Penh from where we had arranged for a car to take us down south. What followed was some three hours of fairly monotonous driving down a typical South East Asian highway – at times wide and smooth enough to accommodate an Airbus A380 while at other times narrow and pot-holed with traffic literally heading through people’s front yards. We stopped for a couple of temples along the way, but if you’ve just come from Angkor everything else just pales in comparison and often didn’t even warrant a photograph.
Our destination was Kep, or Kep-sur-mer as the French aristocracy used to call it, which I envisaged as an abandoned piece of the Cote d’Azur on the Gulf of Thailand, but in reality it was a tiny place without much to do or see, other than eating decent seafood. We only stayed for one night.
After a good kip in Kep we headed to Kampot, a quaint riverside town that could potentially be quite nice if it was spruced up a bit, and onwards to the southern, and only, port city of Sihanoukville.
Sihanoukville supposedly has the best beaches in the country but the town itself remains rather gritty. We stayed at the Sokha Beach Resort, supposedly the best hotel at the best beach, but being locally run it had a certain “Chinese” feel to it and was packed with fat and ugly Europeans. I later found out that the hotel is owned by the local oil company, Sokimex, which also administers the temples in Angkor in return for 15% of the ticket fee. The owner is a good pal of the Prime Minister and apparently also runs his bodyguard service! You WATCH my back and I SCRATCH yours...
Far away from all this five-star luxury however lay the real reason for our detour south: the M’lop Tapang center for street children, a school-plus-shelter-plus-private social service run by a tireless Italian, Francesco Caruso. Mei’s company, through their ADM Capital Foundation is a major sponsor of M’lop Tapang and through our own Little Feet Fund we had financed their mobile library, a bright yellow minibus that reaches out into the slums to children that live too far away from the school. We caught up with our bus at the far side of town, well beyond the port along a dilapidated and rubbish-strewn train line where people live in absolute squalor.
The mobile library seemed the only bright spot by a mile, parked under a tree, its carpets rolled out, with toys and games about and some 40-50 lively kids playing, reading, smiling and well, just being kids. “We want them to feel normal, to live a normal live”, said Francesco of his vision for these kids, many of which live in slums or on the streets and would otherwise end up in drugs, prostitution or worse. And despite the incredible challenges posed by the obvious poverty, he and his admirable team of volunteers, teachers and social workers seem to succeed, little by little, child by child, in making a difference and providing hope for a better future.
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