J is for Jacques

This post is part of the AtoZChallenge, which I'm doing on my recent trip to Siem Reap in Cambodia.

The topic for my 'J' post is the one thing without which I couldn't have done the Angkor trip. I bought it on our very first morning at Angkor Wat, as the sun was rising over the five towers, and I hugged it tight for the two and a half days - so much so that when we were done with the temples on Day 3 and I had to put it back into the bag, I felt orphaned and unprotected.

What IS it, you ask? It's The Holy Book of the Angkor Visitor - Ancient Angkor by Claude Jacques (now you know where the J comes from!) and Michael Freeman. The book was our tour guide and our life-line for two and a half days. 

I read it on the tuk-tuk, I read it in the hotel room, I read it on sunny temple platforms and in the shade of tall shrines. I frowned at it while trying to figure out which carving it was referring to, and I smiled in delight whenever I spotted said carving. I felt a deep sense of camaraderie with all the other tourists who were also frowning and trying to follow in Jacques' footsteps.

In case you haven't figured it out yet, Ancient Angkor is a guide book - an introduction to the Ancient Angkors. It starts with the Khmer kingdom's history, and goes on to provide descriptions and photos of all the major and minor temples around Siem Reap. Each temple is described in loving detail - its history, its plan, how to visit it and the major things to look out for. The most useful section for the tourist is the 'Visit' section, which is a guided tour along the lines of, "Turn left at the end of the gallery. Ahead of you is a richly carved figure of Vishnu reclining." You get the drift. 

Jacques, a scholar and expert on the Khmer kings, wrote the text, and Freeman took the photos. The book is literally a treasure trove. The text is richly detailed, and Jacques' scholarship clearly comes through. Freeman's photos, though a bit too red-tinted, add the required glamour. 

The southern wall of Preah Paliley today

It quickly became evident that the text and the photos are at least ten-fifteen years old. Though that may sound like a disadvantage at first, it works out strangely well. The photo of Preah Paliley, for example, shows two huge trees growing out of the southern wall of the shrine. Today, the trees are gone; only the bases remain, with thin saplings shooting out. Comparing the decade-old photos with today's reality led to some interesting private musings on the passage of time. 

We bought the book for the princely sum of $7. The seller initially quoted $28. Since we had been warned by a friend, we responded with a quote of $5, and stuck to it till he came down to $6. But he disappeared before we could strike a bargain, and we finally bought it from another seller for $7. But honestly, the book is of such glossy high quality that I don't see how it's worthwhile for anybody to sell it for just $7. And here I'm comparing with the Indian market, where books are famously much cheaper than elsewhere in the world. (I just saw that it's selling for $12 on Amazon.) Either way, Ancient Angkors is definitely looking very classy on our bookshelf. And best of all, I can refer to it while writing these blog posts! 

I is for Indians in Cambodia

This post is part of the AtoZChallenge, which I'm doing on my recent trip to Siem Reap in Cambodia.

Given the number of people the husband and I know who've visited the Angkor temples, we had somehow thought that the place would be swarming with Indians. But during our stay in Cambodia, we saw exactly two Indians - two jeans-clad Tamilians who must certainly have been melting in the heat. There were a handful of NRIs and PIOs as well (identifiable by their accents).

The lack of Indians is a bit strange, because Hindu Indians are the people best placed to understand and appreciate these temples and their iconography. The Khmer kings carved every inch of their temples with Hindu Gods and scenes from Hindu mythology, and Hindus who know their mythology would be best able to put these carvings in context.

The Asuras doing their part in the churning of the Sea of Milk

In fact, I thought these temples would make great Hindu pilgrimage spots, though most are not active (and the ones that are have long been Buddhist). As I watched huge buses disgorge dozens of Chinese / Caucasian tourists, I wistfully imagined similar buses full of sari-clad paatis and maamis eager to see the temples and their carvings.

But it's not that Indians have never been there. We found out quickly enough that people from our country have been there and have left a solid reputation behind. On our very first night there, we went out for a stroll and landed up at Central Market, which is on the main road of Siem Reap.

We decided to do some window-shopping, and liked something (I can't remember what it was). We asked the shopkeeper for the price, and she told us. We thought it was too high to even bother negotiating, and we started to leave. And that's when she laid the bombshell, "You Indians. You look, you no buy."

Well. I couldn't argue because in that particular instance, it WAS true. Though we did end up buying stuff later, I can't fault the Indians who decided not to buy anything. Cambodia's street markets are clearly targeted at people who earn in dollars and so don't mind spending in dollars. Indians who earn in rupees and have access to India's cheaper street markets would definitely think twice before buying anything.

H is for the Heat

This post is part of the AtoZChallenge, which I'm doing on my recent trip to Siem Reap in Cambodia.

People, it's HOT in Cambodia. When we visited in the last week of March, the temperature was in the mid-thirties, and the humidity was 70-80%. And it's a sapping kind of heat, a heat that makes you unable or unwilling to move once you sit down.

We suffered particularly on Day 1, when there were a lot of temples that were in the open and provided very little protection from the sun. Baphuon temple (morning of Day 1) stays in my memory particularly, because we just collapsed inside one of the galleries in the upper level, unwilling to climb to the open and sunny highest level.

So do everything you can think of to deal with the heat. Hat, towels, umbrellas, tiny cotton clothes - whatever works for you. But if you're wearing tiny clothes, beware that some temples mandate knee-length shorts / skirts, and shirts / tops with sleeves. Baphuon temple and the central shrine of Angkor Wat are the ones where this is strictly enforced, but I saw the warning board at Ta Prohm as well. 

Water is a huge necessity - the two of us drank 4-5 liters a day there. You can't possibly carry enough water to last the entire day, but bottled water is available inside the park. As with anything in Cambodia, be sure to negotiate. A large 1.5 L bottle of water costs $0.5 in reality, but you'll never be quoted that rate. Stick to your $0.5 figure and you'll be rewarded. If nothing works, get your tuk-tuk driver to buy water for you. A 1.5 L bottle may seem heavy and unwieldy, but you'll be surprised at how quickly it gets over.

Oh, and carry sunscreen. When we look at our own photos now, we can see ourselves getting progressively darker over the three days we were there. 

G is for Getting Around

This post is part of the AtoZChallenge, which I'm doing on my recent trip to Siem Reap in Cambodia.

Siem Reap is quite a small town; walking from one end to the other doesn't take more than fifteen minutes - now if only it wasn't so hot and humid! Thankfully, there are tuk-tuks available everywhere. But be sure to negotiate. The drivers will quote $3, but will agree to $1 (in fact, we were left feeling that we should have quoted $0.5).

Getting around the Angkor Archaeological Park is more of a problem, though. Angkor Wat itself is about 6-8 kilometers from Siem Reap town. Most of the temples inside the park are quite far away from each other too.

Most people, especially when travelling as couples, hire tuk-tuks for the entire day. The tuk-tuk driver takes them to each temple, parks outside while they walk around, and then takes them to the next one. We also saw that some hotels had arranged minivans for their guests. Some crazy people had hired bicycles and were cycling around as well. Foreigners can no longer hire motor-bikes in Siem Reap, so that's not an option anymore.


We hired our tuk-tuk with our hotel's help. We didn't bother to negotiate, because many people on TripAdvisor had mentioned that our hotel had the cheapest tuk-tuk rates. Here are the rates, for what they're worth. The photo (click to enlarge) provides the detailed itinerary for each day.

• Day 1: The inner round - $12 ($15 including sunrise at Angkor Wat)
• Day 2: The outer round - $18 including the far-off Banteay Srei 
• Day 3: The Ruolos temples and surrounding areas - $18

Out of these, the only day I felt we didn't get value for money was Day 3 - but that was for a whole different reason which I'll explain in a different post. Our driver was a smiling Cambodian who introduced himself as 'Phun' and dressed in formals throughout. When he saw us buying bottles of mineral water at $1, he took pity on us and offered to buy them for us at $0.5. He very openly told us that if we had lunch at the restaurant he took us to, he would be able to eat for free there. Unfortunately, we missed taking a photo with him and his tuk-tuk (red with a white canopy, what a happy sight it was at the end of each tiring temple visit!).

F is for the Food

This post is part of the AtoZChallenge, which I'm doing on my recent trip to Siem Reap in Cambodia.

I think it was unfortunate in a way that we came to Cambodia from Thailand. Our four days in Bangkok had made us so sick of Thai food (how it smells!) that we had decided that we hated all South East Asian food. I had decided that, for all my supposed enthusiasm about traveling and seeing new cultures and what not, food was definitely not something I was willing to experiment with.

And so we stuck to very conservative things for the first couple of days in Siem Reap - we even ate at KFC one night!

The bread was strangely-shaped and salty

Which was pretty stupid of us, actually. Khmer food, it turns out, is much tastier than Thai food. Not only that, Siem Reap is much better than Bangkok when it comes to food - because it's a tourist town, after all. It has sprung up and grown purely because of Angkor-related tourism, which means that the food available at most joints in Siem Reap has been tweaked to suit touristy (mostly Western) tastes. Authenticity be damned, tasty food is what matters!

But it took us a day and a half in Siem Reap to finally try some Khmer food - and we actually liked it! The Husband gobbled down his Khmer Fish Amok so fast that a Japanese girl at the next table asked, astounded, "That tasty, huh?" My Khmer Chicken Curry, chicken and vegetables drowned in coconut milk, was the best thing I'd eaten in days.

That's the Khmer Fish Amok on the right, and my half-empty bowl of Khmer Chicken Curry on the left

After that, we were firm converts.

The only problem was that we didn't feel like eating much during the day. The incredible heat of Cambodia made us thirsty, but never hungry. Every day, it was only after the sun went down that we became aware of our stomachs. And then we couldn't get enough of rice and curry.

Food prices in Siem Reap depend on where you're eating. At the roadside stalls inside the Angkor Park, a single dish is around $4, which is pretty steep considering the general price levels. But in Siem Reap town, you can find food to suit whatever budget you have. Below is a page from the menu of the restaurant we ate at on our first night there.

Strangely enough, drinks are amazingly cheap. "Happy Hours" in Siem Reap last all the way till 10 PM. Though the menus mention drinks at $1 and above, it's perfectly possible to get something for half that; many restaurants have one-plus-one offers which work out super-cheap. The only exception was Coke - nobody was willing to go below $1 for a can.

The main street in Siem Reap for food and restaurants is Pub Street. It has restaurants to suit all tastes and budgets. And since all the restaurants follow the practice of displaying their menus outside, it's possible to walk up and down and see what the restaurants offer before making a choice. Many restaurants advertise strange kinds of meat - apart from the usual frog and snake, we saw kangaroo, dog, and crocodile. A girl on our bus for the return journey said she'd eaten tarantula the night before - gross! (Here's the wiki page for what I think she must have eaten.)

We also spotted a handful of Indian restaurants - I have no idea who they cater to in Cambodia. Below is the board of the Kerala restaurant in Pub Street, which was Kerala only in name. It served dishes from across India, but didn't have a single soul inside when we saw it.

E is for East Mabon

This post is part of the AtoZChallenge, which I'm doing on my recent trip to Siem Reap in Cambodia.

East Mabon was one of the temples we visited on Day 2 of the Angkor tour. Though it's neither very large nor particularly elaborate, East Mabon stuck in my memory for two reasons.

When it was built more than ten centuries ago, East Mabon stood in the middle of a large reservoir called the East Baray - a man-made reservoir that served Yasodharapura, the then-capital of the Angkor kings. It could be approached only by boat, and so it had none of the usual trappings of the Angkor temples - the outer enclosures and the causeways and the naga-shaped balustrades. Instead, it had boat landings!

The east entrance

I imagined the temple standing majestically in the middle of the reservoir, its towers reflected in the waters below, its laterite walls glowing red in the sunrise - and fell instantly in love.

Of course, the reservoir has long since dried up. No trace of it remains except possibly the sandy soil around the temple (see above), and the fact that the temple's outer enclosure seems unusually high (because of course it had to be higher than the surrounding water).

A lion guards the east entrance, while an elephant guards the north-east corner

The second reason I liked the temple was its set of elephant guardians. While pairs of lions guard the entrances of East Mabon, elephants stand at the corners of each of the two enclosures. And such cute elephants they are! This was the only temple (I think) where we saw elephant guardians. Most temples have lions; Banteay Srei has monkey guardians!

One of the elephants

The central level of East Mabon has five towers, just like Angkor Wat. But these were made of brick and plaster, and the plaster seems to have flaked off, leaving exposed bricks full of round holes that look like bullet holes. These apparently used to be filled with plaster.

One of the central towers

East Mabon was another temple where we saw the guardian Gods of each direction represented on the pediments. I thought they were less well done than at Banteay Srei, but at least we can see them close up. Below is Indra on his three-headed elephant.

Indra on the east pediment of the central shrine

It drizzled while we were at East Mabon. Actually, the 'drizzle' was no more than a few drops that were still undecided about falling down, but for a brief while I had real hope of rain. Instead, we stood on the top-most enclosure and watched the lone dark cloud pass swiftly overhead towards the south-east. 

D is for the Directions (and their Gods)

This post is part of the AtoZChallenge, which I'm doing on my recent trip to Siem Reap in Cambodia.

Since the Angkor temples were originally Hindu temples, the walls have a lot of carvings from Hindu mythology. Interestingly, the pediments above the doors of some of the shrines have been carved with images of the guardian Gods of that particular direction.

We discovered this for the first time at the beautiful miniature temple of Banteay Srei. Personally, though I have more than a nodding acquaintance with Hindu mythology, I didn't know which God guarded which direction. It was interesting to see this theme coming up over and over again in other temples.

The below photos are all from Banteay Srei temple. Please excuse the quality of the photos - the carvings are so fragile that many parts of the temple have been closed off, and we had to really crane to see these from afar. I've also cropped the original photos so as to focus on the pediments.

Indra, the King of the Gods, is the guardian for the East. He is generally depicted on top of his three-headed elephant, though we saw a single-headed elephant at one place as well.

Yama, the God of Death, is the guardian for the South. He is generally depicted on his buffalo. The below doorway is particularly interesting because he is depicted both on the lintel (just above the door), and on the pediment (above the lintel), in different postures.




Varuna, the God of Water, is the guardian for the West. He is generally depicted with swans as his vehicle (or were they geese?). At one of the temples, we also saw him on a makara, which is generally considered his vehicle.




Kubera, the God of Wealth, is the guardian for the North. Though we Indians generally see him riding his chariot Pushpaka, Khmer art generally depicts him on top of a yaksha, as can be seen below.





The "in-between" directions have Gods too, though they were never carved on the lintels (the temple doors always face one of the four main directions). I'd never even heard of Isana and Nirrti.

• North-East: Isana, an aspect of Shiva. His vehicle is a bull.
• North-West: Vayu, the God of Wind. His vehicle is an antelope.
• South-West: Nirriti, the Goddess of Death and Corruption.
• South-East: Agni, the God of Fire. The Khmers generally depict him on top of a rhinoceros!