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!

C for the Crossing

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

Although I was able to do the first two posts of the AtoZ Challenge in chronological order, the alphabets won't allow me to do that for the remaining posts. This post deals with our 'Crossing' of the land border between Thailand and Cambodia. So this technically takes place before all the other posts. Once I'm done with all twenty-six posts, I'm planning to do a 'summary' post putting it all together in chronological order.

***

Back when we were researching the trip to Cambodia, we realized that flying there directly would cost a bomb. The next best option was to fly via Thailand. A budget airline has recently started cheaper flights between Siem Reap and Cambodia. The only catch was that these budget airlines charge you extra for things you take for granted on normal flights.

That’s when The Husband remembered reading somewhere about buses between Thailand and Cambodia.

"Hmm," we thought, "Why not try that option?" 

Not only would it cut our expenses, the prospect of getting out of the normal tourist circuit and seeing a bit of rural Thailand and Cambodia was appealing. And crossing the land border between two countries and briefly being in ‘No Man’s Land’ for some time? What an adventure! Arriving by flight at a new country started to seem pretty meh.

Some more research later, we learnt that until 2013, tourists who wanted to reach Siem Reap by bus had to go from Bangkok to Aranyaprothet (the Thai checkpost closest to Siem Reap) by bus, cross over to PoiPet (on the Cambodian side), and then arrange their own transportation to Siem Reap from there. This obviously resulted in a whole bunch of scams.

But Thailand now has a bus which connects the two cities directly. The whole trip would take about 6-7 hours. Not only that, tickets were available online! Obviously, we were much prompt in booking. The bus starts from Mo Chit bus station every day, we learnt. There are two buses that run every day - one at 8 AM and one at 9 AM. We chose the later one so that we wouldn't have to wake up too early. 

The bus in its bay at Mo Chit (Chatuchak) bus station

When the bus left Bangkok that Wednesday, there were only fourteen people on board. It took us an hour just to get out of Bangkok, and I started to wonder about this "6-7 hours" story. The ride on the Thai side was pretty uneventful - we stopped at a service station at about 10:30, but that was it. 

About five kilometers before the border, the bus stopped to pick up lunch for the passengers. It was there that the first interesting thing happened - the bus company tried to scam its own passengers!

A young guy got on board and said, “Thank you for booking with us. In order to continue into Cambodia, you would be requiring a Cambodian visa. We have arranged for you to get the visa here. Please follow me.” 

He didn’t bother to mention the fact that they would charge $38 for that visa, as opposed to the $20 that the Cambodian authorities would charge at the border. Luckily, most people on the bus had read about this particular scam already. The two people who did get off quickly got back on when they realized something was wrong. So they netted no fish from our bus.

And now begins the main part of the story - the actual crossing! The immigration check-point at Aranyaprothet was pretty uneventful - we stood in a long queue, got our passports stamped, and walked out on the other side and out of Thailand.

And then, for a glorious couple of minutes, we were on No Man's Land. I don't know how it is at other borders, but we had to cross a short land bridge to get to PoiPet. Ahead of us was the spired gateway welcoming us to Cambodia!

On the other side, a signboard directs people according to whether they already have their visa or not. We had taken the precaution of applying for an e-visa, so we proceeded directly to Passport Control. 

The gateway, with its spires

On the Cambodian side, the difference in prosperity levels between the two countries was clearly visible. Whereas we had queued in an airconditioned room on the first floor of an official building on the Thailand side, the ‘Arrivals’ hall for Cambodia was just a shed, open on two sides. But interestingly enough, each of the Cambodian counters had a fingerprint machine. We hadn't been asked to give our fingerprints for the Thai visa.

We filled up our Arrival cards and stood in another long queue to get them stamped. And then something strange happened. When The Husband got to the counter, he was asked to step aside. A uniformed Cambodia official took him (with me tagging along behind) to another room with dark windows. He asked me to wait outside. 

I waited outside that room for what seemed like ages, with no idea of what was happening inside. Were they interrogating him, were they beating him up, were they torturing him? After an agitated ten minutes, I cautiously opened the door and peeked in. I saw a desk with an officer behind it, and The Husband standing nearby. He gestured that everything was okay, and I closed the door. But not before wishing that they'd asked me to go inside as well - that damn room was airconditioned, and I was slowly getting boiled in the heat outside!

Later, the husband told me that they had, in fact, been interrogating him. What was his purpose in coming to Cambodia, which hotel had he booked? They even called up our hotel in Siem Reap to confirm that we were, in fact, booked there. 

Whew. Anyway, after they were satisfied that we were genuine, they took us back and deposited us at the head of the queue again. After that, everything was normal - we gave our finger-prints and photos, and got our passports stamped.

I still don't know why they it happened. Was it a normal 'random check' that we were unfortunate enough to get caught in, or do they do this for everybody who's got an e-visa? If the latter, that's pretty stupid, because that would disincentivize people from getting an e-visa. An e-visa obviously reduces the processing time at these crossings, and also earns them five dollars extra. 

So in the end, the e-visa didn't do us much good. We spent almost as much time there as the people who hadn't got a visa. Not only that, since the bus could only move after all the passengers had gotten their passports stamped, we were stuck there till all sixteen of the others got their visas. In fact, the bus nearly left one girl behind because she ran late. Despite having passenger lists, they didn't bother to check if everybody had got back to the bus!

Siem Reap is another two hours from PoiPet. The roads aren't as great as on the Thai side, but are still good enough - at least, they're way better than how I imagine Indian roads in similar far-flung places would be. The Cambodian countryside reminded me very much of Kerala - the coconut trees, the mango trees, the yellow kanikonna. Since it was mango season, the mango trees had hundreds of mangoes, strung up like Christmas lights. The trees looked different from the ones here in India, though - they're much shorter, and the mangoes hang a long way down from the branches. You can see one in the below photo (below the coconut tree and next to the yellow kanikonna).

A shot from the bus

In the end, the entire journey took more than 9 hours. The border crossing itself took 1.5-2 hours. It was past six by the time we reached Siem Reap. So I would definitely NOT recommend this option for anybody. If you can afford the flight, do yourself a favour and take the flight. Never mind the romantic notion of a land crossing.

B is for the Bayon Temple

This post is part of the A2ZChallenge, which I'm doing on my recent trip to Siem Reap in Cambodia.

At the end of the last post, we had just left Angkor Wat, the City that Became a Temple. Next up was Angkor Thom, the Great City. 

Just like Angkor Wat, Angkor Thom was also a capital city. It was built in the late twelfth century (about fifty years after Angkor Wat) by Jayavarman VII, who was a prolific builder, and responsible for quite a few of the temples we see in Angkor today. Its four gates and their face-towers have become iconic - one of the things people remember when they hear the word Angkor.

The Southern gate of Angkor Thom

Much larger than Angkor Wat (about 3 kilometers long on each side), Angkor Thom today is home to many temples and other monuments.  Chief of the temples is the Bayon temple, which was the State Temple of Jayavarman VII, and is hence situated at the very center of Angkor Thom.

From far away, Bayon looks almost like a ruin

From far away, Bayon looks almost like a ruin. Why, I wondered, had so many people I know raved about this temple? 

The main approach to the temple is from the east, via a causeway with naga-shaped balustrades (a common feature of Angkor temples, as we would soon discover). 

Bayon consists of two enclosures, the inner one raised. The first enclosure doesn't promise much; it's more a cluster of stones than a wall. We crossed it, and climbed up the first set of stairs to the second enclosure. 

Inside, it's a veritable maze. What I had initially thought of as ruins turned out to be towers with multiple faces. These face-towers pop up wherever you look - there are almost forty of them on that upper level. The faces are strange - almost creepy. Perhaps the word 'inscrutable' describes them best. Some of them are so weathered that it's hard to distinguish them from the stone. 

How many faces can you spot?

The temple has a central shrine, of course. But, despite being quite large, it's comparatively undistinguished - the face towers steal the eye and the heart. 

It's easy to sit there and stare at the faces and wonder - why? What were these faces supposed to symbolize? Why carve them so many times on so many towers? What have these faces seen over the years? What lies behind those inscrutable smiles? Really, if Mona Lisa had a male counterpart, he would be somewhere here. I finally understood why my friends had raved about Bayon in particular. 



On the southern side of the second enclosure is a gallery similar to the one at Angkor Wat. The only difference is that, unlike Angkor Wat, these galleries feature real life scenes. Many of them feature naval battles that the Khmer kings had with the Cham kings. 

Below is an example of a naval battle between the two kingdoms (click to enlarge the photo). The Khmers are the ones on the left with the crossed ropes across their chest, and the Chams are the ones on the right with the strange helmets. Note the exquisitely life-like carving and the sheer amount of detail. Note the dead bodies in the water, a crocodile eating a man who has fallen in, the fishes and turtles in the water. Note the bottom panel, in which the common people are going about their daily lives as usual, oblivious of the great battle that is being fought for their protection.

Coincidentally, I came across another blogger who also wrote about the Bayon Temple for the 'B' post of the A to Z Challenge. Visit her blog for a much better set of photos. She seems to have visited during the rainy season, hence the greenery. 

A is for Angkor

This post is part of the A2ZChallenge, which I'm doing this year on my recent trip to Siem Reap in Cambodia.

Is it possible to get goosebumps on one's heart? Because if it is, then I have them.

I'm walking down the causeway towards Angkor Wat. Those famous tiered spires, the ones I've been dreaming about for months now, are ahead of me. The eastern sky is still lightening, the spires are mere dark outlines against the greyness. Dozens of tourists throng the causeway ahead of me. Hundreds more wait by the pond to the north, waiting to take their own personal version of that legendary photo of Angkor Wat reflected in the waters of the pond. 

***

We leave our hotel at five in the morning. The tuk-tuk takes us through the empty streets of Siem Reap to the entrance of Angkor Archaeological Park. Huge and forested, the Angkor Archaeological Park is almost a museum of cities. The Khmer kings, who ruled this area between the ninth and the sixteenth centuries, believed in building a fresh capital city for each new king. Each capital city had at its center the state temple. Thus, many large temples dot the park, each appearing almost like a mirage of grey stone in the middle of the forest.

Angkor Wat and the other temples are a few kilometers further inside from the entrance of the park. The ride through the dark forest in the morning is an experience not to be forgotten - the cool morning, the lightening sky, the sound of crickets on all sides. Over-taking and being over-taken by cars and vans and buses and tuk-tuks full of other tourists like us, all headed towards one temple, all intent on catching Sunrise at Angkor Wat. 

Angkor Wat (The City that Became a Temple) was built in the first half of the twelfth century by the Khmer king Suryavarman II. Initially a Hindu temple, Angkor became Buddhist later when the latter religion swept the region from the thirteenth century onward. The temple is unique in that, unlike other Hindu temples which face the rising sun, its entrance is towards the west.

Like most of the temples that the later Khmer kings built, it is in the form of a stepped pyramid with three levels. The three enclosures all have four entrances, one in the middle of each side. The pyramid was the Khmer way of symbolizing Mount Meru, the center of the Hindu universe. Hence, it's called a 'temple-mountain'. Because of this symbolism, Angkor Wat was situated at the exact center of the capital city, and the city walls today form a fourth enclosure, with a moat outside it. All the other buildings of the city were made of wood, and have perished in the eight centuries since (and hence the City Became a Temple).

Our tuk-tuk driver drops us just outside the city's moat. We walk down the causeway towards the western gopura in a daze, mesmerized by the prospect of seeing Angkor Wat in a few minutes, not even realizing in the dark that there's water on either side of us. 

The causeway across the moat - the western gopura is ahead

The western gopura is huge, but we don't care - we're eager for our first glimpse of Angkor Wat. Crossing the gopura, we reach another causeway at the end of which, finally, we can see three of the five central spires.

The spires, as seen from the Western gopura

A long walk down the causeway, and we're at the third (the outer-most) enclosure. It's a sort of gallery, with walls in covered exquisite bas-reliefs from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata and also from the reigns of one of the Khmer kings.

A scene from the bas-relief featuring the Kurukshetra war - note Bhishma Pitamaha on his Bed of Arrows

Between the third and the second enclosures on the western side is a hall with multiple stone basins. It used to be lined with statues of Buddha, placed there in later centuries by Buddhist worshipers, and was called the Hall of the Thousand Buddhas. These were either removed or destroyed during the Khmer Rouge reign of terror. Only a few statues still remain.

Entering the second closure, we see a large open space. On either side are small buildings called 'libraries'. I don't know if they originally served the purpose we associate with libraries today.

Inside the second enclosure

The steps up to the inner-most enclosure are steep and not in very great shape. In fact, they're so terrible that, of the four sets of stairs leading up to the central enclosure (one on each side), we are only allowed to use the stairs to the east, where a new set of wooden stairs have been built. These stairs don't open till seven-thirty. Also, be warned - wear tops with sleeves and bottoms that cover your knees, otherwise you won't be allowed in.

The eastern stairs up to the innermost enclosure

The innermost enclosure appears small and crowded after the outer two. This level is the one with the five iconic spires - the central shrine and four corner towers.

The central shrine

The central shrine used to contain a  large statue of an eight-armed Vishnu; but a Buddha statue replaced Vishnu during the later Buddhist era. The Vishnu statue now resides in a small shrine south of the western gopura.

The eight-armed statue of Vishnu

Climbing down, we take a walk down the causeway to the east, to the eastern gopura. This section has not been restored as well as the western section. The gopura is in terrible shape, and the walls are nowhere to be seen. Outside the gopura is the moat again.

The moat, as seen from near the eastern gopura

We walk back, and then walk to the northern side of the temple in search of some food. There are food stalls here, and we have been specially invited by one Mr Tiger Woods, who told us that he runs stall number one there. We see that Harry Potter also has a stall there, as do numerous other celebrities. In fact, I also over-heard a guide introducing himself to a tourist as 'James Bond - Licensed to Guide'. 

The restaurants are highly priced by Cambodian standards - five dollars for a single dish. When we hear the price, we walk on; surely we can get cheaper food elsewhere. The stall owners run after us quoting smaller rates. One girl is particularly persistent - 2 dollars per person, she says. We debate, decide we're not quite hungry yet. We buy a bottle of water and walk on.

Of the dozens of temples in the Angkor Park, why is Angkor Wat the most famous? So famous, in fact, that most people (including us initially) think that the entire park is named Angkor Wat? Several reasons, I think. For one, Angkor Wat is certainly the best preserved (or perhaps the best restored). Secondly, since Angkor Wat was built later than most of the other Angkor temples, the Khmer kings seem to have taken the best elements of the other temples, made them even more majestic and brought them all together at Angkor Wat. More prosaically, the fact that it's closest to the park entrance means that our energy levels are slightly higher at Angkor Wat, and we're able to appreciate it much better.

And so. That's one item off the bucket list. On now to the next city, and the next set of temples. 

The A2Z Challenge

Yeah, I'm back.

It turns out that unless there's an active resolution to blog, no blogging happens. 

"But blogging is so 2004," you might say with a yawn. "Why are you still bothering?"

The answer, clearly, is that I'm not. 

But the thing is - I WANT to bother. It's only on this blog that I write at all, and I've forgotten how it feels to have words flowing from the end of my fingertips.

And so I've signed up for the A2Z Challenge. 

Actually, wait - that's only one of the reasons I've signed up, and not even the main one. 

I just got back from a ten-day vacation to Thailand and Cambodia. Thailand was nice, but Cambodia was just - magical. Temples, history, greenery, lakes, heat - magical.

And when I was thinking of how to hold on to those memories, I realized I had to write. But there's so much to write that it wouldn't have got done in a post or two. 

And then I realized that April was also A2Z Challenge month. Why not, I thought, sign up for the challenge with my experiences in Cambodia as the theme?

At first, the idea seemed audacious. Could I really write twenty-six posts on just three and a half days in Cambodia? I started trying to think of posts for each of the letters and it turned out that - yes, I could do it quite easily. 

And so here we are. I'm fully aware that I might not finish the challenge. Last year, despite being unemployed for the first half of the month, I wrote only eighteen posts. But then last time I was travelling pretty much every weekend. This time, I will not be. Hopefully, I'll manage to finish.

Wish me luck! Here's a taste of things to come.