Si's Year Out! (Plus Europe! Plus Morocco!)

Monday, August 06, 2007

The Legendary Angkor Temples!

The Angkor period ran from the 9th to the 15th century, when the king of cambodia was supposedly the 'god-king'. The Angkor area was the capital at the time and each new monarch would build themselves spectacular temples, usually out-dooing the previous heads of state. In 1431 the capital was sacked by Thai invaders and the population moved south to the current capital of Phnom Penh. The result is a huge area full of amazing temples and palaces between 600-1100 years old, mostly in ruins.

The most famous is Angkor Wat, the largest single religious monument in the world. The Wat is surrounded by a huge moat and a big wall, about 3.6km long! Inside there are three rectangular galleries, each raised above the next. At the centre of the temple stands a quincunx of towers. It took about 2 hours to look around Angkor Wat. The details of carvings on the walls and sheer size of the spectacular buildings was amazing to see. You are allowed to climb around everywhere and there were some great views of teh complex.

Many of the temples have been restored in one way or another over the years but some are little more than piles of rubble. A load of the temples were even covered completely by jungle before historians cleared it away! One of these temples, Ta Prohm, was used as a location for the film Tomb Raider and is covered with huge trees spreading their roots everywhere and even knocking down walls!

The area of Angkor Thom is 9 square kilometers and was the last capital of Angkor. It contains lots of temples, including Baphuon, the Terrace of the Elephants, Phimeanakas, the Royal Palace, the Terrace of the Leper King, Tep Pranam and Preah Palilay, the Prasats Suor Prat, the South Khleang, the North Khleang, and Preah Pithu. I found the Khleangs very interesting. They were collections of red-stone buildings in a line and looked amazing against the background of the light green grass. It is said that they were used for royal performances and later for trials. Each party would be locked inside a building and the first to succombe to disease was proven guilty!

Another temple worth mentioning is the Bayon, which has 54 square towers, each with four huge smiling faces, one carved into each side. It is theorised that at the time Cambodia was split into 54 provinces and each of the faces looked to all four corners of each province to make sure the subjects were behaving themselves.

We looked at all these and more over three days and decided to do it by bicycle. It was a 6km scary ride there (the Cambodians all drive like madmen) and we usually did about 20km in the day. The first day I had a really good mountain bike with 21 grear and suspension but as the days went on, and my funds decreased (faster than i expected, as usual!) my bike got progressively worse until the third day when I had a womens bike with 1 gear and a basket! It was so much fun cruising around the place at our own pace and we got to see some of the really out-of-the-way stuff (not to mention the fact that it was cheaper!). By the end of the three days I was all templed out and ready for another interesting ride back to Bangkok....

My bike action view on the first day - riding a bike on the roads in Cambodia is crazy, but fun!

A tower at the outer entrance of Angkor Wat

The outer walls stretched for a few miles!

Me stepping through

The whole place was covered in amazing carvings

The inside temples at Angkor Wat

There were lots of carvings on the walls

A geko-type creature I found inside the temple!

Sitting where a throne used to be

The view out a window in Angkor Wat

The inner tier of the Wat was made entirely of huge stone blocks

Looking out the window at the Western library

Standing at the top of the Wat the view over the whole complex was stunning

The rear entrance to Angkor Wat

Ta Prohm Kel

Phnom Bakheng

Cambodian writing at Phnom Bakheng

Warriors fighting to control a serpant demon

Angkor Thom main gate

The Bayon temples

Carvings on the walls of Bayon

Carvings of warriors sailing out to sea on a boat

Another detailed carving in Bayon

The Bayon Temple has 56 square towers, each with four faces

Phiemenakas Temple

Taking in the view from the top of Phiemenakas Temple

By the third day funds were low so I could only afford a girls bike with one gear - it had a nice basket though!

The Hindu temple Prasat Kravan

The entrance gates to Ta Prohm, where Tomb Raider was filmed

Each of the stones in this arch are so heavy they could kill you....naturally they decided to prop it up with an old piece of wood

In fact, most of the temple was held up with random bits of stick!

I was lucky to escape this fierce lion!

Nature fights back - this temple was completly covered in forest until it was cleared a few years ago but some of the trees remain

A journey and a half!

Our visas had almost run out so we needed to go over the boarder and come back to get another 30 day Thai visa. This was a great excuse to go over to Cambodia and visit the world-famous temples of the Angkor period. We booked another cheap bus ride to Bangkok (expecting a big air-con bus) and were surprised when we were picked up by a rickety little minibus. We assumed that it was just taking us to a bus station....but after being on it for an hour we were starting to get worried that this was how we were doing the whole 15 hour journey!!

Luckily it was just taking us to a bus stop, it was just that the bus stop was 2 hours drive away! After that it was a fairly relaxing night ride on the air-con bus back to Bangkok. Again people went through our bags but there was nothing to take so we didn't lose anything.

After reaching Bangkok we looked into the journey to Angkor. The border is about 500km from Bangkok and the temples are about 130km from the border. Amazingly, the price for a tour bus there was a ridiculous 800 baht. What with people going through our bags again and the high prices of a tour, we decided to be adventurous and do the trip ourselves using only public transport. This was not as easy as it sounds....

First we had to get to the main bus station, which meant bartering a tuktuk driver and hanging on for dear life as he tried to set the record for the fastest speed on three-wheel transportation! Next we had to find our way through the biggest transport center I've ever seen when everything was in Thai writing. We were actually the only white people at the station! In the end we figured it out and got a bus for 207 baht to the border. We spent the night in a cheap guest house and walked over the next morning. The security was so lax and there were people running around everywhere, it was complete chaos! We got through the Thai departure bit and were directed to the Cambodian visa area. The officials are completely corrupt so they overcharge everyone for the visa by about 30%. We tried arguing but it was impossible so we paid up and went over.

The next step was the 130km ride to Angkor, easy huh? Think again.... The journey would be done on, I quote, the worst road in South East Asia - 137km of dirt, mud and potholes bigger than your average swimming pool! Another story of corruption, it is rumored that Bangkok Airways is bribing the Cambodian government to keep the roads in poor condition so that people are more likely to fly the journey! Even more annoyingly, the government has recently 'regulated' the transport system at the border. This means that there are two ways to get to Angkor; an expensive government bus; or an expensive government taxi! We took the taxi option as it was only slightly more expensive than the bus once we had found another two people to share with.

Words cannot describe the terrible condition of the road! We had an average speed of about 30km/hr and were forever swirving around huge craters in the road. The Cambodians are even crazier than the Thais when it comes to driving and that's saying something. It took us about 15 minutes of driving to figure out that the Cambodians drive on the right side of the road (they actually drive on all sides of it). I didn't need to be so worried about being car-sick as being decapitated as my head was banging against the roof of the car the potholes were so bad! The journey took an amazing 4 hours but all in all it was quite fun and we got to a nice guesthouse in Siam Rep (just by the Angkor area) in time to get a beer to calm our nerves....tomorrow was temple visiting time!

I took a short video of a bit of the drive, we nearley crash a couple of times! See it here!

Me about to set foot in the Kingdom of Cambodia!

A really near miss while driving to Siam Rep

The road was so dusty I dunno how the driver saw anything!

Over 20 people in the back of a ute seems to be mandatory....just like 5 people on a motorbike!

Thursday, August 02, 2007

Railay - like an island, but not!

The guidebook mentioned some cool sounding caves in a place called Railay, just 30km from Krabi. We assumed we'd be able to get a bus there or something but were surprised to find that, even though Railay is a town on the mainland, there were no roads to the place! The only way to get there was by boat but it looked like a cool place to hang out for a few days so we hopped on a longtail boat with all our stuff and cruised over in search of accommodation!

Railay is on a large peninsula that stretches out into the sea and is surrounded by beautiful beaches on three sides. There are no roads and no public phones (but oddly there are lots of internet cafes), its just like being on an island! Annoyingly there is a 5 star resort slap-bang in the middle of the place! Security was so tight that we couldn't even go in to have a look and a room for one night costs more than I've spent in the last month (infact almost double!).

Naturally we headed for the cheapest accommodation available and were amazed to find bungalows, made mostly of sticks, for 100baht (just under 2 quid) in the most beautiful forest area surrounded by spectacular limestone cliffs. They were smallish so we decided to 'splash out' and get one each. We spent the rest of the day checking out Princess Cave and Diamond Cave. The latter has a couple of big caverns with some spectacular Quartz formations and huge stalagmites and stalactites. However, Princess Cave was much more fun! Inside a large limestone cliff there is a network of caverns that you can scramble about in with only a few ropes and bendy bamboo ladders for help. We entered, armed with a torch, and climbed around to see what we could find. At the end of one tunnel was a cavern full of bats hanging from the ceiling, as soon as we entered and shined the light near them they all went crazy and started flying about all over the place! Another tunnel was so steep it involved many ladders and ended at a hole about 150m up the cliff face right over the sea with a great view all along the beach! The scariest of all was the tunnel that ended with a large hole in the ground...looking down, we realised that we were inside a broken stalactite hanging down from the cliff about 100m over the sea! One slip and I'd have fallen out and down into the deep blue sea...

Railay is a beautiful place, but the reason about 70% of people go there is to climb the huge limestone cliffs that surround it....and even though we had decided that it was too expensive to climb again, we couldn't resist! After bargaining a really good deal on all the gear we set out to do some serious rock climbing! After a few exhausting hours we had conquered three difficult, but rewarding, climbs.

I spent the next day chilling on the beaches and walking through the jungle. I also climbed a cliff to a lookout with views all over the area and almost killed myself climbing a very dangerous route to a lagoon (was worth it though!). That afternoon I went back to Krabi and met up with Andre (he had to go back the evening before to make a call) to start the long trip back to Bangkok....