The missus and me got back from our short sojourn in Cambodia on Saturday afternoon. People say you don't get to know a country in 5 days. True, but I think the both of us caught more than an ample glimpse of what this sad but beautiful country has to offer the casual visitor. We moved around on our own, and in such a short time managed to trek most of the Temple ruins on the Angkor Plain, travel the 313km from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh, boat-ride the Tonle Sap as well as depress ourselves at the S-21 Detention Camp of Tuol Sleng and Killing Fields at Choeung Ek.
Looking at my photos taken during the trip, the Contradiction that is Cambodia becomes more and more apparent.
As Angkor Wat looms before you for the first time, approaching it from the long causeway over the gargantuan 190m-wide moat surrounding this Mother of all Temples, honestly its a spine-tingling experience. The Wat is everywhere in Cambodia, on the National Flag, on T-shirts, on the National beer, in hotels and guesthouses, on cigarettes...Cambodians are justifiably proud of this Suryavarman II-inspired, monument to Vishnu. Perhaps too much so really because, what else is there to be proud of? It seems that the glory days of the Angkorian period, now immortalised in the beautifully surreal temple ruins spread across the Angkor Plain, serve to remind ordinary Cambodians that their Khmer ancestors were once a great race. An ego-booster of sorts especially when the country is still trying to pick itself up from the dark ages that was the PolPot regime.
It is not easy, as the missus and me found out, to switch from the Alluring Beauty that is Angkor, to the Atrocious Beastiality found in the torturous detention prison of Tuol Sleng and mass graves at Choeung Ek. From humanity at perhaps its greatest and most sophisticated to humanity at its darkest and most disgusting. All in the same country, a mere 313km away from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh.
Cambodians need Angkor and its temples. If not as a symbol of their former greatnest on the world-stage, then as a carthatic eraser to help them forget about the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge, the lack of true freedom in their own land and the desperate poverty and corruption that is rife all over.
The children are wonderful, their smiles light up your day. But behind those happy faces and accented English honed by months of begging from the Ang Mo's, they live for the day and for the day only.
You cannot blame them because not too long ago, there was no tommorrow.
