Behind the main temple at Angkor, there were two vendors and a troop of monkeys. The cookshop operator threw stones at the monkeys when they came too close or he thought they might be thinking about coming too close. The fruit vendor tossed bits of fruit to them to keep them nearby. Fruit vendors and monkeys are natural enemies: Monkeys like fruit, and don't respect property rights. But in the archaeological park, they've evolved a symbiotic relationship: The fruit sellers sell bananas to tourists for $1 or $2 a bunch, and the tourists hold out the bananas for the monkeys to snatch, and then squeal and take photographs.
Some temples have a sort of driveway of packed red dirt, and along these you run a gauntlet of trinket- and t-shirt sellers. There's usually also a band of amputees playing traditional Cambodian music, with a sign in front of them explaining that they are victims of land mines who studied music in order to be able to give up begging (and take up busking). Most of these bands are actually pretty good, as far as I can tell.
Some of the trinket sellers are young children. At one temple, there's a group of kids who wear crowns of leaves and stand with their arms on each other's shoulders, chorus-line style, and sing cheerful songs and ask for dollars. But the how-cute-Wilbur-give-them-a-dollar school of tourism is in decline, and most tourists just smile uneasily and look away.
Touts in Cambodia were different from Touts elsewhere. From Istanbul to Phuket, I had identical conversations with English-speaking young men who wanted, after forty seconds spent befriending me and gaining my confidence, to recommend tourist offices and shops. There's a unified culture of touting about the size of the Mongol empire. But Siem Reap's outside this area. There were some specific scams, but, apart from that, just more or less honest vendors: Women around the temples who say 'siiir, cold driiink, t-shiiirt', 'maybe when you come back', and 'if you buy, you buy from me, OK?'.
As a tourist at the temples, you smile and say 'hello' and 'no, thanks' dozens of times a day. Everyone, tourists and vendors, has to repeat the same grating dialogues endlessly, like dead Greek tyrants who, while living, seriously annoyed a major god. It's monotonous for the tourists, and must be unbearably so for the vendors, for whom the stakes are much higher and who don't get to fly off somewhere else after a few days. Maybe the economics of tourism in a country this poor make this sort of thing inevitable.
The temples themselves are slouching piles of unmortared blocks held together by gravity and some discreet wooden buttresses. Most of them have been heavily restored; but they are incredible places. Angkor Wat is the most impressive, but also the busiest. Getting around it is slow; tourists instinctively stop in doorways and other important bottlenecks to take pictures. Many of them have a military knack for picking out strategic choke-points. But some of the more distant temples are wonderfully, eerily quiet. Being in one alone is a totally different and dramatically better experience than hanging around Angkor Wat.
In places, local people have set up small shrines, where they sell incense and show rituals to tourists. I climbed a small pyramid, and on the small platform at the top there was an old woman and a tiny altar. On the altar were some incense sticks and an unopened bottle of water. When the woman saw me, she laughed, and couldn't seem to stop until I walked down again. Some of the Khmers find my height kind of outlandish (though my tuktuk driver, Vuthy, speculated that it would make me good at volleyball) -- though it could also have been any number of other things.
It would be interesting to know what Cambodians her age make of what's happened to Siem Reap and Angkor. They lived through some of the worst things ever to happen to anyone anywhere; and then the country filled up with luxury tour buses, and their children grew up to become polyglot, bib-wearing tour guides.
Some temples have brand-new tourist complexes attached, with coffee shops where you can spend the Cambodian median daily wage on a cappuccino, and 'interpretation centres' with histories of the temples and excavations. I went into an interpretation centre to see what it said about the Khmer Rouge years; but it skipped straight from 1950 to 1992. Major temples also have long rows of outdoor restaurants with red plastic chairs. Most of these are empty most of the time; maybe because it's not yet high season, maybe because the alternatives pay poorly enough that it's worthwhile piling in with yet another restaurant even if only a few tourists a day buy your overpriced food.
Outside the path leading up to Kbal Spean, my tuktuk driver pulled up in front of one particular restaurant for lunch. As we ate, management brought out a big glass of local wine for us to share, possibly to thank Vuthy for bringing me along. I had a little in a small plastic cup. Its alcohol content was somewhere between 30 and 50%. They say it's going to be snake wine, but they haven't yet found a cobra to stick in the bottle. But there is an ingredient that has to be extracted from -- there's a communication problem, but the closest we get is that it's extracted from a turtle's belly with a syringe. Well, not quite a turtle, but an animal that's turtle-like. Anyway, it sounds delicious. Vuthy says the wine is given to women in childbirth when other medicines aren't available.
I left Vuthy with the rest of the 'wine' when I went to climb up to Kbal Spean. Kbal Spean is the 'valley of a thousand linga'. Linga are supposed to be kept wet, and so someone had the idea of carving many of them into a riverbed. It's a one-mile hike up to the stream. There's some scrambling over boulders, but the trail is very wide and well-groomed; people in uniforms are sweeping the rocks when I pass. There are butterflies everywhere, small lizards, and a snake with a brightly-coloured head that slips off into the forest as I get close. Thick vines corkscrew around trees, there are lookouts over valleys of jungle, a small waterfall where people swim, and thatch-roofed shelters every couple of hundred metres to wait out rainstorms, as I have to do on the way back down.
Around the Temples
Houses in the archaeological park are built on stilts. In front of some of them, there are racks of Johnny Walker liquor bottles full of gasoline, for sale to motorists. House entrances are guarded by scarecrows, put there to ward off bad spirits. Some of the scarecrows are armed: Some hold wooden cutouts in the shapes of guns, and one has a rocket launcher. This approach to spirit-management contrasts interestingly with the spirit house (which keeps spirits away by giving them a place of their own) preferred elsewhere. In small clearings, volleyball courts have been put up. Volleyball's very popular; along with swinging in a hammock, it's one of Cambodia's national sports.
On the sides of some simple wood-and-thatch houses, there are bright advertising posters. Some look to be for some lottery or other contest; most of the rest are for alcohol or cigarettes. Some of the more prosperous-looking homes have large political posters on their grounds. These show three suit-wearing men of about sixty looking solemnly but optimistically off into the distance, apparently at a glittering but challenging future that's approaching from their right.
From the road, narrow tracks of packed red dirt lead off into the forest. Each has a bilingual blue sign at the entrance, usually claiming that there's a school at the other end. There are tethered buffalo, free-running chickens, and rice fields with occasional palm trees. The rice fields are very beautiful. This might be controversial, but for me, rice is the most beautiful of all cereal crops.
