Talk about a trip to write home about . . .
Back in 1871 Frank Vincent Jr. dropped out of Yale University and, despite frail health, the 17-year-old embarked on “a systematic tour of the most interesting parts of the world.”
After reaching Bangkok in the Kingdom of Siam, the Brooklyn, N.Y.-born Vincent decided to pursue a fantastic tale about a lost city in the jungles. This “city of monasteries” had been uncovered a decade earlier by a French explorer-naturalist named Henri Mouhot. The Frenchman had died of a jungle fever before he could make it back to Paris to publish his findings.
Undaunted by mosquitoes, tigers and cobras, Vincent set off eastward from Bangkok into the Kingdom of Cambodia. He traveled in river boats, on foot, on horseback and in bullock-carts. Seventeen days later, he reached the little Cambodian fishing town of Siem Reap.
Here he persuaded a local bureaucrat to supply him and his companions with three elephants. “Rather impatient” as they neared their imagined goal, they left behind their baggage and took off through the luxuriant forest.
An hour later Vincent emerged at a clearing next to an ancient moat about a third of a mile wide filled with lotus plants. Behind the moat and nearly overrun by giant fig trees rose the outlines of the colossal sandstone temple.
Vincent was one of the first American travelers to see the great temple of Angkor Wat, a monument to the four-armed Hindu god Vishnu the Preserver. Covering nearly one square mile and cresting in a central tower taller than the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, the temple of Angkor Wat is the largest and one of the most haunting religious edifices in the world.
“My heart almost bounded into my mouth,” wrote Vincent. “The general appearance of the wonder of the temple is beautiful and romantic as well as impressive and grand. . . . It must be seen to be understood and appreciated.”
For the next 98 years, an ever-growing stream of sophisticated travelers from around the world journeyed to Angkor Wat and the ruins of the nearby royal city of Angkor Thom.
Under the tutelage of French colonial conservators, trees and giant roots were peeled away and the stone blocks of Angkor Wat’s five great pine-cone-shaped towers were reassembled, starting in 1908.
By the time Jacqueline Kennedy visited Angkor Wat in 1967 with her then-escort Lord Harlech, the 800-year-old relics of the Angkor Kingdom had achieved an almost universal cachet. Angkor ranked among the classic archeological sites that every educated person aspired to visit once in a lifetime, along with Egypt’s Great Pyramid of Giza, the Parthenon in Athens and the Machu Picchu ruins in Peru.
But then in 1969, a curtain dropped on Angkor.
With the spread of communist insurgency, Cambodia’s central government lost control over the jungle, then the country, to Khmer Rouge guerrillas. One of the “wonders of the world” would become inaccessible to Westerners for nearly a quarter-century.
By 1972, the Khmer Rouge had set up an ammunition depot inside the walls of Angkor Wat. Pro-government troops trying to evict them nicked the main stone doorway with machine gun bullets.
When the Vietnam War brought secret U.S. bombing of Cambodia, American bombers flew close enough to Angkor to drop a few bombs within a mile of the temple complex. Local guides and some guidebooks insist that in the early 1970s one American bomb exploded inside the walls of Angkor Wat.
By happenstance, the bomb caused no damage. Even more miraculously, Angkor Wat and the main surrounding temples survived Cambodia’s 20 years of darkness with almost no signs of harm. The worst desecration was caused by off-duty soldiers and other temple robbers who chiseled off a small number of carvings and smuggled their loot to black market antique shops in Thailand. Despite a few painful losses, almost everything at Angkor has survived intact.
Late in 1991, after the United Nations extracted a peace agreement that ended Cambodia’s civil war, Western tourists started trickling back.
Still, for the next few years, visiting Angkor wasn’t exactly safe. In and around the dozen most important temples, a French-led international task force cleared away 21,000 land mines. That job was finished by 1995, but even today mine experts continue finding land mines in more remote temple sites still off-limits to tourists.
In the early 1990s, roving guerrilla bands also posed a risk for tourists, especially for those gung ho enough to stray from the main cluster of Angkor temples. As recently as January 1995, American professor Susan Hadden from Austin, Texas, was killed when Khmer Rouge guerrillas ambushed a convoy of vehicles traveling to another temple just 20 miles from Angkor Wat.
Fortunately, it has become quite tame in the last year to visit Angkor. At least that was our experience this February when we toured Angkor Wat and eight other nearby temples, including Banteay Srei.
As Frank Vincent felt 128 years before us, we found that Angkor is one of those rare sights that exceeds every expectation. The sunrises are more majestic, the ruins are better preserved, the stone carvings are more delicate, the history more compelling.
We spent three and a half days walking the ruins and wished we could have stayed longer. The stone carvings inside the temples are so intricate and vast that connoisseurs can spend months here. Just on the walls of the main Angkor Wat temple, the bas-reliefs stretch on for a mile and contain thousands of carved figures depicting such captivating scenes as “the battle of the gods and the demons” and the “churning of the ocean of milk.”
Angkor is humbling and yet addictive for a photographer, with its mix of ever-changing light, elegant shapes and exotic live people who are sweeping or selling or simply visiting. Saffron-robed Buddhist monks who come as tourists lounge on a step and look quite at home.
Nature’s inexorable power is another integral element, especially at the temple Ta Prohm that has been left largely to the jungle’s invasion. Trees hundreds of years old have twined massive roots through roofs and around walls and columns, insinuating themselves so thoroughly that today they help hold intact the feeble works of men. Here the sense of antiquity is even more tangible than at temples where jungle growth has been beaten back.
Rising before the sun may seem beyond the vacation mode, but we found the morning light magical at the temple Preah Khan.
At 5:30 a.m. the stars were still bright when we walked down the causeway entrance guarded by stone gods and demons and lighted on each side by a row of lanterns. Inside, the silent complex of galleries and linked corridors began to loom in silhouette as the sky lightened above the broken roofs. The experience was spectacular enough that we were compelled to try it again the next day at the main Angkor Wat temple, before we caught our airplane out. The sight was totally different, yet equally absorbing.
An early start makes sense for other reasons. Middays are steamy hot. Four or five hours of touring followed by lunch and a long recline by the hotel swimming pool comprise a normal schedule. Emerging for more sightseeing in the late afternoon gives the advantage of more fabulous light effects as the sun goes down.
Reading about Angkor Wat before you leave home will help you narrow down the choices to fit your time. Even with the best guidebooks, the traveler is well-advised to hire a local, trained guide. Choup Lorn, our guide, added immeasurably to our trip, giving the history, pointing out the best-preserved garudas (statues of mythical creatures with birdlike wings and human bodies), tipping us to good camera angles and sharing the local gossip.
For travelers averse to any kind of risks while on holiday, it may still be too soon to visit Angkor. Perhaps this is why only about 100 foreign tourists visit Angkor on an average day, including only about a half-dozen Americans.
Occasionally, there are still terrifying incidents.
On the road from the airport toward Angkor Wat, unknown assassins last September set off a booby trap of rocket-propelled grenades. They were trying to kill the visiting Cambodian prime minister, Hun Sen, but he escaped when three of the four remote-controlled rockets failed to ignite in the wet weather. Then, early this year, a gang of teenage Cambodian robbers knocked a Belgian woman tourist on the head several hundred yards from Angkor Wat, sending her to the hospital while they took her wallet.
That said, however, European tourists continue to visit South Florida, even though some have met equally terrifying incidents in Miami.
For inveterate globe-trotters, fears of another security incident must be balanced against a second risk: although Cambodia is relatively stable now, the curtain of civil war could once again descend on Angkor.
Even should politics remain under control, in another few years it probably will get far more crowded here. Now that all known Khmer Rouge units have come out of hiding and accepted “integration” into the Cambodian Army, both Cambodian promoters and foreign investors are planning for a tourist boom.
Already 10 big new hotels are under construction on the outskirts of Siem Reap, adding to the one luxury-class hotel, three moderately priced hotels and scores of budget guesthouses already operating.
“If we have political stability in our country, we’ll have a big increase in tourism,” said Kousoum Saroeuth, director of the provincial tourism office. “The numbers will be two or three times higher than today, I hope.”
So if you are a nervy traveler and you don’t like crowds, you’d better go to Angkor soon.
IF YOU GO
GETTING THERE
By air: For $55, you can fly to Siem Reap on Royal Air Cambodge from the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh. If you want to skip Phnom Penh, there are scheduled daily flights to and from Bangkok on Bangkok Air and Royal Air Cambodge. Given the hazards of armed robbery on some Cambodian roads, it is probably safest to travel to Angkor Wat by air.
By boat: From Phnom Penh, you can travel up the Mekong River and across Tonle Sap Lake on a ferry boat for a few dollars. But the boats take about six hours and are prone to breakdown.
LODGING
In great luxury: For $360 a night for a double, you can stay at the renovated Grand Hotel d’Angkor, one of the most comfortable hotels in Asia. One reason it’s so pricey is that it is the only first-class hotel in Siem Reap.
Next best: If you like staying in the middle of town (within walking distance of the outdoor marketplace and the honky-tonk nightclubs) try the Ta Prohm Hotel ($70 a night for a twin-bedded room, or $100 for a suite). Two other pretty good second-class hotels are further from the center of town: the Hotel Nokor Kok Thlok and the Angkor Hotel. All three are clean and air-conditioned, but the rooms are reminiscent of off-brand motel rooms.
Cheap: For $2 a night, you can sleep under a mosquito net in your own tiny room at the Naga Guesthouse, which many count as one of the bargains of the Southeast Asian backpacking circuit. For $3 a night, you can even have a room with a bath of sorts.
BEST BOOKS
“Cambodia, a Lonely Planet Survival Kit” (updated 1996)
“Angkor: An Introduction to the Temples,” by Dawn Rooney (1997)
“A History of Cambodia,” by David P. Chandler (1993)
CHANGING MONEY
Don’t bother. Instead, bring along American dollars, especially $1 and $5 bills. Greenbacks are the most widely accepted coin of the realm in today’s chaotic Cambodia.
SEEING THE MONUMENTS
Admission: An individual ticket costs $20 for one day; or $40 for up to three days; or $60 for up to one week.
Getting around: You’ll need wheels because the temples are all spread out, and the nearest one is 5 miles from Siem Reap. If you can afford the Grand Hotel, you will probably also want to rent a car or minibus and driver, for up to $40 a day. If you’re staying at Naga Guesthouse, you’ll probably hire a motorcycle-taxi with driver, for about $8 a day.
Guides: You’ll get far more out of the trip if you pay for a guide. We think our guide cost us about $30 a day. But we aren’t sure because our guide was included in the price of our tour package.
