by
evilhippy
@ 2008-04-20 - 06:42:30
There is such a temptation to use The Dead Kennedy's song as the title here, but it is just too predictable. But it is a holiday, one hell of one. My location is undeniable.
Man, if you want to party in a `hot new location`, as the marketing monkeys might say, then Siem Reap is about all you could want right now. It seems to be what Bali was a few years back, and what Goa was about 15 years ago in terms of exciting youth culture, free and casual fun (need I spell it out...) and it hasn't yet reached the ears of the mainstraeam household media, but still overflows with hoards of fit young things out for a good time in an exotic locale.
It wont last so it's best to here NOW, instead of waiting for too many people to know about it and let the already bulging tourist trade permeate every single mind and manner.
It is constantly exciting by night, sleepy and hungover by day. I personally haven't drunk for 3 days now, currently sitting on the morning of the 4th day ("oh yea, and verily did the Lord drink coffee in overpriced French restaurants, and fix the nail holes with much Polyfill and Dettol, Amen") back in Le Tigre De Papier which is one of the restaurants here open 24hours a day.
I can come here and get a pizza, fried noodles with capsicum and banana blossom, and/or a bowl of chicken amok at 4pm or 4 am, if I like.
I can even come here for a drinky, if I was feeling naughty, at any hour of the day or day of the week, which isn't as hard to resist as I thought at first, even though they DO have free wireless 'net access as well.
If you didn't recognise two out of three of the above mentioned foods, by the way, then that was the point. The food is pretty good around here, not the biggest fan of Khmer or even Thai cuisine yet although some things are getting onto my favourites list pretty quickly, but that is mainly because so many places serve simply stunning food from a more westernised angle.
Still, I really do love the idea of a dish called amok, listed in menus as `chicken amok with noodles` which always conjures up images of demented (well, more demented) poultry going apeshit in the kitchen among the vegetables before becoming dinner for 3, extra panic 'n' fear on the side.
Banana blossom isn't as exquisitely piquant as the more fanciful among you, or as bizarrely vegetative as the more carnivourous among you, might possibly imagine.
It is, in fact, quite a lot like flavourless vegetable matter with a texture like very well stewed, finely folded leather, or so I can only presume. It is an almost perfect hybrid of boiled cabbage and cauliflower.
-
What you'll probably be wanting to hear about, rather than me getting wasted for the first few days (like a decadent reprobate) and me being strictly sober for a few more (like a puritanical spoilsport), is the mighty temple of Angkor Wat, a few miles from Siem Reap which owes its current prosperity, virtually its whole existence, entirely to the surrounding temples. It is the largest religious building on earth, far larger than Mecca or even the biggest synagogue or Brahmin temple, bigger, even, then the Vatican, and larger than Vatican City by a factor of more than 3.
It is, as you may imagine, somewhat impressive, or at the very least takes a long time to walk around.
In fact some may say that Angkor Wat is cheating a bit because inside the moat, inside the outer wall with all its carvings and ornate balustrades and towering gopurams, to reach the actual towered temple you've seen in all the pictures one has to walk a full 250 metres or more to reach the outer courtyard of the temple proper, leaving rather a lot of empty space.
However, there are 3 mitigating factors; 1) the large, mostly forested area inside the walls is littered with stone buildings and the remains thererof as well as many still-standing buildings and half-collapsed terraces that occupy large parts of this inner area 2) almost everything else that once was here to support and supplement and benefit from such a massive congregation (literally) of people must have been lost to time, undoubtedly through being timber-built, and 3) that moat.
My oh my, is that moat impressive. An average of 4.4 kilometres long - it is so large and wide that its length varies by a full kilometre and a half depending whether you measure the interior or exterior edges - and 190m wide in all places, just by itself it posesses an area of nearly a million square metres, 915,800 to be precise and is quite the thing for the ambitious earthmover. Just imagine how much had to be done to make that alone - and it was all done, by hand, because this part of the country is one of the flatest places on Earth.
There are two pictures you must look at - I insist
The first one here, linked, inevitably, from Wikipedia is a model of the Angkor Wat as it once was, intact and with all terraces and towers of the central temple complex still standing. It rather bloody awesome, I think you'll agree, and that main square of towers, courtyards and cloisters is about 210 metres long by around 190 metres wide.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Angkor-wat-central.jpg
Looks pretty, dunnit?
-
Now.
Have a look at this current picture of the temple and its immediate grounds - everything inside that gigantic moat is Angkor Wat, the outside perimeter road that Greg and I cycled along (yes, cycled, we've done a bit of that lately) is about 6.5 kilometers long just in itself, and everything inside that is the Wat, or temple, itself.
Just have a look at how that mighty central temple looks amidst the now-forested grounds:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Angkor-Wat-from-the-air.JPG
That large rectangular watery thing in the background is, in fact, a large rectangular body of water, a truly monumental lake called West Baray clocking in at a staggering 8 kilometers long by 2km wide, dug completely, once again, by the hand of men.
Thank god for whips, eh? ')
-
Having spent far too much of my life now on the inside of taxis and rickshaws, shielded from the world at large and from any kind of physical effort, We (i.e Greg) decided that we should get bikes and cycle to see these famous temples.
There are, incidentally, about a hundred temples around here, the most impressive is Angkor Wat and the best (in my opinion) is another called Ta Prohm a few miles away. In between, all around and inside and out of these are dozens of other places, of which we saw about 7 or 8.
What all that means is that, aside from the Angkor Wat itself being a mere (ha!) 7km from our hotel, and we saw that in one day and came back, the rest of them, which we saw all on another day, incurred a round trip of somewhere around fifty kilometres. Me. Cycling 50km in a day. I know, I can scarcely believe it myself.
What Greg thought was probably hilarious was almost my eternal undoing - apart from my legs filing for a divorce from my body half an hour after setting off on grounds of irreconcilable differences and gross physical abuse, my poor little heart and lungs underwent some of the roughest treatment in years - although I'm damned happy that I did it. Mostly I'm happy it's over of course, but also there's some sense of acheivement in there. And a certain rubbery quality ot me legs this morning.
-
We, i.e. you, shall see all this soon enough, as I'll probably skip my photo order a bit and only chuck in the very fewest and best of India, Laos and Thailand, and try to get down to brass tacks with Cambodia and get up to speed this very day, with a bit of luck.
It's not like I can do much else now, after all 
