Tom Pepinsky

Author: tompepinsky

  • Many, Many Temples

    Today we saw temples.  Angkor Wat, Bayon, Baphoun, Phimeanakas, Ta Prohm, Phnom Bakheng, etc etc etc.  Many many temples.  Our day started at 5:00 with a sunrise view of Angkor Wat, then breakfast back at the hotel, then a long morning of climbing all over giant temples, then lunch, then some more temples, back to Angkor Wat for a more detailed visit, then a climb to another hidden temple, and the back to the room by 3:30.  We were sweaty and exhausted by the end of our day, and we looked rather like drowned rats when we arrived back at the hotel.  And the three of us did it rather in comfort, in an air-conditioned car with a driver and a guide and all the cold water we could drink.

    Our guide was quite a historian and was able to tell us lots of interesting things.  The temples are a mix between Hindu and Buddhist, with intricate artwork detailing the great Indian epics, Buddhist icons and symbols, and Khmer history.  Probably my (TP’s) favorite part was a great big relief at Bayon depicting a war between the Khmers and the Chams.  You could identify the Chams (Muslims, related to Malays) because they had helmets on and were losing.  You could identify the Khmers because they had long earlobes (long earlobes are thought to symbolize long life).  You could also identify the Chinese, fighting along with the Khmers as allies, because they had beards.  At any rate, we learned way too much.  Learn about the Angkor temple complex on wikipedia.

    Our guide also gave us quite the rundown on recent Cambodian history.  What a terrible set of stories.  He was born in 1977, so his was the generation who were taken from their mothers at the age of one month because their mothers were needed in the fields.  Even after the Vietnamese drove the Khmer Rouge back into the jungles, the country didn’t enjoy any peace; there was still bitter fighting until 1998.  He described the days of hiding in Angkor Wat from the armies fighting in the area.  The tourism industry in Siem Reap has blossomed between 1998 and today, but civil war has left Cambodia a legacy of stunning poverty and lack of nearly any infrastructure aside from hotels and restaurants for tourists.

    Our agenda for tomorrow is still unclear, but we are greatly enjoying our time here so far.

  • Greetings from Siem Reap

    As it turns out, our hotel in Siem Reap does have internet access, so we will be able to update from here.  Cambodia is really neat.  As we landed in Siem Reap, we flew over Lake Tonle Sap, which is a huge freshwater lake that produces a lot of seafood and allows for lots of wet rice cultivation.  The land here is very lush, much like Java, but the difference is that the land here seems totally flat.  So unlike Java and Bali, where terraced rice cultivation is the norm, the land is patchworked with regular old paddies.

    I didn’t think that this would be possible, but it appears to be actually hotter here than in Java.  It’s definitely more humid.  We went for a walk in Siem Reap’s Old Market (Psar Chas) at around 2:30 and were drenched immediately.  We don’t think that we’ve been this hot in Indonesia. (Although we remember the area inland from Yogyakarta as much hotter than Jakarta.  Maybe Southeast Asian Hindu-Buddhist complexes are just hot.)

    A couple of more interesting things.  First, the monetary system here has never really recovered from decades of civil war under the Khmer Rouge and afterwards.  So, dollars are accepted openly here.  But there are no coins as change.  So if you have bill for $6.50, you have to pay with a five dollar bill, a one dollar bill, and two thousand Cambodian riels.  This happened to us over lunch today.  The policy consequences of having a currency that no one trusts as a store of value are quite interesting, incidentally.

    Second, there are a lot of Westerners here.  When you go downtown to "sightsee," they are everywhere. The reason why we put sightsee in quotes is that Siem Reap, we have decided, has very little to offer for sightseers aside from its proximity to the temples at Angkor Wat.  The town just has markets that offer cheap goods and restaurants that cater to lager louts.

    Third, Khmer is an interesting language, closely related to Vietnamese but with a notable set of loanwords from the Malay/Indonesian family of languages.  We have noticed a couple:

    m’rech = pepper (related to merica in Indonesian)
    barang = counter for things that are shaped like sticks (the same as barang in Indonesian, which means the same thing)
    kampong = village (same as kampong in Malay)
    sala = snakefruit (related to salak in Indonesian)
    psar = market (related to pasar in Indonesian and Malay, which is
    borrowed originally from Turkish and which gives us the English word bazaar)
    pheasar = to speak (we hypothesize that this is linked to bahasa.  It is clearly not related to the Vietnamese word for language, which is tiếng, or Vietnamese for talk, which is nói)

    Fourth, we are happy to report that a college friend of TP’s, known for this blog’s purposes as J, will be joining us for the next couple of days.  We are going to meet him in about an hour, and will be touring the temples together tomorrow and perhaps the next day.