Angkor's Away

Battambang, Cambodia

 

So this is sovreign state number 6 on this trip, not counting HK/Macau, and for the 6th time  I am sitting here sweating like a banshee in a stuffy building.  Thank god for climalite fabric.  Yesterday and the day before I was in Siem Reap (and would have written about it contemporaneously if not for the frequent blackouts) which is the home base for all things Angkor. 

 

As for Angkor, simply put - holy shit.  Absolutely incredible and exceeded expectations.  It is a truly massive collection of sites - I spent one hot sun beaten day but am going back in a few days to check it out again, but you could spend a week there and just scratch the surface.  It's loaded with tourists of course, but for things like that, it really should be, and it doesn't detract from the grandeur too much as the sites and buildings are simply so huge that people only serve to make it look bigger.

 

Some of the signature buildings (angkor wat and the Bayon of Angkor thom) have undergone pretty extensive restoration work - and in many cases complete rebuilding.  There is a fundamental difference between western and eastern approaches to archealogical preservation/conservation/restoration - with the eastern (mostly japanese funded and trained) approach focusing on rebuilding things the way they would have looked, even if it means using non-original materials, and the western approach being more on preserving what's there and letting the fallen stones gather moss in Ozymandias-like tragedy. (for the japanese, allegedly, the idea of the temple/building supersedes the individual stones, etc.) 

 

For my money though, some of the most impressive ones are the outer "minor" (although they are so massive it is hard to call them minor) buildings that exist on the fringe of the jungle, some with massive 200 foot trees literally growing right in the middle of the buildings as the Khmers used soil as filler under the limestone and sandstone blocks.   They're covered with lichen and moss and bas-relief rubble lies everywhere - the whole thing has a spooky Indiana Jones quality that I haven't encountered anywhere else yet.  Worth the trip.

 

THis morning I took a long hot boat ride down the river to Battambang, in Northeast Cambodia.  THe boat ride itself was hot, long, and filled with groundings and collisions, as it's not so much a navigable river as a series of muddy mangrove swamps filled with punting fisherman and the occassional sampan.  Battambang itself is described as a charming french colonial administrative town, of which I'd say at least the "administrative" part is still apparent.  It's not horrible, just not that great.  It's also, along with most of the NE, a former Khmer Rouge stronghold, though things are fine on that front these days, and like any population center in Cambodia, the dominant force is that of the NGO.

 

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