Angkor

Cambodians love a public holiday and who are we to disagree. For the Pchum Ben 3-day holiday in October, we decided that it really was about time that we visited what is truly one of the great wonders of the ancient world: Angkor Wat. So we hopped on a bus to Siem Reap, put on our walking sandals, hired a guide (whose knowledge of and delight in Khmer culture and history were simply wonderful) and sallied forth.

Actually, referring to Angkor Wat is a bit of a misnomer. There are actually hundreds of ruins in a great many complexes spread out over many kilometres; Angkor Wat is just one of them. And throughout them all, you will encounter majesty wherever you turn.

Most people have heard of Angkor but nothing prepares you for the size and scale of the ancient buildings and monuments in the area. The Angkor civilisation built an extraordinary series of buildings from about the 12th to the 15th century, many of which have survived largely intact despite centuries of intervening neglect and return to the jungle. Below is the Bayon temple, one of the highlight of the Angkor Thom complex: a walled and moated city of over 3 square kilometres.

The Angkor civilisation transitioned from Hinduism to Buddhism during the course of its existence, and the Hindu influence can be seen very clearly throughout the architecture. Carved stone faces of gods and demons appear everywhere and in all sizes from the immense to the miniature. On most of the temples, all of the walls are covered in intricate carvings, while the turrets and towers are host to gigantic watching faces.

Each block in the face below is about a metre square. The sheer physical effort that must have been involved in its construction - in about the 14th Century - is mind-boggling. Added to that, all the stone came from quarries over a hundred kilometres away and was brought through the jungle to the site. Shows what you can do when you put your mind to it!

In all, there are many kilometres of beautifully carved walls, most of which are wonderfully preserved and show scenes of Cambodian life from over 500 years ago - some of which are remarkably similar to scenes of Cambodian life today.

They also show great events from Cambodian history and from Hindu mythology.

Our guide Lypeng's hand gives you some idea of the scale and the amazing intricacy of the carving. Renaissance Italy, eat your heart out!

This fellow reminds us of someone. Suggestions on a postcard...

Not all of the temples are particularly big, and not all of them were built by people with T-squares and straight edges. But they all have the most extraordinary feeling of antiquity and majesty, even when you're not quite sure whether the builders really meant them like that or whether overconsumption of Cambodia's beloved Angkor beer actually dates back 800 years to the Angkor period. Actually, we've had one or two cans that taste like there might be something in that theory.

One temple has a particular eerie majesty of its very own. Ta Prohm is not particularly large or spectacular (although it is reputed to have once had a tower with over 1,000 diamonds in, the recesses for which you can still see today). It is, however, the temple that has become the most at one with the jungle. Pictures can not begin to do it justice, but we'll show you a couple anyway.

To give you some idea of the scale, that's a 6 foot 1, 220 pound barang in among the tree roots in the picture below. For those of you reading this in metric, that's 186 cm and 100 kg. Lypeng stands well clear on the right (perhaps he's read the bit about Old Man Willow in The Lord of The Rings).

And now on to the most famous of them all: Angkor Wat itself. You approach it across an artificial, perfectly rectangular lake that goes right around the complex and makes the lakes in every western park we've ever seen look like garden ponds.

After you pass through the outer portico, you're not even nearly there. You then follow an elevated stone causeway for about a kilometre to the main temple building with its five beehive towers. The building is square and each side is 1 kilometre long: now work out the size of the lake!

Every available surface is covered in carvings. There are over 1,000 of these dancing girls (called Apsaras in Khmer) but this one, hidden around a corner that you have to lean out madly over a 5 metre drop in order to see, is the only one that is smiling. The motivation of the artist is a mistery, but I think I would have liked him.

Inside the main temple, the sheer scale is breahtaking.



And there are surprises around every corner.



All too soon, the sun started to come down and we had to leave, despite hardly having scratched the surface. We'll be going back.

The classic view: Angkor Wat in the jungle clearing (and if anyone out there can tell us how to photoshop out the scaffolding that seems to follow us around the most beautiful spots on the planet, we'd love to hear from you).

More soon. In the meantime, please don't forget the need to keep supporting VSO through our Justgiving page at www.justgiving.com/jagoteers.

Worth Travelling Half Way Round the World For

As a brief interlude from the warm weather, blue skies and beautiful smiles of Cambodia, we went back to good old England and its grey clouds, cold days, miserable rain and interminable traffic jams. Hmmm...

But Anna's wedding at Christchurch in Dorset was one of the loveliest days we've ever had. The rain even stopped for the duration of the ceremony. Perhaps not surprisingly, we had travelled the furthest among the many friends and relatives who it was so lovely to see (although, to hear of some of the journeys from the corners of England, I'm not sure that our journey was actually the longest).

Some of the pictures are ours, but thanks go to Kenny for most of them. Anna's best friend from school (and bridesmaid), Sarah, & her partner Kenny took time off work to look after Anna & Ben for 4 days before the wedding, doing everything from housework to chauffering (or butling as Kenny succinctly put it). I honestly don't think Anna would have had quite such a big grin on her face the whole day if she had not had such fantastic support. So thanks again you two.

Arriving at Parley Manor

The lady in red in the next picture is Emily's mum. Emily designed & made Anna's beautiful dress & jacket, & sewed all the beads on the jacket. Her mum very kindly gave Anna the lovely silk & lace for the jacket & helped Emily with the making too. The lady in the black spotty dress is the wedding co-ordinator at the Manor & she did a fabulous job of making us all feel very special & relaxed at the same time - which is quite an art.

Nearly ready...



eeek!



Here she comes...



Here we go!



Just sign here Sir...



It's legal...



...and there are witnesses...



By Jove we did it!



With the lovely bridesmaids, Sarah & Kate (Anna's big sister)

... and the proud (okay I know I look smug!) parents. Ben's dad Paul & his wife Christine not only travelled down from Manchester, bringing lots of Ben's family too, but Paul did a fantastic service to the wedding party by driving us all back to our various hotels & b&bs after the reception. What a star and many thanks again.

Anna's lot...



Ben's lot



That's number two sorted... only one to go (I'll drink to that!)



Hmm... what can I say?...



God Dad... you're so embarrassing...



Poor Ben, it was all too much...



But Wibbly Pig came to the rescue!



Wow! I'm a married lady!



First dance

Tristan did a lovely job of the reading from Captain Corelli's Mandolin that Anna & Ben chose:

Love is a temporary madness; it erupts like volcanoes and then subsides. And when it subsides you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of eternal passion. That is just being in love, which any fool can do. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Those that truly love have roots that grow towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossoms have fallen from their branches, they find that they are one tree and not two.

Little Brother



Well that was a nice day!

We're back through the looking glass now, so more about Cambodia again soon. In the meantime, please don't forget the need to keep supporting VSO through our Justgiving page at www.justgiving.com/jagoteers.

What we did in the Summer Holidays

Time for a quick update before we head back to the UK for two weeks for our daughter Anna's wedding. First and foremost, we've both been getting about a bit: Perry has now been to Kampong Chnang, Kampong Thom and Sihanoukville for work, and Sarah has been to Kiri Rom National Park for a picnic: of which, more below. The picture below shows where we've been so far but you can see just how little of Cambodia we have got to yet.

Unfortunately, Cambodia doesn't do straight lines or good roads; the picture below shows how we actually got to each of these places. What it doesn't show is how long it took: the longer journeys have taken more than 6 hours by bus. Even Perry's work trips in government 4-wheel drive pick-up trucks take what feels like for ever (especially with 6 people, bags and what one can only describe as everyone's kitchen sink all in one truck).



Nothing on the roads here goes very fast, but the road conditions (potholes'r'us) and mix of traffic (buses to buffalo carts) means that anything more than walking speed can quite often still be too fast. Still, it's nice to get those regular adrenalin rushes when you move your eyes from the beautiful scenery on one side of you to the fascinating village on the other side without closing them while your head is pointing at the road ahead. We will say, though, that Cambodian drivers all seem to have pretty good reflexes; perhaps it's the effects of natural selection.

As you can see from the map, most of the roads in Cambodia go via Phnom Penh. The one exception so far was a trip Perry took from Kampong Cham to Kampong Chnang which included a ferry crossing of the Tonle Sap river. The ferry is just like the street but everyone actually stops for a while (which is more than they do at any other time, especially for road junctions).

Not everyone seems altogether happy about the prospect of sharing the ferry with a busload of barangs, though...



The next picture is of a smaller ferry crossing the Mekong about 25km south of Kampong Cham. All together now in your best Scouse accents: "Ferry, cross the Mekong..."



Transport Cambodian-style is a delight that we will devote a future posting to but, in the meantime, here are a few of the local deluxe mobility options for you and your prized possessions:





We've carried on being adventurous on our travels too. Perry has now added turtle, tortoise, fire ants (and their eggs), sparrows, baby turtle doves and, last but not least, bull's penis soup (complete with large lumps of bull's penis) to the list of delicacies he has eaten. Interesting, but probably not going to make it onto the menu at the Savoy.

Sarah stuck to more conventional fare at her picnic. It was a typically Cambodian outing:

"We set off from the office an hour after the 7.30 deadline (although it was variously reported as being between 6.30 - 8 am) in a relative's minibus taxi. Crawled through the city traffic picking up other staff members laden down with vast amounts of food that they had started cooking at 3am (fridge? ...I know you can get them because we have one!). Finally left PP at 9.30.

Got to Kiri Rom National Park (more than halfway to Sihanoukville) & drove up a beautiful but precipitous mountain road to a blissfully cool pine forest. Parked in a car park where the rubbish from the weekend picnickers was being burned in the concrete waste bins, picked the furthest verandah from the smoke and overlooking a pretty river.



At 11.50 started unpacking and consuming said food. 12.30 - finished food & flaked out for an hour into a deep sleep (me anyway as I am incapable of staying awake all day at the moment).



At 1.50 - sort of cleared up, 2 pm headed back to PP. Got there 3 hours later due to arriving on the outskirts just as all the garment factories were finishing their shifts and thus blocking the roads with bikes. A thoroughly successful & memorable day was declared by all. I really love Cambodians, their expectations are about 150 years behind ours, & it's great".

Both of us have now ended up with gastric parasites (dear diary, today I made some new friends...). These don't come from the exotic meals but from the vegetables that are often washed with untreated water. The most common parasites are worms and amoebae and, from the evidence here, their natural habitat is lettuce leaves. The one thing not to eat in Cambodia, therefore, is the side salad. The little visitors are fairly easily treatable and, if you ask our lovely Russian Doctor Lioudmilla nicely, she will even give you antibiotics that still allow you to drink! Sarah didn't ask but Perry just happened to mention Anna's wedding, which was also convenient for the regular Friday night bash.

To close, here's a little edict that we thought of trying on the local parasites.

More soon when we get back. In the meantime, please don't forget the need to keep supporting VSO through our Justgiving page at www.justgiving.com/jagoteers.

Our Home

Or in Khmer:

As we mentioned in a previous post, we live in an apartment on the top floor of a family home in the South of Phnom Penh. As the map below shows, it's quite convenient for work for both of us and it's also handily situated for the local markets. Phnom Penh isn't a particularly big city - about one and a half million inhabitants and about 8 km from top to bottom of the map, although the city itself sprawls on for about another 2 or 3 km North and South, and some 5 km West to the airport. In the middle, though, nowhere is much more than twenty minutes away by bike.

Don't be misled by the apparent large swathes of green on the map, especially by the river to the East of Perry's office. These are largely areas of wasteland, often inhabited by the very poor. Phnom Penh is improving and modernising, but there's an awfully long way to go in some parts. What do exist are the lakes both North and South of the city. However, don't get the wrong impression; these are not idyllic picnic spots where you might take in a little sailing on a Sunday afternoon.

The Northern one is quite pretty and has a couple of bars where you can sit and watch the sun go down (albeit over the shanty town) but you really wouldn't want to fall in or drink it, because you won't be the first human product that's been in it. It's called Boong Kak: just say it in a Yorkshire accent and you'll get the idea. It's covered in a floating plant called morning glory which acts as a natural waste recycling system. It's also one of the favourite vegetables in Khmer cooking, so it's best to give it a bit of a rinse before eating.

You can see a thin blue line running North to South next to our house and down to the Southern lake; we have named this the Suej Canal. Because we're up on the second floor, most of the time we don't notice it but, when the wind's in the wrong direction, it can sometimes be just a touche niffy. Perry has to ride right alongside it for a while when going to and from work: this is good, as it encourages him to cycle very fast and get fit.



Fortunately, there is also a local remedy. As a Buddhist country, you can buy incense sticks here by the bushel and when we want to sit on the balcony we just light up a few. They completely obliterate any residual pong when it's there and actually smell wonderfully exotic into the bargain. Burning mosquito coils also helps, as well as giving us a fighting chance of not catching Dengue Fever.



So, time for a walk-through of our humble abode. This is our entrance seen from street level



And this is where we're heading - the top floor balcony.



First we go through the private executive parking lot for our company vehicles. In Khmer, bicycle is kong and to ride a bicycle is chi kong. Hence Perry's big rusty silver bicycle is King Kong and Sarah's dinky red one is Chi-chi. We have no idea whose the third one at the back is - it just appeared there one day and has never left. We suspect a combination of visiting VSO friends and alcohol might be behind it, but we just don't know.



After this are the stairs. There are another two flights after this, and they get narrower as they go up. There's also exactly 6 feet of headroom, which is particularly handy for 6 ft 1 Perry.



On arrival, we enter the kitchen. You can see the big water filter on the right: all drinking and cooking water has to be boiled and filtered to get rid of any little visitors. Of course, when you eat out, they're sometimes just ever so slightly less rigorous.



Yes, that is the cooker where the poor little kettle met its untimely end.

Next we go through the combination railway carriage corridor / dining room / state receiving room. The furniture at the back is solid hardwood and is unbelievably heavy. We have no idea how they ever got it up the stairs in the first place; perhaps they dug the rest of the house out from underneath it. However they did it, we can understand why it's still here.



Now we have a choice - turn right for the guest bedroom, left for the main bedroom or straight on for the sitting room. Let's go left!



The boudoir. Note the obligatory mozzie net on the bed. At the moment, we have two volunteers down with Dengue and another with Typhoid. Three more have just got over Dengue, one over Typhoid and another two over Malaria. Must run the stats and sort out a probability curve on those numbers at some point - or perhaps not. No-one's down with dysentery at the moment but we have three loos for the two of us, just in case. Plus three showers and a bath, which also has a shower in it, making four. Two of them (sadly, not including the bath) even have warm water. No, we didn't mean hot.

We've been advised by a friend who claims to be a doctor that the prophylaxis for all these tropical ailments is to just refuse to go down with any of them. Since this person is one of three volunteers up North in Stung Treng, and since the other two form 40% of the Dengue figures, she must know what she's talking about. Actually, the two doctors in our group are both quite inspirational and, frankly, Cambodia is lucky to have people of such quality volunteering to come here. More importantly, they're both also jolly good fun. Our lawyers told us we had to say that. Actually, we think there's a posting about the crowd that needs to be written soon...



Yes we did crack and buy a second hand Japanese washing machine which you can see bottom right; the choice is either an old second hand Japanese machine or an even older second hand Japanese machine. Bizarrely, none of them heat water at all (in fact Cambodians themselves never do washing, or washing up, in hot water, which helps enormously with the "just don't allow yourself to go down with it" approach).

Our machine does get things clean though and frees up our precious spare time enormously despite its age, although Perry thinks it was probably made out of recycled Zeros shot down during World War II. Sarah bought it with the help of her office friend Sopha one lunch time. THAT story is going into the 'shopping blog' by itself.... And as for Perry e-mailing Japan to see if there were any instructions for it in English! The response was interesting; we're now waiting for an offer from the Japanese National Washing Machine Museum. Or possibly the Japanese Air Force Museum.



The bedroom also hosts our little office area, where we e-mail, blog, skype and quite often work when the ultra-high-tech IT systems at our offices aren't operating at 100% efficiency. This can be due to number of factors:

1. There's been another power cut (although, to be fair, these only happen on days with a y in them).

2. The system is refusing to update because it claims that you're running pirated software (for those who know South East Asia, who'd have thought it!).

3. You can't get spares for valve-driven equipment any more.

And now back out to the living room.



And, at last, we reach the balcony. Here's a panoramic view.

Just to make the horticulturalists amongst you drool, here's one of the four orchids we bought recently for the princely sum of £3.25. That's for all four. Including the pots, liners and hanging things.



We don't even have to water them every day either: this is the view from the balcony when it's raining.

No, it doesn't look like a monsoon, it IS a monsoon. And not a heavy one by Cambodian standards, but we don't have any clips of those as they always seem to happen when we're out somewhere. Having gone there by bike...

More soon. In the meantime, please don't forget the need to keep supporting VSO through our Justgiving page at www.justgiving.com/jagoteers.

And remember - just say no to Dengue.