It’s 4am and the rush-hour trail of tuk-tuks is already snaking through the dark towards the sprawling Angkor complex, illuminated only by the roadside bonfires lit by hawkers and itinerant families.
At this hour, when the sun has yet to cast silhouettes of temple towers against the sky, it’s surprisingly chilly. The sweet smell of wood smoke and sticky rice fills the air. My guide sniffs, smiles and pulls his cotton patterned krama scarf up around his face.
The traffic goes two ways. Scarf-wrapped tourists head towards Angkor Wat and the surrounding complex of temples; hotel staff and construction workers flow the other way, into the boom town that is Siem Reap, 15 minutes from the ancient wats (Buddhist monasteries) along a jungle-fringed road. Two to a bike, four to a scooter, men wear oversized leather jackets, babies balance on their mothers’ laps, wearing woolly bonnets.
We bump off the main drag, the buzz fading behind us in the dark. It’s dry season in Cambodia, when humidity drops and tourist numbers soar – a time when the resourceful guide will try to flee the crowds and find a novel route into the temples. With visitor numbers to the Angkor temples rising, these days a successful visit is all about timing.
I’m in Siem Reap to see the newly restored 11th-century site of Baphuon, a treasure of the Ankgor complex that has just reopened to the public after a 50-year restoration project. But that’s best seen, I am reliably advised, in the afternoon when the tide of tourists recedes from the temples to elbow each other up the sacred hill of Phnom Bakheng for a noisy sunset ritual and panoramic photo op across Siem Reap.
This morning, I’m avoiding Siem Reap’s main act, the traditional sunrise stampede for a position at Angkor Wat. This immaculately restored 12th-century temple is seen as the zenith of Khmer architecture and represents Cambodia itself for many visitors, who gun for it straight off the plane. Instead I favour a visit to the neighbouring “jungle temple” of Ta Prohm.
We make our stealthy entrance at its outer eastern gate where we hope to have the place to ourselves for a while, moving in against the stream of sightseers that will come in from the west gate.
The sun is skirting the trees as we walk towards the inner sanctum of the “Tomb Raider Temple” (known as such since 2001 when Angelina Jolie filmed the first Lara Croft movie here), taking a broad sandy track.
Here, at this back door of sorts, the only other people we encounter are a couple of sleepy souvenir sellers yet to display their krama, tribal drums and origami animals.
The path is devoid of the untamed jungly overgrowth that makes Ta Prohm unique; this is one of the few Angkor temples where the jungle has been left to its own devices. But further in we find the postcard scene: kapok trees growing antler-like from temple walls, strangler figs winding in and out of brickwork like mortar-eating snakes.
Eruptions of tree roots penetrate the temple’s concentric stone galleries and intricately carved pillars, a woody web over and under which we clamber, snapping pictures of Apsara (celestial dancing girls of Hindu mythology) framed by keyhole gaps in gnarly tree trunks. It’s at least half an hour before we meet the crowds coming the other way.
At the tree-strangled stone doorway featured in the Tomb Raider movie, several tour groups are queuing for a picture while their guides bid them: “Say Angeliiiiina!” The sandstone brick dust kicks up from the floor, mingling with incense smoke that weaves in ribbons from shrines dotted around the collapsed temple towers.
For all the photos taken at Ta Prohm and the numerous other ruins that make up what is loosely known as “the temples of Angkor”, it’s hard to get a clear picture of the place.
First, it’s massive. The Unesco-protected site alone is spread over 400km2, with sites spanning six centuries. And the “temples” often aren’t temples at all, many of them shrines, royal palaces, walled cities and monasteries – integral parts of ancient Khmer capitals that see-sawed over time between Buddhist and Hindu faith, as diverse as the 30 or more kings who built them.
It’s a complicated place that, for visitors at least, sits somewhere between archaeological adventure playground and vaguely defined spiritual retreat.
“The classic view of Angkor is that it’s a bunch of temples,” explains Roland Fletcher when I join him for lunch the next day at the Amansara hotel. “Angkor is no more a bunch of temples than London or New York.”
Fletcher, a lively sexagenarian, is an Asian archaeology expert at the University of Sydney. The annual Scholar in Residence at the Amansara Hotel, he’s also co-director of the Greater Angkor Project, a multinational research programme focused on what has been considered the mysterious decline of Angkor’s settlements.
We lunch on Amansara’s sunny patio, flipping through sepia photos that reveal the hotel’s former incarnation as the 1960s guest villa of Cambodia’s King Norodom Sihanouk. It’s a recent history that Fletcher clearly gets a kick out of, but this afternoon we are due to head back to the 11th century, on one of Fletcher’s tour groups to Baphuon.
This treasured temple was recently re-opened to the public after a mammoth rebuilding project that took over half a century.
Working with the few records spared by the Khmer Rouge after Cambodia’s civil war in the 1970s, a French-led team of archaeologists has managed to piece together 300 000 sandstone blocks to recreate Baphuon, a three-tier “temple mountain” that is one of Angkor’s largest structures. The pioneering restoration is all the more impressive when you consider that each piece in this giant, picture-less puzzle is unique. Angkor’s temples were created without mortar, the sandstone blocks chiselled so each slotted into a specific position.
“Just one millimetre out would have made a difference,” Fletcher tells me. “It’s a vast piece of geometry that, even with modern mechanics, still relied on the eye of Khmer workmen.”
It’s clear that Fletcher’s passion lies with people, not puzzles. For him, Angkor’s temples are not a study in ascetic worship, but centres of rude life.
“The fascinating stuff is the civilisation,” he says, giving the example of Ta Prohm, a working monastery that housed 12 000 people with a further 80 000 workers drawn from surrounding villages. “There were 615 royal dancers alone. The clergy had no real power; Angkor is not about religious fluff.”
Before the building of Baphuon, one of the greatest political changes of Angkor took place. After the construction of Baphuon’s predecessor temple, Ta Keo, King Suryavarman I, the great conqueror, took control of Angkor, carving inscriptions on walls that showed he brokered no argument. “His oath that his enemies would be ‘fried, sliced and diced in hell for the remainder of history’ showed that these kings played a very tough version of family politics,” Fletcher recounts.
I travel half an hour from Siem Reap with Fletcher to West Baray, a more logical place for Angkor tours to begin. Under Suryavarman I’s rule, this massive reservoir took six years and 200 000 people to dig. It was the key to a system of irrigation that fed Angkor’s sprawling capitals.
Fletcher calls it “the largest single engineering project in the pre-industrial world”. Yet it is barely visited by tourists. It is now a popular spot for Cambodians to fish and picnic. Yet its waters were once responsible for the success and, Fletcher believes, eventual decline of the Khmer empire. The management of water still looms large for Siem Reap, a town that’s growing hotels quicker than it does rice.
With a new international airport slated for imminent development, the burden that tourism puts on the infrastructure of this little town continues to increase, as does the intense footfall around the small group of favoured temples.
Elsewhere in Cambodia, the tourism sector is also growing at pace. Resort development on its slender stretch of coast and idyllic archipelago should flourish with the launch two months ago of internal flights between Siem Reap and coastal Sihanoukville. Add to this a Chinese-funded network of highways being built and the revitalisation of Cambodia’s railways by an Australian company, and perhaps the country will rediscover a pre-war affluence that saw its coastal resorts compete with Cannes for glamour.
On my final night I take a walk along Siem Reap’s “pub street” where an entrepreneurial revolution seems to be taking place, led by retro cocktail bars, “fish pedicure” spas and boutiques filled by the work of young Cambodian designers.
Equivalent streets are popping up in other cities such as Phnom Penh and Battambang – it’s brash, noisy and full of life. Cambodia’s tourism may have grown up around Angkor’s ancient temples but it seems that its future is far from set in stone. – The Independent.