Nearly Neutral Travel

As one of the finalists for the seven wonders of the modern world, the temples of Angkor are a proper bucket-list experience. On top of this, Angkor Wat also makes an appearance in Age of Empires (one of my favourite video games). I was really excited to see it with my own eyes, and managed to convince Sara into a three-day itinerary of temple exploration.

However, temple fatigue is real thing. The Angkor park is huge – it contains literally hundreds of temples, and the afternoon heat and sun certainly aren’t the ideal conditions to be climbing temple steps. Our strategy was to pace ourselves, make use of the cooler mornings, and gradually work up the highlights (which we saved for day three).

Almost everyone gets around the Angkor park by tuk-tuk. The distances are just too great to walk, and for some reason, tourists aren’t allowed to hire motorbikes in Siem Reap. But of course neither of these are really our style, so instead we opted to hire a couple of city bikes to get around. Thank goodness these bikes were in good condition and the going was relatively flat, because we covered nearly 100 km on them over the next three days.

Day 1: The Roluos temples (30 km cycled)

We started well off the beaten path with a visit to the Roluos group of temples, located 13 km east of Siem Reap (where we were staying). The route to these temples goes along the main road between Siem Reap and Phnom Penh, so it was probably the least relaxing cycle of our stay.

This group consists of a trio of temples; Bakong, Preah Ko, and Lolei. These are the oldest in the Angkor area, with each temple being completed between 879 and 893 AD.

Despite the slight slog of a journey, arriving at the temples was immensely rewarding. Not only did we have each temple to ourselves for at least some of the time, but we were also the only ones brave (or stupid) enough to have attempted the journey on bicycles. In fact, there were about ten times as many children cycling to and from school (past the temples) as there were tourists. I did wonder what it must be like growing up cycling past ancient temples on your school commute – let’s just say it was a bit of a contrast to the bus I used to take to my primary school in Eltham.

Day 2: The grand circuit (40 km cycled)

On our second day we upped the temple tempo with a lap around the “grand circuit” road. We left the hotel shortly after sunrise and powered through the first 13 km to Ta Prohm temple. This temple had been abandoned for so long that it had been gradually reclaimed by nature, with trees literally growing straight out of a few towers, while some walls have become so entangled with roots that I’m pretty sure they’re now holding up what’s left of the wall.

This temple also featured in the 2001 movie Tomb Raider starring Angelina Jolie, and it’s not hard to see why this location was selected.

Next, we cycled 10 km through dense forest to reach Neak Pean, a small temple located right in the middle of a massive rectangular lake, connected to the lake shore via a long and sunbaked boardwalk. The temple itself was beautifully serene, and rather confusingly set in a mini-lake within an island in the centre of the larger lake.

Just 2 km along the grand circuit road is Preah Khan, yet another stunning temple. Unbeknownst to us, we approached this temple from the lesser-used East Entrance, and were confused by just how few fellow tourists were about. We’d later realise that this is actually a great strategy to explore temples while also avoiding the largest tour groups!

Unlike Ta Promh (the Tomb Raider temple), Preah Khan has been extensively restored, allowing visitors to get a feeling for how the temple must have felt in its prime. The video below shows me walking only half of the temple’s length, so you can imagine how much more there was to see!

We rounded off the day with a cycle through Ankor Thom – the 9 km² final capital of the Khmer empire. This involved passing through one of the four giant gates in the city walls.

This was where cycling really came into its own, as it afforded us incredible views of the ancient constructions and also gave us the option to pause at any point to savour the views.

And just as we were starting to run out of steam, we caught our first glimpse of Angkor Wat. The afternoon sun had cast a golden glow over its many towers, and it would have been rude not to stop to catch our breath.

Day 3: Angkor Wat at sunrise (24 km cycled)

We left our hotel at 5:20am and cycled through the night to reach Angkor Wat before dawn. Sunrise at this temple is a big deal and features on almost every itinerary, and we’d read some pretty disappointed tales about just how crowded it can get. So while thousands of people jostled for position outside the west gate, we doubled down on our strategy of heading to the “wrong” gate and approached from the east. We passed through the temple gate at 6.02am, just as the cicadas abruptly broke out into song and the first light appeared in the sky, and within seconds the chorus was nearly deafening.

Exploring the empty temple in the pre-dawn light was absolutely breathtaking, and we did our best to enjoy the moment as well as snap a few photos. We genuinely couldn’t believe that we had one of the world’s busiest sights all to ourselves.

After a half-lap of the temple, we emerged opposite the west gate, and could see hoards of fellow visitors heading up through the main entrance directly towards us.

We made an abrupt about-turn, and with sunrise imminent, made a beeline for a perch protruding from the north side of the temple that we’d scoped out as a good spot.

Here, we tucked into our breakfast boxes of hard-boiled eggs, bread and marmalade as the sun rose. It’s not often we get up before sunrise (let alone arrive at our destination!) but my goodness was it worth it.

We spent the rest of the morning exploring the other temples within Angkor Thom. At its centre is Bayon temple, a huge (if slightly bizarre) temple featuring 216 giant faces which apparently resembled the king who had ordered the temple’s construction. Many of the faces aren’t immediately apparent following roughly 800 years of weathering, but it’s one of those situations where the more you look, the more you find peering back at you from the rock.

Finally, we deployed what little energy we had left to climb the (incredibly steep) steps of Baphuon temple. In addition to offering great views from its top level, this temple also has an interesting backstory of relatively recent history. In the 1960s, it was painstakingly disassembled for restoration, block by block, and meticulously catalogued to allow it to be reassembled again. However, the Khmer Rouge regime who took power in 1970s did not approve of such activity, and destroyed the records. This left behind one of the world’s largest (and heaviest!) jigsaw puzzles, which has since only been partially completed. The thousands of stone blocks that still cover the area surrounding the temple are evidence of how much work still remains. It slightly reminds me of the handful of screws that I often have left over after taking something apart and putting it back together again, though I guess I don’t have such a good excuse.

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While our stay in Siem Reap was longer than we’ve stayed anywhere for months now, I’m so glad we had the time to do it some justice. And with that, our somewhat brief foray into Cambodia was over already, as we boarded an 8.5-hour bus to Bangkok, the beating heart of Thailand.

We got up bright and early to catch the daily train from Phnom Penh to Battambang, departing at 6.40am. Oli had booked our tickets online the previous day and carefully selected our seats from the hundreds available, but when we eventually found our train (by some fluke) on an un-numbered platform at Phnom Penh’s central station, it had only three tiny carriages and no seat numbers, so our seat reservations didn’t mean a thing. We did read this might happen! No matter, we found a spot and settled down for the journey across Cambodia.

We had no real idea how long it might take, because Oli had looked everywhere and couldn’t find an official arrival time (only an estimate from our fave Man in Seat 61). I suppose no one can complain it’s late if there’s no indication when it will arrive! In the end, it was a scenic (if rather bumpy and dusty) six-hour journey through some beautiful small villages and rural areas.

Our guidebook had described Battambang as an ‘elegant riverside town’, so we were a bit surprised to discover just how dusty it was. For the next couple of days, we never quite managed to shift the dust we’d acquired from the open windows of the train, but actually, we really liked the town’s architecture and its super-relaxed vibe. In fact, I was really surprised to discover (when fact-checking this post) that it’s Cambodia’s third largest city – I would never have guessed!

The town is known for having Cambodia’s best-preserved French colonial architecture and traditional shophouses, so we spent some time following an excellent walking tour of the area (or, more accurately, Oli navigated and read out the information while I pointed out the buildings and tried not to yawn – it was HOT and I hadn’t had coffee!)

We also hired bikes for a day so that we could explore a bit further afield, and took a lovely 25km roundtrip cycle along the river and to Ek Phnom Pagoda, a half-ruined temple. This was a great warm up for our upcoming visit to Angkor Wat!

While we were there, we saw a group of monks in orange robes working by hand to clear overgrown plants from around the temple. I’m not sure if they had plans to put more of the huge stone blocks that were strewn around the site back together or whether they were simply taking care of it as it stood, but either way, it looked like incredibly hot work.

In the same area, we also explored a modern temple, which had incredibly colourful painted scenes on every surface of the interior. Our guidebook suggested skipping this in favour of the ruined temple hidden behind, but I really liked it here – we’ve visited an awful lot of historic temples recently and it was nice to see where people actually worship today. Not to mention that I am easily impressed by brightly-coloured things!

Just next door, we spotted a giant Buddha statue. The first time I went to visit one of these (in Hong Kong), I assumed that they were really unusual, but actually, it turns out they are everywhere, hidden in the most unexpected of places! It always makes us smile that they all hold some kind of record for being the largest, with lots and lots of qualifications (e.g. the one in Hong Kong is the largest seated bronze Buddha in the world – it’s not the largest Buddha, or the largest seated Buddha, or even the largest bronze Buddha, but when you put them all together…)

Our final activity in Battambang was a first for us on this trip: we took a cooking class. It’s been quite some time since we stayed anywhere with a full kitchen so we haven’t cooked since maybe Almaty (actually that’s not quite true, we had kitchens in many of our Korean Airbnbs, but with the weird quirk that you weren’t actually allowed to cook in them)! Anyway, we decided that as we enjoyed eating the local food so much, perhaps we should learn to make some of it.

Our first stop was the local market, which was buzzing in the early morning. We bought some of the ingredients we would need for our class, including the coconut milk required for our main course. I found this part really interesting – we saw the dedicated machine that compresses the fresh coconuts to produce the rich, creamy coconut milk and deposits it into a clear plastic bag. I’ve never had coconut milk as fresh as this! But what really got me were the huge sacks of dessicated coconut that are left over from this process. Chef LyLy laughed as he asked us whether we use this as an ingredient at home (obviously, he already knew that the answer was yes) – in Cambodia, this is used as chicken food!

Unfortunately, I was really messy from eating the delicious coconut sticky rice that we’d been given as breakfast, so I didn’t manage to get any photos of the cool coconut machine. But you can have a photo of my breakfast, instead…

Next, it was back to the cookery school to get started on our four dishes. We were making Fish Amok, which is a coconut milk and white fish curry steamed in a banana leaf bowl. It is milder than a Thai curry (Cambodian food has very little spice), with a slightly different fragrance and an unusual moussey texture, but equally delicious. Fish Amok is Cambodia’s national dish, and Oli has been eating it almost daily so now considers himself a bit of a connoisseur. To accompany this, we made a green mango salad with a tangy dressing and fried carrot and taro spring rolls with a dipping sauce. Finally, pudding was the restaurant’s own speciality, a coconut dessert akin to a Panna Cotta.

The jury is out on whether we’ll ever actually make this food at home – if previous cookery classes we’ve taken are anything to go by, then probably not! But it was a fun way to spend a morning, and we got an absolutely delicous lunch out of it.

This concluded our time in lovely Battambang, so we boarded an eastbound bus to Siem Reap, the gateway to the mighty Angkor Wat.

From Ho Chi Minh City, we took a 6-hour, cross-border bus to reach Phnom Penh, our first stop in Cambodia.

One of the first big contrasts we noticed on the streets of Phnom Penh were the number of tuk tuks around – although these are often associated with the whole of Southeast Asia, we didn’t see a single one in Vietnam. But in Cambodia, it’s even possible to hail them using Grab (the Southeast Asian version of Uber), which we loved. It was a bit more exciting than a Prius turning up every time!

We took a ride in one to visit Phsar Tuol Tompoung, better known as the Russian Market. It acquired this nickname during the 1980s, when it was frequented by the then-large Soviet immigrant population in the city. We read that it was worth a visit even though it sounded very tourist-focused, but it well exceeded our expectations. Yes, there were stalls selling the ever-present elephant trousers, but there were also sections for fresh produce, fish, meats and, always my personal favourite, car and bike parts. I love the idea that you could pop to the market to find a spare wing mirror after a prang on the busy streets!

Our next stop was the Royal Palace, which sits just next to the Mekong River. This was a spacious compound filled with lots of impressive buildings, most of which we couldn’t enter because this is still the official residence of King Sihamoni. We were allowed to peek into the Throne Hall, but sadly no pictures were allowed. More impressive was the Silver Pagoda next door (and part of the same entrance ticket), which housed an emerald Buddha and a seriously blingy, diamond-encrusted Buddha (although again, no photos allowed). In any case, my favourite part was the 642 metre mural, which extended around the whole enclosure and told the tale of a Cambodian poem. Although we weren’t familiar with the story, the paintings were so beautifully intricate that we spent quite some time following the walls around the complex to admire them.

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Wat Phnom is a temple set on the only hill in town, and gives the city part of its name (phnom means hill in Khmer). We climbed the hill to visit the temple and were hoping to watch the sunset over the city, but sadly we couldn’t see much of the view because there were so many trees. But the temple was definitely worth a visit, and we also saw a chicken visiting a shrine to worship, which was bizarre enough to make our day and probably better than a sunset anyway. While we were there, three monks arrived (and we saw more getting out of tuk tuks at the entrance, which was a little surreal).

As we were exploring the temple, we started to realise that literally every available surface was covered in banknotes that had been left as offerings throughout the day. Even as the monks prayed, one of the temple attendants was going around, retrieving all the money and giving it to another group to count. They had stacks and stacks of notes already!

As we left, we saw a commotion just across the road and went to see what was happening. There was a crowd of people feeding a group of ENORMOUS hornbills, who would rest for a while on the railings outside a company headquarters while they took as much food as they fancied, then spread their wings and fly back across to the trees in the temple grounds. They looked like dinosaurs when they were in the air, and it was a pretty unexpected sight in the middle of the city!

Finally, we couldn’t resist some time swimming in the glass-sided rooftop pool of our hotel, which had a brilliant view towards the Mekong River and across many of the sights we’d visited during our short stay in the city.

To be honest, I’m not sure we really got under the skin of Phnom Penh. We’d read that the city had a bit of an edge to it, but we found it surprisingly relaxed and with a bit of a hipster vibe, so I’m sure there was much more we didn’t experience. We liked its tropical and steamy atmosphere though, which felt like it had much more in common with Singapore than its geographically closer neighbours in Vietnam. It’s somewhere we’d have to revisit to explore further – but for now, we were hopping on a train across Cambodia to the small city of Battambang.