Cambodian Travel: In Search of Lost Roads 1
Part One: Temple Hunting in Kompong Chhnang
We had stayed in Kompong Chhnang once, for a single night, to break up a hard trip back from Pursat on an old Daelim. That trip had given me the impression that Kompong Chhnang was a bit of a dull place. With a large park at its centre and rugged hills as its backdrop, it was certainly quiet, pleasant, and even pretty. But the only thing we had found to do there was drive north on the highway and spend an evening at a stilt restaurant, sitting cross-legged on wooden floorboards, eating Khmer food, listening to the sound of crickets, and gazing out onto a moonlit marsh.
More than a year later, I was researching places of interest around the country in anticipation of a long bike trip. Kompong Chhnang turned out to have more than I had thought: an abandoned airport built by the Chinese during the Khmer Rouge years, a massive cave where people were confined to cells after the forced exodus from Phnom Penh, and a long tradition of fashioning fired-clay pottery. What interested me most, however, was mention of a path directly from Kompong Chhnang to Kompong Thom through the dusty floodplains of the Tonle Sap.
When we finally went on the long bike trip, we stayed away from most of the provinces near Phnom Penh. The only times we saw Kompong Chhnang were on a ride from Battambang to Phnom Penh to get some repairs the bike and on the ride back out to Pursat before entering the Cardamom Mountains. After we returned to the capital and I started work again, several incidents involving knives, ashtrays, and flaming T-shirts put an end to travels with my buxom Khmer girl. I went off on short weekend trips, and a ride around the Tonle Sap for Khmer New Year, but the thought of that path from Kompong Chhnang stuck with me.
As the monsoon season approached, I became increasingly impatient to give that ride a try. The rains would soon render it impossible for the remainder of the year. I put the plan to my Khmer girl on one of those nights when she pounded on my door in the early hours of the morning. With a long weekend coming up, I would have enough time to spend a few nights in the provinces. We would drive to Kompong Chhnang in the morning, cross the river on a boat, and take in a circuit that included several pre-Angkorean temples. Then we would look for the path and take it all the way to Kompong Thom. After a night there, we would take backroads through the rubber plantations to Kompong Cham.
She stayed at my place, a seedy guesthouse that doubled as a short-time hotel, the night before the trip so we could get an early start and leave lots of time in case we got stuck or had to turn back and seek another, more conventional, route to Kompong Thom. Unfortunately, it was another drunken night, with all the histrionics that I had come to know so well, and we did not see the statue of Kong Rei, the legendary woman abandoned by her princely lover, at the entrance to the city until nearly noon.
We went right past the market to the banks of the Tonle Sap River. There were signs for small, motorised boats. You could pay one of the old Vietnamese men who owned them to take you to the floating villages upstream. But we kept going until we spotted a throng of motodops and knew we had found the entrance to the ferry landing. There was a steep concrete ramp leading to a wooden bridge and then to the dock. On both sides was a little market. I ducked down to pass under the colourful umbrellas spread over carts of fruit, heaps of fish, and women bearing plastic bags filled with sugarcane juice and platters of fried insects.
We parked the bike on the dock for the Khmer stevedores and climbed aboard the ferry. The ferry was made of old wooden planks, and its sides were covered with chipped blue paint, and it appeared to be dangerously overloaded. With no room on the long, hard, wooden benches against the walls, my buxom companion crouched on the ramp into the belly of the ferry and leaned inside to keep the hot sun off her face. The air in the ferry’s belly was sticky and stuffy. The floor was heaped with bags of cement. Old women dressed in thick jackets and layers of gold jewellery languidly fanned their faces with broad-brimmed sunhats. They must have been on a trip to this side of the river for some special occasion.
Although there was a schedule scrawled on the wall in white paint, we waited long past the departure time for the boat to become sufficiently bloated with passengers and their junk. Stout young men in sweat-soaked shirts staggered past with ever more bags of cement and bundles of thick metal rods. Finally, tiring of the stuffy air and the jostling of the stevedores, I decided to climb up to the top of the ferry. There were as many people up there as there were inside, and they were all frying on the ferry’s sheet metal roof. But from up there I had a clear view of the little harbour, with its collection of blue ferries and longboats moored in a haphazard way. Across the river were dark mountains outlined against the blue sky, long horizontal bands of white clouds, and the green banks of the riverside lapped by the muddy water.
Soon the stevedores started loading the roof as well. The bikes were the last things to come aboard. The men lugged them up the angled ladder on their shoulders until the place looked like a small parking lot. Mine turned out to be too heavy, however, and the men decided to roll it over a wooden plank onto the deck. I slipped down the ladder to watch them load the bike. I found my girl leaning against a post next to the captain?s chair ready to faint. The stevedores rearranged the junk to find space, then rolled the bike aboard, and lashed it to a railing.
The captain elbowed his way through the throng to his tall wooden chair. He was a short man with spotty, wrinkled skin and a few dark whiskers sticking out of a red mole on his cheek. He acted like the boss, herding passengers like cattle, shouting orders at the workers, and flashing a thick wad of 500 riel notes. He carried himself like someone who was aware of the fact that he was sporting a gold watch, several gold teeth, and a walkie-talkie shoved into his breast pocket. He operated the ferry with a steering wheel and a throttle connected to a system of wires and pulleys. He cackled with laughter as he blared the horn, startling the passengers.
The boat chugged out of the harbour. We wove around islands. Then we pulled up to a muddy riverbank. Clumps of vegetation grew out of the water. Small rotten boats sat half dragged ashore. We bumped against a wooden dock packed with locals, and there was a sudden push to be the first one off the deck. We waited until the stevedores had unloaded the bikes and then jumped down onto the dock. My bike churned up a wave of mud as I rode to the top of the slope that led to a collection of huts with T.V. antennae rising above their thatch roofs – the village of Kompong Leng.
The road at the top was hard packed dirt studded with stones. The main path consisted of a loop through nearby villages. But there were many alternative routes in the vicinity of Kompong Leng, and we had to ask locals the way to the nearest temple. The information we got was conflicting: some people said they had never heard of any temples, while others sent us in all sorts of directions. I let my girl talk to the locals and followed her judgement. After turning here and there, we finally passed a yellow hilltop wat and entered the next village. Odd scarecrows were set up near houses, which we were later told were there to deter cows from wandering into houses – scarecows.
We turned off the road onto a sandy trail towards Prasat Srey. There was a small clearing at the end of the trail, and we parked the bike to walk to the first of the temples. Set amidst a backdrop of sweeping ricefields, the temple stood atop a small raised section of land. But directly behind the temple was an unfinished modern wat, which seemed to be a testament to the Khmer predilection for building wats around, or sometimes directly on top of, ancient temples. We walked up the three steps, passed beneath a huge tree, and step around the scattered remains of blocks and posts and lintels. Intricately carved columns and the remnants of a few sculptures remained on the otherwise plain brick temple.
Back out on the main road, we continued only a short distance before finding the trail to the next temple, Prasat Bproh. The sandy path was covered with rotting rubbish, and pigs and dogs competed to scavenge the best bits. We bounced over big stumps and made wrong turns into the backyards of various villagers before we came to a dried up ricefield and rode up one of the narrow field dividers. My girl anxiously clutched my stomach and shouted instructions on how to keep my balance.
Quite suddenly, we saw the tower atop a low knoll in the middle of an empty field. The original stairway must have been stolen or destroyed because there was a new one of elaborately decorated concrete. The walls were rough brick, the door posts solid stone, and on the top was a bizarre four-faced head utterly unlike the traditional Angkorean icons. This feature of the temple puzzled us, and we were discussing it when a wizened old beggar, followed by two little boys, hobbled across the field and stopped by our side.
The man was ancient, with leathery skin and squinting eyes, and stood no taller than my chest. He wore a stained shirt, had a red checked kromah thrown over his shoulder, and went barefoot with a walking stick. There could be no better candidate to interview regarding this peculiar temple, and provided he was coherent he could earn the money for which he was about to beg.
We asked him what he knew about the temple. He told us the familiar story that it was built just after Prasat Srey, unusual because a temple named after woman should be built after a temple named after man to reflect the relative status of the sexes. Getting more information was always a wearisome activity with my plump Khmer interpreter, who seemed to give up quite quickly and refused to pester people for specifics enough for my liking. The old man told her, for example, that the four-faced sculpture was ‘old.’ That was enough to satisfy her, and I had to fuss until she exchanged a few more words with the man and explained that ‘old’ meant less than a century – and so, compared to the temple itself, quite modern.
We thanked the man and gave his some money. Then we headed back out to the main road. We continued straight until a forested hill came into view. Barely visible on top was the form of twin towers. The road looped around the base of the hill. As we got close, we could see the temples through the trees, as well as a rocky path to the top. My companion squealed with glee, as only she could when finding another temple, and gripped one of my shoulders as she pointed over the other one to the hilltop.
We rounded the hill, passing the path, to see if there was an easier approach on the other side. We were in luck, as there was a much less steep, but equally rocky, path on the far side of the hill. We parked beside a small wooden shelter at the bottom of the path. Five boys sat inside keeping out of the sun. We hired two of them to watch the bike (not because we feared it would be pilfered by passers-by, but because we thought that would be the best way to ensure the boys themselves did not get too curious) and the other three to lead the way to the hilltop.
The boys, I thought, might have a little information about the temples. But they were worth taking for the entertainment value alone. My buxom Khmer companion, with her streak of vanity, beamed with delight when one of the boys asked her if she was on T.V. or in movies. I wondered if they were just flattering her, and she was falling for it in her typical way, or if these little boys, living in an isolated and impoverished part of the country, really did see this city girl, with her modish clothes, makeup, jewellery, and flashy phone as something out of Hollywood.
The trees were evenly spaced, suggesting they were selectively cut in order to improve the appearance of the site, but still thick enough to conceal the temples in a green haze. They emerged into our sight gradually, twin dark brown towers. They had been given different names. We heard Phnom Prasat, Prasat Srey Bpee, and Prasat Phoon Nearey. They were partly collapsed, with caved in walls and ceilings, but still standing tall.
We walked around the structures, panting and sweating from the hike, and scanned their bare brick sides for carvings but found none. The attraction of the site lies elsewhere, in the remarkable atmosphere of the place and the journey you must undertake to reach it. Quiet, cool, shady, overlooking magnificent scenery ? two ancient edifices in a remote corner of this country.
The boys led us back down the slope. Their two companions were diligently keeping watch over the Djebel. When my girl passed them a dollar to divide between themselves, they examined it curiously and asked how much it was worth in the local currency.
Coming Next: A Way through the Floodplains of the Tonle Sap.
