Travel: In Search of Lost Roads 4

After riding through old rubber plantations, hiking up sacred mountains, and wandering around ancient temples, all I could think about was a big, juicy hamburger. We headed to Mekong Crossing, Kompong Cham’s only Western bar and restaurant, and I got my hamburger with a heap of fries on the side and tried to fend off my girl as she waited impatiently for her favourite meal, pork chops, mash, and baked beans.

The next morning, we slept late, ate a leisurely breakfast of stirfried shrimp, and got on the road around noon. With only daytrips ahead of us now, there was no need to hurry. We drove up along the north of town, catching glimpses of the river through the trees, as we passed a host of villages and temples. The broad, brown river glittered in the sunshine.

We planned to visit a few of the minor temples in the area beginning with Han Chey, but there was nothing to stop us from taking a curious peek into a few places along the way. One thing that caught my eye was a long, blue boat sitting under a tree in the grounds of a simple wat. Swinging in for a closer look, my girl guessed that it was the boat used in local races for the Water Festival.

As we were about to leave, we heard a gang of boys calling us, so we turned back to see what they wanted and were greeted by a throng of smiling faces. They were on lunch break from their studies at the wat and wanted to try out some of their recently acquired language skills. Each one lined up before me and declaimed in stiff English, ‘How do you do?’

Taken aback, I replied, ‘Fine, thanks. How are you guys?’ They all replied, ‘How do you do?’ Although they were not yet ready for conversation, they were eager enough to have their photos taken and giggled when I showed them their smiling faces, with snot dripping out of their nostrils, on the digital camera’s display screen. The surreal atmosphere of the scene was completed when an old woman waddled around the corner with a basket balanced on her head and addressed me in fluent French.

We took to the road again. The dirt path split in a nearby village, and we trundled along in a cloud of red dust. The landscape was lush. Then the road slanted upward, and we wound around the base of a hill and came to a stop next to a tall brick temple, Han Chey. The doorway was inscribed with archaic characters. Inside were smashed tiles and plaster busts of the Buddha. Nothing on the outside remained but the rough, irregular surface of crumbling brown bricks.

Next to this temple was a modern wat. To the Khmer mind it seems modern temples can feed off the holiness of ancient ones. We passed the giant tree at its entrance, surrounded by shrines and statues, and climbed the stairs to the wat’s open doorways. The inside of wats are dusky, like churches, but the open doorways allow a fresh breeze to enter. The walls were covered with murals of mythical stories painted in bold colours.

We fetched the bike and took a spin around the wide grounds. The view from the front of the wat looked down the smooth green banks of the hillside dotted with mounds of earth and mysterious white gravestones. Around the side of the wat were a collection of shrines, ornate red Angkorean imitations, and the mouldering stump of another brick temple.

Finally, at the back was a sort of resort area, with long strips of grass containing rows of statues, a colourful concrete zoo with such unlikely inclusions as a kangaroo with a baby in its pouch. Huts made of thatch and bamboo set up for weekend holidaymakers sat perched on the cliffs overlooking the glittering river.

Slowly, we circled back to the front of the complex. But before departing back down the hill, we turned around a corner to catch a shamefaced monk squatting by the side of a temple. When I asked my plump Khmer girl why he did not just use a toilet, she explained, ‘Monk in Cambodia have a lot of lazy.’

We returned to town to take in Kompong Cham’s most famous attractions, Phnom Bproh and Phnom Srey. The two hills, situated just outside of town on the highway to Phnom Penh, have been written about many times. The precise reason for their fame is not so readily apparent.

The first is Phnom Bproh, with a paved road leading to the summit, where a huge Angkorean replica sits on a bed of gravel. The view from the back is pretty, with monkeys fooling in a thick canopy, and because of the holiday there were fruit sellers there to provide us with mangoes and fresh coconut juice.

There was a Buddhist theme park on the way to Phnom Srey. A huge gold Buddha encircled by bowing maidens, a collection of spirit houses, and a cartoonish four-faced temple – along with a reclining Buddha, two seated Buddhas, and a particularly effeminate Buddha who appeared to be wearing a thick smear of lipstick and eye-shadow, thought to have said this would have incurred the wrath of my Khmer girl.

A little further on were the first of the 211 steps to the top of Phnom Srey. We bought a bottle of water and made the hike. At the top were two impressive nagas, like petrified cobras poised to strike, and a series of little lookout spots affording us panoramic views of the countryside under the shade of trees bearing thick boughs of orange flowers.

We had time for one more short trip, so we headed back into town and across the bridge. I had heard of one temple nearby, but the locals seemed confused and gave us vague directions. We ended up taking a gravel road, in a cloud of dust, until we reached a four-faced archway in the middle of a village. We were always lost, asking locals, turning back, seeing the same gawking kids again and again. The locals shouted jokes as we passed, ‘Your motorbike has only one eye!’

To our surprise, we came upon a paved road that took us through an old rubber plantation. Then just as soon, we found ourselves on a narrow embankment in the midst of rice fields. There was a low knoll ahead with a sort of spire on top, and we decided to shoot for this knoll.

When we finally reached it, dusk was swiftly approaching. We were surrounded by a mob of kids, thrilled by the wonders of my digital camera, and shown to a modern wat built atop a base of ancient laterite blocks. I wondered if foundation of blocks had existed before the wat, in which case the old temple must have been huge, or if the workers had simply collected the blocks over a large area in order to lay a new foundation.

To the left was a burned out old buiding. More blocks were scattered in the tall grass. Others had been used to make a wall and as the base for a wooden building. The sheer number of blocks was impressive. At one time, there must have been a big temple on this spot.

We returned to Mekong Crossing for hamburgers that evening, and then went to the market to buy fruit, chocolate, and instant noodles. The next morning, I had planned to take the river road back to Phnom Penh, the dirt path that hugs the Mekong until about an hour north of the capital, but there was too much tension between us, and the arguments and bitterness were beginning to return.

The bond that has held us together, after we had been separated for so long, was the journey that both of us had wanted to take and had known we would only enjoy with each other. But now that it was over, the capital just a short trip away, there was a sense of marching back to that place where everything would soon fall apart again in all the impossibilities of our relationship.

So we took the highway, the fastest route back, with just another memory, or a ‘souvenir’ as she would say, to bitterly reminisce about as we returned to our inevitable separation.