Our destination was Phnom Bakheng, the 9th century hilltop temple just south of Angkor Thom. This is a very popular spot for taking in the sunset, as it affords a view over Angkor Wat. Every day at dusk the temple is mobbed by hundreds, if not thousands, of tourists queuing for the ascent. So popular is it, that only 300 people are permitted on the upper terrace, for fear of structural collapse and injury.
At sunset, elephants can be hired to make the climb to the summit. However, these beasts of burden were still asleep as we arose this morning. The normal approach is to take a tuk-tuk to the base of the hill and walk up. Bucking the trend, our journey began on bicycle. Fortunately, the outside temperature at this time of the morning is still north of 20°C, so getting up is less of an endurance test than seeing a chilly British sunrise.
We had hired two White Bicycles the previous evening, which awaited us in the dark hours of the early morning. Sadly, only one of these had a dynamo-driven light, so I cycled clutching a torch to the handlebars. Having made the journey several times by daylight, the route was familiar to us, but the surrounding trees, harbouring amorphous shapes, whether real or imagined, took on a different character.
At this hour, we had the path to ourselves, save for a few market stallholders setting out for their pitch. As the Angkor complex does not open until 5:30AM, we breezed past the usual checkpoint on Charles de Gaulle, which was unmanned.
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| Phnom Bakheng |
After some guesswork, we arrived at the inconspicuous entrance to Phnom Bakheng at 5:00AM. My torch illuminated a figure in the woods. It moved and approached us, lighting up a torch of its own. The figure revealed itself to be the Angkor security guard for the temple. He and others like him sit watch throughout the night, enforcing the opening hours.
We parked our bikes and joined the sentry at his post, perched on a wooden fence. With our torches extinguished, no other artificial light was visible, and we sat in companionable silence observing the blanket of stars above us and the sounds of nature in the surrounding jungle.
Not long after, a pair of cycle lamps approached. "Is this a good place for the sunrise?" asked an accented voice out of the blackness. We were joined by a Dutch couple, who had also made the journey (naturally) on two wheels. Unlike sunset, this end of the day is far less popular with visitors, and so the four of us made up the entire party of sun worshippers today.
Despite not rising until 6:10, by 5:30 the advancing sun had already brightened the sky considerably to a deep blue. Reaching the top of the hill, we groped for the staircase to ascend the temple walls. On top, we were rewarded with a largely uninterrupted view over the surrounding flat plains. As the blanket of night was drawn back across the land, it gradually revealed the distinctive form of Angkor Wat, whose grey silhouette popped out of the misty landscape like a layer of a diorama.
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| View of Angkor Wat from Phnom Bakheng |
Photography was tricky in the half-light, and the flaming red sun was partially obscured by a bank of cloud on the horizon, but the atmosphere was magical. We made the descent shortly after being joined by a group of early-morning joggers clad in identical pink sweatshirts, and proceeded to a couple of temples with the aim of enjoying the peaceful atmosphere without the braying of tour groups.
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| Bayon |
We made a brief stop at Angkor Thom's centrepiece, the magnificent Bayon, with its fifty towers, and two hundred smiling faces.
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| Ta Prohm |
Arriving at one of our favourite temples, the overgrown Ta Prohm, we realised a fundamental truth of visiting Angkor: there is always a loud party of tourists arriving just as you get there. Fortunately, the maze-like temple allowed us to slip away amid the tall trees, which seem to have reached down their finger-like roots from the sky and taken hold of the stone walls.
In the grounds, we also came across a number of the tiniest frogs imaginable. At first we thought they were crickets or another small insect. They were camouflaged brown against the earth, so that the very smallest ones appeared as a speck of dirt. The above frog was one of the larger ones and even its weight was not sufficient to bend a blade of grass.
By the time we had finished inspecting frogs, it was later than we realised, given the early start, and so we doubled back after revisiting a couple more temples. Outside Angkor Wat's western gate is the Angkor Café. This caters predominantly to the large tour groups we had been trying to avoid. Fortunately, as they were still marauding about the temple complexes, the café was empty. Less fortunately, the tour operators had booked out the entire space for their customers. We joined the waiter in laughing at the irony of having to seat us outside the completely empty restaurant and ordered brunch.
As usual, vegetarian options were more prevalent in the western section of the menu than in the Khmer food, so we gave in and had a tofu burger.
Tempted by the menu of ice cream confections, we attempted to order dessert and fell foul of a cultural misunderstanding. "We only have vanilla and chocolate", said the waiter. I had my heart set on a decadent sundae involving peanut-flavour ice cream and a chocolate brownie. I expressed my dismay. "We pick the ice cream up from the market every day at 11am". I observed that it was already approaching midday and that we would be happy to wait a little while fora greater range of flavours. The waiter looked confused and a little embarrassed. "I think maybe it is running late. It will probably be a long time for you". I was nonplussed. Was he trying to save us from a wait of indeterminate length, or was he politely implying that no matter how long we stuck around, the ice cream would never arrive. Unable to discern the truth, we intimated that we would stay awhile and try our luck. However, inwardly we puzzled. When would the ice cream arrive? Never?
We have had a few such confusing exchanges while travelling. Some we have put down to a lack on both sides to find and understand the right words to adequately explain a nuanced problem. On other occasions, we have realised that procrastination and, in some cases, prevarication are methods used to avoid giving an outright negative answer and to save face.
Confusion is not always the result of a lack of understanding but can be feigned in order to save a lengthier explanation and to avoid any confrontation that might result. Most of the time, however, we often expect a direct response and fail to take the hint. If there is no ice cream, just let us know. If you don't know how to operate the credit card machine or fill out the correct paperwork, please tell us. For us there is no shame in admitting to a shortcoming. We won't make a fuss. But some tourists might make a scene and for some cultures it seems to be more important to smile and maintain a happy relationship than necessarily to satisfy the customer's every whim.
Happily, we were proven wrong in our presumption on this occasion. The waiter came to tell us the good news and we indulged in dessert, which was predictably delicious. The taste was tinged a little with guilt at our suspicions and, as we ate, we realised that we are equally apt to create confusion through politeness and obfuscation.
A weekend trip we had planned to join out to Preah Vihear - a temple near the Thai border whose ownership is hotly, and sometimes violently, contested - fell through at the last moment. Several members of the group had decided to switch to a different tour operator, making the shared cost for the remaining individuals too high and the trip unviable. However, the original trip wasn't being run by a tour operator, but by our Khmer teacher, who organises transport and accommodation more as an outing among friends, rather than as a business. Determined to make the plan successful, she suggested that we could go by motorbike instead of bus. We were less than sure about making the 500km round trip by bike, and told her so. However, we hedged and caveated our response, using "I think..." and "perhaps" to soften the blow of our refusal. Despite speaking and understanding English to a high level, this indirection muddied the message for our teacher. Did we want to go or not? In the end, we discovered that brevity is the brother of clarity. But the delivery seemed too curt to our sensitive British ears. We wanted to prevaricate, to avoid a negative. The use of language implies a lot about a culture but it seems that the approach between East and West is differently similar enough to lay a minefield for the unwary.
Having gorged ourselves at brunch, we dined lightly in the evening on a rice pilaf using aubergine, pomegranate, cucumber, tomatoes, and a handfuls of fresh mint and basil.
Our Khmer teacher realised that talking face to face would lessen the gap of misunderstanding, and so she joined us in the evening. We shared a beer and our mutual disappointment that the trip would not go ahead. Instead we made plans of our own for Monday that could not be stymied by others' lack of commitment.
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