Window on Southeast Asia:
Along Cambodia's Backroads
This is part of our Window on Southeast Asia series.
To visit Cambodia and not visit Angkor, the capital of Cambodia's ancient empire (802 - 1432 AD,) would be like visiting Versailles and skipping the palace. That, along with Phnom Penh, is all most tourists see of Cambodia. But after being dazzled by Angkor while on vacation from my job in Thailand, I felt myself compelled to explore more of Cambodia and her people, who call themselves the "Khmer." I would find myself in a land filled with charm, beauty, a rich culture, and friendly people bouncing back from years of turmoil. Only the tourists were missing.
The lack of tourists should surprise no one. For the last three decades the name "Cambodia" has been associated with repression, bombing, genocide, and seemingly endless civil war. But with the collapse of the Khmer Rouge in 1999, peace has finally come to this tormented but resilient land. In December 2001, I was able to visit places that were recently considered too dangerous for travel.
A village mother and child near Kampong Thom.
My first stop was Kampong Thom (pronounced like the name "Tom") in the center of the country. Like many Cambodian towns, Kampong Thom has a charming mixture of French and Khmer architecture and is almost devoid of tourists. I hired a driver to take me to the ancient capital city of Sombor Prei Kuk near the city. Sombor Prei Kuk was the capital of ancient empire of Chenla (6th to 8th century), the Cambodian kingdom that preceded Angkor. It contains nearly 100 temples, most of which are 1,400 years old. The ride took us through a number of villages and recently harvested, golden-brown rice fields. We never once passed a single car—just bicycles, pedestrians, an occasional motorcycle, and ox carts loaded with children playing on stacks of hay. Ah, the simple pleasures of life.
In Laos I had visited a ruined Angkor-era temple. When I showed a picture of the interior to a Thai friend, she looked surprised and asked, "Weren't you afraid of ghosts?" I quickly recalled that conversation in Sombor Prei Kuk. Under the canopy of trees were crumbling temples, some with carved images. Gods, kings, angels, and other ghosts from centuries ago were scattered haphazardly about, some draped in a veil of moss. The cool breeze, the sounds of jungle birds and insects, the wind whispering through the trees, and the beams of dapple sunlight dancing upon the ancient temples made me feel that if there really were ghosts, they were there in Sombor Prei Kuk that afternoon.
Many of the temples are just piles of brick now, but some are in reasonably good condition. Only a few carvings and bas reliefs are left, but they certainly give one an idea of how ancient Khmer culture is as they are quite similar to the carvings at Angkor. But what makes the place dramatic is the location deep in the jungle. Some of the temples have trees growing right through them. A few of the temples have small Buddhist altars. (The temples would have been Hindu during the time of Chenla.) Like elsewhere in Cambodia, colorful images shaped somewhat like a human hung over the altars. I was told that these are human shapes representing ancestors and also a mythical bird.
I had my driver stop at a village I had chosen at random on the way back. The village was set in a quiet banana grove and had houses made of wood with fences and shelters made very charmingly from bamboo and thatch. As I had seen in other Khmer villages this one had beehive-shaped ovens containing huge woks. My driver explained that they were used to make palm sugar.
A you man churning the palm sap in a village near Kampong Thom.
Wood was burning in one of the ovens beneath a wok of boiling palm sap. I watched as some members of the family took the wok and set it into a shallow pit. Over the pit was a contraption made of bamboo; it had a pole with what looked like a double-bladed axe at the bottom. A young man pushed the blade into the sap, then wrapped a rope with a handle on both ends around it. He pulled from one side to the other churning the sap until it became darker and thicker. After doing that for a little while he then churned only at the surface, spattering it along the edges of the wok. His mother would then scrape it back into the middle of the wok until the whole batch had become light in color and more like sugar in consistency. The driver gave me a taste. It tasted a little like brown sugar. The first bite inspired me to take another bite, but the third bite was far too sweet. They said they would take it to market and sell it for 25 cents a kilo. I lingered awhile and watched an ancient way of life continuing as it had for centuries.
It was easy to forget that there was once a time when this way of life had nearly been destroyed. Earlier I had visited some villages that were only liberated from the Khmer Rouge in 1998. Life there was not just poor, but confused. The people did nothing more than grow rice, the only thing they were allowed to do under the Khmer Rouge. They seemed to have no idea what else to do. They had very few possessions and their traditional way of life appeared to have been eradicated by the Khmer Rouge, as had been the case throughout Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. But in this village, where the Khmer Rouge was driven out in 1979, the people had slowly but surely regained their old way of life. It gave me a sense of hope for the people of the other villages and for Cambodia as a whole.
