Bali - is this a vision of the future?

I last came to Kuta Beach, Bali thirty one years ago. It was a tourist place then, but low key and with charm and I have fond memories of that visit.

Now the reality is the beautiful beach and the friendly people that made it so attractive are still there but buried under commercialism; thousands of stalls selling the same mass produced tat, much of it aimed at the lowest common denominator of taste and a marketing philosophy of getting as much cheap alcohol into people as possible.

In case you haven't worked it out, definitely not to my taste.

Fortunately if you can get away from the tourist strip (which takes quite an effort given the horrendous traffic) the center of the island is still lovely, the scenery, especially the tiered rice paddies climbing up the hillsides and some of the small villages, are in places stunning and the people still friendly. I hired a dirt bike and a guide one day and seeing the small villages with him, and meeting his friends and family, was the highlight of the ten days here.

Phnom Penh (Dec 10)

I wanted to go to Phnom Penh for a variety of reasons, not least the exoticness of the name and all it conjured up of the far East and stories I read when I was young. But there is another side which those of us who grew up in the seventies think of, and that this of course is the association with the Cambodian civil war and the Khmer rouge. They came to power in 1975 and in the three and a half years until they were ousted by the Vietnamese killed either directly, or through starvation, a quarter of the countries population - a level of atrocity I find hard to imagine. What I also find incomprehensible is that despite everyone knowing what they'd done, the Australian, UK, American and many other governments continued to recognize the Khmer rouge as the "legitimate" government for ten further years in a perverse refusal to recognize the communist government of Vietnam could actually done something good. That ten years meant more people died in guerrilla warfare before the remenants of the Khmer rouge finally self destructed. Something I'll try to remember next time I hear my government trying to justify the indefensible.

During the morning I went to visit one of the Khmer rouge jails that has been preserved in the city and also one of the " killing fields " where 9000 bodies were disposed of in mass graves. Profoundly depressing. I took very few pictures at these places and i won't put any of these, except the one of the preserved sign, because they all tend to make the places look prettier and more pleasant than they should ever appear.

The afternoon Megan and I spent walking around the city, mainly taking time in the rather grand Central Market but also walking up the banks of the Mekong river (from whence you can get a boat to Vietnam - now that's definitely something to do in the future)  and watching Cambodians out enjoying themselves.

To Phonm Penh

From Siem Reap it's a claimed six hour bus journey to the capital Phomn Penh, but the reality is more like nine. Not to worry I like local bus journeys, looking out at the scenery, watching life happening at the roadside, looking out the front window and watching the truck approaching head on in the other direction and wondering if one of us is going to pull in in time - certainly never boring. Driving in Cambodia initially appears really anarchic, but once you watch for awhile you realize there is quite a sophisticated system working around you. Rule one is only ever worry about what's in front of you, rule two blow your horn everytime you overtake to let those concentrating on rule one know you're there, rule three always let the overtaking vehicle back in - no road rage here despite the massively overcrowded roads and vast disparity in vehicle speeds, and it all seems to work remarkably well. It's also noteworthy we saw no accidents whilst we were here, and virtually no vehicles with signs of accident damage.

The journey itself went well, with only one unexplained stop whilst they did something to the engine but like everywhere there are quirks; in Cambodia the buses need to be thoroughly washed off all their road grime immediately before entering Phnom Penh - never discovered why, but it made a nice half hour interlude on the journey and a place to buy our (late) lunch.

Siem Reap again (Dec 7 & 8)

So why did we come back to Siem Reap again? Two reasons, mainly to see more of the temples but also so yesterday I could only in the Angkor Wat half marathon.

Running this half marathon was one of those things that looked like a great idea at the time - it was on at the same time as when we are in Cambodia why not do it? As always I thought there was plenty of time to train for it, and as ever I let things interrupt those plans, so come race day I was definitely under prepared. As it was it didn't go to badly. It was the hottest and most humid half I've ever run and I can use that as a partial excuse for my slowest ever time (2 hours 12 minutes), but at least I made it around without stopping.  Irrespective of the time it was a great event to run in, partly because of the  beauty of the course as it winds it's way around the temple complexes, partly because of the enthusiastic locals who lined the course are (and especially the kids who " high fived" so much that my arm wasdo,s worn out as your legs by the end) and partly by the size of the field you run with. I hadn't realized that this was part of a circuit keen amateur runners do, and there were about 1500 people doing the half marathon and another 6500 doing a shorter 10k or 3k course - a good half or more of these runners being foreigners like me.

The run had started at just after six and we were back at the hotel by nine so in theory we had a whole day in front of us to use productively- instead I used post-run recovery as an excuse to been around all day drinking beer and watching movies - this is meant to be a holiday after all.

Today we did get back to doing the tourist thing, visiting some of the more outlying temples. Below is a picture of our transport for the day, and (hopefully) some video footage of the fun on the roads out here. As ever for me the traveling is at least as important as the destination.

The first temple we visited was the very tumble down Beng Melea - Megan first saw this complex ten years ago when it was very overgrown and so unvisited that for several hours she had it all to herself. Today it's somewhat different, whilst still relatively unvisited compared to the temples close to town it still had half a dozen large tourist buses at the entrance when we arrived. Fortunately it is large enough (just) to absorb the current crowd.

As you walk into the site a big sign says the standard things like "stick to set paths", " don't climb things"  etc. We quickly discovered that because this not part of the main complex it is not actually very controlled and the local guide we hired (or more correctly attached herself to us) obviously hadn't read it and soon had us scrambling up rock piles and around ledges to see the interesting stuff. She also fortunately had a smattering of English;enough to explain all the important stuff but not so much that she bored you to tears with facts that you are going to instantly forget. As we followed her around it was obvious she had a limp but it didn't seem to hinder her to much and we didn't pay any attention to it. It was only at the end did she reveal she actually had an artificial leg having lost one to a mine explosion- an instant reminder of the countries bloody recent history. Below are a few shots from the site.

From Being Melea it was another two hours of rural travel to see "The river of a thousand linga's" (linga = penis, I kid you not). The Hindu religion is a bit fixated on these, Freud would probably had a field day.  The location  was very beautiful though.

And finally as we would or way home from a long day, Bantaey Srei, which whilst small has exquisite carving on its stonework.

It's only after you've been here a short while do realize what a variety there is in the Khymer temples and how the style developed over four or five hundred years of the empires peak. You also realize how priveliged you are too see it all within a short distance; it's the same as if all Europe's key cathedrals were within 50 miles of each other.

Battambang and back to Siem Reap

Battambang turned out to be a lovely little town, untidy, chaotic but great fun to just walk around and watch life happening.

Outside town though is one of its real attractions the "bamboo railway". The pictures below explain it better than wordsNow  can do, but in essence the rolling stock, and I use that term loosely, consist of nothing but two axles, a basic timber and bamboo platform and a lawn mower sized engine driving through an old fan-belt. These are all built as lightly as possible so that if two meet going in the opposite direction, the lightest loaded could quickly be lifted off the track to let the other go through - what a simple solution to a single track railway! Apparently for awhile in the eighties and nineties these were quite common in Cambodia as a simple way of moving goods up and down the countries badly damaged railway tracks. Now most have gone but Battambsngs lives on (though by the looks of it 100%as a tourist attraction rather than as a load carrier).

Riding on it is as much fun as it looks; they jolt around terribly because of the condition of the track, but still manage to hurtle on at (reputedly) up to forty kilometers an hour. Hopefully there will be a video link in this post to give you a bit of a feel for it.

After a couple of nights in Battambang we headed back to Siem Reap by luxury coach - seating arrangements were interesting.

Actually, just kidding, this was only a local bus that took us the first few k's from the town center to the bus station proper. The coach we had for most of the journey whilst tired was much more normal in its seating layout and quite adequate.

Cambodia (1- 3 Dec 2014)

The next few weeks posts won't, for once, be about a bike trip. More of that is coming soon but in the meantime I'm going to use this blog as a place to record other travels.

Years of living in Australia but mostly holidaying in Europe has always let me feeling slightly guilty that I'm not visiting my own backyard of Asia more frequently - in fact my only real trip there was in 1983 on my way to Australia. So I've vowed to travel there more often in the next few years and this is the first step - three weeks split equally between Cambodia and Bali.

December the first saw Megan and I step onto a plane at Sydney and less than 24 hours later, after a brief overnight in Kuala Lumpur, arrive in Siem Reap, Cambodia.

Why Siem Reap? Well its the town that sits beside Angkor Wat (and as I soon discovered many other equally, but differently spectacular temples), somewhere I've wanted to visit for many years. Megan has been here before but for me a complete new experience. We spent our first day in town doing the temples; up early to see sunrise at Angkor Wat then on to some of the other key ones. The scale of the place is what blows you away. Angkor Wat is supposedly the largest individual religious building in the world, and it's just one of many other huge structures- all superbly crafted out of stone; different to the European cathedrals but equally stunning. When you start reading about Khmer history you realize just what a limited view of the world we learn at school - in the twelve centuary they had a city of a million people when the population of London was just fifty thousand. Anyway here are a few photos just to whet your appetite.

On to Battambang (Dec 4)

After only a day on Siem Reap we're on the move already to visit a small provincial town of Battembang. When I was planning the trip the main attraction for going there was the journey to it by boat - reputedly the most scenic in the country. Well it fully lived up to it's billing; seven hours of travel across lakes and down narrow waterways where you could really see both the natural beauty of the country and the basic lives of many of the people. Cambodia has the lowest average income in Asia at under $3000 per year and you could see the reality of this on the poor riverside communities we passed through- but balanced against this were the smiles and waves from everyone.

 Shall we sayloading standards are interesting