Lucretia Stewart's Lotus Season
Author and travel writer Lucretia Stewart penned the 1992 travel book, Tiger Balm: Travels in Laos, Vietnam & Cambodia, which alongwith Sue Downie's Down Highway One, were the first couple of modern travel books I'd read about Cambodia around the time of my first-ever trip to Cambodia in November 1994. So I was intrigued to find a travel article she wrote in 1997 called Lotus Season, that appeared in an anthology and a radio programme called Amazonians at the time. I was particularly intrigued because it was the story of her friendship with Tan Sotho, the managing director of Phnom Penh-based travel company Hanuman Tourism and mum-in-law to Nick Ray, and mother to his wife, Kulikar Sotho. I'd been friends with Nick - he of Lonely Planet fame - and Kulikar for a while before I met Mrs Sotho way back in December 2000 when she invited me to an evening meal in Siem Reap, so to read Stewart's bio of her was absorbing. You can read it too, at: http://www.travelintelligence.net/wsd/articles/art_1808.html.
posted by Andy Brouwer at
7:58 AM
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Andy said...
To read an article from The Sunday Times in the UK dated 2 July 2006 that highlights temple-safari tours organised by Nick Ray, go to: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2100-2250490.html
10:04 PM
Andy said...
From The Sunday Times
July 2, 2006
Camping it up in Cambodia
A new tented jungle tour sidesteps Angkor to find the real riches of Cambodia: just mind those arachnids, says Vincent Crump.
But these are not hairdos at all; the girls have metal platters on their heads — platters brimming over with fist-sized spiders. Their dreadlocks are not dreadlocks, they are hairy legs.
The spiders are dead. They smell so pungent because they’ve been soaked in soy and deep fried. And now I’m expected to eat them.
I am in Skuon, home of the world’s most repellent roadside snack: a thing even less palatable than the 3am doner kebab. I hand over 500 riel for an incy-wincy portion — one arachnid — and finger it uncertainly, wondering if it would be rude to put it in my sunglasses case and take it home to scare the milkman. The legs are the size and colour of a Cadbury’s chocolate finger, though if your chocolate finger was as hirsute as this, you’d definitely take it back to Sainsbury’s.
Just then another car pulls up and a German named Ulli jumps out. Ulli is not pussyfooting about. He buys a dozen spiders, hands his girlfriend the camera and takes a great big bite. It’s even worse than I feared: brown gunk explodes down his chin, and he’s spitting and choking. Tra, my safari guide, turns away and winces.
“Never eat the abdomen,” he whispers. “Eggs or excrement.”
Skuon is the first staging post on my sally into undiscovered Cambodia, and a taste of things to come. Until a decade ago, the phrase “undiscovered Cambodia” was travel tautology — but then Pol Pot died, the Khmer Rouge was finally vanquished, and the world, its wife and a busload of in-laws flocked here to visit Angkor, lost capital of the god-kings, the most humdinging archeological site in Asia. Now, a million tourists pitch up each year, including Korean coach parties wielding megaphones.
Angkor must be seen, certainly — but if you wonder what the 1,000-year-old civilisation of the Khmers looked like before it got “discovered” by French colonists and tarted up for the megaphone masses, you need to strike out beyond Siem Reap into Cambodia’s steaming, spidery highlands. Here lie the outposts of Khmer empire: Sambor Prei Kuk, a religious complex even older than Angkor; Koh Ker, jungle stronghold of the usurper king Jayavarman IV; and especially Preah Vihear, a cathedral-sized monastery chipped into the top of a 2,000ft crag. A new “temple safari” promises to take travellers with intrepid urges to find them — and that’s what I’ve signed up for: just me and my tent (and my driver, my tour guide, my cook and my factotum).
The brains behind the safari is Nick Ray, Lonely Planet author and self-styled temple-hunter, whose love affair with Cambodia has gone from collecting bottle-tops for Kampuchea to unearthing Angkorian citadels for Angelina Jolie to romp through in her Lara Croft hot pants.
“People think the places you’ll be going to are just for the hardcore dirt-bike community and Mick Jagger in his helicopter,” Nick tells me. “It’s not an easy ride, but once you arrive, you get to spend dusk and dawn alone in your own personal temple — no hawkers or hassle, and a feeling of spiritual communion that’s hard to find nowadays at Angkor. It’s a blast. That’s what I love about Cambodia: it’s still as much an adventure as a holiday.”
Spider savouries are only the start of it. The big worry with back-country Cambodia is not coming home with too many legs but too few. During decades of murderous civil war, the northern hinterland was sown with 4m landmines, and the road to Preah Vihear is staked out with grinning skull and crossbones — which mean step off the trail and you’ll end up like Long John Silver.
We bid goodbye to 21st-century Cambodia in Kompong Thom, a one-horse, two-horsepower town full of kamikaze mopeds loaded with chickens and children. The high street is like a life-or-death Dodgem rink, and I see one chap with a full-grown pig strapped sideways across the pillion of his scooter — which is funny, but not as funny as when I realise the pig is alive.
Soon we’re out in the country and space-hopping north along vivid red-sand roads through the rice paddies and sugar palms, where babies and buffalo bathe together in the levees. Mopeds dwindle away to ox carts, pick-up trucks to ploughshares, and Tra points out a woman baking fish inside a mud oven by the road: “This is the way of cooking that’s depicted in the bas-reliefs at the Bayon temple in Angkor,” he says. “Life hasn’t changed for 900 years.”
Our temple pilgrimage begins with impeccable chronological logic at 7th-century Sambor Prei Kuk, a prototype Khmer capital from 200 years before Angkor. It is so far gone in forest that I don’t see it coming. A monstrous octopus is eating the gatehouse — Tra says it’s a strangler-fig tree — and beyond, crumbling brick shrines scatter like stamped-on sandcastles through the jungle. The only other visitors are two backpackers, and the tourist infrastructure amounts to three ragged boys with scarves draped over their forearms, who trail behind us from temple to temple like pages — steadfast and silent, never once begging a sale.
We wander between the sanctuaries, dipping into their cool, kiln-like interiors, inhaling the solitude. The sun-spangled woods feel curiously English, more Christopher Robin than Mowgli — though, as far as I know, Christopher Robin never grappled with huge female pudenda. These are the yoni — suggestively shaped altars secreted inside each shrine, and originally pierced by the sacred phallus of the Hindu deity Shiva.
The stone members have long since been plundered, but inside one sanctuary we find evidence of continuing worship: a shapeless boulder draped in a scraggy orange krama, the Cambodian scarf. Tra thinks it’s a totem set up by villagers to the spirits of health or harvest — their flyblown offering of rice and incense speaks of the animist beliefs of the Cambodian countryside. Asia’s earliest temple city may be tumbledown but it seems nobody remembered to tell the locals it was “lost”.
We jolt on northward on bomb-site roads, the scarlet skulls multiplying, the jungle pressing in. To the west lies tomorrow’s target, Koh Ker, where I’ll scramble to the top of a 120ft pyramid on a rickety ladder and find myself sole overlord of a 10th-century settlement almost as big as Angkor — a hundred of its monuments still lurking, unclaimed by archeology, somewhere in the undergrowth.
But tonight we plan to camp at the furthest-flung wonder of the lot: Prasat Preah Vihear, the “Great Temple in the Sky” — three centuries’ worth of super-intricate gods and monsters chiselled straight into a cloud-snagged mountaintop by successive Angkor emperors. The journey time is unpredictable: it depends how many plank bridges are down and how many stops you make to drag crumped Land Cruisers out of a ditch. On our trip it turns out to be one of each — plus one mini-monsoon that soaks us through as we batten down the roof rack. Six hours in all, by which time our driver, Siha — button- collared and bespectacled when he picked me up at the airport — is bare-torsoed and bulging-eyed, with his krama knotted round his forehead like Ben Gunn.
The last half-hour is straight up the side of the Dangrek mountains on hair-whitening hairpins, the road crumbling under our wheels like in a Hitchcock car chase. A hilarious three-inch kerb separates us from gory oblivion.
It’s worth it. At the top, mist froths mythically around a mighty pink causeway, pedlars wobble under the weight of milkmaid-type yokes, and a few Thai day-trippers from the other side of the mountain straggle back to their cars. Yes, there are other people around — but that’s where our tents come in. It is four o’clock, two hours till dusk: time to spend completely alone with the Angkorian ancients.
While Siha and the rest of our retinue make camp, Tra and I set off to climb the staircase of broken-topped sanctuaries towards the temple summit, swarming hand-over-hand across a terrifying rubble of Hindu iconography: writhing serpents, gaping birdmen, mad-eyed demons. This is Indiana Jones made real: along shadowy corridors, into flooded vaults, never sure whether you’ll find Buddhas or bats. We finally emerge onto a craggy balcony 2,000ft above the jungle, where kings once came to greet their gods. Sunset seeps across the plain; the roar of the cicadas is lion-loud. It’s quite incredible.
As we descend again, Tra points out pockmarks in the temple ramparts: “Gunfire. The Khmer Rouge retreated here in the 1990s. Preah Vihear was their last stand.” When we get back to camp, now perfumed by tree-resin torches, Chung the cook is dishing up chicken with lemongrass. It’s the most astounding camp site I’ve been to, knocking Happy Valley Caravan Park and Silage Plant, Porthmadog, into a cocked hat. I feel privileged to be here, and very well looked after. Time to crack open my sunnies case and hand round the spider legs.
Travel details: Audley Travel (01869 276360, www.audleytravel.com) has nine nights in Cambodia from £1,895pp, including flights from London, a two-night temple safari, four nights in Siem Reap and two in Phnom Penh. Or try Regent (0870 499 0911, www.regent-holidays.co.uk.
The safari can be booked independently through Hanuman (00 855 23 218356, www.hanumantourism.com): the two-night tour, starting from Siem Reap, with a guide and meals, costs from £350pp.
4:54 AM
This post has been removed by the author.
The original article, Lotus Season, has been removed from these comments at the behest of the writer's literary agent. The only place where you can read the article in full is at www.travelIntelligence.net.
Andy
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