Travel Journal

Currently, China is experiencing severe floodings, causing over 500 deaths and leaving millions of people homeless across several provinces. What makes this tradegy even worse, is that this happens every year, with rivers incapable of transporting the huge quantities of rainfall during this rainy season. In Guanxi province, I saw some of the damage for myself, with large landslides that had destroyed roads.

Here in Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong province, parts of this big city were flooded due to the quickly risen level of the Pearl River which intersects the city. Shops, homes, restaurants and offices located near the river were affected, and although the floodwaters have receded, sandbags are still piled up near the entrances of metro stations, ready to be used again when needed. Although neighbouring Hong Kong has seen heavy rainfall, here in Guangzhou it has been more or less dry over the past two days.

I went out to explore a small part of the city, mostly on foot, occasionally using the efficient metro. A custom of a large number of Chinese is, very unfortunately, spitting. This is done with great fervour and after a long, audible preparation that is almost as bad as the spitting itself. The Chinese government has been trying to discourage this in view of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, and thankfully, there is a “no spitting” sign on Guangzhou’s metro.

I went around town, explored a beautiful Buddhist temple. Although the People’s Republic of China is officially atheist, Buddhism is one of the most followed of religions here. I walked the streets, including some of the many shopping streets with blinking neon signs, sometimes having to actually wrestle myself through the crowds.

One of the reasons I stopped in this city for a couple of days, was to try the Cantonese food, for which this province is famous. People from other provinces in China joke that the Cantonese like to eat anything with legs that isn’t a piece of furniture, and anything with wings that isn’t an airplane. And indeed, in front of many restaurants, there’s usually a small zoo with live animals, ready to be selected by the customer, as the Cantonese demand the freshest of ingredients.

Most Chinese are quite loud, shouting at eachother during normal conversations, yelling at the top of their voice into their mobile phones, and in the restaurants it can feel like you’re dining in a packed football stadium. After dinner, the tables resemble battlefields, littered with the cascasses of slewn poultry, seafood, and what not. But the food is admittedly delicious. Having gone to restaurants where nobody speaks English, and with no menus in English available, I found myself sometimes having to rely on the choice of the waiter or waitress, as they pointed to something on the menu, and exclaimed “haochi!”, meaning “delicious!". These choices have always been fantastic, wonderfully scrumptious suprise dishes.

Another famous part of Cantonese cuisine is yum cha, also known as dim sum, known in Mandarin as dianxin. Usually eaten for breakfast or lunch, it consists of dozens of small delicacies placed inside bamboo steamers, wheeled around on carts by waitresses, and you pick what you like. Most numerous are all kinds of fried or steamed dumplings, beautifully presented and absolutely delectable. Then there are the various kinds of buns, spring rolls, chicken feet, custard tarts, et cetera. For each choice, you receive a stamp on a small card, which you bring to the cashier when you’re finished.

Tomorrow, I will be trying to make my way over the Pearl River to Hong Kong. In Beijing yesterday, Donald Tsang was sworn in as new Chief Executive of this special part of China, where the so-called “one country, two systems” principle is used, to indicate it is part of China, but retains a form of democracy, self-rule, and a legal system inherited from the British. But when I enter Hong Kong, the first entry on my Chinese visa will expire, and I will have to get Hong Kong Dollars, instead of Chinese yuan.

Discovering new countries, always starting over again when visiting an unknown territory, exploring its customs and attempting to understand its language, can be both very exciting and unnerving.

And so I arrived in Nanning, provincial capital of the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, exhausted after a long train journey on two different trains from Hanoi, but excited to be in China, or Zhongguo, as the people here call this enormous country.

It was early on a Saturday morning, but the square in front of Nanning’s train station was already filled with people, opening their shops, having a smoke, reading newspapers, chatting, or exercising those interestingly slow gymnastics of tai chi. After a 15 minute walk from the station, I checked into what turned out to be a 2-star hotel, using mainly handsignals in communicating with the receptionists, who spoke no English.

Then, I went out to explore Nanning. I hadn’t known what to expect of China, but it certainly wasn’t this. This city with its new high-rise buildings, its center with luxurious shopping malls and huge department stores, cinemas, nice cafes and restaurants. It was like walking in Singapore, but everything was of course in Chinese, those extremely complex characters, completely incomprehensible to me. Hardly anyone spoke any English, the Mandarin phrasebook I carry with me proved invaluable. The funny thing is, once people see that I don’t understand what they’re saying, they write it down for me, but in Chinese. Nice, but not very helpful.

In this city, I also had my first taste of true Chinese food, not the westernised versions I’ve had in restaurants back home. Even at the cheapest of restaurants or food stalls, the taste of the food is so much more refined than in the other countries I’ve visited. It is absolutely delicious, and there are so many kinds of cuisines to explore in this huge country.

After spending a couple of days in the city, frantically trying to learn at least a little Mandarin, and recovering from somewhat of a culture shock, I was about to go further north in the province. I made my way to a brand new busstation, 3 kilometers from Nanning’s center, servicing the northern lines, and got on the most luxurious coach I’ve ever been on, including during my travels in Europe and Australia. I was astonished to find, for the first time in eight months visiting other countries in Asia, seatbelts for every passenger. After checking the tickets, a coach stewardess in uniform handed out lunch packs, drinks and snacks, and while we were heading to the city of Guilin, the newest movies from Hong Kong were shown on the LCD screen in the front. After a smooth four hour journey, I arrived in Guilin, and got on another coach to the village of Yangshuo.

Located on both sides of the famous Li-river, Yangshuo is a beautiful yet very touristy village. A little relieved to find a disproportionate amount of Chinese who spoke English, I explored the village, and gazed at the surroundings consisting of karst hills and peaks. Yangshuo is completely hemmed in by them, and one even had a pagoda on top, although it is baffling to think how anyone can get up there, seen the near-90 degree angles of the rock walls of the peak.

I went on a boat tour of the Li-river, and looked at the extraordinary scenery, the most unusual mountain ranges I’ve ever seen. They consisted of bizarrely shaped karst peaks everywhere you looked, covered with lush forests and bush. It is no surprise that, over the past centuries, so many writers and painters have been inspired by this unique landscape. A week later, travelling on a bus that would bring me further east, I saw the same scenery around Yangshuo once more, and this nightly landscape was even more bizarre. Backlit by the moon, the unusual shapes of the peaks and hills were perfectly outlined. This didn’t resemble a real landscape, it almost seemed as if a painter had gone to great lengths to paint an ever changing mystical landscape on my window.

After a couple of days, I went back to Guilin, and took two buses that brought me to Ping An, a tiny village high up in the mountains. I had to walk the last kilometer to the village, as cars, motorbikes and bicycles were not allowed in, and couldn’t drive on the tiny rocky path anyway. I checked into one of the highest situated hotels, and the view from my room was the most stunning I’ve ever seen, of dozens, no hundreds of levels of rice terraces carved out of the mountain. This was done some 700 years ago during the Yuan Dynasty, and ever since, huge quantities of rice and corn are grown here by the ethnic Zhuang and the neighbouring Yao people. After a short walk to a viewpoint higher up, even more of the rice terraces were revealed, what the locals call Dragon Spine Rice Terraces, because of the shape. Some farmers, tiny figures in this vast landscape, are planting rice. There are many waterfalls and small brooks, and the locals have used bamboo to build a complex irrigation system, with water continuously flowing into the rice terraces at the top, which then cascades down to the lower levels.

The village itself is quite picturesque, with very large wooden houses connected by a small, occasionally steep rocky path, with bridges over the brooks and near waterfalls, where Zhuang women, wearing traditional clothing, are washing vegetables. A Zhuang man, carrying a knife and some other tools in a woven basket on his back, is guiding a large ox on the small path. The man is wearing the conical hat which I associate with Vietnam, although there, only women wear it. But it rains a lot here, and the hat is very effective as an umbrella. On his shoulder, he is carrying a plough, which he will attach with ropes to the ox and use it on one of the terraces, to prepare for the planting of rice.

It is very peaceful here, quiet in this village, the air fresh and cool. Sometimes buildings and landscape are suddenly enveloped in clouds, and everything is white and faded. On clear moments, I made several walks to the lookout point, and just sat there and gazed. It is a stunning and breathtaking scenery, these terraces, the deep valley, the green mountains opposite.

But it was time to move on, as I did, heading to the large city of Guangzhou, in neighbouring Guangdong province. A city of millions, I couldn’t have picked a more different environment, but such are the contrasts in China.

The last city I visited in Vietnam is its capital, Hanoi. During my first visit to Vietnam, it was the starting point of my voyage through this country, and I instantly liked the city. If you forget about the mad traffic for a moment, the city is really charming with its old center with narrow streets, just north of Hoan Kiem lake. There, a number of streets are named after the products that virtually every shop in the street sells, like Hang Bo, with Hang meaning “merchandise” and Bo stands for “baskets". There is a Hang Manh for bamboo screens, and a Hang Muoi, for salt.

There are of course many family restaurants, with delicious food, served usually within a minute after ordering. And then the many coffeeshops, where you can sit down and relax, and watch life going by on the busy street in front of you. Many women, wearing the typically Vietnamese conical hat, carrying a bamboo pole on one shoulder with two baskets attached to it. They sell fruit or carry all kinds of goods. Across some streets, there are red banners with slogans in Vietnamese, reminding you that you’re in a socialist country: “Honesty, Nobility, Solidarity!", or “Long Live President Ho Chi Minh!". Every hundred meters or so people ask you if you want their motorbike taxi services, very cheap (after bargaining) and very fast.

Hanoi is also the city where you can see Ho Chi Minh, or Uncle Ho as he is fondly known, in the mausoleum built after his death. Next to the building, two large banners proclaiming “The Socialist Republic Of Vietnam Will Live On!", and “President Ho Chi Minh Will Walk With Us Forever!", facing the large square that is crowded with people and dignitaries on special occassions. Soldiers in khaki or bright white uniforms guard the mausoleum, and inside is the body of the late Ho Chi Minh, subtly lit in a glass sarcophagus, emphasising his thin white hair, goatee and his bony hands.

The mausoleum is surrounded by large botanical gardens with enormous trees and plants from all over the country, and they were well kept by a dozen female workers with those typical straw hats again. Further on, there is Unclo Ho’s presidential palace, his residential house, and his semi-residential bungalow, completely made out of teak wood, with a carp-filled pond in front of it.

Also on the mausoleum terrain is the famous One Pillar Pagoda, originally constructed by Emperor Ly Thai Tong, who ruled from 1028-1054, destroyed by the French upon leaving Hanoi in 1954, and rebuilt by the Vietnamese government. This small pagoda on an enormous stone pillar has a buddha statue in it, surrounded by flowers and other offerings, and incense.

There are a lot of Chinese influences everywhere in Hanoi, from the Temple of Literature, dedicated to Confucius, to the many Chinese gates, temples and pagodas in this city. The Chinese / Japanese style (fat) Buddha can be seen a lot here, and sometimes statues of Confucius, Vietnamese emperors, and occasionally the more slimmed down Thai version of Buddha. In the center of Hanoi is a Catholic church, a dark grey structure resembling the Notre Dame on the Ile de la Cite in Paris.

By now, I spoke enough Vietnamese to have basic conversations, and it helps enormously with negotiating to get the right price for transportation, or for that nice t-shirt you want to buy. Usually, the asking price is about five times as high as the actual price, and if negotiating doesn’t get the price down enough, the tactic of walking away helps. The vendor shouts out the lowest price, in the hope you turn around. Some people confided in me, in Vietnamese, that the asking price would have been much higher, if I wouldn’t have spoken in Vietnamese to them.

Unfortunately, after several weeks revisiting wonderful Vietnam, it was time for me to leave. My next destination was going to be China, and I was very excited that my explorations of this huge and unfamiliar country were about to start.

Nha Trang, on Vietnam’s south-central coast, is very touristy, and like most places in Vietnam, it has changed drastically over the past decade. It now has hundreds of hotels for the large number of Vietnamese and foreign tourists who want to spend some time in this pleasant city, and it seems that every week, construction starts on a new hotel, even more luxurious than the others.

I was excited to be back in this city, to meet some of the friends I had made during previous visits, and to see all of the now very familiar places, coffeeshops and restaurants again. The long beach is wonderful, and Nha Trang could almost be mistaken for a Mediterranean town, were it not for the many pictures and paintings of Ho Chi Minh, and slogans in Vietnamese like “Nha Trang Is The City Of Heroes", referring to the resistance during the American War.

In the evenings, young couples drive on scooters or motorbikes on the main boulevard along the beach, to see and be seen, and a special section of the beach is crowded after dark with parked motorbikes, where couples are kissing, as this, or even holding hands, is unheard of during the day.

From Nha Trang, I made a short excursion to Dalat. It is a cool mountain resort in the central highlands, and is a famous honeymooning resort for Vietnamese couples because of its climate and idyllic location. There is indeed some beautiful scenery to explore around Dalat, which I did on a rented motorbike, as I drove on winding roads through mountains covered with lush forests, visiting some large waterfalls a dozen kilometers away from the town.

Back in Nha Trang, I bought a ticket for a night bus to the small town of Hoi An. It is just south of the central Vietnamese city of Danang, and it is one of my favourite places in Vietnam. A Unesco World Heritage site, it is a very picturesque riverside town with narrow streets and old houses, many beautiful pagodas and Chinese temples with nice gardens. Some of the many wooden buildings date back to early 19th century. It is very touristy, but this doesn’t diminish the feeling you get, of being in an open-air museum of historical Vietnam, when you walk through Hoi An. The town is also famous for manufacturing clothes, and the hundreds of tailors can produce basically anything you want in 24 hours, including copies of your favourite shirts or trousers, in the material of your choosing.

After a couple of days, I travelled further north to Hue, located on either side of the wide Perfume River. Around Hue, there are a number of interesting pagodas and tombs of emperors to be explored. Close to the city, the Thien Mu pagoda is where monk Thich Quang Duc used to live. Although not famous by name, photographs of him were printed on the front pages of newspapers and magazines all around the world, as he burned himself to death in Saigon on 11 June 1963, in protest of the policies of the brutal South-Vietnamese Diem regime.

The old part of the city, on the north side of the river, is situated inside a moated citadel. It is here where the Imperial Enclosure and the Forbidden Purple City are located, home to the emperors of the Nguyen dynasty, until the end of World War II, when Emperor Bao Dai abdicated to Ho Chi Minh’s Provisional Revolutionary Government. Although much of the historical buildings and temples were destroyed during the American War, some of the residences, halls, palaces and gates have been restored, and are well worth a visit.

After visiting the Imperial Enclosure, I cycled around on a rented bicycle through the old city, and stopped near Tinh Tam Lake, where I enjoyed an absolutely delicious bun bo Hue, a local specialty, consisting of rice vermicelli and vegetables with beef soup. Another of my favourite dishes, sold everywhere in Vietnam, is pho bo, or beef noodle soup, to which you add some extra flavour by using the nuoc mam, or fish sauce, and of course chillies. What you’ll probably want to give a miss is the absolutely foul smelling mam nem, a different kind of fermented fish sauce and uniquely Vietnamese, it has the strongest stench I’ve ever encountered, worse than the already very unpleasant odour of the durian fruit. Both are, not unlike those British and Australian concoctions of condiments called Marmite and Vegemite, an acquired taste (to say the least).

After a couple of days in Hue, a long busride brought me to Hanoi, my last stop before I would go to China.

After spending some time in the south of Cambodia, on the deserted beaches of Sihanoukville, or Kampong Som, with seawater with a temperature approaching that of a hot bath, I returned to Phnom Penh.

From there, I took a bus that brought me to the border with Vietnam, and after the customs formalities, I was on my way to Thanh Pho Ho Chi Minh, also known as Saigon.

From 1859, most of Vietnam was under French rule. During World War II, Japanese forces occupied Vietnam, frequently attacked by the largely communist Viet Minh resistance forces, led by Nguyen Tat Thanh (1890-1969), more widely known as Ho Chi Minh, or Bringer of Light. After the end of World War II, French troops tried in vain to regain control of their former colony, until their catastrophic defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954.

The Geneva Accords that followed allowed for a temporary division of the country along the 17th Parallel, until a possible reunification. The north of Vietnam, known as the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, was led by Ho Chi Minh, and the south, or Republic of Vietnam, had Ngo Dinh Diem as head of state. Diem, who used nepotism and a near-tyrannical rule to remain in power, refused to implement the Geneva Accords to reunify Vietnam. What followed was a war between the north and south, during which American support to the south increased from a handful of “military advisers” to hundreds of thousands of troops. What is known everywhere else as the “Vietnam War", is referred to as the “American War” here, and its outcome is now famous.

When the war was over, Saigon was renamed to Ho Chi Minh City, and Vietnam was once again united, with Hanoi being its present day capital.

I have visited Vietnam twice before, and it is nice to be in a familiar country again. Also, the fact that the Vietnamese language uses the Roman script makes things a lot easier, although its pronunciation is very difficult.

After arriving in Ho Chi Minh City, I was again reminded of how bad the Vietnamese traffic is. Of all the countries I have visited in Asia, nowhere is the traffic as bad and seemingly suicidal as here. As usual, there are more motorbikes than cars on the streets, and none of the drivers wear helmets. Motorbikes coming from side streets hardly slow down and never look, putting their faith in their God and the drivers behind them. On the roads connecting the towns and cities, it seems that overtaking is a necessity when there is absolutely no way to know if there is any oncoming traffic. Therefor, it’s not a question if you see any accidents or their aftermath, but how many.

Ho Chi Minh City is huge, with wide boulevards connecting the different quarters. I visited the Reunification Palace, formerly the seat of the South Vietnamese government before tanks from the North Vietnamese army crushed the gates in front of the palace on 30 April 1975, signaling the liberation of Saigon. The elaborately decorated rooms are now occasionally used for government meetings, and the Palace took centre stage on 30 April of this year, during the celebrations to mark 30 years since the end of the American War.

Vietnam is the number two coffee producing country in the world, and I frequently enjoyed this delicious coffee (usually served with condensed milk) in some of the many coffeeshops in the city. Some are stunningly beautiful, with elaborate gardens, ponds filled with enormous fish, caged singing birds, and sitting here is a nice change from being in the busy, polluted streets.

After several days of exploring the city, with its striking mix of French and socialist architecture, I made my way further north, to the city of Nha Trang, with its beautiful beach, looking out over the South China Sea.

From Siem Reap, I went by bus to Cambodia’s second city, Battambang. The roads were quite bad during most of the long trip, and we stopped for lunch in a town with the intruiging sounding name of Sisophon, where young kids sold the most delicious mangos I’ve ever tasted.

Battambang means “disappearing stick", named after a powerful stick used by legendary Khmer king Ta Dambong Kranhoung, to achieve and maintain power in the Battambang area. You wouldn’t say it’s Cambodia’s second city, it has more of a small town feel about it, with the central market and small shops and cafes located near the Sanker river. In the evenings, the streets are deserted, the dark sky filled with stars.

I went for a tour around the countryside on a motorbike with a nice guide called Thon, a little over thirty years old. We drove over extremely dusty roads to Phnom Sampeou, or Boat Hill, named for its shape. As we were walking up the hill, Thon started telling me about his childhood here. How he was seperated from his parents at the age of 5, during the reign of the Khmer Rouge, and put in a large camp with 500 other children, not far from Phnom Sampeou. He told me about the famine, how they received a littlebit of rice once a day if they were lucky. His sister, age 10, was so hungry that she stole a banana. For this, she was killed by the Khmer Rouge. Less than half of the 500 children in the camp survived.

We reached the top of the hill, offering a spectacular view of the surrounding plains and the small hills in the distance. Thon explained that there are still many landmines in this area, even though a large clearing effort has been underway for quite some time now. I thought of the groups of men and women I had seen near the temples of Angkor, who had lost limbs because of those landmines, and were now performing traditional Cambodian music, asking for a small donation.

Standing at the top of Phnom Sampeou, we walked to the horrible sites of the “Killing Caves". Thon explained how, back then, he had seen groups of 20 to 30 people, men, women and children, being marched up the hill every day, never to return. They were thrown from great height into the caves, or beaten to death. There are now small shrines, with the skeletal remains of the victims, inside the caves.

During a surge in fighting, Thon, still a young child, fled the camp, aided by a couple who took him as one of their own children, as they ran through the jungle for several days, to the relative safety near the Thai border. Miraculously, he met his mother underway, and although he didn’t recognise her, she recognised her son, and took him into her arms. Although the couple wanted to take Thon into the refugee camps, and eventually to the United States, his mother wouldn’t hear of it. Now, Thon still sees the couple, who aided his escape, as his second parents, and they regularly visit him from the US.

Back in his home village, he was conscripted into the army when he was 16, to fight the remaining Khmer Rouge elements, alongside the Vietnamese army with their Russian tanks and heavy artillery. Thon imitated the sounds of bullets whizzing by and mortar shells exploding, as he told about his comrades dying around him, about how he prayed to Buddha to give him strength, how he wore his krama (traditional scarf) for protection.

Thon narrated everything with half a smile, as to indicate I shouldn’t be put off by this, as if that was then and now we live in a different age. Sometimes, he would go quiet and his smile disappeared. Then he would point some beautiful flowers out to me, growing near one of the caves. Thon still lives in his home village, and plants and harvests rice for most of the year, on several hectares of farmland in and around his village. In the dry season, he shows tourists like me around on the back of his motorbike, going through the beautiful countryside that is his home.

In the end of the afternoon, we drove on, through small villages, where people would stop what they’re doing and look at the foreigner. Children came running out of their houses and yell “hello!” or “bye bye!” to me. Most houses were simple huts, made from bamboo or wood, sometimes with small reservoirs of muddy brown water nearby. Occasionally, we would drive through herds of cows or buffaloes, being herded by a young kid. We drove alongside the wide Sangker river for a while, where people were bathing, washing clothes, or allowing their buffaloes to drink. Even then, people would look up at the sound of the motorbike, and wave.

Towards the end of our journey, we reached a small train track, now only used by a tiny bamboo train, assembled in front of your eyes within five minutes. It is used by locals to haul all kinds of goods from village to village, and for tourists who wish to experience a ride. Although the engine is tiny, the ‘train’ reaches speeds up to 80 kph, as you sit out in the open on mats on the small bamboo surface. As the landscape was whizzing by, I watched the sun set over the brown acres, and soon dusk changed everything into a dark blue colour.

Dusty, tired, but grateful, I eventually arrived at my hotel, and thanked Thon. After a shower and dinner, I spent some time on the rooftop of the hotel, where, laying in a hammock, I watched the skies filled with stars, and counted the many bright shooting stars. I thought about my experiences of this day, but inevitably thought about Thon’s personal history. It seems that every Cambodian I meet, of my age or above, has a story to tell of their own horrible experiences, of the deaths in their family or circle of friends, during Cambodia’s dark times. But going through the rebuilt villages and cities, meeting the very friendly people, seeing how babies and young children are now brought up in a country at peace, is a testament to the resiliance of the Cambodian people, and gives hope for the future.

During the long busride from Phnom Penh to Siem Reap, I gazed at the scenery of stretched out plains with sparse palmtrees as far as the eye could see. Underway, during the several stops we made, I enjoyed the milky white seeds of the lotus plant, which were sold as snacks.

Siem Reap is extremely touristy, and it’s probably Cambodia’s most expensive town, but it’s a base from which to explore the temples of Angkor.

“Angkor” literally means “Capital City” or “Holy City", and was indeed the capital of the Khmer empire between the 9th and 12th centuries, before Phnom Penh was established as a capital in 1432. During the Angkor era, many kings ordered the construction of temples, villages and many hospitals, as well as large water reservoirs, or barays. Most notably, king Suryavarman II ordered the construction of the famed Angkor Wat, as well as a number of surrounding temples. Several decades later, Jayavarman II launched a building campaign, during which hundreds of monuments and temples were constructed in less than a 40-year period.

The art and architecture of the temples are strongly influenced by the religion of the time. For over 350 years, Hinduism was dominant, until Mahayana Buddhism was made the state religion by Jayavarman II, followed by a Hindu resurgence, during which many Buddhist monuments, statues and carvings were vandalized.

At the entrance of the park, I purchased a three-day pass, and I spent two days going from temple to temple on the back of a motorbike with a local guide. On the last day, I rented a bicycle, and cycled through the incredible heat, revisiting some temples, and visiting some unseen ones.

Angkor Wat, the most famous temple of them all, is indeed very impressive. It’s surrounded by a moat and a large exterior wall. After going through the gate, approaching the temple along the long walkway, the five beehive-like towers seem to rise out of the structure. When you finally stand in the inner courtyard, you feel tiny indeed. The steps leading up to the towers are very, very steep, but you are rewarded with a spectacular view of the surrounding jungle once you stand at the top. The long walls of the temple complex are covered with bas-reliefs and nearly 2000 Apsara carvings, of mythological celestial nymphs. There are incredibly detailed reliefs depicting stories and characters from Hindu mythology, and historical wars.

Even more stunning than Angkor Wat was, in my opinion, Bayon. It is a massive temple, with hundreds of large smiling faces, more than 2 meters tall, carved out of big slabs of stone. Inside, there is a maze of corridors and small plazas, and bas-reliefs on the exterior walls, depicting battle scenes including the historical sea battle between the Khmer and the Cham, from a neighbouring state in the south of Vietnam. There are also extensive and intruiging carvings depicting scenes of everyday life, including market scenes, cockfighting, chess games and even childbirth.

The monastic complex of Ta Phrom is fascinating in the way how it has slowly been overtaken by the surrounding jungle. Massive fig and silk-cotton trees grow from the towers and corridors, and have knocked down walls, leaving much of the complex in ruins. Its dark corridors are quiet, standing in the open plazas you hear the sounds of the jungle, as you look at the giant trees, their roots thicker than a man’s waist.

There are too many temples to see, each with their own distinct style, religious influence and historical significance. Although three days only allowed me to see a fraction of the number of temples, it was an amazing experience. As you walk around in this old city, you cannot help but wish to be transported back in time, to see Angkor in its full glory, to experience daily life in this advanced, thriving culture.