Nature's been kind to Cambodia, but
man hasn't. That's the fascination of the place - it's what makes it
more than just another edgy tropical paradise on the backpacker trail.
In fact, this is the most compelling tourist destination in South-East Asia. You can go just to unwind.
The
scenery is rich, the food - with its French colonial overtones -
exotic. Park by the pool, order the beers and soak up the old Indochina,
free of Thailand's rampant commercialism or Vietnam's frenetic crowds.
From glory to ruin: Angkor Wat reminds you of the feats humans can attain, and how quickly the jungle can claim it all back
But this would be missing the point. The history of Cambodia adds up to a short course in human futility.
Successive
rulers have tried to impose their own ideas of earthly heaven, which
have all ended in varying kinds of ruin. And it is all there; awful, in
every sense.
Monuments to ancient grandeur and modern cruelty, both probably unequalled anywhere in the world.
I
came away half-haunted by three faces. First, King Jayavarman's is
carved over and over again in stone 15ft high, staring down on what he
helped to create. In the 12th century, Angkor was the greatest city on
Earth. A million people lived in it - at a time when London could only
count 20,000.
Now, half
overgrown by tropical forest, it is arguably the greatest wonder of the
old world. It is the centre of a sprawl of vast temple cities, spreading
across 80 square miles, monumental in their magnificence, many covered
in acres of intricate allegorical carving.
Second,
there is Chan Kim Srun, who stares at you from a black-and-white
photograph in the former Khmer Rouge interrogation centre, her newborn
baby in her arms and an unfathomable sadness in her eyes.
Her
husband was high in the ranks of those mass murdering madmen before, in
their paranoia, they turned on their own. You can tell she knows
they're both about to be murdered.
They were taken to the killing fields the night that photograph was taken.
Dark history: Cambodia's stunning architecture is contrasted by its black history
And, third, Hun Sen, the
current prime minister, a former Khmer Rouge commander before he ratted
on them and was put into power by the Vietnamese, who brought the
insanity to an end.
He's
been in charge of Cambodia for a quarter of century, a former
ultra-Maoist who now encourages capitalism so he and his cronies can rip
it off.
He heads what
is widel y acknowledged as one of the most corrupt governments in the
world, a kleptocratic elite that has made itself fabulously wealthy
through seizing public assets and illegal logging, leading to repeated
complaints of corruption from the World Bank.
The
U.S. ambassador publicly accused government officials of stealing $500
million a year. All this when one in three Cambodians live on less than
$1 a day.
This is more
than a holiday. It's an education. Start in Phnom Penh, an attractive
riverside city, tatty but game after the years of war and extermination.
They call it Lexus City these days because of all the gleaming 4x4s the
officials buy with their graft money.
Stay, if you can, in Le Royal, the
grandest of French colonial hotels, now done up by the Raffles Group. It
has sweeping hardwood staircases, scents of cinnamon, oozing luxury and
Jeeves-like service.
The ghosts of Somerset Maugham and Andre Malraux slink down the corridors in their silk dressing gowns.
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| Fascinated foreign correspondent: Michael Buerk and his wife Christine |
Go for a drink in the Foreign
Correspondents Club. I was the only real foreign correspondent they'd
had in the place for years - it's now a lively gathering place for
gap-year girls.
Eat at Friends - a non-profit Jamie
Oliver-type place that teaches street youths catering skills; a good,
cheap, philanthropic feed.
There's plenty to see here. The Royal
Palace complex is a relatively modern masterpiece of distinctive
Cambodian architecture. The Silver Pagoda within it has a floor made up
of six tons of ill-fitting solid silver tiles.
But the real, and awful, fascination
is the four-year nightmare rule of the Khmer Rouge at the end of the
Seventies. They murdered a million people while a million more starved
to death, one in five of the population.
The former school they used as an interrogation centre is now a museum. In its way, it's as chilling as Auschwitz.
The rough bedsteads with their iron
shackles surrounded by bloodstains, the classrooms, crudely subdivided
into cells like hutches, the children's climbing frame they turned into a
gallows, are all still there.
Worst
of all are the pictures. The Khmer Rouge photographed their victims
just before they were taken off to be murdered. They look at you now,
hundreds and hundreds of them, blank, bewildered, doomed.
Human
bones and fragments of clothing are still coming out of the ground
today. Above, clouds of yellow and white butterflies - the sacred
colours of the country's two historic religions - dance in the afternoon
sun.
It's a dreadful place, marked now by a stupa with 17 tiers of crushed skulls.
Recovering: Traditional dancers are once again becoming common after they were massacred by the Khmer Rouge
The glories of Cambodia are the
magnificent temple cities, just north of the modern town of Siem Reap,
itself a short flight from Phnom Penh. The most famous, and best
preserved, is Angkor Wat, the world's largest and surely most impressive
religious monument.
It is an entire Hindu universe (it became Buddhist in the 13th century) realised entirely in laterite and sandstone.
It's
also huge - more than 500 acres - and fantastically rich in sculptural
detail. More than half a mile of its walls are covered in narrative
bas-reliefs. It is only one of numerous fabulous temple complexes.
Jayavarman's legacy, Angkor Thom, is even bigger in total area and, in places, even more intricately decorated.
But
the centuries, and the jungle, have taken a greater toll - soaring
tropical trees swell out and up through the ruins. This is a place to
dwell on the futility of human ambition while you keep a sharp look out
for Indiana Jones.
It is joint first on my list of 1,000
places to see before you die (only Machu Picchu and the Galapagos come
close). Go there soon, before the planned international airport opens
and the world's most impressive tourist site becomes one of the world's
busiest.
The place to stay is the Hotel de la Paix, a well-run modern hotel in the centre of bustling Siem Reap.
The
service and the food are exemplary and they lay on traditional
Cambodian dancing with all its old grace and control - an art thankfully
recovering after the royal dancers, like everyone with any skill,
talent or education, were massacred by the Khmer Rouge.
One day, somebody will explain why the most horrible things tend to happen in the nicest places.
Cambodia is utterly beautiful, its people are charming, its heritage unequalled.
Yet,
in the lifetime of a single generation, it's been carpet-bombed by the
Cold War, partly wiped out by a clique who made an ideology of insanity,
and systematically raped by crooks with blood on their hands.
Tourism isn't the best hope. It may be the only hope for Cambodia to have the future it surely deserves.
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