Ancient to Modern: From Angkor Wat to KL and Beyond (Ryan)

Right, it's about high time we rounded up this lengthy tale. I don't think it'll all happen in one post, but we'll have it all written down for you soon enough. At least Tim's last photo post reassured you we hadn't all died in some horrible accident somewhere in Cambodge. Yes, we are all still here, have made it home and are reacclimatising to the way of life in our homeland. Before I start I'll just apologise for being so useless and not posting this until a week and a half after getting back to England. I know a fair few people maintain a keen interest in this site and I really owed it to those people to write this update sooner. As I say, sorry for that, and I hope you enjoy this post now it's finally being written.

So, Siem Reap. As Tim said, things at the bus station were pretty hectic and the man with the rubber hose was definitely earning his keep, not that the drivers seem to mind him in the slightest. Our guesthouse was actually very nice and not the worst place for Tim to have been bed-ridden. It had a rooftop restauraunt and free internet and all like that, as well as a pack of tuk-tuk drivers waiting to take you wherever you wanted. Also, on our first day staying there, I bumped into a rather nice bloke called Tim who happens to be going to the same college as me in Oxford this October. Not the first place you expect to meet someone going to your Uni, let alone college, but then I suppose stranger things have happened.

Cut to the next morning, waking up as I did after predictably little sleep but probably just about sober, we met our drivers at around five in the morning, half an hour later than we'd arranged, and headed off to chase the sunrise. The road to Angkor Wat was alive with cars, minibuses and tuk-tuks just like ours, all temple-fiends making the pilgrimage to Angkor Wat for that perfect sunrise photo. As it happens the sunrise was somewhat cloudy and the light not the best for that crowning holiday snap everyone was searching for. Nonetheless, we got a few long-shots for the scrapbook and headed into the main complex. It was huge, built on a scale such as I'd never seen. From the massive gardens out front, on which the fair-sized ante-temples look insignificant, to the inside, where the inner courtyard surrounds the five-spired main section, the whole thing is simply over-awing. Once at the doors into the courtyard, after walking along the path that bisects the huge green area out front, you see that to get to the five towers you have to climb a great flight of stairs and that just puts you at the bottom of the towers themselves, which stand, preserved in almost all their original glory, hand-carved and dominant, above your head. To think that the temple itself was built in the 11th or 12th century and is still standing in such marvellous condition is quite simply mind-boggling.

After our visit to the main temple we grabbed some breakfast, which upset my none-too-delicate stomach a little, and proceeded to Bayon, where almost every stone pillar has had a face carved into it. It was oddly overrun with moss, not something we found to have happened at the other temples, and was not quite as tall as many others, but nonetheless very impressive to walk around and again very old. Once we'd arsed around there for long enough and hugged a few of the faces and whatnot we proceeded to another pair of temples, the names of which I don't recall but which were fairly small and not quite on a par with the others. Following those two we climbed to the very top of another of Angkor's most famous temples, Ta Keo. It's around 40m high and the top was dominated not by moss, vines, or even ancient epigraphs of myth and mystery, but by Japanese tourists. We've got a photo to prove it! It was like a 40m anthill that had just spewed out tens of wee Asian folk with glasses and tiny cameras.

After that spectacle in mass tourism we climbed down, reboarded the tuk-tuks and headed to Ta Phrom, a temple pulled apart by the jungle and Hindus at various times in its life. Still it stands, at least for the most part, an example of the awesome power of nature over stone. Several trees on the site are over two hundred years old and have literally over time torn the stone apart. Some scenes from Tomb Raider, not sure which one of the movies, were filmed at this temple, apparently. I'll have to watch the movies again. Then again, maybe it'd be better to live in blissful ignorance. By this time of day - around 10am and we'd been up since four - it was both inevitable that there would be a good deal more fellow snappers ambling around in great tour parties, and also that we would be becoming quite tired of wandering around gawking at the ruins. Don't get me wrong, they were lovely, very impressive, but there is only so much one can take, especially on limited sleep and in blisteringly hot weather. After paying for a guided tour of Ta Phrom, on which we got to learn a little about some of the carvings, which used to be Buddhas but which were centuries ago scratched out by marauding Hindus and replaced with Hindu deities instead, and the great old trees that had pulled some of the place to pieces, we hit the road back to the guesthouse.

I generally don't remember the rest of our stay in Siem Reap being all that eventful. With Tim laid up and on medication, which had been one of our missions, namely getting him to a doctor to be provided with said medication, it didn't seem right to go out too much. We did go back to the temples the following day after waking at a far more sensible hour and got some nice shots in good light of Angkor Wat itself, but neglected all of the other temples we had visited on the previous day. The rest of the time was spent relaxing and, for Tim, recuperating with his course of antibiotics. Shaun and I did go and give up half a pint of our blood at an international blood clinic on our last day, which we felt was pretty noble and all for a good cause and all like that. Never found out if my sample was actually usable, but let's hope so. There was an outbreak of Dengue Fever at the time of our visit, so it was urgently needed.

On 15th July we flew from Siem Reap, which has a very nice airport, in case anyone was interested, likely so because Siem Reap has one of the highest concentrations of massive five-star hotels probably in the world, to Kuala Lumpur. Needless to say, it was a heck of a contrast. Cambodia, where two miles outside the cities the houses turn to wood and the roads to caking mud, versus Malaysia, where fast-food was back on the dinner menu, no one seemed to be going poor, and where you navigate the capital not in a rusty old carriage tied to the back of a moped, but on an ultra-modern air-conditioned SkyTrain. Shopping malls were our occupation in KL. Never mind the centuries of history and the beautiful Muslim architecture; we went to the mall almost every day and watched movies and shopped and wandered around. When we weren't doing that, we found a couple of handily located internet cafes where we could sit and play online games for hours at a time for peanuts. Safe to say that by this point on our trip the culture had been forgotten. Oddly enough, going to these places was probably one of the best ways to absorb the way of life. The real people in Malaysia don't go to the tourist sites and embark on two-hour walking tours of the city; they go to the mall and kids go to the internet cafes to play games, because they can't at home. So, that's what we did. We were staying in Chinatown, which was an experience in itself, and though the bustle of the city was slightly odd compared to Cambodia, we quickly acclimatised, got the hang of the SkyTrain and generally chilled out whilst making plans for the next few weeks. In the end, we decided to skip most of Malaysia and head straight to the Perhentian Islands, near the Thai border. Why go to the other, lesser, islands, we figured, when we could just go straight to Malaysia's best? So, that's where we went next. Our cutting out of some places in Malaysia might also have something to do with the fact that we wanted to go to the Project Trust volunteers' last night out in Bangkok, but more of that later.

The main thing of note that we did in Kuala Lumpur was to go to the top of the Petronas Towers, those two massive glass structures joined together by a 146m-high bridge that you'd see if you watched Entrapment. The view from the bridge was pretty spectacular and even more so because we very nearly didn't get to see it. The first day we went to try to go up the towers all the tickets had already been sold, the second day they weren't running any trips, because it was a Monday, of course, and the third day we arrived at a fairly sensible time and the place was mobbed. Thankfully a very nice Spanish lady had three tickets more than she needed and gave them to the three depressed-looking English lads at the very back of a very long ticket queue. It's all rather well-oiled, this whole tower-ascending enterprise, in that you go up at a very specific time after watching a video for a given period, then you have your wander around on the bridge and then shoot back down to the ground floor. Efficiency was something we hadn't really witnessed in a long time, so it had more of an impact on us than it should have.

Other than our wee trip up to the top of those towers, it's fair to say we didn't do much in Kuala Lumpur. We did, though, whilst sitting late one night in a McDonalds, decide to head to the Perhentian Islands as soon as we could.

The journey was pretty straight-forward. Malaysia has a very good bus service, which stretches out to pretty much everywhere from Kuala Lumpur, so getting to Kota Bharu, where we had to stay one night before we could catch the early ferry, was pretty straightforward. Admittedly, we arrived at a crazy hour in the morning, which left us a bit tired for a while, but we'd become so accustomed to oddly timed journeys that it barely affected us. We managed to get a few hours sleep at a hostel in the town, before being picked up for taxi transfer to Kuala Besut, where we'd get our boat. Happily enough, it turned out to be a very fast boat journey, on a boat that cut through the waves rather than lazily cruising up and down the crests and troughs and inducing sea-sickness of the third kind.

Now, the Perhentians. After a search for accommodation that took us right from one end of the main beach on the smaller of the two islands, all the way to the other end, in the searing midday heat, we began our chilling out phase. Our main pursuits on these gorgeous islands, of which we regrettably have very few photos, none that do the place justice, were scuba diving, snorkelling and sober nights out. The first of those three was magnificent. We hadn't been diving for months, not since Koh Tao, so to get back into a wet-suit and be leaping into the warm, tropical sea again was wonderful. Shaun and I completed our Advanced Open Water courses, whilst Tim, regrettably, was forced to abstain because he was on antibiotics. Still, me and Shaun continued unabashed. We did a buoyancy dive, to perfect the technique of using our breathing to control our level in the water; a fish identification dive, where we were supposed to be surveying the different schools of fish but basically just swam around in awe of the whole scene; a navigation dive, which is easier than it sounds; a deep dive, on which the visibility was terrible and we saw nothing, and, best of all, a wreck dive. The conditions for our diving the wreck, an old sugar-carrying cargo vessel that sank whilst taking supplies to the larger island, were perfect. The relatively low visibility gave the great looming structure a very eerie feel, whilst the fact that it lay on it's side and the amount of coral and barnacle life made the whole experience quite surreal. We managed to catch some small bamboo sharks sleeping beneath the massive cargo doors a few metres away and saw some massive fish and large schools of smaller ones, at one point ravenously devouring an unfortunate jellyfish.

If you ever get to see pictures of the islands (I'd suggest Google images), then you'll understand why these islands are my personal favourite. In Thailand the islands are typically quite large and have a road network of some description and shops and houses; on the Perhentians the strip of beach melts into tropical jungle on one side and runs down into the crystal clear, temperate sea on the other. The days were so good and the place so stunning and idyllic that we didn't even mind going out at nights and being sober. This was because we were normally diving the next day and, more importantly, alcohol on the islands was just as, if not more, expensive that it was on the mainland. That, and we knew we'd be doing a fair bit of drinking back in Thailand, so a break wouldn't exactly hurt.

So after several days in paradise, we headed back to the mainland in much the same fashion as we had come, back to Kota Bharu, where we caught a cab to the border, a minibus to Hat Yai in Thailand, where we spent one night before boarding a sleeper train back up to Bangkok. The sleeper train was rather interesting and another new experience. At around eight o'clock, so a few hours into the journey, a jolly fat Thai man wandered down the carriage and turned the two adjacent seats into one fair-sized bed and then pulled down a top bunk from where the overhead baggage compartments normally are. All in all a very good use of space, if you ask me. After some slightly dodgy food sold to us by roaming vendors in the aisles and a reasonable nights sleep, considering we were on a train, we pulled into a busy, humid Hualamphong Station at about 7am, ready for another day back in Bangkok and the infamous Khao San Road.