And now for something climbing unrelated

How did people build such complex and beautiful structures more than 1,000 years ago without modern machinery? The ruins around Angkor Wat are an extraordinary and humbling reminder of the knowledge and skills that have been learned by mankind and lost. The comparatively clumsy attempts to repair and restore many of the temples around Angkor are a stark example of this. Parts have been patched simply with concrete replacements for the intricately carved sandstone blocks that have disintegrated with time. Other temples, however, are beautifully preserved.

See what they did with the steps...

Angkor Wat itself, is awe-inspiring, with the steep stairs and graduated sections built on top of one another to create an optical illusion that, from the bottom, makes it appear far taller than it really is. Little now remains of the jungle that once must have twisted and grown over these ruins. Vegetation grows quickly in this part of the world and it wouldn’t have taken long for the forests to reclaim the land the ancient Khmer empire had claimed from it. Strangely, walking through the ruins today is more like a trip to Richmond park or a stroll through the sandy, open forests of Fontainebleau. The dense tangle of plants and vines are absent. Instead broad avenues lined by tall, broad trees and tame stretches of grass take visitors between each of the ruins.

One of the buildings where the jungle has moved in

One of the local climbers at Angkor Wat

The only reminder of the jungle near by are the monkeys that venture into the ruins and one ruin where the trees that invaded it have been allowed to remain. It is more of a jungle of tourists and hawkers, desperately selling underripe mangos and photocopies of guidebooks. There is also, sadly, a lack of information about the ruins, who built them, what they were used for and when they fell into disrepair. In exasperation, I opted to buy a guidebook from one of the hawkers and found myself being bustled towards their stall where they said I could only look at the book if I paid them one dollar first. I walked away.

In comparison, the killing fields and torture prisons of the Khmer Rouge are a more sobering experience. The concept of making tourist capital out of events that are too horrible to comprehend is difficult for me, but the museum and memorials at the killing fields, where thousands of victims of Pol Pots regieme were murdered and buried in mass graves, serve as a reminder of terrible crimes that should never happen again. I still struggle to understand how humans can batter other defenceless men, woman, children and babies to death on such a scale. The array of wounds left on the skulls that have been interred by the forensics experts show the brutality of what happened. Victims were driven in trucks to killing factories in former orchards, farms and wells where they were imprisoned in sheds at the killing sites, manacled with home made shackles while they waited their turn for the killing squads to get to them. Many were beaten to death with sticks, or bludgeoned with axes and machetes. The luckier ones were shot in the top of the head, while young children and babies were simply picked up by their feet and smashed against a tree until they stopped screaming. Mothers had their heads cut off after watching their children killed and some were simply pushed into village wells. In the capital of Phnom Penh, any who were considered to be a threat to the regime were taken to a former high school which had been turned into the S21 torture prison. Prisoners were shackled in tiny, makeshift cells before being taken to the former class rooms for torture. Most were tortured to death. Ghoulish pictures of the dead are now set in long galleries through many of the rooms. Watching many of the tourists walking around taking idle snapshots of the metal beds where victims were tortured and of the images of those who had died, I couldn’t help feeling that they had missed the point. Personally, I couldn’t bring myself to take pictures here – I felt words were a better way of remembering what went on.

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