Victory Gate at Angkor Thom

I’m sure there’s no doubt in anyone’s mind that a key motivation for our Cambodia/Laos trek (see posting below) was to visit Angkor Wat – one of the truly extraordinary locations on the planet. And we were extremely fortunate to have some very knowledgeable (& dedicated) Cambodia experts put together a program for us.

About Asia Travel is a travel company founded more than a decade ago by Andy Booth, an Oxford-trained physicist & former (15-year) investment banker, who moved to Siem Reap after visiting Cambodia on a family vacation. Perhaps not surprisingly, Andy used ‘footfall counts’ & similar analytical data to help develop crowd-avoidance scheduling, and now has a crew of nearly sixty people working in three countries. A key focus of his company is local re-investment…. & 100% of the firm’s profit is targeted at schools.

Upon arriving in Cambodia, we were handed a copy of Andy’s new book, The Angkor Guidebook, a beautifully-produced photo guidebook showing how the sites looked when they came to European attention in the mid & late 19th century; how they look today; and visualizations about how they would have appeared in their (typically 12th Century) heyday, in addition to descriptive text.

Subsequent tour highlights made it a very, very special visit: Angkor Wat at dawn; Ta Prohm, often called the Tomb Raider temple, because notable scenes from that movie were filmed there; Angkor Thom (which means ‘Great City’), a walled city that was capital of the Khmer empire in the 12th Century; the Victory Gate at Angkor Thom (shown in the nearby photo); and an extended mix of rural Cambodian experiences, including tuk-tuk & ox-cart rides; boating excursions and picnics; and a delightful culinary experience at Villa Chandara (at a table adjacent to the British Ambassador), serving five courses (with eleven dishes) of “celebratory Khmer cuisine.”

Sunrise at Angkor Wat

While the Siem Reap part of our trip highlighted the remarkable and truly great achievements of Cambodian history/culture, the Phnom Penh portion gave indications of a much darker side. We visited the infamous Tuol Sleng prison, a high school turned into the notorious S-21 (Security Prison 21) by the Khmer Rouge in the late 1970s; and the nearby Choueng Ek “killing fields,” where thousands & thousands of S-21 prisoners lost their lives.

I picked up a copy of Joel Brinkley’s book Cambodia’s Curse: The Modern History of a Troubled Land during our Phnom Penh visit, and it makes for troubling reading. Brinkley won the Pulitzer Prize in 1980 for his reporting covering Cambodian refugees, and his return almost thirty years later suggests that the country still has far to go in recovering from that trauma. Hopefully, efforts such as Andy Booth’s provide both a productive & positive way forward.