I arrived at Siem Reap, after a 12-hour bus journey from Ho Chi Minh City, at night and in a downpour. Torrents of rain lashed the palm trees, and men holding kerosene lanterns with capes over their heads emerged out of the darkness and asked where I was going. It was what I imagined Japan might have been like in the 18th century, and I warmed to it immediately.
The next morning dawned sunny and hot, and a quick tour revealed the town to be small, compact and divided by a languid river. On the one side stood a grid of some six streets containing tourist cafes and bars, with several grand hotels in sprawling gardens not far away. The other bank was characterized by picturesque lanes, the crowing of cocks, and a handful of laid-back, mostly mid-priced hotels.
The vast complex centering on Angkor Wat stands a few kilometers away, while at a slightly greater distance in the opposite direction are the shores of the largest lake in Southeast Asia, Tonle Sap, somewhere well worth visiting.
Angkor is one of the world’s greatest historical sites, and Siem Reap would be insignificant without it. Angkor Wat, merely the grandest of many temples spread over a wide area, recalls Versailles — large-scale architecture representing power and control towering over placid watery surroundings.
On a typical day Japanese tour groups following their pennant-bearing guides under brilliantly-colored parasols contrast with the somber grey, green and sooty colors of the ancient buildings. But the tourist chatter only briefly interrupts the silent grandeur of the place, and you have merely to deviate slightly from the masses’ single-minded trajectory to be among motionless trees in dappled glades, with some minor temple still largely in a state of nature in view.
Angkor Wat itself was always the biggest and most assiduously restored of the temples. But the entire complex is thought to have been a city of a million inhabitants, with the wooden residences of the people now rotted away and only the ostentatious public buildings remaining.
Between the two World Wars, Angkor was a prime destination for affluent travelers escaping the European and North American winter. The Europeans would arrive in what’s now Indonesia on a Dutch liner, then tour Southeast Asia with Angkor as the culmination. In those days the whole area was largely untouched, crumbling ruins all but throttled by jungle replete with monkeys, deer and poisonous snakes.
Two such English travelers were the novelist Somerset Maugham and the art critic Geoffrey Gorer. Both wrote books about their trips, with Maugham omitting any mention of the gay encounters with locals that were certainly among his journey’s main motivations. He was there in 1922 to 1923 but didn’t publish his account, The Gentleman in the Parlour, until 1930. He considered Angkor the most wonderful place he’d ever visited, while Gorer, in Bali and Angkor (1936), believed the entire edifice was evidence of a populace enslaved by opium, adding details of his own experiences with mescaline as an appendix.
Both writers homed in on Bayon, the temple with the most impressive concentration of carvings. It’s still wonderful, and your pass is carefully re-examined before entry. (The charge for the whole Angkor complex, incidentally, is US$20 per day). Impassive faces on a huge scale look down on images depicting dancing and everyday life, and the richness feels all the more potent for being concentrated, and so squeezed upwards, within a relatively restricted perimeter.
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