January 2012 – East of Elveden

Get there early – this is the sound advice usually given when visiting popular tourist sites. This is exactly what I did in Siem Reap, Cambodia when visiting Angkor Wat a week or so ago but it seems like several thousand others also had the same idea. As I tuk-tuked my way into the vast ancient complex the site was already crawling with a vast number of hot and sweaty camera-clicking visitors – mostly large tour groups obediently following their guides over the stones like human snakes. All I could do was join them in the fray.

Wat Phou in southern Laos is another ancient Khmer site. While it may not have the enigmatic stone faces of Angkor Tom’s Bayon, or be as enormous in scale, it makes up for it with a gorgeous hillside location close to the Mekong River -that, and a lack of crowds.

A couple of days ago, I got up at sunrise – it is difficult to sleep late in steamy, low-lying Laos. After a quick breakfast watching the sun lift over the Mekong, I hired a bike – a much-abused machine that misleadingly bore the name ‘Turbo’ – to cycle the 10km to the site. Forty-five minutes later, I arrived at the entrance to Wat Phou on my squeaky ‘ladies’ shopper’. The dusty road that lead there was the sort of terrain that most cyclists would probably consider ‘off-road’ – but it was an interesting pedal alongside dry paddy fields and through tiny villages where the day was just starting as people burned joss sticks and prayed in front of the bird table-like spirit house that stands in front of every house, however modest, in the country.

A processional way leads through the Wat Phou temple complex, passing between large baray or ceremonial ponds before climbing steps steeply up the hillside up to the sanctuary itself. The steps were lined with flowering frangipani trees so voluptuously aromatic that you could almost eat the air with a spoon. Pleasingly – or should I say, smugly – I seemed to be the first to arrive. First, apart from a few locals who were setting up their pitches at the top selling shrine offerings and soft drinks. With the place to myself, I made a leisurely tour of the sanctuary, originally Hindu, now Buddhist, seeking out the sacred Shiva spring, the rock-carved elephant and crocodile, and the library. I never did find the Buddha’s footprint but it was a pleasure to survey the shimmering plains below from this breezy elevated viewpoint beneath the deep shade of mango trees.

Eventually, a few others arrived – a friendly Lao-American family, a couple from Manchester who were staying at my guesthouse. Later still a few small tour groups turned up, French and German mostly. Even then it was hardly the circus that Angkor Wat seems to have become these days. Wat Phou may not be ‘undiscovered’ but it is certainly very low-key when compared to its sister site to the south in Cambodia. And let us not forget, Wat Phou is also the older of the two.

This post comes from somewhere firmly east of Elveden – from Southeast Asia or, more precisely, the deep south of Laos.

Last week was spent travelling along the Mekong River from Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam north into Cambodia. Then, courtesy of Lao Air, a quick crossborder turboprop hop from Siem Reap to Pakse in southern Laos.

Angkor Wat near Siem Reap was, of course, astounding but the vast crowds and grey-skied humidity were debilitating and within a few hours I found myself to be in that state universally known as ‘templed-out’. Angkor Wat, Angkor Tom and the other religious sites around Siem Reap are by far the country’s biggest draw but elsewhere Cambodia is a poor and savagely scarred place. Quite understandably, almost everyone over the age of 40 seems to have a haunted look, although these survivors of the Khymer Rouge period will tell you that contemporary Cambodian youth simply doesn’t want to know about the horrors of the past. The dreaded Killing Fields just outside Phnom Penh and the city’s infamous S-21 prison are just as bad as you might imagine – even worse perhaps. The continuing tragedy is the fact that several erstwhile senior Khymer Rouge officials still hold high-ranking government posts. These are the ones that parade around Phnom Penh in black-windowed Lexus, eating at fancy air-conditioned restaurants while the vast majority of the population barely scrapes a living farming rice in the hinterland.

Laos – or rather the People’s Democratic Republic of Laos – feels different. Poor certainly, but seemingly a happier place despite its unenviable reputation as being, in per capita terms, the world’s most heavily bombed country of all time – this, during The Vietnam War (or, as they call it in Vietnam, ‘The American War’).

Stopping for a coffee this morning at a place that serves as an outlet for local organic coffee production there was no coffee to be had as the machine had just broken. So I drank tea instead and listened as a table of saffron-clad Buddhist monks start chanting as soon as they had finished their noodle soup. No-one reacted in the slightest: monks are everywhere here; an almost quotidian part of Laotian daily life. In Laos, the future may be orange, but so was the past.

Another ubiquitous sight here is advertising for Beerlao, the nation’s favourite beer. The beer – pretty tasty by the way – is sold everywhere in no-nonsense 640ml bottles. Everywhere, too, are the yellow signs that advertise the brew, as well as beer mats, table cloths, menu covers, waitresses’ aprons and café clocks. Its cheerful yellow and green logo is so widespread here in Laos that Beerlao appears to fill a semiotic niche even more comprehensively than Coca-Cola manages throughout much of the rest of the developing world. Unusually, signs advertising the familiar fizzy sweet are nowhere to be seen.