Preah Vihear

Up early today for a super long day trip. We were heading to the ancient temple complex of Preah Vihear, about four hours north of Siem Reap on the Thai border. Our driver, Mr Smarty who we'd organised with Google Search and Whatsapp turned up promptly at 7:30 as we were finishing our breakfast. His car was air conditioned and reasonably comfortable, and he was quite chatty with reasonable English so was quite a good companion. It was a long drive there, but eventually we made it.

No museum here, but the only way up to the temple complex itself was via a 4WD, so we bought our tickets and headed up. It was surprisingly crowded, entirely with domestic tourists, as it's some sort of Buddhist holy week and people were coming up to pray and offer.

The story here is actually quite interesting as well. It was built by the Khmer Empire as their second-most important religious site, after Angkor Wat. It was built about the same time as Angkor, and was of course built as a Hindu shrine. It sits on top of a mountain, with five large temples arrayed in a straight line. I quite liked that at each level, the only thing you could see was the next level up - there was never any spot you could see the whole shrine. Although it fell into disuse as the Khmer Empire declined and was converted into Buddhist, it sits almost directly on the Cambodian-Thai border and has been the subject of bitter ownership disputes.

Essentially, when the French drew up maps in the early 20th century, they placed the border on the watershed line of the mountain range. Except, the temple is technically on the Thai side, but the French maps explicitly and for no apparent reason drew the border line around the temple, placing it wholly in Cambodia. The Thais didn't seem to notice until the 1960s that the temple wasn't theirs, at which point they took legal action in the International Court of Justice which basically ruled that since Thais had used those maps in many ways since inception and hadn't disputed temple ownership for 50+ years, it clearly wasn't that important and thus the temple was in Cambodia.

It's been rather a tense issue between the two countries, with gunfire and artillery exchanged over the border sporadically since the decision. Mostly recent was in 2011, when soldiers on both sides were killed. The situation seemed fairly calm now, but there were definitely plenty of soldiers around.

Oh well. We just enjoyed the temple, filming various statues and buildings etc and getting ourselves extremely sunburned in the fierce midday sun. Even Shandos, wearing her *conical* hat (which is apparently super offensive to Cambodians because they hate Vietnamese for historic reasons) got burned.

Back to the car where we had a late lunch at about 3pm and then started the long drive back to Siem Reap. Finally back around 7:30pm, so a loong 12 hour day. And more to come in the following days! We organised with Mr Smarty that he'd take us for our daytrip tomorrow as well, and he gave us a big discount since it was somewhere he hadn't been before and wanted to see!

Just a quick dinner nearby where I had Korean-style fried chicken which repeated on me in the middle of the night. Three trips to Siem Reap, two bouts of "gastric distress". Not the best luck in this city!Read more