Battambang countryside
27 November. I have just had a very necessary shower after spending the day at the back of a moped that drove me around Battambang countryside. This is my first day in Cambodia after arriving yesterday directly from Bangkok, which I left at once towards the border town of Poipet. Getting into this country was like taking a rather sharp leap backwards from the Thai order, cleanliness and efficiency as I was able to observe in the few hours that I spent there. Seeing the clean bus station, the very condition of the bus in which I travelled up to the border was enough to get an altogether positive impression. On the contrary I got to the frontier on the look-out after reading all the possible snares that await the foreigner at this gateway to Cambodia.
28 November – I have left behind 7 hours' sailing that I did to travel from Battambang to Siem Reap. The road wouldn’t have been quicker, in spite of the moderate distance, 170 km. By boat however the experience was novel and particularly so in this region where you can see not only an unusual environment, but also the lifestyle of people living in the so called floating villages.It was not the most comfortable trip. During those 7 hours I was sitting, lying, crouching, squatting; I just didn't know what a posture I could take to alleviate the ache in the muscles caused by the obliged position. Sitting on the cabin roof, on the other hand, was nice, but also a forced choice, since all the indoor seats were taken and the group of the last 15 or so passengers, all foreigners, was seated on the roof.Usually the roof wouldn't be an area apt to accommodate people, but on these boats they cram as many passengers as they can in their greed for profit, here too at special rates for foreigners.
2 December – I start a new chapter a week into my trip and after several nights spent in Siem Reap. The moment has now come to move on, but I have been doubtful as to the destinations that I'm after and what interest could come from their visit. They may be nothing the matter, they may be remote places that I doggedly and overzealously want to reach, while most tourists limit their visit to Cambodia to Angkor temples and then leave. On the other hand I think it would be very superficial to reduce the country to just one site, however extraordinary its level may be, especially if I consider that Cambodia is the heritage left by the ancient Khmer civilisation that back in time ruled over the entire region.After a journey of several hours I have now got to the banks of the imposing Mekong, that I was admiring tonight in the darkness slowly flowing under the newly built bridge, the only one to span over this river in Cambodia. Now it looks calm and placid, but it doesn't take too much effort to imagine it swollen with monsoon rains: on the pillars of the bridge stands the muddy mark of the flood and you can see that its level is on the par with the embankment. I picture this might of water filling the bridge arches, a grand spectacle of nature.
29 November – I have started visiting Angkor temples, the huge area dotted with myriad temples as old as 1000 years on the verge between the tourist town that has recently boomed and the jungle that kept them submerged for ages and constantly threatens to take them back. This imposing and looming presence of powerful nature is the most fascinating feature of the temples and scales down the blatantly commercial and touristy character of the town that in a few years' time has become the third largest in the country. All the temples are steeped and surrounded by a garden of elegant and centuries-old trees with tall and stalwart trunks. Some buildings are literally superimposed by these vegetal beings in a defying embrace between carved stones and the wooden parts that strangle them and look as if they were sculpted themselves by the hand of an extraordinary mason. You cannot know which one will gain the upper hand. Some of the wood appears to have been shaped by time and produces interesting as well as surprising shapes that could well be petrified veils. The stones witness to their old age by the colour that they have taken, the lichens and the mosses that have clad them, their very disposition in heaps or stacks caused by crashes that man's hands didn't want or were not able to fix.