Luang Prabang to Angkor – Day 9: Preah Vihear & Koh Ker

We woke up early this morning, as we had booked a tour to go to Preah Vihear and Koh Ker. These temples lie quite far from Siem Reap: the journey to Preah Vihear takes around three and a half hours – or three with a fiendish driver like ours. When we arrived by the ticket office at the foot of the mountain, our guide asked whether we would like to rent motorcycles or a van to ride up. We had already noted our rapidly diminishing supply of riel as we were buying the tickets, so when we learned that the motorcycles cost five dollars each and the van twenty-five, we opted for the former.

Within half a minute, three men in helmets rode up to the ticket office on their motorbikes, and before I could even think about asking for my own helmet, I was already sitting behind one of them. I cursed my lack of foresight as we zoomed up the steep path, my hands gripping the backseat until they were red, and my mind fixed on the ride back with abject horror. Once we arrived, our tour guide proceeded to tell us, laughing, that we he had never taken the motorbike up before because tourists always request the van. Of course, the fact that I am writing this blog attests to the fact that I survived even the ride down, but perhaps only thanks to my telling the excessively young driver “Slow, slow, please” whenever he approached a steep drop. Barron did not escape unscathed: he lost his hat.

On the footpath to the first gateway, we passed by several bunkers made of stacked sandbags. Our guide explained that these were set up to defend the site from Thailand, which has long harboured a claim to the temple. Preah Vihear sits right on the border between the countries, and the narrow way up crosses it multiple times. This is why there is a small booth right at the border for monitoring crossings, but I noticed that on our way back it was empty. Nowadays, at least one guard, oftentimes a woman, is stationed by almost every structure in the complex to keep an eye on the tourists.

In 1962, the ICJ ruled that Preah Vihear belonged to Cambodia, but when the temple became a UNESCO site in 2008, the conflict resumed. Luckily for Cambodia, the ICJ made another ruling in its favour, settling the case for good. Interestingly, this whole history has earned the Netherlands much goodwill among some Cambodians, who see them as responsible for whatever happens at the Hague. Upon learning that another tourist at the temple was Dutch, my guide loudly thanked her for her support and explained the situation to some of the onlooking guards. Confused by the whole situation, they mistook me as the target of his already misplaced praise, and one of them patted me on the back as I walked past.

Preah Vihear stretches around eight hundred metres from its entrance in the north to the cliff edge that overlooks the Cambodian countryside in the south. On the way to its main shrine, visitors pass through increasingly impressive galleries, many of which are still being restored to their former glory. Towards the beginning of the temple, the tympani above the entrances tend to depict the god Vishnu standing atop the head of the demon Rahu. Rahu is known in Hindu mythology as the swallower of the sun and the moon, who told on him to Vishnu when he stole the elixir of immortality. To punish this transgression, Vishnu cut off his head, but of course Rahu was already immortal, and his head could survive on its own.

The main shrine of Preah Vihear is dedicated to the god Shiva. As is tradition, the god was worshipped in the form of a lingam, but this artifact has disappeared along with Hinduism. The shrine now serves as a Buddhist house of prayer. We did not even cross the threshold to take a better look at the icons inside, as the place was full of worshippers and their clouds of incense smoke.

We rolled up to Koh Ker about an hour and a half after leaving Preah Vihear. Koh Ker briefly served as the Khmer capital under kings Jayavarman IV and Harshavarman II between the years 928-944 CE. The site spans over thirty square kilometres and contains over sixty shrines, so we only visited a few. Our first stop was by a cluster of five shrines, all of them bereft of their lingams with one broken yoni lying to the side. Barron fell in love with the trees that soar from the roofs of some shrines while sinking their hefty roots into their walls. We stopped again by the main temple, which consists of multiple galleries leading past a water pool to a massive seven-tiered pyramid. I did not find the view from the top of this pyramid very impressive: all I could see were trees and a few low hills. Finally, we stopped by two temples which still had their lingams.

We noted the information our guide shared with interest, though much of it bore no relation to the history of the sites we saw; the factoids he did share about the sites always oscillated between minute retellings of royal histories and sweeping generalisations about Hinduism. Nonetheless, we learned that two of the three men we kept seeing on patriotic posters were the former prime minister and his son, the current prime minister. The guide did not hide his disdain for the political system that had kept the same political family in power for decades. He blamed corruption for the high prices of cars, saying that even second-hand models are subject to prohibitive import taxes, as well as Cambodia’s reliance on imports from Thailand and Vietnam. Interestingly, he expressed positive views of the French, noting that although many Khmers dislike France as a former colonial power, it was French intervention that kept Vietnam and Thailand from annexing Cambodia entirely.

Having eaten lunch at Koh Ker, we returned to the city a little before five o’clock. We stopped by the Beng Mealea Temple entrance on the way back but learned that entering it would only be possible with the 37-dollar day pass to the Angkor Wat complex, which seemed irrationally excessive. We told ourselves that if, after seeing the splendour of Angkor Wat, we were still thirsty for more, we could stop by Beng Mealea on our way to the airport the next day.