A Little Temple Adventure

August 22, 2011

We decided not to get too ambitious with our exploration of the Northeast of Thailand, and just base ourselves in Surin for some little excursions. The day after our trip to the elephant farm, we decided to visit the ancient Khmer ruins of Phanom Rung. Built between the tenth and thirteenth centuries, it is the largest of the Khmer era ruins in Thailand.

There wasn’t any direct public transport to the ruins, so once again we relied on hitching to get there. It was another long walk out of town, this time going south. We had gotten an early start, though, so there wasn’t much rush. We walked past a large reservoir surrounded by a relaxing park, where monks wandered around and socialized. At the edge of town were big statues of elephants, typical of Thailand. We got a ride from a family in a truck. They dropped us off 25 km south of Surin, in a town called Prasat. Then we walked through the tiny town, to where the other main road crossed it and we turned east. We got a ride with a man with a truck packed with work supplies. We piled into the cab and moved on our way. The man didn’t seem to speak any English, but we made it the 30 km to our turnoff anyway. When we got out, there were a couple of taxi drivers waiting for the occasional tourist who wanted to go to the ruins. We ignored their questions of “where are you going?” and just walked down the road for a while.

A unique ride followed. A black behemoth of an SUV pulled up. Two young, pretty, women were in the front seats and we told them we were headed to Phanom Rung. They spoke more English than most people in this area. They seemed much more Bangkok than Surin province. They were sassy and funny with an edgy urban style. They came off as a couple of wild girls on a mission to have wild times with their older husbands’ credit cards. They drove fast and aggressively through the rolling and windy roads of the countryside, stopping once to say a prayer at a small roadside shrine. We thanked the young women when we arrived at the entrance to the ruins and made our way in. The temple was on the top of a big hill, which had a great view.

The ruins were well-restored, and the grounds nicely manicured. I always feel, though, that this takes a little away from the atmosphere and gives the ruins more of a museum feel. This was my first time seeing Hindu temples in Southeast Asia. I started to come to understand large swaths of Southeast Asia (especially the Khmer Empire of present day Cambodia) was Hindu, rather than Buddhist.

The ruins we were looking at contained elaborate carvings of scenes from Hindu mythology as well as sculptures of Shiva, Vishnu, and his carnations Rama and Krishna. Being from the same era and empire, it shared a lot of similarities to the famous temples at Angkor Wat.

We had the ruins to ourselves for a while, but when a couple of groups moved in (a French family and a group of loud, rich Thai men) we decided to proceed through the ruins and down the other side.

There were a few food stalls at the other entrance, but everything looked overpriced and uninteresting so we decided to hitchhike instead. We weren’t sure if we could hitchhike in either direction. According to my map we could take the road in either direction, but we decided to go and ask the man at the tourist information booth. We went into the small glass-walled building and there was a security officer sitting behind the desk, fast asleep. I figured he would wake up in a moment or two, but he didn’t. We tried talking louder as we looked through tourist pamphlets. We shuffled along the tile floor loudly. Eventually we made various loud noises, but it did nothing. I wasn’t about to tap this guy on the shoulder or yell at him, so we ended up just walking out of the place.

We took our chance leaving the opposite direction than where we had come from. The man that picked us up in the back of the pickup truck couldn’t tell us where he was going, due to language barriers, but he seemed to know where we were going and would drop us off. It always seems to be backs of pickup trucks in Thailand. Isn’t it glorious? Apparently Thailand has a higher number of pickup trucks per capita than any other country. Take that Texas!

We wound through the well-paved country road, past small villages and vast rice paddies. For a while, we weren’t sure if we were actually going in the right direction. We had twisted and turned so much that we had lost our bearings. Eventually, though, we emerged into a small town intersected by the narrow highway. He dropped us off near the bus station, but we found that there were no buses going to Surin. So as we walked through town, we waded through hoards of students as they got out of their primary, secondary and whatever other schools. Food stalls lined the streets, selling youth-friendly treats. We hadn’t eaten any lunch so we decided to try some after school snacks. One guy had a variety of Fantas and Coke in two-liter bottles that he would serve in cups with ice. One of the snacks was some sort of sweet flat bread, not unlike a pancake with a peanut filling. There were a few fried snacks and some things that were pretty obscure and beyond my memory.

Back on the road, we got a ride from some teenagers driving a covered pickup truck. They seemed to pull over without realizing that their truck bed was filled with something like school furniture. Desks, chairs, etc. They didn’t think we would be able to fit, but we eventually wedged ourselves into the mess.

In Surin that night, we did our normal routine of visiting the night market. For our third time, though, it was getting a little boring, and we wanted to sit and have a meal, rather than snacking from various food carts. So we went around the corner to the town’s other, more low key market. This one seems to be an all-hours market. Produce, meats, typical market things by day, and stalls serving noodles, rice, curry, roast meats, etc. by night. We found a spectacular local phad Thai stall (no, that stuff you get at carts on Khao San Road can barely be described as phad Thai) and ordered some cheap beers from an adjacent stall. As we were eating, a small elephant showed up, walking through the market with its trainer. It was remarkably cute because it was small enough to fit through the aisles of the market and wasn’t too tall for the roof.

Lise has a good friend from university who was partially raised in Cambodia. She was spending the summer at her parents’ house there, and had invited us to come for a visit. This was part of the reason that we had come to the part of Thailand that we did. It was not to far from the Cambodian border, so as soon as we were ready to get there, it would only take a couple days.

It was time, so we packed our bags and walked south out of town just like we had done the day before. We easily got a ride to the town of Prasat. Next we were just a quick 30 km jaunt to the border of Cambodia. An upper middle class family with a new king cab truck picked us up. We volunteered to sit in the bed, but they insisted we cram into the cab with them. I like to interact with the people that pick us up, but I also get self-conscious when people pick us up in a gleaming air-conditioned vehicle with leather seats. It was a friendly family, though we could not communicate with them. In some places it seems easy to equate skills in a second language (English, French, Spanish) to increased development or higher education. Relatively developed Thailand, however, having never been colonized, speaks much less English than, for example, the Philippines, which is far poorer. Kerala, one of India’s wealthier and better educated states will have far more English speakers than, say Bihar, India’s poorest state. In Thailand, which is one of the more educated and developed countries that I have traveled in, seems to speak far less English or French than perhaps any other country I have traveled in. It can be surprising since in places like India, I equate wealth with education and therefore with English skills. This is a misleading notion in Thailand.

When we reached the border, we parked the car and continued on foot toward the immigration office. I realized that this family didn’t have any actual business being inside Cambodia. We followed them toward the office. They handed a small wad of cash to the official sitting at the booth and the whole family proceeded through, unbothered. No passports, IDs, stamps or visas were involved. You see, gambling is illegal in Thailand, although it is not in Cambodia. Therefore at any border between the two countries, there are some upscale casinos directly across the border. There were loads of Thais pouring through the gates to get there gamble on, and maybe stay at one of the fancy hotels.

We passed through the Thai immigration office and received our stamps. Then we noticed that the Thais didn’t even need to enter Cambodia to go to the casinos. They were actually right there in the no-man’s land between the two borders. On the other side, it looked like there was nothing even on the Cambodia side of the border, except an empty dirt road.