Ancient Chenla Temples in Kampong Chhnang

I have found an area that is a good fifteen years behind modern rural Cambodia. As I visited Chenla sites scattered across a massive island surrounded by the Tonlee Sap River and its flood plain, I felt that it was 1995 again. We were on the trail of two Chenla era temples, found three, learned of a fourth, but I came away with a great feeling of appreciation for the slow pace of life on this large island and its physical beauty. It presents so many of the things that one loves about Cambodia, but that, in modern Cambodia, is slowly slipping away.

What were the signs that I was going back in time?

First, almost no cars. I saw three vehicles in the four hours it took me to circumnavigate this island. Three cars along fifty kilometers of road. What vehicles there were, were providing taxi service around the island.

Instead thousands of cows and water buffalo. It is late in the rice growing season. Cows need to be feed, but there are no pastures and no fences! So the kids and the grandparents take their cattle, whatever the size of the herd and carefully let them feed on open, public land on the margins of the vast rice fields that make up the center of this island (I am using a word that fits what I saw, but it may not be an island during the dry season when the flood plain dries).

But they never, ever, let them eat the growing rice.

I am told that the cows need at least three hours of grazing a day to get their fill. And then, the slow walk back to the house.

Was there more? Well, almost no phone shops for one thing. And no gasoline stations, None. Though some families, as they still do across Cambodia sell gasoline from cans in front of their houses. To be sure, lots of motorcycles, common everywhere, but also lots and lots of bicycles, mostly replaced by motobikes in the larger cities.

Lots of ox carts though, the most I have seen in a long time.

This all created an atmosphere of calm and slowness, with a backdrop of Cambodian flood plain mountains. As we circumnavigated the island, we were always within view, if not under the shadow of a mountain!

Maybe I was mentally set up by the ferry boat trip from Kampong Chhnang to the main town on the island, Kampong Klang (kampong is an imported Malay word that means village in Malaysia, but here means port, riverine or sea). The picture above is how it looked as we approached the town. The next picture is the ferry we took.

The trip took a half-hour, cost 1000 riel (25 cents) for me and the same for my motorcycle! The big boat ran three times a day on a fairly predictable schedule, so a day trip is easy.

This lady was a talker. My motorcycle is behind her, outside. Below a family in deep conversation the whole trip. Maybe checking their shopping list, trying to see if they bought everything they needed to bring over from the 'mainland'.

Depart KC at 0930, arrive around 1000. Drive the island, visit three temple sites, two you have to walk to from the main road, get back to town, meet the boat for the return at about 1500. And if you miss the big main boat, there are many small boats who will charge you only 2 to 3 times a much, still less than a dollar.

Easy peasy. And we haven't talked about the temples yet!

Maps of Cambodia show two sites near the town of Kampong Klang across the Tonlee Sap River from the Provincial town of Kampong Chhnang. Two names are given on the maps I have seen (the third temple is unamed): Prasat Preah Srai and Samroang Sean. A fourth temple is on top of a mountain; locals say that it has collapsed into a pile of bricks and we did not visit it. (Confusing things a bit is that local people have different names for Samraong Sean, for them it is Prasaat Proh. The two towers described below, not on the maps, are called Prasaat T'nong P'dei (Prasaat means something like ancient temple in this context).

The temple below required us to pick our way across and around a series of rice paddies. It sits on a small rise in this paddy surround.

The finest temple we saw was co-located with a more modern Khmer Buddhist Temple. The Khmer people trace themselves back to the Angkor Empire, most prominently known by the large number of temples north of the Tonlee Sap river and lake (we are south) many in and around Siem Reap town.

The Chenla (Khmer) Kingdom which preceeded it was early influenced by Indian culture from southern India and its earlier monuments (circa 700 A.D.) are found scattered from Laos to SE Cambodia and S Vietnam.

Though guide books tend to dismiss these temples (and for someone who was staying even as long as a month in Cambodia, your list of priorities would probably give you no time for these), the level of surviving detail on this temple is simply astounding. Remember it is made of brick, even the carved surfaces are brick, and they have been washed by more than a thousand rainy seasons!

The two smallest temples that we visited, found in an open field of a small dirt track about a kilometer from the main road on mainly white, sandy soil, is called locally Prasaat T'nong P'dei. It features stone lintels, but very little of what may have been carved remains, perhaps looted long ago. One tower has a deep hole dug in its dirt floor. Looters looking for buried statues, who know what they might or might not have found. (Such digs are the cause of tower collapse in many places).

I don't think so very many tourists are going to visit this island, but if you are a longer-stay guest of Cambodia, you might consider it. And as I took the ferry back over to Kampong Chhnang, mounted my motor-cycle and took the highway back to Phnom Penh, I was jerked a full fifteen years back into the present. (Damn! Watch out for that Lexus!)

Read more...