The Wonders of ANGKOR WAT

Set within the Angkor Archaeological Park that covers several thousand acres of flat plain in Cambodia is the temple complex of Angkor Wat the world's largest religious shrine. A solo traveller describes a memorable excursion

My bus trundled down a highway leading out of hour. Four hours later, we arrived at the frontier town of Aranya Prathet and joined a serpentine queue before an immigration booth. Passing under a huge arched gateway guarded by snarling lions and threatening dragons, we crossed into Cambodia. A dry bed of a stream, choked with rubbish, marked the border between these two high

Once inside Cambodia looking back across the border to the Thai side, I could see brightly-painted shops bursting with consumer goods, chic cafes, high fashion boutiques, and Chinese-run money-changing booths, doing brisk business. On the Cambodian side, limbless beggars importuned for alms, wrinkled men pushed wooden carts laden with cardboard boxes and rusted pipes, skinny women with taut skins dressed daintily in batik sarongs and turbans, squatted on their haunches vending boiled beans, prickly fruit in cardboards with clothes clips. Feverish construction activity choked the air with fumes and dust — a dozen casinos, owned by Thai-based Chinese tycoons, were coming up. The kingdom of Cambodia (pop.16 million) is still struggling to American invasion of the 1970s and the Indo-China war followed by years of brutal rule under the communist Khmer Rouge led by the megalomaniacal Pol Pot and his clique until the early 1980s.