Michael Batson

The town itself stretches north to south along the Siem Reap River and east to west along National Route Six.  Siem Reap literally means “Siam Vanquished” and was the administrative and spiritual centre of the bloodthirsty Khmer Empire, which rivaled the Roman in size before it somewhat mysteriously crumbled.   Siem Reap has been receiving visitors for over 100 years and is actually a cluster of old villages which originally developed around individual pagodas and later overlaid with a French colonial-era centre.  Its development was gradual at first and then snowballed. Today the town has its very own international airport with visitors flying in direct from as far afield as China and Korea. The roads have improved too. The once notorious route from the Thai border, a distance of barely 150kms, used to take over seven hours due to the appalling state of what passed for a highway. It was a journey I had made twice. Now you can drive from the border town of Poipet in two-three hours. The same road will bring you from Battambang. There is also an overpriced fast ferry plying the nearby Great Lake to and from Phnom Penh. For decades the region was controlled by the Thais. In 1906 Thailand ceded control of Siem Reap to the French. Thereafter it became an autonomous military region for a period. In 1979 journalist John Pilger had seen a mass grave of several thousand people at Siem Reap, “many of whom had been beaten to death