The Four Kingdoms Tour of Southeast Asia

• P a r t T w o •

In five days i had traveled from Manila to Bangkok, to Sukhothai and on to Luang Prabang in Laos with eight Philippine ladies eager to see unesco World Heritage Sites. The four destinations of our tour were the capitals of Southeast Asia’s illustrious ancient kingdoms, replete with art treasures, architectural monuments and fascinating local culture.

Celia Lazaro of G & S Travel and Tours had planned our itinerary and was accompanying us as tour leader. Celia handled the tickets, visas and passports and connected with the hotels and local guides at each stop. Two of our members left the group in Luang Prabang and headed south to Vientiane in search of more exotic Laotian temples and more bargains in local textiles. Our remaining group of seven flew off to Da Nang, Vietnam on a Siem Reap Airways turboprop to visit Hué, Hoi An and then on to Angkor Wat in Cambodia.

Flying out of Luang Prabang late in the morning we headed south-southeast over the mysterious Laotian Plain of Jars and the rugged Vietnamese Central Highlands.

The Plain of Jars, so named for the thousands of ancient burial jars which dot the landscape, is still a dangerous site for international tourists due to unexploded bombs and landmines. The Ho Chi Minh Trail wound its way through this region during the Vietnam/American War and was the constant target of B52 bombers flying out of the huge American base at Da Nang. The airbase is now an international tourist airport complete with duty free shopping. The rows of American-built concrete quonset huts are quietly being overgrown with grass and turning black with age.

Our Vietnamese guide met us outside the terminal and hurried us into a waiting bus. The streets of Da Nang were bustling with people buying flowers, pastries and liquor for the Chinese New Year celebration that night, which the Vietnamese refer to as Tet. It has become a great day of national celebration since the famous Tet Offensive in 1968, which turned the tide of war in favor of the Vietnamese army. I thought how appropriate and ironic for me, a vete-ran of the American anti-war movement, to be arriving in Vietnam on this historic anniversary.

The weather was cold and blustery. After stopping for bottled water and cookies to hold us over until dinner, we headed north towards Hué over a twisting mountain pass. Looking back at Da Nang we could see Da Nang Bay churning with white caps and great muddy waves crashing on the coast far below us. Manila was only a few hundred miles due east across the China Sea but somehow seemed much further away. As we crossed the pass a slow drizzle set in and remained with us until we reached Hué three hours later after nightfall.

Our guide brought us directly to an open-air restaurant near the river. The cold night air brought out the pashminas, sweaters and jackets. A large bottle of Tiger Beer and a hot soup were most welcome. The Vietnamese spring rolls were delicious but the rest of the food was a bit bland. I was beginning to suspect tour guides of Southeast Asia had gotten together and agreed on a menu that would be acceptable to the greatest number of people, the result being a bland, generic international Chinese fare.

From the restaurant we were escorted to a fancy wooden barge for a cruise on the Perfume River, and a performance by traditional Vietnamese singers. The boat drifted to the center of the river and was anchored there for some time as the singers and musicians performed for us. The evening was billed to end with a romantic floating candle festival on the water. Considering we were the only ones out on the river that night our little candles looked a bit forlorn floating off by themselves.

Fortunately we docked right around the corner from the Century Hotel and soon found ourselves ensconced in warm and comfortable rooms looking out over the river. At midnight we were awoken by the sound of great booming fireworks exploding half a kilometer up the river.

A huge red and gold Vietnamese flag waved proudly in the night sky over the famous Hué Citadel. It was dramatically floodlit from below while the incandescent fireworks exploded in the dark clouds overhead. The Vietnamese had fought long and hard over several generations for their independence both from the West and from the Chinese–they had much to celebrate.

The next morning we were back on the river heading upstream to the 17th century Thien Mu Pagoda and fabled tombs of the Nguyen Emperors. Despite the communist government the pagoda’s many altars and ceremonial halls were busy with flocks of worshipers lighting incense and bowing to the sacred images. The tombs of the emperors are popular with the people. Crowds of local Vietnamese were visiting, many men in traditional long coats and women in white silk dresses to celebrate the national holiday.

The tombs are located among rolling, forested hills on sites carefully selected by Chinese geomancy. A private bus was waiting to take us from site to site. Designed to be palaces for the emperors in the next world, they each had elaborate pagodas, rest houses, ornamental lakes and landscaped gardens in addition to the Emperor’s hidden mausoleum.

Built in the 19th and early 20th centuries, they range in style from traditional Sino-Vietnamese to eclectic international baroque fantasy. The more traditional, with gilt Buddhist images, floral motifs, red lacquer columns, moon gates and low tile roofs set amid bonsai gardens, flowering trees and reflecting pools are the most beautiful and serene.

In contrast the mausoleum of Emperor Khai Dinh, completed in 1931 on the side of a steep hill, borders on the grotesque. It sports elaborate decorative towers, a grandiose staircase and fantastic ornamental carvings of dragons, soldiers and mandarins all in concrete. National property taxes had to be raised 30% just to finish the construction. It’s a wonder the Vietnamese didn’t turn to communism sooner.

Although somewhat tired and hungry we made one last stop before returning to Hué. Turning down a wooded lane we came to the entrance of the most tranquil Buddhist monastery I have ever seen. A two-storey stone ceremonial gate surrounded by ancient trees opened onto a crescent-shaped pool filled with lotus and royal water lilies. Walking around the pool and up a winding path through pine trees one comes upon the Tu Hieu Pagoda. Restored and renovated by the Nguyen Emperors’ palace eunuchs in 1848, the monks at this pagoda were charged with caring for the graves and honoring the souls of the eunuchs, who had no offspring to perform this duty.

There are several golden altars within the temple dedicated to Buddha, Chinese deities and famous eunuchs. They were all festooned with elaborate silk lanterns, joss sticks, colorful candles and offerings of flowers and fruit. The young novices in attendance in their maroon robes and shaven heads seemed quite happy to have visitors and invited us to share their afternoon tea.

We were back at the citadel in Hué for sunset. A huge portrait of Ho Chi Minh mounted on the walls gazes benignly across the moat at the majestic 54-meter high national flagpole. Much of the interior of the original Imperial Citadel had been destroyed by wars over the years, but a few buildings remain and a great deal of reconstruction and conservation has taken place since Hué was declared a unesco World Heritage Site.

From the Citadel we were driven directly to a fine Chinese restaurant for a New Year’s dinner featuring many local Vietnamese variations of Chinese delicacies and pretty cakes of fragrant rice molded into the shape of the Chinese character for double happiness and longevity.

The next day we returned to Da Nang for lunch and a tour of the Cham civilization museum and its interesting collection of thousand-year-old sandstone and terra cotta sculpture excavated in central Vietnam. From there we drove southeast another hour to Hoi An, a picturesque, medieval trading village on the China Sea. Hoi An is famous for its traditional Southeast Asian shophouses and a quaint Japanese bridge with a tiled roof. Chinese and Japanese traders made regular stops at Hoi An centuries before the Spanish had even arrived in the Philippines. Due to its location near the center of Vietnam’s silk industry there were lots of textiles for sale along with a variety of attractive local souvenirs. That night we checked into a large resort hotel near the beach and were happily wafted to sleep by the sound of the surf.

The last stop on our Four Kingdoms Tour was Angkor, capital of the prodigious Khmer Empire from the 9th to the 15th centuries. Angkor is located a couple of kilometers outside the provincial capital of Siem Reap, which has been rapidly transformed into an international tourist destination since peace was finally restored in Cambodia in 1993. unesco initiated a vast internationally supported reconstruction and preservation project at that time, which continues up to the present.

The main attractions at Siem Reap are, of course, the temples, not only the main temple Angkor Wat itself, but also the dozens of smaller temples in the area. Over the centuries the Khmer Kingdom built a succession of walled cities around ceremonial temple compounds. Angkor Thom, just one kilometer north of Angkor Wat, is believed to have once housed over one million inhabitants and would have been grander than any city in Europe at the time.

Originally Hindu, the Khmers converted to Buddhism around the 13th century. The massive temple complexes with distinctive cone shaped towers, walls several kilometers long and moats display a rich mix of both Hindu and Buddhist motifs. Historical bas-reliefs carved on the walls of the temples tell the history of the Khmers and the myths and legends of their two great religions.

We had one full day for touring, which was only enough to walk through the magnificent main temple of Angkor Wat and the neighboring temple, the Bayon, at Angkor Thom. The Bayon is world-renowned for its 54 towers with great stone faces of Lokesvara looking out in the four directions of the universe. Outside Siem Reap there are hundreds of sites to explore, from sacred streams with phallic carvings in the natural rock to the exquisite red sandstone temple of Banteay Srei an hour north of town.

Our tour nearly over we all made one last minute dash to the market to see what Cambodian souvenirs we could find. The market at Siem Reap is small but the selection is excellent and the prices are ridiculously low. Dealers sell a large variety of well-made antique reproductions along with hand-woven silk, silverware, local crafts and woodcarvings. The government has banned the export of any antiques so reproductions are a good substitute. Two of the ladies in our group were made to open their suitcases and unwrap all their packages even after passing through the x-ray machines at customs.

We returned to Bangkok the next day to catch the flight back to Manila. Tired but happy and with seriously overweight luggage, we all deemed the trip a great success. Four kingdoms is a lot to cover in just ten days but it gave us a new perspective on Southeast Asia, the region of the world closest to the Philippines. With European and American history still filling Philippine history books it is fascinating to see that vast and sophisticated kingdoms once existed in our region, long before Europeans and Americans dominated the world.

Hopefully this inaugural expedition of G & S Travel and Tours will stimulate more regional travel not only by adventurous high-end Filipino travelers but also by students and middle class folk on limited budgets.