From the mouth of the lion - Saint-Bertrand de Comminges

Some towns, some cathedrals, some palaces, grew over time. They have a lived-in feel. Generations of different patrons, architects, craftspeople, DIYers and repairers, have left their mark on them. They're works of cooperation, of adjustment, of agglomeration and compromise.
Other places are the work of one visionary. Versailles - though its kernel is in fact a Louis XIII hunting lodge, which survives at the centre of the larger, later work like a small jewel set in a much bigger and more exuberant monstrance - can't be seen without the figure of Louis XIV, bestriding the scene in his curly long wig and gold embroidered frock coat. St Petersburg, though many of its buildings are later, has at its heart the great urban plan of its founder, Peter the Great; and quite literally, almost at its geographical centre, his original wooden cabin, predecessor of all the imperial palaces.
The cathedral of Saint-Bertrand-de-Comminges is one of those works. Even though the Romanesque cloister and narthex and the Gothic choir were the work of others, it's the work of bishop Jean de Mauleon that gives the church its character - the warmth of the woodwork, the fantasy of the carvers, the richness of the decoration, are all his work. Most choir stalls simply fill a space in the east end of the church - these stalls dominate the cathedral, thrusting out into the nave, leaving pilgrims and parishioners (excluded from the choir in the Middle Ages) almost nowhere to go. They're complemented by the organ - unusually, neither set up in the west end, nor as a 'swallow's nest' hanging from the wall of the nave, but straddling the north-west angle of the nave.
Jean de Mauleon was a bishop brought up in a humanist age, and something of a scholar. The work he commissioned shows that dual nature; there are busts of Dante and the Medicis, and the organ shows the Labours of Hercules, as well as a number of musicians including a fetching little bagpipe player. The busts of the Nine Worthies show the pagan heroes Hector, Alexander, and Julius Caesar, in the company of Joshua, King David, and Judas Maccabeus, and the Christian heroes Charlemagne, Arthur, and Godfrey of Boulogne. In the stalls, the dorsals show not just prophets and saints, but the Twelve Sibyls, pagan prophetesses (also found in the choir stalls at Auch, which just happens to be where Jean de Mauleon was consecrated bishop).
His humanism shows through too in the triumphal arches which form part of the concept, an appropriate symbol in this ancient Roman town (there are numerous remains of the Roman forum and theatre in the plain below). The entrance to the choir is through one such triumphal arch, and another is shown, facing it, in the east window.
And then there are lions everywhere. There's a wonderful pair of crouching lions in the choir stalls, their haunches curved with tension as they wait to spring, full of suppressed energy. There's a lion painted high above on the stone of the vault. You might think they are just symbols of strength, like the Romanesque lions which flank the entrances to so many Italian cathedrals; or lions of St Mark. But they are also the bad lion, the Mauvais Lion, Mau-Leon, the heraldic badge of Jean de Mauleon. He's put his mark on the woodwork.

There are numerous St Johns, too. There is a lovely young John the Evangelist with his eagle, carved in the round. There is a John the Baptist whose camel skin garment actually shows a camel's head hanging down beside the fringe- a little like figures of Hercules wearing the skin of the lion. Both of them are shown, together with St Bertrand, in marquetry, above the clergy seats in the choir. And there's a John the Baptist on the bishop's throne; with a rampant lion on a shield below, just in case you had missed the allusion.
Again, not unusual to find either or both of the Sainted Johns in a cathedral, though perhaps less usual to find them so prominent in a cathedral that's dedicated (as this one is) to the Virgin. But then think that of course they were both Jean de Mauleon's patron saints, and again you see how the free-spending bishop signed his work to show off his patronage.
By the lion in the vault the initials EHN (for Jehan, the older spelling of the bishop's name) can be seen - easy enough to work out. The initials OAT are a bit more obscure, but his contemporaries would have known; Omnis Amor Tecum, all love be with you - Jean de Mauleon's motto. The OAT logograph is found elsewhere, on the woodwork on the outside of the choir.
It's not ridiculously overt, like the portcullises and roses in King's College Chapel, or the crescent moon symbols of Diane de Poitiers at Anet, or the Sun of the roi soleil at Versailles. It's rather subtle, worked into a rich tapestry of fantasy and symbolism. Saint John the Baptist mixes sociably with the Company of Saints, the Evangelist and his eagle join Mark with his lion (a significant pairing?), and the lions romp with mermaids, wodwoses, nickering horses, and chained pet monkeys.
The most subtle touch is yet to come. Right at the bottom of one of the east windows, and (consequently) almost invisible from inside the choir, is a little kneeling figure of a priest. Almost always, in medieval art, the little kneeling figure is that of a donor, praying to his patron, or to the Virgin, or kneeling in admiration of the whole sacred scene playing out in the window above. Here, in a surprisingly humble position, if my supposition is right, we find Jean de Mauleon himself.

Unexpected delights

The car broke down. Again. The problem a mechanic had incompetently fixed a bit north of Clermont-Ferrand stopped us completely a bit south of Aurillac.

We pulled up, ironically outside a Renault garage that had closed down, called the insurance company, and were told we'd have to wait an hour. We walked into Montsalvy for lunch.

Montsalvy is a sweet little town, once you get through the fortified gate, with a single main street lined by low stone houses. Nothing much in the way of attractions, just an old church, a monks' refectory that now serves as exhibition space, and a few bars and restaurants.

And one marvellous, unexpected delight; a treasury in the local church.

Here were fine liturgical vestments, chalices, monstrances, curiosities. A monstrance with tiny cherubs peeping between sharp shards of sunburst; another with angel-heads in entrail-fat clouds. A crocheted surplice that used to belong to a Colombian priest, and on his death was left to the priest here in Montsalvy who had once worked with him. All displayed in a tall, light, vaulted room, just off the south aisle.

It was a little like the town. Nothing would rate two asterisks in the Blue Guide; no Romanesque candelabras, no priceless medieval textiles or Limoges enamel, no Byzantine ivories. Just a collection of interesting and sometimes beautiful things, which neatly occupied a few minutes while we waited for the mechanic to arrive.

And then we had to go all the way back to Aurillac to get the car fixed, through a horrendous traffic jam in the narrow one way street at the end of which the garage was located. And then we were told it would take a few hours to fix. And then we discovered there was a street theatre festival in Aurillac.

There were white-faced, rouge-cheeked ladies in huge white satin crinolines. Pirates roaming the streets. Jugglers and bubble-blowers, prestidigitators and propagandists. There were Duos Habet, two men in stridently plasticky suits - one lugubrious, one glib - who present magic as a means of mass manipulation and neatly puncture their own mysteries with sardonic cynicism, and there was an incredible Italian clown who spoke a language entirely his own invention and threatened members of the audience with immense streams of cross babbling if they dared to sit in the wrong place, and flirted outrageously and still wordlessly with a woman who took his photograph, and ...more silliness, like this.

And then Jacques' mobile rang, and the car was ready, and we were actually, after the unexpected and uproarious fun of the afternoon, just a little bit annoyed.



Aurillac

Tinta - the character of Iceland

One of the delights of Verdian opera is how each individual opera has its own 'tinta', its own musical and dramatic colour. The mixture of frenetic eroticism and melancholy in Traviata, the savagery and ostinato of Rigoletto, the splendid trumpet tones of Aida.

Force travel into a couple of weeks' summer holiday and all you get is one tune. You visit Iceland and you see a waterfall, a geyser, a rift, in ten-minute slices, and then it's back in the bus. You don't waste any time. It's like listening to Verdi's greatest hits - 'La donna è mobile', 'Va pensiero', 'Caro nome' - but you don't get any of the story, any of the tinta.

Spend a little longer, wander around on your own, resist the packages, and you find something else. The tinta of the country. In this case, Iceland. Stranger than I thought it would be.

• Icelanders all tell a good story. I suppose the long winter makes them good at storytelling if there's not much else to do. Ten percent of Icelanders are said to have written a book. I was told about the Asbyrgi Heatwave - "if I Google myself, there's my name, and the temperature," the petrol store owner at Asbyrgi told me - about the father who crashed his son's car ("it's meant to be the other way around. So he had to offer me a job in his company to pay for it"), about the outlaw who scrambled up into a cave in Thorsmork and the young partiers who followed ("my father used to go up there, and I think maybe so did my mother, in summer... and I was born in April, so..."). And I suspect, based on the various stories I heard, that Icelanders are far more eccentric than most nationalities. Put another way, they don't seem to have a particularly entrenched concept of 'normal'.
• Odd museums. Yes, there's a Phallological Museum in Reykjavik (I didn't go). And there are museums dedicated to singular aspects of Icelandic life, such as volcanoes, earthquakes, sheeps, whales, and Icelandic writers no one outside the country has ever heard of. But there are also places like The Nonsense Museum, featuring, for instance, a collection of Police Caps Of The World, and another collection of sugar cubes and sachets. Another sign of Icelander's slight eccentricity. They tend to go their own way. (Come to think of it, that's how the country was founded, by Vikings 'going their own way' instead of staying in a mainland devoid of opportunity; and Icelanders continued to strike out on their own... that's how Greenland and America were discovered.)
• Icelanders don't let living in a cold country cramp their style. They love swimming, for instance; and though that's partly because they're lucky enough to have geothermally heated water, I found at Nautholsvik beach in Reykjavik that sea swimming is increasingly popular, even though all the water temperature was just 12 degrees and most of the swimmers were sporting insulated slippers to guard against cramp. And they love icecream. If there's ever a north-south war in the country it will be between supporters of the Valdis ice cream parlour (Reykavik) against fans of Brynja (Akureyri). They don't wait for good weather, as we do - I've seen people walking down the street eating ice cream in the rain. A lady in the hot tub at Nautholvsik explained that to me: "If we wait for good weather to eat ice cream, well, then we never get to eat it, and that would be a shame!"
• Geographically, or geologically, Iceland is a country that hasn't been finished yet. Mountain rocks drip with moss as if they've been doused with lurid green icing, and it's still half liquid. Rivers change course as the whim takes them. River islands ooze with mud, and sometimes seem almost as liquid as the rivers, so that you're not sure whether you're walking, skiing on the slippery mud, or actually swimming - a sort of weird Icelandic hike-triathlon. New islands appear; Surtsey is younger than I am, but a national park ranger told me "it may not last much longer; it's getting smaller all the time," eroded by wind and sea. Vegetation has only a tenuous grip on the soil, rock, sand. I saw a nasty pouting little fumarole spitting petulantly near Landmannalaugur, and I thought to myself, "that's the personality of the landscape". Or one of them, at least.
• There's not much variety. Native fauna is limited to the Arctic fox; reindeer have been introduced from Norway, Icelandic horses came with the Vikings, and mice are illegal immigrants. Even bird life is limited, despite the fact that Myvatn teems with waterfowl; there are only two native birds of prey (the merlin and the gyrfalcon). Food can be very similar; meat, potatoes, meat and potatoes. Icelandic life seems to be a continual struggle against dullness. Fortunately, that's a struggle that most Icelanders manage quite successfully.
• On the other hand the country has other inhabitants. Many Icelanders still believe in the hidden people; trolls, elves, Yule spirits. After hiking the country for a while I could see why; you keep seeing rock formations that look just like people, so that the landscape seems inhabited, yet as soon as you turn and look directly at such a thing, it seems to disappear.
• Colour. A thing that struck me about Iceland is that the colours of the landscape are so garish - incredible vivid green of moss, bright white or ochre mud in the fumaroles, turquoise water, blindingly luminous ice, though these colours are so often shot through with the black of lava or volcanic sand, giving the landscape a sort of melancholy even on a bright day. And then Icelanders like to set their dwellings apart from nature by painting them in a palette of oxblood, skyblue, primrose yellow, with bright white detailing.
• Humour. Much Icelandic humour seems akin to Norfolk humour - rather dry. There's a lovely graffito in Stöðvarfjorður showing a boat full of fishermen on the end wall of the house harpooning a lively whale on the front wall. What they don't know is that the whale has got its own harpoon gun - and a bright red missile is headed straight for them. In Reykjavik harbour, I climbed the little turf mound called 'Thufa' on its spiral path - and burst out laughing when I realised the little wooden house on top was inhabited by three ugly-looking fish that had been hung up to dry. 
• Self-reliance. That's another thing that got me - Icelanders aren't good at goodbyes.You can have been chatting for a while, and they'll just get up and go. They're quite self-sufficient. There's not a lot of asking permission or deference or you-go-first kind of politeness. (On the other hand, when you're really in the shit, if you ask for help, you'll get it.) Perhaps it's telling that Iceland's single Nobel Prizewinner, novelist Halldor Laxness, called his best known book 'Independent People' - and as he shows, independence is both a blessing and a curse. You notice it in the townscape, too - even in central Reykjavik, houses have a little fence to cordon them off, and often, a neat garden.
• Informality. The ranger who took the morning tour of Thingvellir (starts at ten from the church, very highly recommended) told us we couldn't go and knock on the prime minister's door and ask for a cup of coffee, "because he's not there at the moment. But if he was, yes, I have told people to go and ask for a coffee, and he's made them one and had a little chat with them." Icelandic society is less equal than it once was, due to the changes brought about by stock market boom and bust, but no one stands on ceremony. (It's difficult to, I suppose, when there are only 300,000 of you, and you're related to about half the rest of the population.) I was told by one musician not to be surprised if Sigur Ros turned up to a small gig in a bar - that's like Placido Domingo singing 'Knees up Mother Brown' in a pub in London after his Royal Opera stint, except this is Iceland, so it isn't.

 That's a glimpse of Iceland's unique character. Which has a lot to do with landscape. And a lot to do with history. And equally, a lot to do with some quite fascinating people.

Know your city

A recent visit to London reminded me that I wasted twenty years living there and never managed to get as far west as Richmond Park, and though I visited Greenwich many times I never got as far as the Queen's House. It's not just me - most people seriously underuse their own cities, and while they pay good money to fly off somewhere else, don't know what's hidden under their own noses.

There are several ways to wake people up to their surroundings. Several of my friends now look forward to the Heritage Days in September when many wonderful sites not normally open to the public have open days - I took advantage of one to explore the Hanseatic city of King's Lynn, while Norwich opens the Great Hospital, St Mary Coslany (now a huge book warehouse), medieval undercrofts and half-timbered houses. London Open House is another effort well worth attending - I particularly want to get to the Mughal style garden on top of the Ismaili centre in South Kensington.

But you can also play games. A favourite of mine - stemming from the actor's need for superstitions (anything can go wrong on stage, so the more 'lucky knickers', not-mentioning-the-Scottish-play, crossed fingers, black cats, and so on you've got, the more protected you feel) is to walk from A to B (house to theatre) a different way each day. The first three or four days are easy; after that, you have to investigate back doubles, tiny alleyways, cuts through churchyards or parks or courtyards - and before you know where you are, you've found surprises; a thatched house in the middle of the city, a house with viol-players on the door-knockers, a set of tiny steps up what you'd never realised was actually quite a steep hill,  a secondhand shop with a display of old beer bottles in the window.

Go at a different time. Go out late at night instead of in the day to see things differently. Go early in the morning before everyone is up and watch the early deliveries roll in.

Look at the backs of buildings, not the front. In parts of Norwich, that gets you into the old courts, with their half-timbered and brick houses clustered round the courtyard; in New Town Edinburgh it shows you the mews, humble stableyards and cottages tucked in behind the high Georgian houses; in other places you can see how the street frontage preserves an orderly atmosphere, but the back is a higgledy-piggledy mass and mess of lean-tos and extensions.

Best bits of Bangkok

Bangkok is a tough city to love. There's too much of it. It's too difficult to get around. It's too touristy. And it doesn't wake up till eleven o'clock in the morning - even the Dunkin' Donuts near Siam Square doesn't open for breakfast till ten-thirty - which is no good for a morning person, which I tend to be when I'm travelling.

And then many of the things I'd expected to like were rather disappointing. The Chao Mae Tuptim shrine with its phallic offerings is amusing but not very atmospheric. The Chao Praya River is wide and choppy and the waterfront is relatively unspectacular. Chinatown and Little India were tedious. The shopping malls around Siam Square were full of the kind of brands you get in any airport terminal, with price tags to match, and Chatuchak Market was far less interesting than I'd expected (though I did find a wonderful little street of paper merchants, where I got some sweet notebooks and fine marbled paper).

On the other hand....

• The river taxis out along Khlong Saen Sap are great fun, speeding up the narrow canal and thrusting out a massive foamy wake as they go. Along the canal side an older, single-story, wooden-built Bangkok coexists with the skyscrapers in the background; caged birds hang from the eaves of some houses, roosters strut back yards. You catch glimpses as the boat rushes past. A hundred yards away there's a six-lane road choked with traffic, but you can't even hear it over the noise of boat engine and splashing water. I didn't have time to get to know the klongs of Thonburi... next time, I will.
• Wat Saket was always going to be a favourite place of mine, given my love of pilgrimage mountains and hilltop sanctuaries, even though this hill is really no more than a slumped and overgrown stupa base (South East Asia Visions has a fascinating view of its previous dilapidated state). It's kitsch and yet charming, the way up screened by high bamboo and jungle creepers, with bodhisattvas posing elegantly in the shrubbery. At the top, you come out to the platform surrounding the golden chedi; and there below lies the whole of Bangkok - a low skyline punctuated to the west by the chedis of Wat Pho, Wat Arun, and the other monasteries, and to the east by the skyscrapers of the new city, and right underneath, the geometrically disposed buildings of the Wat Saket monastery. Pilgrims offer money or incense to the many buddhas, or bash the hanging bells and gongs along the way - a temptation I did not resist.
• I strolled out to Wat Mahathat in the early morning and found the amulet market in full swing. Even better, I found the wholesale market tucked away between the monastery and the river, part of it, I think, actually floating over the river; small shops around long thin courtyards or off shadowy alleyways, and only just opening for business, with that lazy feeling of a shopping district before anything starts happening. The world of the Thai amulet is a fascinating ecosystem, encapsulating everything from mass-market key-ring Buddhas to hand-carved, brass-inlaid willies (Thailand maintains a thriving phallic cult, as at the Chao Mae Tuptim shrine); collectors will inspect old amulets through a loupe (cheap, good jeweller's loupes are an absolute best buy here) and dicker for hours about the quality and price of the one they've got their eye on.
• Surprisingly, some of the most interesting experiences I had were not far from Khao San Road. You don't have to go far off the main drag to get out of Backpackerville, Arizona and into the Thai existence. Early in the morning, nuns were preparing the monks' breakfasts at Wat Chanasongkram, the roofs of which I could see from my guesthouse; rice from a huge steamer, and stir fried greens, and a single fish split down the middle and splayed out. Inside the temple, a middle-aged man sat to read his newspaper. In Wat Borroniwet, a few minutes' walk further away, the gates were hung with the black and white of mourning, and worshippers filed into the hall where the three-months dead Supreme Patriarch sat within a golden urn, and bowed and prayed in unison; and I was handed a plate of fruit when I came out, and given a cup of sweet cold tea.

My souvenirs this time? Bargain bottles of Pelikan ink from a stationery shop in Chinatown, at a fifth of what they ought to cost, and a couple of Thai school exercise books, bound in stiff card with a dharma wheel printed on the cover. And, rather more expensively, a Thai hammered dulcimer, or khim, which I can now pronounce properly (it's an upward tone, which, Thai being a tonal language, is important), and which I am beginning to play with reasonable proficiency thanks to my friends in Chiang Mai and the wonderful resources of YouTube.

Motorbike freedom... and safety

One of the most important things I did a while back was to get a full motorbike licence. It's given me real freedom on the road. It's given me something else, too: confidence.

You don't need a full licence to rent a bike in many countries. For instance in India, no one is going to check your licence if you rent out a bike. And you can get a moped in Thailand with just your passport. (I don't know whether or not that's legal, but you can do it.)

But with a full licence, I know I can do it anywhere in the European Union, where motorcycling laws are quite tight. I can get an International Driving Licence that shows my motorbike entitlement, and that will work pretty much across the world.

I also know I've been pretty well trained. Emergency stops; check. Swerves: check. Countersteering: check. Which all helps when you're not a great biker, and not a very experienced biker (outside the UK), and you're confronted with the following traffic hazards:

• Cow in the road. (India)
• Flock of goats crossing the road. (Pyrenees)
• Potholes. (England. As well as plenty of other places.)
• Huge lump of ice falling on to the road. (India.)
• Twisty mountain roads.
• The Thai road designers' obsession with U-turns.
• Crazy traffic .(India, Thailand, Cambodia.)
• Road made of mud. (Cambodia).
• Road made of loose gravel and mud. (France.)
• Kids playing in the road. (All over, including a complete 22 boy cricket match at one place in India.)

So why bike? Why not rent a car? Why not rent a moto with its driver, which in Cambodia - with few road signs and many of its most interesting sights stuck somewhere in the jungle with little or no signage - is definitely a good move?

Quite simply, it's the freedom. Stop when and where you like. Go fast or slow. Take the high road or the low road, or the little lane shaded by high hedges and tall trees. Roads not suitable for cars are open to you. Parking is easier. And you are in the elements, not divided from them by doors and a windscreen. (Besides, in many places, car hire is next to impossible. Less so in Europe, but certainly in Asia and Latin America.)

In particular, the motorbike gets you out into the middle of the country. If you're travelling mainly by bus and train, it's just too easy to get stuck in urban mode, going from city centre to city centre. A motorbike gets you to villages, hamlets, isolated huts, mountain passes, tiny gompas stuck up side valleys. It gets you off the main road. It's the internal combustion equivalent of hiking.

There are the friends you make. Chatting to a biker with a Tamil Nadu registration plate while waiting for a bridge to be rebuilt on the Manali-Leh pass (I wasn't biking that time, but he was, and he had interesting stories to tell me about the ride up to Srinagar and along to Leh). The Sikh guy with his young son in front of him who grinned broadly when I praised his Enfield - "Best bike in the world," he said.

And there's the sheer pleasure of biking. The first time I ever rode a motorbike, I remember taking a series of nice easy curves between green English hedges, and feeling how much I was leaning the bike, and how the tyres were gripping the road, and suddenly realising my grin was wider than my visor. If you see a dirt track as a pleasurable challenge rather than a failure of the road traffic department, you are already on the primrose path that leads to the Khardongla Pass.

Still, hiring a bike is not without its dangers, so here, in the interest of safety, is a bit of advice based on my own experience. Even if you're going to hire a moped without a full licence, I'd recommend getting a good bike school to take you through the basics. (In my view, there are two things you really, really need to get right. One, emergency stop. Two, helmet.)

And you need to do a bit of a teach-in every time you hire a different bike, since in my opinion most bike hire companies don't take you through the bike properly. They rattle off at very high speed, "here's the gear and here's the brake and here's the speedometer and this is the horn", and then they set you loose. Before you ride off, do your own checks.

•  Check you know how the gears operate. South-East Asian bikes tend to have 'rocker' gears where you use your toes to go up a gear and your heel to go down, as opposed to the UK/Indian style where you use your toes to hook the lever up and down. It takes a bit of practice to change your habits.
• Just in case... check that the brakes are where you expect they are. Older Enfields have a different configuration from UK bikes, with the front and back brakes on opposite sides of the bike (so you brake diagonally rather than with both brakes on the same side).
• Before you take the bike out, make sure you've identified some relatively traffic-free, easy streets to put the bike through its paces and get used to where the gears are speed-wise, how forceful the braking is (or isn't),  how noisy the bike is (I've had some that roar even in neutral, others that are totally silent at traffic lights), how sensitive the clutch is, how much acceleration you've got.
• And get the mirrors set up so you can see the road behind you properly.

Escape from Angkor

It was quarter to ten and I was hating it. Pushed around by Russians taking selfies. Trodden on by someone trying to scramble up a stairway barred with wooden hurdles and no entry signs. Damp and sweaty in the muggy morning heat.

I'm supposed to be enjoying this. Welcome to Angkor Wat.

Angkor is a supreme monument. I can imagine, if you managed to visit it on the right day, at the right time, it might be as mysterious as, say, the Meenakshi temple at Madurai (to which no one ever compares it; all they ever talk about is Notre Dame, the inevitable, inexorable reference). Courts within courts, dim corridors, stairs leading steeply up to darkened shrines where fragmentary Buddhas lurk.

But mystery soon disappears when hundreds of shouting, selfie-ing tourists descend. And then there are the hustlers. The 'buddhist' who shoves incense sticks in tourist's hands and then demands to be paid (this is not religion; this is extortion). The women running out from their food stalls to grab you before the next woman can. The kids whose determination to sell postcards exceeds their mathematical ability.

"You buy my postcard."

"No."

"Very cheap."

"No."

"Five one dollar."

"No."

"Very cheap, for you special price, ten three dollars."

A very special price indeed.

I had to get out. The problem; everywhere is like this. The Bayon, check. Angkor Wat, check. Ta Prohm, check. This was hurting. It was a full-on assault. I researched the internet, read the guidebooks, drew maps in my journal, strategised and planned.

Escape Route 1: ignore the guidebooks. ignore the tourist sights.

I gave up on Angkor. I wandered out to a modern temple instead. Brightly coloured animal figures in the front; a horse and its rider gleamed wetly with acrylic paint, plaster peacocks froze in mid-strut. A solemn father propelled his chubby toddler gently towards the open door. Day-glo murals showed a smiling princely Buddha flying through rainbow skies, while neon clad monks traipsed a Rousseau-esque forest below.

But inside the prayer hall, the rolodex of time shuffled its cards five centuries back; a reclining Buddha smiled, complacent and lipsticky, gold leaf dulled with depth and age, and around it the pavement was warped and sunken with the passage of the years and the slow oozing of subterranean waters.

A longer walk took me to Wat Bo, where dogs snarled and middle aged Khmers played keepy-uppy to keep fit, and among the gold and white painted memorial stupas I disturbed a woman squatting to take a leak. It was as if I'd stepped straight out of twenty-first century Siem Reap, where ATMs compete for business and you can get Erdinger Weissbier or Président camembert in the supermarkets, and into a rural village where nothing had changed much for centuries, and nothing ever would.

I'd really come to see the murals painted in the monastery's main temple. In the near dark of the interior I could make out a few isolated details; what looked like Western gentlemen with striped trousers and pith helmets; an opium smoker; elephants with parasoled howdahs, two soldiers with tricorn hats. A nun came into the temple and lit three incense sticks before the Buddha. My eyes were beginning to adjust to the dark; the details broadened out, till I could see the whole wall, a patchwork quilt of scenes in different colours - a bright yellow background to one, another royal blue, another in a rich, deep oxblood.

The nun had knelt before the Buddha. The monk who'd been showing a pair of German tourists around came and chatted to me for a while, opening some of the windows for me to photograph the murals. The light was beginning to fade outside, afternoon shading into evening. The nun started chanting; a slow, simple tune, almost like a Lutheran chorale. When the monk's back was turned I slipped a few notes into the donation box, and sat at the back of the temple, not a worshipper exactly but feeling somehow refreshed, made new. The monk was starting to close the windows again. In the fresh dark, the great golden Buddha seemed to glow more intensely.

I looked at my watch. Quarter to six; quarter to sunset. Time to go.

As I left, the monk smiled, a simple and slight smile, and said: "Thank you for the donation."


Escape Route 2: the temples no one visits

I nearly didn't get to Banteay Prei. Everybody kept telling me it was twenty kilometres away. Except that was Banteay Srei. Or there was Banteay Kdei, people visited that.

But no, I knew what I wanted. Banteay Prei and Prasat Prei, little marks on my map that weren't in any of the guidebooks. I shot past the turnoff first time, got to Neak Pean, had to come back; there was a dirt road heading north, almost unsignposted - I saw the road before I found the sign.

Three Cambodian women were sweeping the grounds in front of the temple. A man passed on his bike and shouted out to them. Two children ran along, racing him for a few yards before peeling off into the jungle. But once I stooped to enter the central enclosure through its strangely low gateway, I was alone. Tumbled rock, short grass, a few sticky burrs. Only a delicate apsara regarded me, her eyebrows raised; she'd been looking for centuries, and would carry on looking once I'd gone. I scrambled into dim corridors, the windows low and small; all the doors were tiny, as if this was a monastery built for children. A lintel with curling foliage and praying Buddhas lay slantwise on the ground.

As I came out, a young man with a goatee entered. The first tourist I'd seen since I'd arrived.

I met him several times later that day. I saw almost no one else, except on the roads, where groups in tuktuks puttered from one monument to the next, and the occasional huge coach swooshed by.

On to Ta Nei. The tour buses don't come here; they can't. A tuk-tuk can just get down the sandy, bicycle-rutted track. Or you can bike it, though I ended up pushing my bike rather than riding through the worst of the sand, shaded from the heat by tall jungle trees. Ta Nei is a tiny temple, half overgrown, tree roots working their way between the stones, lichen greening or making grey the orangey sandstone. A bird sang tink, tink, tink, another tonk, tonk like a xylophone; leaves twisted down slowly from the trees, crisped brown by the dry season.

From Ta Nei I tried to get back towards Ta Prohm, but I hadn't reckoned on the rushing rapids that lay in the way. A dam spans the river, but there are steps both sides, narrow and steep, and I had the bike to manage. Thudding music and the chink of beer bottles betrayed a party going on on the other side; within a minute I had two not quite sober local helpers to haul the bike down and up again, and left them with their tuktuks and their girlfriends and an incongruous looking guy in a suit to enjoy the afternoon. I never did find out what the party was about.

At nearly the end of the day I reached the Bayon, ramshackle like a tumbled limestone mountain. Should I go straight back to Siem Reap? More by luck than judgment, and swayed by the grammatical error as well as the foreboding macabre of the title "Deads Gate", I decided to add one more sight to the list, and set off down the dirt track to the east gate of Angkor Thom.

There was a small group of American women there, climbing down from the top of the wall. We chatted for a minute, and then I was alone, alone with the great face of Jayavarman VII looking down at me. The track behind was a tunnel, a canyon carved in the forest; the gate vertiginously high, claustrophobically narrow. Up to the right a narrow path led upwards.

I spent the last quarter of an hour of daylight riding a narrow track on top of a millennium old wall; forty feet below, the waters of the moat, a hundred yards wide, and beyond, the jungle. At times my front tyre was no more than six inches from the edge; overhanging branches whipped at my face; grass encroached on the track. Startled birds crashed up through the trees as I approached; below, I caught a glimpse of an egret flapping lazily across the water, but only a glimpse. I was balanced riskily, on the edge, the sunset dazzling and dancing in my eyes, gloriously alone.

Escape Route 3: get out on the road

This took a leap of faith. I had about 90 percent of the information I wanted. But there were missing links. I didn't have a great map. No one will give you information on buses in Siem Reap, because they all want you to hire a car for the day, at a cost of $100 up. And that's a horrid way to go, because you end up spending six hours travelling for just a couple of hours at the temple, in the middle of the day, when it's too hot, and the light is terrible for photography, and you're already tired from the journey.

First: Banteay Chhmar. Reaching it is a little bit of an adventure (but only a little). You take the Poipet bus and get off on the road past Sisophon. You get a moto to the market. You get a shared taxi to Banteay Chhmar. Cost: $7 for the bus, a buck for the moto, $5-7 for the taxi. If you're lucky, and I was, the moto driver will help find you a taxi. And then a long, bumping, dusty dirt road, swerving past tractors and piles of soil in the middle of the road, the driver jamming the brakes on to avoid the oncoming triple-overtakers or a pothole, squashed up with seven or eight other people, till you get to Banteay Chhmar, long after you've lost all feeling in your legs, and nearly fall over getting out of the taxi.

It's supposed to work like that. But of course, although when I pointed out I was getting out at Sisopon there was a huge commotion - wow, that's not supposed to happen, no one ever does that, why aren't you going to Thailand, what is there in Sisophon? - the driver, and his three mates, actually forgot I was getting off there, so it was only when I realised we were nearly at Poipet and asked one of the three mates that he realised what was up - and yelled aloud, and stepped on the brakes, and pulled my bag out of the luggage and made off across the main road with it, dodging trucks and speeding cars to flag down a bus going in the opposite direction, which did, eventually, get me to Sisopon (and didn't, thank God, forget, and end me up back in Siem Reap two hours later).

Banteay Chhmar is wonderful. You get an inkling when, from the taxi, you see the bridge that spans the moat, its time-worn devas and demons pulling at their tug-of-war stone rope. And immediately, the village feels quite different; no one rushes to sell you anything or point you towards a guest house. You can wander the market undisturbed, grab a couple of beers at one of the shops, stop in at the village tourism office (website) to borrow a map or arrange a moto or just have a chat.

The temple is ruined - and still being ruined. (I was quite shocked to hear archaeologist Olivier Cunin, in a fascinating presentation on reconstructing the temple, show a photograph of quite recent work there - and another showing how a couple of years later, an entire tower had been demolished by the fall of a great tree.) On one side, workers are gradually piecing together the fallen reliefs of the outside gallery; elsewhere, you have to hop the tumbled blocks to find, in one place, a nose, or a single thick curling lip, or an elegant almond shaped eye. In one place I nearly trod on a small Buddha, staring up at me from a fallen lintel. From some of the towers, the serious face of Jayavarman regards you; in one, scattered incense sticks and a packet of matches bore witness that this is still a living temple, though its heartbeat has slowed so far it's hardly audible.

My next plan was to visit Sambor Prei Kuk, Preah Khan Kompong Svay, and Prasat Preah Vihear - bagging three temples in a three-day visit. First, bus to Kompong Thom; that was easy, it's on the route to Phnom Penh. I knew I could hire a moto from Kompong Thom to Preah Khan; but getting to Preah Vihear was the missing link.

Fortunately, as soon as I arrived in Kompong Thom I was met by a friendly English-speaking moto driver, and we worked out a plan; he could get me to the main road past Preah Khan, and flag down a bus or a share taxi going north.

Sambor Prei Kuk has a very different feeling from Angkorian ruins; it feels more Indian, somehow, more intimate, more spontaneous - small brick spires rising in clearings in the forest. Warm brick colours; orange and red. Carvings of temples hanging in the air, of gods too eroded to be identifiable. Sandy tracks through the trees. You can see what Angkor grew out of - the square compounds with their long, low walls, the shape of the spires, the staircase-guarding lions - and yet this is different; lower key, happier.

In the golden light of afternoon, we motored along the Sen river, passing fishermen standing to haul their nets through the water, past sandbanks and low ochre cliffs, to a raft which ferried three motorbikes and four people over the river to a temple built like a boat where fat golden Buddhas crewed the poop deck, and smaller boat-shrines clustered round like a Buddhist armada. Then at last through flat fields to Phnom Santuk on its hill - not high, but visible from everywhere in this flat land of rice paddy and river marsh, where I climbed the eight hundred steps to the top, and a boy monk, a dead bird dangling from one hand, showed me reclining Buddhas under the cliffs' overhang, and chased away the monkeys with gleeful, raucous yells. From a bald dome of rock I looked out to the dusty plain and the slow meanders of the river, misty silver in the near sunset.

You start early in Cambodia if you want to get anywhere; six the next morning saw me already on the pillion, rucksack stowed in the front well of the moped, three shirts one under the other keeping the worst of the morning chill off. Then it was hours of red dirt road, and dust everywhere; my clothes orange with it, my hands sweating orange, my eyelashes crusted with orange sand. Long, straight, level roads, interminable, where as soon as you got up speed, there would be a bridge, with a sudden ramp , two or three inches above the road, that you hit with a bang; or there would be a truck going the other way, raising a cloud  of dust in which the road suddenly disappeared. Or there would be a corner that you hadn't expected, or a herd of cows being taken to graze, and one would suddenly take it into its head to trot in front of us.

Preah Khan is a strange experience.The great bridge is half fallen in, though beaky Garudas still line its sides; the central tower has collapsed, the side towers are partly fallen, the trailing, rambling weeds seem to be taking back the temple. Yet the entrance gopura stands proud, despite the tree that forms one side of the central gate; and apsaras smile knowingly from dark recesses. I was alone with this jigsaw puzzle of randomly scattered stones, and the ghosts of a temple city whose shadow I could dimly see in what was left.

There are smaller temples here, too; one of Jayavarman VII, with his face on one of the towers; I scrambled up on the roof of a half-fallen gallery till I could reach up and nearly touch it, and then lost my nerve, too far from the ground; and a strange small pyramid, guarded by elephants at the corners and graceful apsaras at the gates, where men were sitting playing cards on the terrace at the top, and the waters of the great Baray - three kilometres from end to end - shimmer in the heat.

But there was one temple missing; the Mebon, the temple in the middle of the baray. We set out to find it; down a steep slope, on tiny dirt paths through the woods and through dug fields, turning and twisting on muddy ground that once lay under the waters of the great lake. When the ground started to rise again, I realised we had come to the island; and there, half hidden by immense trees, was a wall, and beyond the wall, the spire of a temple. Huge garuda birds stretched their wings across the side walls; carved elephants sprayed floral waterfalls; moss-covered buddhas or deva figures sat in the shadowed corners. All abandoned, all overgrown, and yet the carving was pristine; a perfect, amazing discovery.

The rest of the day was spent heading north; my driver dropped me off on the main road north, from which it was a $5 taxi ride into Preah Vihear town, where I'd planned to stay, but I was lucky enough to get a further shared taxi to Sra Em, less a town than a sprawl of market stalls and single level houses; and lucky enough to organise a moto for 6 the next morning to get me to the mountain. (Cost of hotel: $5. Cost of meal: $5. Cost of moto: $15 there and back. Cost of a separate moto to get up the mountain: $5. Cost of bribe to get in before official opening time: $5. Cambodia is not all that cheap.)

The Dongrek mountains close off the landscape, a long dark ridge above the plain. The road up is steep, so steep I nearly slide off the back of the motorbike, so steep the engine can hardly cope, even in first gear. The bike rocks and slides as the road gives out, and we cross a slope of bare rock, pitted and cracked. And there's the first of the gopuras, half collapsed, and the great paved way upwards, towards the next gateway, and then the next, and the expanse of dark grey sky on this stormy morning.

Preah Vihear rises from the steep staircase at its foot, all the way up the mountain, the gradient decreasing as it rises; stairs give way to a long, wide paved avenue, and then there are more steps, up through three gates in a low wall that bars the way, dissipating the upwards, longitudinal thrust of the temple plan for a moment, as you go through into a courtyard, with small temple or library wings on each side. Then the path starts again; and on to the third of the gopuras - and then the fourth - and finally, steps rise up to the small courtyard at the top, with low, narrow cloisters around it, and a half-collapsed spired temple rising in the middle. It must be half a kilometre from the bottom to the top - just glance at the plan and you see how strung out Preah Vihear is, that it's the huge staircase and esplanade that give the monument its entire character - yet every time you approach one of the gopuras, that impulse is lost in the horizontality, the expansion of those walls to either side, the courtyards and tiny rooms and corridors that run counter to your movement. It's so different from the neat and tidy mandalas of the Angkor temples, concentric squares within squares; it's long and strung out, and wild, too, with a cold wind blowing.

And then, behind the topmost courtyard, there's a space of bare rock, and a cliff that drops suddenly away, all the way down to the plain, glittering in the early sunlight, hazy in the muggy noon. Turn around, and you can see back to the plains of Thailand, separated by only a few hundred yards from the start of the temple stairs. There's nothing higher than I am, on this prow of stone; the trees below are stunted.

It's an uneasy place, this temple that clings to the mountain slope; along the old pilgrim stairs to the east, there are sandbagged bunkers, and bullet holes pock the walls of the lower gopuras, and signs warn of landmines if you stray from the path. Did pilgrims here always feel so endangered, I wonder, on the exposed, steep  stairway that led up from the jungle, where now, new wooden steps take seven or eight twists of serpentine complexity to go as far as a single straight flight of steep steps did so many centuries ago?

It warms up later. A group of Cambodian tourists arrive, little girls playing grandmother's footsteps on the massive slabs of the path, men in straw hats, a little boy who throws his toy truck at the ground again and again. I can't work out whether he's laughing or screaming. A soldier starts singing, his round face happy. War's not breaking out today, that's for sure.