Macau Matters | Amazing Angkor Wat

Richard Whitfield

I am  inclined towards calm stoicism rather than extravagant gushery, but when you see Angkor Wat you cannot help but gush about it. It is a truly astonishing place the like of which I have never seen before. I can only suspect that the Great Pyramids in Egypt and Machu Picchu in Peru are comparable, but Angkor Wat makes the Forbidden City and even the Great Wall pale in comparison. Angkor Wat itself is roughly square with an enclosed area of about 160 hectares surrounded by a 4.5m wall, a 30m wide apron and a 190m wide moat. The central temple within the enclosure is substantially bigger than any European Cathedral I have ever seen. Then there are dozens of other temples in the area, some of which are similar in size, but most are in a worse state of disrepair. It is now on the “must see” list of destinations I tell to everybody.

There were many tour guides to show you around the temples and explain them and we did see some audio guide-books, but not much in the way of easily consumed online information. An iPad loaded with GPS keyed information similar to the iPads that they give to visitors to MONA in Tasmania would have been very useful. This is also something we need to do much better in Macau – a good iPad/iPhone app that incorporates a GPS enabled map and gives lots of written and verbal information about nearby points of interest (in several languages) is something I have not yet really seen for Macau.

Angkor Wat is near the city of Siem Reap in Cambodia which has some French remnants giving it a nice “Indochine” feel. The main currency used there is US dollars, and you need lots of small denomination, relatively new notes. While it is often convenient, I do not like the US currency – why would any country be stupid enough to make all their notes the same size and color with almost indistinguishable designs is beyond me. I regularly confuse USD50 and USD10 notes and end up getting short-changed.

A great hidden benefit is that you can fly direct from Macau, which is always a great thing because it saves you the (effectively) 2+ hour each-way trip to and from Hong Kong airport. When returning direct to Macau you can always be confident of being at home having a cuppa in well under 1 hour from touchdown. However, for the direct flight there is a lot of rigmarole to get tickets which involves visiting the airport and hunting down the one ticketing agent that can supply them. Most of the Macau-Siem Reap flights are full of tour groups of Chinese tourists so they are not advertised here.

It is so typical of Macau that we have the makings of an excellent and successful airport and transportation hub that is let down by poor management and even worse urban design. Macau has the potential to be an excellent secondary regional airport to complement Hong Kong but whoever is in charge cannot seem to manage organizing routes or airlines to fly them and consequently our airport is under-utilized. And do not get me started on the stupendously bad urban design of having an airport, ferry terminal, bus terminal and two light rail stations that are just far enough apart and with such poor pedestrian interconnections that the whole complex is virtually unworkable.

It is very clear that transport links are a major Achilles Heel of Macau and that we need and deserve much better. Can we sack everybody in all the government departments that manage our transport infrastructure and hire some reasonable international experts to sort out the current mess?