Quotes of the Day

"You must understand," says Mony, my guide, with an ominous little smile, "that the roads in my country are, ahem, less than excellent."

In fact, the roads in Cambodia are literally the pits: bone-rattling ruts that can shake old fillings loose and pop your contact lenses out of your eyeballs.

Depending on the season, they are either impassable bogs or dusty, potholed nightmares. "Ass-shatteringly bad," one visitor warned me. "I had back problems for weeks," confided another. Indeed, when I told my driver I wanted to go beyond Siem Reap's asphalt to sample the infamous hardship of roads less traveled, he promptly tripled his daily fee to $60.

But I wasn't going to let either money or the possibility of spinal dislocation stop me exploring the ravaged glory of this country. And so we struck out for Spean Praptos—Cambodia's most venerable bridge—and the overgrown temples of Beng Mealea. This is a round-trip of less than 140 kilometers, but in Cambodia it's a bone-numbing, dawn-to-dusk odyssey.

I didn't notice the bridge until we were almost upon it. We came out of a cumulus of red dust to find ourselves whizzing between massive stone balustrades over a yawning gorge. At 85 meters, Spean Praptos is the longest surviving bridge from the Angkor era. "That bridge has been standing more than 800 years," said Mony, who works for the government's conservation authority, Apsara. "My ancestors built roads and bridges that were just as impressive in their way as any of the temples."

Not anymore. Nowadays, faced with the discomfort of these roads and bridges, most tourists limit themselves to two or three days exploring Angkor Wat and other sites within easy reach of Siem Reap and its proliferating hotels. If your idea of Cambodian magic is a scrum for vantage points, against the deflating sound of clicking cameras and revving tour coaches, and curtailed by the need to be back at the hotel bar by nightfall, then fine. But if you want to leave the tourist pack behind, you have no choice but to hit the awful dirt.

To historians, there's a weird irony in Cambodia's decrepit infrastructure. In the 12th century, King Jayavarman VII built highways that had few equals on earth. They can be seen from satellite photographs (although from the ground, few traces are apparent), with the longest running some 220 kilometers northwest to Phimai, in modern-day Thailand.

Those glory days might never return, but there's cause for hope, nonetheless. Handouts from organizations such as the World Bank and Asian Development Bank are being used to upgrade much of the country's two major arteries, National Routes 5 and 6, into two-lane highways over the next two or three years. "When the roads are fixed up, we could do today's trip in a couple of hours instead of taking all day," says Mony, who hopes easier access to places like Beng Mealea, Preah Vihear and other temple ruins will take pressure off the well-trodden stones of Angkor Wat.

There isn't a soul in sight when we arrive at Beng Mealea and stand openmouthed, taking in this awesome confrontation of history and nature.

Beng Mealea is nearly as big—and impressive—as Angkor Wat, but without the incessant babble of tourists. A sore butt and some car-bound boredom seem a small price for this.

"Do you know," says Mony, breaking the reverie, "that the very roads that made the Angkor empire great led to its downfall?" These ancient superhighways, he explains, allowed Khmer Kings to control tributary states as far away as China's Yunnan province. But when the empire weakened, invaders used those same highways to march to the capital.

I glanced down the red, rutted road, before taking another deep draught of Beng Mealea's solitude. Then I wondered if its ghosts were braced for a fresh invasion.

• By Jason Gagliardi
• Will improved access despoil Angkor's monuments?