Kbal Spean alias The River of Thousand Lingas

Sometimes, one knows more about distant places than one knows about one’s own native land. That is what happened to us.

We had NEVER heard of a river on the banks of which, there are thousands of Lingas (Phallic symbols) carved in stone, but I came to know about it through the Internet AFTER we had visited Kbal Spean in Cambodia, and it amuses me to think that this original River of Thousand Lingas is less than 100 miles away from my own native town Belgaum, at Sirsi, and I had never heard or read about it.

No, we are not particularly ignorant or stupid, but we did not have Internet in those days.

Internet is a wonderful thing. I think, the spread of knowledge among common people was made possible through two great inventions. Printing press was one and the Internet is the second.

So, there are at least TWO rivers of Thousand Lingas in this world. One is at Sirsi and the other is at Kbal Spean in Cambodia, and we have seen the one at Kbal Spean, but not yet seen the one in our own backyard, so to say.

I read about Kbal Spean when I started researching about Cambodia on the internet and it immediately caught my fancy. Imagine a river, which flows over a thousand lingas. I mean the lingas are carved, not on the banks of river, but on the bed of the river. How they could have done it? The carvers must have been expert divers too. Did they dive in the river with chisel and hammer, put a stroke or two on the stone of the river bed and came up for a deep breath, before diving in again?

Here, my concept of a ‘river’ was at fault.  Our Krishna, Koyna, Godavari, Kaveri, Kshipra may not stand comparison with Mississippi or Amazon, or even with North Indian rivers like Ganga, Sindhu, Brahmaputra, but they are no mean rivers. The “river” at Kbal Spean is just a brook, 10 feet wide and 3 feet deep. The king Jayavarman II had dammed and turned it aside temporarily when he decided to carve those lingas on the riverbed. Diving skills were not included in the job description of the carvers.

The river water flowing over these lingas was supposed to bring fertility to the region.

Note: Kbal Spean (Kapol Span?) means HeadBridge, a natural bridge over the river.

This site and the nearby Phnom Kulen (They used to call it Mahendragiri once) which are deep in the jungle, are recently opened up for tourists. Just a few years back, the area was under the control of Khmer Rouge, and it was impossible to visit it that time. Our guide told us -- and we also could see it for ourselves -- that there were more people in the villages around there with a limb or two missing, than a normal population would warrant. That was because of the landmines still left in the jungle. The beads/fans/wood carvings sellers were almost all handicapped, (but they were not beggars. They were eking out a living with dignity) so we ended up buying things that we absolutely did not need and have never used afterwards.

I may disagree that Kbal Spean is a river, but it is a very charming brook all the same and as we rolled up our jeans and stepped in the water, our childhood’s pure delights came flooding back into the memory. Hand in hand, we walked along the riverbed while soft mud oozed through our toes, the reeds swayed along the riverbanks, crickets chirped in the trees and a frog croaked upstream. We passed a cursory glance over those lingas, saw a few carved figures of gods on the stones and proceeded to the source of the river.

The river has its source in a pit about 4 feet by 4 feet and about four feet deep, filled with crystal clear water. No wonder the Cambodians consider this river sacred. Its source is a mineral spring. I do not know what mineral was present in the water, but it looked as though the pit was illuminated with electric blue light from within, while golden green shafts of sunlight fell on it in the early morning. At regular intervals of 4-5 minutes, the white sand at the bottom of the pit gave a gentle hiccup and blew up in a tiny geyser, bringing in fresh water from the ground into the pit, which immediately bubbled up and overflowed into the river. The iridescent sand grains slowly settled on the bottom again.

It was an enchanted place.

Some 4-5 small girls from the nearby village were carefully filling plastic water bottles from the spring. They would sell these bottles later as ‘Mineral water’ in the stalls to the tourists. They were not wrong either. It WAS mineral water and pure unadulterated at that.

Downstream, the river cascades about 4 meters in a waterfall and then another 30 meters in another waterfall. It is a nice picnic spot.

The number of step I would have to climb to see the Giant Buddha daunted me. Moreover, we had an overload of Buddha statues for the four preceding days in Thailand, so we opted out of seeing the Buddha.

So, the color of Siem Reap is also the electric blue of that magical pit of the mineral spring.