CAMBODIA’S  LEADING HOTEL

Prince D’Angkor Hotel and Spa won the ‘Cambodia’s Leading Hotel’ title at the World Travel Awards held at the Intercontinental Hotel in Singapore last Thursday night in partnership with the Singapore Tourism Board and travel trade festival TravelRave 2012.

The hotel’s public relations executive Laura Dávila told Man About, “This ceremony is known the Oscar of the hospitality business and we were nominated together with other high class hotels of Cambodia. It is indeed an honour for us to win this award and we want to thank everyone that supported us and helped us win this award.

This is the second year in a row that the hotel won this title, claiming it for the first time in 2011.

Laura Dávila  said, “Prince D'Angkor Hotel  and Spa is well known because it’s friendly staff, best location and quality in all services,  and winning for the second year makes us want to continue to work hard and give our guest a great time in our hotel.”

Before Prince D’Angkor’s ascendancy,   the title had gone to Le Meridien Angkor four years in a row, from 2007 to 2010.

This year Le Meridien won the title of ‘Cambodia’s Leading Spa Resort,’ while Angkor Century Resort and Spa won the title of ‘Cambodia’s Leading Resort,’ a surprise win to say the least.

NEWLY NOTED ANGKORIAN CANALS

Conventional cable TV ‘wisdom’ is that anything to do with ancient monuments that’s monumentally difficult to achieve by today’s standards, such as moving massive chunks of stone, is the work of aliens.

There have been suggestions that aliens must have been complicit in the construction of Angkor, because how else could such large blocks of stone have been moved by the ancients?

And what a beaut notion it is. But science has yet again stood in the way of the alien theorists. On October 12, Science magazine posited, “Scientists have long known that the sandstone blocks used to

build the famous Angkor Wat temple and other monuments… came from quarries at the foot of a sacred mountain nearby. But how did the 5 million to 10 million blocks, some weighing more than 1500 kilograms, reach Angkor?”

A report in the Journal of Archaeological Science claims that archaeologists have uncovered traces of canals that suggest the sandstone blocks took a far shorter route than previously thought.

The sandstone blocks originate from quarries at Mount Kulen. The Journal says, “It was thought they were taken 35 kilometres along a canal to Tonlé Sap Lake, rafted another 35 km along the lake, then taken up the Siem Reap River for 15 km, against the current.”

Science reports that when researchers examined Google Earth maps of the area, they saw lines that looked like a transportation network. Field surveys revealed that the lines are a series of canals, connected by short stretches of road and river, which  lead from the quarries straight to Angkor. The roads and canals would have carried blocks from the 9th century to the 13th century on a journey of 37 kilometers or so.

Science noted, “The researchers don't know whether the blocks would've floated down the canals on rafts or via some other method.” No mention of aliens, but.