Angkor Wat, Zip-lining and the Art of Waiting: Back in Cambodia
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My first trip to Cambodia was in 2011, on a backpacking trip through Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos with my university friends after we graduated. In January 2014, I went back for a short holiday.
This post is about two things from that second trip. One is the temples of Angkor, which are as big as everyone says. The other is a line from Jesse Livermore about waiting, which I wrote about after this trip and still teach today.
Why go back to Cambodia?
Most places I visit once. Cambodia got a second trip.
It helps that Siem Reap, the town next to the temples, is a short flight from Singapore. You can do Angkor properly in a long weekend, which makes it one of the easiest big sights in the world to reach from here.
How big is Angkor, really?
Bigger than a single temple, which is the first thing most people get wrong. Angkor Wat is the famous one, the temple on Cambodia’s flag. It was built in the early 12th century under King Suryavarman II, first as a Hindu temple to Vishnu, and later it became Buddhist. It is often called the largest religious monument in the world.
But Angkor Wat is only one building in a park of about 400 square kilometres, with hundreds of temples spread through the forest. Two more are worth the trip on their own. The Bayon, in the old walled city of Angkor Thom, has over 200 giant stone faces smiling down at you from its towers. And Ta Prohm has been left half to the jungle, with tree roots pouring over the walls, which is why it ended up in Tomb Raider.
Most visitors hire a tuk-tuk driver for the day and work around the temples in a loop, starting at Angkor Wat before dawn and finishing at the Bayon or Ta Prohm once the heat sets in. That loop is known as the small circuit. It is hot work.
What is zip-lining at Angkor like?
The other half of the trip was a lot less spiritual. I went zip-lining at Angkor Zipline, a course of lines and platforms strung through the forest canopy inside the Angkor park.
It is a good way to break up a temple trip. After 2 or 3 days of stone and heat, flying over the trees is a very different way to see the same forest.
What does a temple trip have to do with trading?
Here is the lesson I wrote about after this trip. In trading, the less action you take, the better you tend to do. More trading does not mean more profits.
Jesse Livermore put it best, in the 1923 book about his career, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator: “It never was my thinking that made the big money for me. It always was my sitting.”
Do note what Livermore meant by sitting. It means holding a position that is already working, and letting it do its job, rather than jumping in and out on every small move. It is easy to read “sit tight” as permission to wait forever before taking any trade, and that is a different habit altogether. Trading is 99% waiting and 1% action, and the waiting Livermore meant happens after you are in.
The hard part is the gaps between good setups, when you are bored, the screen is right there, and a small move looks like it might be the start of something big. That is when people trade too much.
A holiday forces that lesson on you. You cannot watch every tick from the top of a temple, so the waiting happens whether you like it or not.
If you want to go deeper on Livermore, I wrote about his trading tips here.
How does the trading fit in now?
These days the routine is about 15 minutes a day, wherever I am.
I wrote up how it works, the watchlist, the alerts and the time zones, in how I trade while travelling. I wrote about a short trip to Johor the same year, too.
What helps if you are planning Angkor?
If you are planning Angkor, three small things help. Go between November and January, when it is dry and a little cooler. Buy a multi-day pass rather than a single day, because one day is barely enough for Angkor Wat itself. And start at sunrise, when the light is soft and the crowds and the heat have not arrived yet.
Have you been to Angkor, or is it still on your list? And which temple would you see first? Let me know in the comments.
All my other trips are on the travel log, country by country, and more photos are on Instagram, @iamrecneps.
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