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From memory (at) blank.org Thu May 17 10:53:24 2001
Date: Wed, 16 May 2001 09:19:45 GMT
From: "Nathan J. Mehl, Road Worrier" <memory (at) blank.org>
To: memory (at) blank.org


Bangkok, 3:30pm.  I am in a tiny internet cafe, completely surrounded by
energetic Thai 9-year-olds who are completely kicking ass at CounterStrike.
 (For the non-gamers in the audience: the world's most popular online
first-person-perspective game.)  I may never play CS again: the suspicion
that it may be one of these kids handing my head to me will be almost
overpowering.

Anyways.  Cambodia.  My apologies in advance if this is disjointed: I'm
suffering from a mild case of traveller's stomach at the moment, and have
that spacey "too many time zones in too many days" feeling.

My first tipoff that we were about to disappear down the rabbit hole came
in the Singapore airport, when I sauntered up to the amex counter, and
asked to change my Singapore Dollars into Cambodian Riel.  The counterwoman
gave me a stunning example of the "I'm too polite to point out what a moron
you are" look, and flatly told me that they didn't carry Riel, and that I
should just exchange into american dollars.

Measured in objective terms, the flight from Singapore to Siem Reap is just
a hair under 90 minutes.  In somewhat more subjective terms, it can be seen
as taking just about 200 years...backwards.  Singapore's international
airport is a glittering, pristine, spotless example of inspired
architecture and engineering.  The Siem Reap airport, from the overhead
view, appears to consist of two smallish buildings and a few quonset huts. 
Oh, and a fully armed Apache gunship.

The overall theme here: we are not in Kansas any more.

Quick digression: the last 50 years of Cambodian history read like one of
those Jacobean revenge tragedies where so many people are dead by the end
of Act II that you're not entirely clear on who, exactly, the play is
supposed to be about any more.  The reader's digest version goes like this:
Richard Nixon and Henry Kissenger decide to bomb them most of the way back
to the stone age.  After that little black op ended, Pol Pot decided that
the stone age looked like a pretty nifty place, and the Khmer Rouge did
their damndes to drag the country the rest of the way there, by means of
killing anybody who didn't feel like doing a good appoximation of a 16th
century Khmer farmer (which was damn near everyone).  A few years later,
the Vietnamese invaded and then things got really messy, with the
Vietnamese, the Khmer Rouge and a ragtag group of nationalist and royalist
concerns fighting back and forth over the ability to rule what looked less
like a country with every year.  About three years ago, Pol Pot made his
one useful contribution to the process by finally dying, and a UN-backed
royalist consortium has been more or less in charge of the place ever
since.

What there is of it, anyways.

Cambodia, right now, is a landscape of need.  It's hard to avoid the
temptation to make itemized lists of the things the country needs as you
drive or walk through it: enclosed sewers.  competant dental care. 
hospitals.  reliable electricity.  a few less land mines in the rice
fields, eh?  some attention from the superpowers other than arming one side
or another.  a working phone system.  hard currency.  did we mention about
the land mines?  It's a little overpowering.

They need, basically, everything.  And they have?  Well, themselves: a
people for whom the appelation of "resiliant" is woefully inadequate and
tastes of ashes.  And they have Angkor.

Oh boy do they have Angkor.  Not being stupid, they're milking it for all
that it is worth.  They're building hotels by the twelve-pack.  Every last
menu has been translated into english and japanese, and dollars are the
currency of the land here -- good luck even finding a price marked in Riel.
 We saw two schools of Hotel Management just ambling around Siem Reap, and
according to our guide most people go to private school for just that
purpose.

Driving into Siem Reap, on a pockmarked, only partially paved road that
turns out to be the main national highway, the landscape is this:
aluminum-sided hut with grass roof, another hut, open sewer, FIVE-STAR
HOTEL, another hotel, a hotel under construction, three more huts, rice
field, several cows grazing, a spotless western-style gas station, and
another hotel under construction.  Repeat until you get to the town square.
 Basically, every available bit of real estate in Siem Reap is being
converted into either hotels or restaurants catering to the tourists, and
it's not hard to understand why: Angkor tourism accounts for the second
largest percentage of Cambodia's GDP, just behind foreign aid.

We were put up at the Angkor Hotel, which is a 4-star place about 5 minutes
away from the center of town.  Spotlessly clean, well-kept.  In the back
was a small cage with a sunbear that the owner had adopted to keep it from
being eaten or rendered for Chinese medicine (or so the sign said anyways).
 The contrast between the hotel and its immediate neighbors (see above)
only added to the down-the-rabbit-hole feeling, but you can't really hold
that against it. :)

We were met at the airport by our guide, Mr. Li, a young Khmer man who was
with us most of the time.  (Foreign tourists are required to have a guide
when visiting the temples.)  He was very friendly, but had only been
studying English for 3 years, so a bit hard to understand at times.  Also,
Cambodian history had a way of turning innocent conversational gambits into
black holes: when we asked (in the middle of a conversation about
entertainment in Siem Reap) who his favorite Cambodian singer was, he
relied that there weren't very many popular Khmer singers these days, since
the Khmer Rouge executed all of the artists: his favorite was one who had
perished in a death camp, and written his last songs there.

Anyways, Angkor.  The temples are all that and a bag of ferrets too.  There
are about a dozen of them scattered throughout the area, and we spent most
of our time in Cambodia poking through them.  I took nearly 300 photographs
there, and I'm loath to try to describe them textually.  The highlight for
me was a temple at Angkor Thom, where huge banyan (?) trees had actually
grown through the temple itself, their taproots cascading over the ruined
walls and through piles of rubble.

The most beautiful, and interesting parts of the temples are the bas
reliefs, which show graphic evidence of the way Cambodia stood directly on
the shifting demarcation line between Hinduism and Buddhism: different
Khmer kings would order temples built venerating the Buddha or the Hindu
trinity...or just as often a politically practical mixture of the two.  In
a number of cases, icons of one religion were transformed into icons of the
other, most notably in the case of a number of images of the Buddha that
had been transformed (by some none-to-subtle carving) into Hindu Lingams.

On the second day, our guide took us to the top of the highest temple,
situated on the highest point in the area, somewhat optimistically referred
to as a mountain but really just a promonatory, where we could look down at
the Angkor Wat complex while the sun set.  Elephant rides were offered up
and down the mountain, but we elected to hoof it, carefully picking our way
around the rather fragrant elephant dung. :)

Earlier that afternoon, we'd gone into the center of town to get lunch and
poke through the open market.  Lunch was good, but in retrospect we should
have eaten lunch after the market and not before: the market was enclosed,
and the meat-selling section on a hot-season afternoon was kinda
overpowering to anybody not used to it.

Food, on the whole, was a mixed bag.  We had three meals, and the first one
was by far the best.  ("Angkor Sour", apparently too new to be mentioned in
the guidebooks.)  The worst was the meal on the flight back to Bangkok,
which was a bizarre attempt at lasagne that counts as the single worst
thing I have ever eaten on a plane.  There wasn't much of the easily
acquired street food that I enjoyed in China: all of the onstreet
restaurants cater to tourists, and the local establishments don't seem to
make themselves apparent.

Other random impressions: the afternoon we wandered the city center, we
passed a Budhist funeral procession, with monks being drawn on carts by
uniformed schoolchildren.  Nearly getting run off the road by an
out-of-control scooter as we walked in almost complete darkness to try to
find dinner on our last night.  A small kitten in the restaurant we
eventually found playing with a very, very large cockroach.  (We kept
urging it to kill and eat the damn thing, but it was a very young kitten
and hadn't quite gotten that part of it yet.)  At a Buddhist monestary, a
shrine containing a small mountain of skulls and other bones found in
nearby fields where the Khmer Rouge had executed people.  The girl at a
stoneworking school moving about on her knees for lack of feet.

I'm very glad that I went to Cambodia, but I'm not sure that I could say I
"enjoyed" it in any straightforward sense.  The primary feeling I came away
with was anxiety: I really, really, really hope that they make it, but
there are so many things that could go wrong.  Right now, Angkor is
experiencing a tourism boom, but such things are transient, and if the
hotels start sitting empty most of the time, I have no idea what would fill
the void, and the hotels appear to drive just about every aspect of the
local economy: people come from all over the country to try to get jobs
working in them and send money home to their family.  Even the Les
Chantiers Ecoles, the handicrafts training institute we visited on our last
day (which trains children from the countryside in silk weaving, stone and
wood carving and other local arts that the Khmer Rouge tried diligently to
wipe out) seems to be getting most of its orders for decorations
(sculptures, balustrades, ornaments) for the hotels.

I wish them luck.  And, um, please donate to land mine clearance charities.
 (The Halo Trust, www.halotrust.org, appears to be the most active one in
the Siem Reap area.)  They could use a lot less of the damn things.

We spent our last few hours in Cambodia hanging around the single waiting
room in the airport, which was filled mostly with european backpackers,
plus one extremely stylish-looking Mexican couple apparently on their
honeymoon.  The flight to Bangkok took about 90 minutes (or about 200 years
forward), and when we got out of the terminal and stood on the sidewalk of
the pickup area, I heard the overwhelming roar of a city: engines, exhaust,
screaming street vendors, horns and jackhammers...and nearly kissed the
ground.

More on Bangkok later.

-n