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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