Um, yeah. So about that……
I’m hunched unhappily in the corner, as once again I have failed to grasp that I need winter clothing in Asia to counter the frigging air conditioning. I feel like a small, disgruntled animal huddled on my half of the bench, “sleeping”, if that’s what you call being horizontal at 3 AM with your eyes closed. But since I’m shivering there is no sleep, so instead I am lying there and thinking happy thoughts of coffee and mattresses. The bench pokes me in the side, in the back, wherever, so I give up and move to the floor. I’m wearing everything I’ve got, more or less, using my sarong as a blanket and my raincoat as a jacket. As it is not currently raining in the airport, my poor jacket is not particularly effective.
Departure lounges—i.e. couches—are only available to those lucky souls with boarding cards, which we do not have, and so we are forced to spend the happy hours from 2 until 4 AM cold in the corner. “White nights” are always terrible, as the lack of intervening sleep means that it’s all just one super duper unending long day.
Cambodian immigraion is thorough. Arrival card, departure card, health form, customs form, visa application. I know my passport number now by heart, scribble it everywhere, claim not to have foreign currency or swine flu and queue up for the apparently extensive visa process. They employ about fifteen people: one to take the passport, one to open it, one to look at it, one to look at the forms, one to compare the forms to the passport, one to take your money, one to stamp the form, one to stamp the passport, one to stick in the visa, one to stamp it, one to hand it back. Yay for countries with low wages. Somehow we manage to be pretty much the very last people in line at immigration and thus the last people out, where we are greeted by a mob of drivers looking hopeful and holding signs with various names. We are neither Ms Melissa nor Ms Bzewski or whatever else was there, but we did manage to locate the youngish fellow with my friend’s name on his sign. Somewhere since exiting the plane (directly on the tarmac) the sky has fallen in, and a few fat drops turn into an apocalyptic downpour: the world, in fact, might actually be ending if this storm is any judge. The parking lot has turned into a lake and the rain seems to be falling sideways in sheets. Our driver dashes across the parking lot, already completely soaked. We expect him to come back with a car, but to our dismay we see him leaping about in a plastic poncho, trying to secure the side panels on and dry out the inside of his poor tuk tuk.
The ride has to have been one of the more miserable ones we’ve undergone – though considerably more comfortable for us than for our driver. Despite the plastic panels we were still steadily getting soaked. Strong winds buffeted the little trailer. I wondered if we would end up in a ditch some point, and the massive (and very close) lightning made me wonder if a tuk tuk would function as a faraday cage the same way a car does. I grew up in an area with lots of and quite dangerous lightning, and we learned how to tell how far away the lightning is by counting the number of seconds between the flash and the boom. As the speed of sound lags the speed of light, you can calculate that every three seconds is about a kilometer away, and every five seconds a mile. Considering that lightning can easily strike anywhere in a 2-mile (3.2 km) radius, anything less than 10 seconds is both close and dangerous lightning. This was what we like to call 1-second-lightning.
Nevertheless, we made it alive to our guesthouse, a comfortable and well-appointed little place between downtown and Angkor Wat in Siem Reap, serving hot breakfast (mmmm, omlette, yummmm), halfway drinkable coffee, and banana milkshakes. Still recovering from our drive and our night at the airport—I for my part guzzling coffee—we could happily have stayed half the morning there had our airport pickup driver not approached us and suggested we make our way to the temples. Visiting the temples requires some means of transportation: you rent a bike, or most likely, a tuk tuk and driver for the day, who will take you from place to place. Our driver proposed a 3-day tour and a fair price, so we set off.
Liberally quoted from Wikipedia:
The temples of the Angkor area number over one thousand, ranging in scale from nondescript piles of brick rubble scattered through rice fields to the magnificent Angkor Wat, said to be the world's largest single religious monument. Many of the temples at Angkor have been restored, and together they comprise the most significant site of Khmer architecture and have been designated a UNESCO World Heritage site. Visitor numbers approach two million annually.
Angkor wat itself was built for the king Suryavarman II in the early 12th century as his state temple and capital city. As the best-preserved temple at the site, it is the only one to have remained a significant religious centre since its foundation—first Hindu, dedicated to Vishnu, then Buddhist. The temple is the epitome of the high classical style of Khmer architecture. Another famous temple is the temple of Bayon, whose distinctive feature is “the multitude of serene and massive stone faces on the many towers which jut out from the upper terrace and cluster around its central peak. The temple is known also for two impressive sets of bas-reliefs, which present an unusual combination of mythological, historical, and mundane scenes.
Interested parties can follow the history of the period, but the main point is that Angkor was the capital for several centuries, excepting about a hundred years at one point, and that the era spans periods of alternate Hindu and Buddhist dominance. Some temples belong to one faith, others to the other, and some have been converted. Some temples are mountain-temple style, with concentric stacked levels leading to an upper area with multiple shrines; others are more laterally constructed; others are a combination. Based on the style of the columns, the lintels, and the decoration, the temples can be dated to various reigns. Some temples are constructed of brick, others of sandstone, others of limestone.
We started off with the littler temples, which offered the opportunity of clambering about more or less solitary, with perhaps one or two other sweating and red faces visible. The first temple-mount we visited offered supreme views of the bucolic countryside: many people live and work inside the park, raising cattle, cultivating rice, and operating the massive syndicates supplying tourist goods to the little children who hawk them at any opportunity.
In fact, the recurrant theme of our visit was the following: we arrive at any temple in our tuk tuk. Our driver explains which temple it is and where he will wait; meanwhile, an entire pack of women and small children have descended upon us. “Hey lady! You want cold drink? You want scarves? I have lots of colors? Hey lady! Ladyyyyyyyyy! Buy from meeeeeeeeeee!” Tiny children proffer postcards and reed-bracelets, respectively 10 for 1 USD, and they dog our heels like a pack of hungry Chihuahuas. We ignore them and proceed, but they persist: “when you come back, you buy? If you buy, you buy from me!” We suspect this latter promise means something different to them than to us; as we are not buying, it is easy to promise that if we were to buy, we would do so from them. I also met one little girl who could rattle off the same spiel in alternating French and English. Some of the kids will ask where we’re from. One of them, upon hearing I’m American, replied “CapitalWashingtonDCpopulationthreehundredandsixtymillion”. I wanted to test them: “What is the capital of Spain?” I ask, and immediately comes the response: “Madrid!” while another child chants in the background: “Valencia, Barcelona, Bilbao, Malaga, Sevilla….” Ok, let’s think. A hard one: “what is the capital of Latvia?” They seem stumped, then one: “ Riga!” The children don’t learn this in school, they learn it from the tourists. At least they go to school in the morning, even if they are out selling in the afternoon. As soon as you start to talk to them, they drop their schpiel and actually talk to you; still, perhaps I’m cynical, but I fear even this apparent openness is a tactic to win “friends”: all of the sudden, they switch back to “ladyyyyyy! Buy from meeeeeeee!” which followed us everywhere.
One of my favorite temples was a ruined “jungle temple”: a flat-built temple, mostly falling down, and trees growing out of portions of it. And best of all: no one else in sight. The temple itself was huge, with room after room after room, flanked by galleries reminiscent of roman architecture, and beautiful carvings. The temple at Bayon was also magnificent, but full of tourists. Our sunset view turned out to include several hundred other tourists, but was nevertheless beautiful.
Cambodia seems obviously poorer than Thailand, with an obvious lack of 40- and 50-year olds, a multitude of children, and a dearth of future opportunities. Our driver, a guy a little younger than I am, told us that even if you can pay the fees to go to university, there’s no work; sentiments echoed by another guy I met who was looking for work in Dubai or elsewhere in the Gulf. Anywhere where there’s work.
The night markets and old market proved a pleasant change from the aggressive hawkers at the temples; they would come to you only of you expressed obvious interest in their wares, rather than trying to drag you into their shop. They would bargain but with a smile, and if you remember how much you would pay for the same stuff in the US or Europe, you’ll come away satisfied. Cambodia runs a parallel economy: both dollars and real are accepted at more or less the same exchange rate; but the influx of tourists has created tourist prices and a tourist economy separate from that which the locals pay. An excellent curry with rice will cost about $4 in a white-linen restaurant but so will standard “fried noodles with vegetables” or “fried noodles with meat” at the ubiquitous restaurants in the park; the same meal would cost about a fifty cents if you could manage to eat it “on the street”. So where $4 is less than you pay at home, just knowing that they are gouging you sometimes takes away from your appetite. The price-value relationship, therefore, is entirely subjective.
Our last night in Siem Reap, we went to a massive, and I mean massive concert. Cambodia’s “Number 1 singer” was playing in an open-air extravaganza. We rolled in late, which meant that we spent at least half an hour “rolling” in wall-to-wall motorcycles inching forward. Trying to get a tuk tuk through that was an exercise in patience and creativity; traffic congestion was exacerbated by all the people who had despaired of ever getting further and who had parked more or less where they were. Still, we edged the tuk tuk up to where we could at least hear and kinda see the concert, so if worst came to worst we could stay there. We wanted to stay together as a group, so leaving S. with his bike and us girls forging off on our own was out of the question – how would we ever find him again? Still, he parked, and we edged our way into the foray. The place was decked out as if at an amusement park, complete with Ferris wheel and food stalls everywhere. The balloon toss game was apparently also popular, as stalls for that lined the roadway for several hundred yards. B. tried some kind of meat on a stick, and all of us had boiled eggs which had been injected with some kind of pepper sauce (quite excellent) and sugarcane juice, plus traditional merengue pastries similar to those I knew in Thailand, consisting of a thin crepe-like batter cooked into small pancakes, spread with sugared egg white and cooked till crispy. We also acquired a groupie, a little boy who was fascinated with us and insisted on having his picture taken with us. I think many Cambodians don’t understand the ‘point’ of taking pictures – I think they think it’s just to take a picture and then see yourself on the screen, rather than for us touries to keep and look at later.
More to come…. I hope….
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