Angkor Management
Determined to squeeze in as many sites as possible, my brother Daniel and I took a plane from Thailand to the Kingdom of Cambodia on November 17 and spent one night there, in the Siem Reap province, home of the spectacular temples of the ancient Khmer people.
We got off the plane in the late afternoon and walked across the tarmac in humid weather and verdant surroundings similar to Hawaii’s. We got in a taxi and began chatting with our driver, a young, earnest guy who struggled with English but made himself understood. Eager to turn a buck, he stuck to us for the next day-and-a-half like our sweat-soaked shirts. Before we even settled on a hotel, he took us to the ruins of Angkor Wat, the most famous of the ancient Khmer temples, in order to ensure we’d see it during sunset.
Angkor Wat is a sizeable temple complex and not a single structure. Built in the 12th century, it was originally a Hindu temple dedicated to Vishnu, but later it became a Buddhist monastery. Many of the over 100 Ankgorian monuments in the area, built during the Khmer Empire (9th to 15th centuries), are likewise Hindu-Buddhist hybrids. They were erected by kings believed to be divine as an assertion of that divinity. Siam sacked them in the 15th century, then they were lost to the jungles. But in the 19th century, they were rediscovered by the West.
Incidentally, the Khmer Empire has no real connection to the evil Khmer Rouge group led by Pol Pot in the 1970s and until Pol Pot’s death in 1998. He and his communist guerillas relocated the entire population of Phnom Penh, Cambodia’s capitol, to the countryside to become peasants working the land, consistent with the communist vision of utopia. But worse, from 1975 to 1979, one to three million Khmer people died at the hands of the Khmer Rouge as part of a deliberate mass extermination of intellectuals, writers, teachers–anyone educated or who looked educated (including people who merely wore glasses!)–and their families, for fear that such people would undermine communist ambitions. But this has nothing to do with the ancient temples.
To get to Angkor Wat’s main gate, which lookes like a temple in itself and sits across a wide moat, you walk across an expansive bridge made of large, black stone blocks. Then you ascend one of two sets of steep stairs and enter a dark chamber within the gate edifice. In the middle is a squatting, golden Hindu idol encircled by incense sticks. A rear doorway opens up to a huge grassy area with a 300 meter long stone block causeway in the middle continuing on into the distance. At the far end is the main temple.
As we walked toward it, a high-pitched tone filled the air, presumably the chorus of a million insects in the surrounding jungle. It wasn’t a multi-syllabic sound, like crickets would make, but a single, sustained note. My brother thinks it was in the key of E, but whatever it was, it gave the site a foreboding air, like the mood music in a suspense film just before something big happens. Meanwhile, in the dwindling sunlight, the temple blackened into a silhouette of jagged conical towers, built to look like lotus buds. We weren’t able to go inside then due to the lateness of the hour. So we walked all the way around to the back. We came upon the floodlit set of some sort of production of an historical reenactment, with amplified voiceover narration accompanying a team of actors performing to the bullhorn commands of a director. After watching for a while, we strolled back around the temple and began the long walk back toward the main gate.
By now it was pitch black. The complex had officially closed, so an attendant redirected us to a dirt path beside the huge, grassy field. No one else was around. The dirt path was not lit. Bugs collided with our faces and flew into our mouths. But our bigger concern had to do with warnings we had read. Cambodia is one of the poorest countries in the world. Its history is violent and it has a reputation of being a culture of guns. The police cannot be trusted. The guidebooks suggest leaving your passports in a hotel safe and carrying only a small amount of money and taking a cab instead of walking and not resisting if attacked. This was on our minds. So, we adopted the strides of men who must not be reckoned with. And as we walked, we prayed out loud for God’s protection. And He gave it. We didn’t encounter a soul. We passed the gate and crossed the bridge, relieved and thankful. The bugs didn’t fare as well. The ones we couldn’t spit out met their demise in our mouths.
We found our loyal taxi driver waiting for us across the bridge. He drove us to an acceptable hotel and agreed to retrieve us early the next morning to take us back to Angkor Wat for the sunrise.
That night, Daniel and I ate at a place called the Dead Fish Tower, a tall, warehouse-sized building with an interior made up of small, open terraces, each one supporting an eating nook, something akin to a huge treehouse. We climbed one set of stairs, removed our shoes, sat on the floor and feasted on a variety of Khmer dishes. An Australian guy played an acoustic guitar on a nearby terrace. After the meal, we visited the crocodile pit downstairs. Near it was a pond with a huge, eel-like fish and a sign that read “fish bites.”
The next day we returned to Angkor Wat. Scores of others, armed with cameras, had the same idea. After taking in the sunrise, we wandered in and around the main temple, studying sandstone etchings of celestial Hindu nymphs and marveling at the bizarrely shaped structures.
From there, our driver took us to a place for breakfast. Whenever we were on foot, people, mostly big-eyed children, accosted us with trinkets and books and drinks for sale. Saying “no” was difficult.
Next up was Angkor Thom, another walled temple complex, built in the late 12 century and early 13th. The most noteworthy building within it is the Bayon, with its four giant smiling faces carved into the sides of its central tower. Nearby, we watched some monkeys agitate some dogs and some local children harass the monkeys. Buddhist monks set up banners and chairs in preparation for an annual festival. One young monk explained that he and the others would soon receive new robes as part of the celebration. Two elephants ambled by not far from us.
We climbed onto and through several other temples in the very hot sun, dripping with sweat. Sitting in the cool cab and chugging bottled water came as a relief. We stopped at another temple–Ta Phrom–unique in that trees grew up out of the ruins, their branches resembling giant fingers gripping the walls from above.
After lunch, our driver took us to Tonle Sap, a lake, for a boat ride. He told us the scenery would be beautiful, worthy of many photographs. I imagined a placid, tropical lake surrounded by lush jungle foliage. Instead, the captain and second mate, a teenager and preteen boy, respectively, took us through narrow inlets lined with many crude stilted shacks and bobbing houseboats. Their occupants busied themselves with daily chores on the decks, mending nets or sorting produce, or just relaxed on swings. We were close enough to them to feel intrusive. But they didn’t seem to mind. Some of the children waved to us. Periodically, floating vendors would subside up to our boat and offer things like bananas and cold drinks for sale. We stopped at a three-story barge and sampled snake jerky. The entire scene looked like something from a World Vision ad or National Geographic. In that sense our driver had been correct–though not what we’d expected, the lake was beautiful and, indeed, worthy of many photographs.
Feeling like photojournalists, Daniel and I got back into the taxi and rode to the airport, where we said goodbye to our faithful cabbie, to Siem Reap, to Cambodia. Then we flew to Vietnam.
Tags: Angkor Wat, Cambodia, Khmer, Siem Reap, Southeast Asia, Travel
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