Cambodia

Thus one actually goes after Vietnam but I can't figure out how to move it.

I had a once of a lifetime opportunity to travel to Cambodia for three days. I flew from Ho Chi Minh airport to Siem Reap Cambodia. Ho Chi Minh airport looked identical to SFO International but shinier and with fewer people. The Siem Reap airport looked like any small airport in Hawaii oddly enough. Parts of downtown Siem Reap look a bit like a beach town downtown with all the travelers coming through, ice cream shops and Internet cafes. Much of the Siem Reap on the way to the main entrance is either dirt roads and jungle or rows and rows of new condos and hotels. There is so much construction going on. In five years it’s going to be filled with sterile new hotels and condos. We did a sunset tour of Angkor Wat. Angkor Wat is a huge temple complex built and rebuilt between the 7 and 11 century as a Hindu then a Buddhist religious and administrative site at the height of the Khmer civilization. I believe during the 11th century it was the largest city in the world. After too many invasions from Thailand and wear on the temples the king moved the capital to the current capital of Phnom Penh. After this the jungle retook the complex until the arrival of the French. It’s unbelievably surreal to wander this site. You can basically walk on anything and touch anything in this massive complex. At first I thought it was smaller than I thought it would be with only the famous site of the main temple with its five towers but the next day I realized that I was only at the west gate as in 1 out of 4 sections of the complex. It’s really interesting because many Cambodian 18 year old men still have to become Buddhist monks so there are still many saffron robed monks wandering the temple.


At night we went to a cultural show and dinner in which dancers performed. They dressed and performed like the pictures I’ve seen of Thai or Balinese dancing and the food it similar to Vietnamese and Chinese. The food in general is amazing. I could eat it almost everyday for lunch and dinner. At breakfast they eat things that just seem so foreign to me that are fun to eat once in awhile but I couldn’t want it everyday. At breakfast they drink sweet coffee or tea with a soup made of broth, rice noodles, lemon grass, bean sprouts, maybe stir-fried beef and a dumpling (with additions like lime, chili or other spices) or they have what we would think of as a curry with rice and maybe chicken. The fresh spring rolls are amazing here though they are seriously lacking in the dessert department. Every time we ate out dessert consisted of a gelatin cube thing- like squares of sturdier Jell-O flavored with fruits or I didn’t know what (one of the signs said Grass Jelly and it was green and did have a grassy flavor). At a buffet there might be 5 or 6 varieties of these gelatin products!

The next day, I can’t believe I even get to write this but I watched the sunrise over Angkor Wat. Later in the Angkor City section of the complex I went to the Bayon Temple of the complex, which is an edifice of 54 towers, each with the four faces of Buddha carved on them and bas-relief events. Every corner of every wall is carved with dancers, temple scenes, ships, animals, market scenes, and everything else imaginable. While staring at the carving and trying to sneakily take a picture of some nearby monks one of the monks comes up to me and does the universal hand motions for “can I take a picture with you?”so I got someone to take a picture for my camera too. After taking a picture with one of the monks the monk taking the picture with the digital camera also “asked”if we could take a picture! In a lot of the shops here women and children have petted and pulled my hair while one of my friends whose parents are from Ghana got legitimately stared at and whenever she made eye contact with anyone they started giggling hysterically. We wander tons of temple sites for the rest of the day. At the Elephant Walk you can walk across the pavilion the king sat on to watch performances and parades. Across from where he sat there are 5 carved towers, which they used to put rope between and have trapeze acts perform. At the Leper Terrance a king who prayed have his leprosy curved built a temple to thank the gods and the bas relieves often have three levels with get of the figures progressively going through the stages of leprosy carved into the stone! Another site used to be a university for the Buddhist monks while another was a hospital with a man made pond in the middle and in the four corners are altars for lack of a better world to the four main elements. So when you were diagnosed with an illness it meant one of your elements were out of order so you would then go pray or bathe in that element’s section. At sunset we climbed to the top of this huge temple in the jungle and watched the sun set with the Thai border behind us and the main 5-towered Angkor Wat temple complex in front of us. Once you get away from the main famous temple the number of people decreases so you really feel like it’s your own private adventure. At night we went into Siem Reap to the night market, which was really fun except for the bargaining which for me is kind of stressful and I’m not very good at it.

At the temples near the entrance there are musicians playing traditional music who are land mine victims. There are still so many landmines in Cambodia and most people are so poor that many try to find and take apart landmines to sell for scrap metal. An unfortunate irony is that the very dangerous scrap metal from the landmines (many of which haven’t detonated yet) is then sold and smuggled across the Thai border where it is converted into steel, which is then resold to build the new hotels and condos in Cambodia. There are many children and women selling tourist things at these sites but since most of the families can’t farm their land in order to make way for the tour buses and the children go to school in shifts and sell souvenirs in the off time. The poverty here was so different than India for example because I almost felt more sympathetic towards the Cambodians. In India there was more a feeling that the social structure and society were to blame for the massive poverty but in Cambodia I felt worse almost for the people because of the American role in the instability extending the Viet Nam War into the region (more bombs were dropped in the country of Cambodia than were dropped on all of Europe during WWII) and the horrors of the Poi Pot / Khmer Rouge Regime who killed between 1 million and 3 million of its own people. There is a greater sense here that the poor and underprivileged Cambodians are working towards a solution- the children go to school, people try to learn English, people make crafts to sell, farmers try to clear the land… Our tour guide for example was orphaned at age 7 when the Khmer Rouge killed both his parents one night. In the orphanage he started to teach himself English and when he was 18 he became a monk (which he said was a way to honor his dead parents). Now he is a teacher and a tour guide in addition to volunteering at orphanages. His wife while pregnant was hit by a motorcycle and though the baby survived his wife is bedridden while he tries to save the money for her operation. The sheer pride he has in his family and his drive to provide a better life for his family was so inspiring. He said he wanted his daughter (who he intentionally gave the American name Jamie) to become a public school teacher because even though it doesn’t pay well he wants he to be able to help more Cambodians. He never told his life story or current problems as a way to gain sympathy but rather as a matter of fact account of the lives of many Cambodians. I felt very proud of my fellow students and faculty members (the 50 of us on the trip) in one day raised $1300 in cash to completely pay for his wife’s operation. The operation cost $900 but for comparison value the guide’s rent for a single room apartment is $80 a month. The cautious optimism and “pull yourself up by your boot straps”idea were prevalent in many Cambodians.

The second largest freshwater lake in the world (after Lake Baikal which is mostly frozen in Russia) is the Tonlé Sap in Cambodia. In the morning we took a boat trip up the lake to visit the floating villages of the Vietnamese and Cambodians living on pontoon boats and structures. All along the banks are rows of homes and shops. The buildings aren’t like the houseboats you see in San Francisco or vacation houseboats- they are all one story and still very mobile. Most are painted a cheery blue color and have a “porch”in front they use to farm fish on and in front some of the houses had large pots of chrysanthemums. Churches, a police station, grocery stores, restaurants and even a billiard hall and a basketball court line float on the water. Women in boats go “door to door”selling groceries and we even saw the Cambodia water version of a U-Haul moving one of the houses up the water. One of coolest sites we saw in Cambodia was later that day when we went to Ta Prohm know for it’s eerie atmosphere result from the encroaching jungle and more importantly as the main filming location for Tomb Raider! Huge trees grow up, over and through the abandoned temple. The temples here aren’t like Christian churches or synagogues or mosques but rather tend to be many series of small rooms, tower and hallways in which to pray and meditate hence it’s a very individual type religious observation. Especially at this temple there is a feeling of being out of the ordinary climbing on 900 hundred year old temples that are intertwined with trees easily 100-200 feet high out in the middle of the jungle with the smell of burning incense and the grass smell from the dense vegetation and the strangest high pitched noise from the insects and the faint sound of string instruments and drums from the landmine victims. As I said- surreal but amazing.