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Published: April 7th 2008
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Today was our day to see Angkor Wat! We set off from the hotel at 7:30 with a guide and a driver in a dusty little Toyota Camry with weak air conditioning and a tendency to overheat. (Okay, I’m exaggerating a little. It only overheated once.) We drove 15 minutes or so to Angkor Wat, which I won’t describe in great detail - you can read all about it in books or online, and it is an amazing sight. It was hot and busy, full of groups of Korean tourists in matching yellow visors being led by megaphone-waving tour guides. (“Koreans always loud,” said our guide.) We also ran into some of our fellow passengers from the ship, looking hot and sweaty themselves and trailing behind their own guide. (It must have really been a struggle for some of the older members of the group to scale the steep stone stairs and step through doorways with high thresholds and low ceilings.)
It was nice to have a guide to ourselves, and he took great pains to explain the significance of all that we were seeing, which was lovely at times, but at other times we wished for the chance
just to wander at our own pace and in the direction of our own choosing. I suppose we could have told him so - after all, we were paying him and could have asked for what we wanted - but he seemed so earnest and eager to educate us that we followed along obediently. Of course, some of the background was very interesting, but some was a bit hard to understand because his accent and sentence structure. He kept referring to “Thousand Calorie Buddha” which had me a bit confused until I realized he meant “Thousand Buddha Gallery.”
From Angkor Wat (the largest temple), we drove a few more minutes to Angkor Thom, a bigger complex with several significant temples within its walls. At one point in time (I’m afraid I’ve forgotten the dates, but after all, that’s what Google is for) a million people lived within the Angkor Thom complex. Our favorite temple here was Bayon, which originally had 54 towers, each with four large stone faces, each looking in a different direction. Many of the faces are still easily visible, and our guide positioned us so he could take photos with each of nose-to-nose with one of
the faces in the background.
It was quite interesting to imagine the state of these temples when Henri Mahout came across them in the nineteenth century completely overgrown by jungle. Now they are in process of restoration in some areas, with wide dirt roads making access easy for both tourists and the dozens of tchotchke-selling vendors and kids hawking postcards and straw hats and bracelets. The kids have an interesting sales tactic beyond the usual approach of waving merchandise and calling, “You buy, Madame?” If they can get you to pay the least attention to them, they will ask, “
Where you from?” When you tell them the U.S., they begin chanting, “
The capital of US is Washington DC. What state you from? If I tell you capital of your state, you buy from me?” They give it a good shot if you let them, but none of them knew the capital of Vermont - they universally guessed “Vermont City” with a grin and a hopeful look. (They did know several state capitals though.) One of them then told me, “
If you know capital of Madasgascar, I give you good price.” And damn it, I didn’t know the capital of Madagascar, so no special price just for me this time. Next time, I’ll study up before I come here.
We stopped and ate a picnic lunch packed for us by the hotel and watched the long row of vendors selling food and merchandise while their children ran around barefoot and played games. There were no GameBoys, no iPods, no balls or bats or plastic toys to be seen, but we watched while a group of kids played an elaborate game that involved throwing some kind of nuts or small stones at a piece of wood, cheering and laughing. Other kids and even a few adults joined in over the course of a half hour or so, briefly putting down their merchandise to take a turn or two before getting back to work. It was refreshing to see kids being kids in the most imaginative and playful sense - making fun out of found objects and each other’s company.
By 1:00, we were far too hot and tired to continue on to the third temple we had planned to see, so we headed back to the hotel for showers and cold drinks and time spent inside with the air conditioning on. The heat of the day can really wipe us out, and it was wonderful to just lie around, half-dozing or reading or sorting some of the photos. After writing for a bit, I went off in search of working wifi (I still can’t connect to our hotel wifi) and found it downtown at the Blue Pumpkin Café and Lounge. Their second floor lounge had a window seat available with a view of the street, and fast internet, and $3 margaritas, so I was completely content for a couple of hours.
By the time I got back to the hotel, it was 8:00 or so and mom was half asleep with her book. She looked a little under the weather, and we decided she probably wasn’t drinking enough - dehydration really knocks her out, and we have to drink A LOT during the day. We compared notes and realized I had consumed at least twice as much liquid as she had, so she agreed to have a beer, and then an Orangina, after which she perked up considerably. After all these liquids, and an earlier mid-afternoon snack of almond croissants, neither of us were hungry enough to bother with dinner, so we popped open the can of Pringle’s Sour Cream & Onion Potato Chips that the hotel provides and replenished our salt reserves. (Steve will be so disappointed in me to hear I had Pringles for dinner in Cambodia. Sorry, Steve.)
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