Advertisement
Published: September 26th 2006
Edit Blog Post
Angkor Wat
This is it! The famous Angkor Wat. Angkor Wat and the other Hindu and Buddhist temples in Siem Reap, Cambodia, was the latest stop in my tour of Southeast Asia. For better or worse, that’s just what it has become to most other people as well.
These thousand plus year old temples and the surrounding town of Angkor contrast the ancient and primitive with the modern and cosmopolitan, and accordingly, its population hovers with one leg in each sphere. The stones that make up the temples, depicting life in ancient times, were intricately hand-carved by millions of Khmer several generations past. Although now crumbling and overrun by trees, if you can block out the sights and sounds of Japanese tour groups, they still provide a magical backdrop. A recently constructed opera hall and modern hospital remind us that we’re in the 21st century, not the 10th.
But the children begging for money and vendors yelling, “Ladeeee” in a high-pitched voice to plead with you to buy their wares, remind visitors of the desperate times that the Khmer have just lived through, no matter how grandiose the infrastructure of their remote past and near future are. Still, the savvy children begging for school money while counting to
ten in English, French, Spanish and Japanese, are a fascinating indication the direction that the city is going in. Siem Reap, the next cosmopolitan city?
Phnom Penh, Cambodia’s capital, provided more of my impression of Cambodia: downtrodden, destitute, yet rapidly developing, if a little bit more on the downtrodden than in Siem Reap.
Given Cambodia’s recent history, it is not hard to understand why Cambodians, or the Khmer as they are ethnically described, seem downtrodden or destitute. The Khmer Rouge, under a brutal dictator known as Pol Pot, staged a radical revolution in an attempt to transform the country into a Maoist agrarian society. The result was the horrifying death of 2 million Cambodians between 1975 and 1979 either by malnutrition (all Cambodians had to eat essentially was rice) or murder at the hands of the Khmer Rouge for being of an educated class.
Mired in the Vietnam conflict, the Khmer Rouge was ousted by the Vietnamese but continued to stage a guerrilla war financed by China, Thailand and the US, indirectly. The fighting continued until a peace treaty was finally signed in 1991. Today, thousands of mines still litter the Cambodian countryside, the effects of which
Apsara Dancers
Carved into the stone structures. Took about a million people to get it all done. can be seen by legless Khmer.
I leave you with a mental image particularly illustrative of the primitive, the modern and the cosmopolitan Cambodias I had the brief chance to know:
In Phnom Penh, we stayed at a very simply guesthouse on the Tonle Sap River. The guesthouse has a lounge area that juts out onto the river, and on that last night in the country, I sat watching the sunset over the placid water. A fisherman drifted along the water checking his nets for any catch one last time for the day. Off in the distance, colorful four-star and five-star hotels littered the skyline. I sat mesmerized until fellow guests at the guesthouse from Switzerland, from England, from Italy, flashed their expensive digital cameras to capture the image. Instantly brought back to the present, I settled in with the group to watch the recent installment of Pirates of the Caribbean on DVD.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.111s; Tpl: 0.011s; cc: 7; qc: 49; dbt: 0.0526s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
mataho
nom
Eyes wide open
I enjoy your keen and interesting perspective on history, the brutal ironies of present times, and the not-so-subtle absurdities of modern tourism. Maybe I will see you in BKK?