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Published: January 19th 2009
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Greetings!
We are steadily eating our way north through Vietnam, but wanted to update everyone on our year-end sojourn in Cambodia, which included two stops: Siem Reap--site of Angkor Wat--and Phnom Penh.
Angkor Wat was truly breathtaking. Silly Jub didn't realize Angkor is way more than one temple--it's seventy-three, in fact, all built between 900 and 1200 A.D., and spread over an area the size of Los Angeles. During our three days in town, we took our time climbing in and around fourteen major sites. Our favorite was the Bayon, a three-tiered temple dedicated to Buddha--in contrast to Angkor's other temples, which were built Hindu, with later additions of Buddhist iconography as times changed. The Bayon stands out because it is adorned with two hundred Buick-sized, serene smiling faces, at least one of which seemed to gaze directly at us no matter what random staircase or passageway we emerged from. Ta Promh was another favorite, primarily for the surreal sight of centuries-old strangler figs alternately piercing and holding together its thousand year-old facade. Although Ta Prohm also featured by far the most aggressive jewelry and postcard hawking kids we encountered, with several perfecting a technique where they eyed us
Wedding party
Making the walk to Angkor Wat for good luck coming out of the temple, and followed our every move hoping to wear us down by incessantly repeating the price of the items they were selling--a master plan one (otherwise) adorable girl all but conceded when she paused from her fifteen minute mantra of "you buy bracelet, five for one dollar...you buy bracelet, five for one dollar" just long enough to say "you buy bracelet and I go away."
We also really enjoyed (1) the namesake Angkor temple, where we marveled at the massive, hand-dug moat surrounding the eight-square-kilometer stone courtyard within a courtyard within a courtyard layout, while watching a group of monks and a dressed-to-the-T Khmer wedding party do the same; a truly pleasant outing, marred only by an argument about whether the "Churning the Sea of Milk," Hindu creation myth carved across the temple's back wall inspired the title to Primus's album "Sailing the Seas of Cheese"--which seems pretty obvious. . . ; (2) Ta Keo, which was abandoned just short of completion (but following sixteen years of work) after a lighting strike convinced the King that it was unlucky, which may explain why we were able to take in early morning views of the surrounding
temples by ourselves from the pyramid-like central alter; and (3) Banteay Srei, the intricately carved, pink sandstone Woman's Temple, where Shiva, Kama and a host of other Hindu gods look completely unaffected by a millennium's exposure to the elements. On our last day we stopped at the small, private Cambodian Landmine Museum, run by Aki Ra--a former child solder with the Khmer Rouge who then spent a decade locating and defusing over 50,000 mines, by himself, by hand, for no money, before the big NGOs came on the scene in the early 90's. The museum documents both his early recovery efforts, as well as the ongoing struggle to clear the six-million-odd mines still buried in the Cambodia countryside--oh, and if single-handedly defusing 50,000 mines wasn't atonement enough, Ra also uses the museum's $1 entry to care for and educate dozens of disabled children living in the compound he built next door.
If this all sounds good to you, or if you've always wanted to see Angkor Wat, you should really, really, try to get there in the next year or so, because it was nearly overrun with tourists during our visit, and the crowds are expected to keep growing
Super cute kids
Inside Ta Promh at a near-exponential rate. To wit: In 1993, 7,600 tourists visited Angkor Wat; in 2007 there were 1.2 million visitors, or 3,400 a day! The result was quite literally a traffic jam of cars, tour buses and tuk-tuk's stretching uninterrupted from the hotel area for over a mile to the main temple parking lot each morning at 8:00. Fortunately, we took our driver's advice and visited the temples in the least logical sequence possible, thereby avoiding the worse of the crowds. But, rest assured, getting our peaceful looking photos took effort, especially in the patience department ("They're moving, they're moving--take it!"). And sunset on our last day was a total lost cause, as Angkor's thousands of visitors converged on a single hill-side temple at 5:30, which meant we spent considerably more time worrying about the waves of Japanese octogenarians scaling the insanely steep, irregular steps than admiring the fading azure above. (Note to Japanese octogenarians: do not let this last sentence deter you from going).
From Angkor, we bussed it six hours south to Phnom Penh--sweaty and nauseous the whole way as our steed's exhaust seemed to pour directly into the passenger compartment--and unable to tune out the world
via our iPods after the driver cranked the volume on the day's DVD selection: Rambo III, with the same woman monotonously delivering every line of the movie in overdubbed Khmer.
Once we arrived, however, we enjoyed our time in Cambodia's bustling (and still mall- and skyscraper-less) capital, although our two days in town were a definite study in contrast, as evidenced by our itinerary:
Day 1: 10:00 a.m.--Breakfast outside along the river, to include regular requests for spare change by land-mind and napalm bombing victims; 12:30 p.m.--tour of the Killing Fields and related memorial, to view bodily remains and learn in gruesome detail how the Khmer Rouge executed over 200,000 people charged with "pre-revolutionary lifestyle or political crimes" in a preemptive attempt to silence those who might object to their social engineering experiment of forced labor and re-ruralization; 4:00 p.m.--tour of S21, an elementary school that Pol Pot converted into a prison by dividing each classroom into twenty crude brick wall cells where those accused of political crimes could be housed until tortured into confession, to include an unavoidable walk through of the torture chamber itself, followed by a gallery housing a selection of contemporaneous photos taken during
each prisoner's last days; 10:00 p.m.--begin fitful night's rest.
Day 2: 9:00 a.m.--Breakfast along the river, where a random Cambodian cafe will serendipitously show a live telecast of the Oregon Ducks' beat-down of Oklahoma State in the Holiday Bowl; 1:00 p.m.--dignified lunch of fish and chips at the Foreign Correspondent's Club (where we will not even need to use the fake press credentials we bought on the street in Bangkok to gain admittance); 3:30 p.m.--browse party-supply store and make ill-advised sequined hat purchase; 8:00 p.m.--begin New Year's celebration at downtown bar Metro by consuming several fresh-squeezed cocktails, followed by befriending the super-nice bartenders, chefs, and government officials' kids sitting next to us making a show of not having to pay for their drinks; 12:03 a.m.--join in tardy but nonetheless bar-wide new years countdown (making you appreciate having a ball drop to watch state-side); 2:00 a.m.--begin much-needed alcohol-aided first slumber of 2009.
So that was Cambodia, in a nutshell. Stay tuned for tales of our slow descent into winter here in Vietnam--home of the fifteen-cent beer.
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Tina
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We must have gotten lucky when we were in Cambodia because there weren't too many people there with us! We loved Ta Promh too. So cool.