Angkor, the mother of all temple complexes

Next stop on the grand tour of Southeast Asia: Siem Reap, Cambodia, home of Angkor Wat, many other temple complexes, several capitals of the Khmer Empire dating from the 9th to 15th centuries, and the remains of the world's largest pre-industrial city. (Thank you, wikiTravel.)

From the get-go, this place was a surprise. The hotel-provided taxi service arrived in the form of a tuk-tuk, a vehicle I'd carefully avoided in Bangkok. Soon I found myself loaded up in an open-air cart-type structure hooked up to the back of a motorbike. (As I said in my last entry, people in Southeast Asia will strap about anything on a motorbike!) The ride was bumpy, but not entirely unpleasant. As long as I kept a firm grip on my sunhat, the wind rushing through my hair was quite welcome, even if it came with quite a lost of dust.

My first tuk-tuk ride

My second surprise came just a few minutes later when, short on cash to pay the hotel, my tuk-tuk drove me around the corner to withdraw. Here, I found that the ATM was spitting out US dollars! Only later did I discover that they do also have their own currency, which they use as a substitute for US coins. Basically, instead of getting 50 cents in change, you'll find yourself being handed a couple of Cambodian bills.

On that first night in Cambodia, I met an elderly American man with his Cambodian escort, and we ended up sharing conversation over dinner at our hotel. He had a life story, one that was sad, even tragic, at times, and at other moments left him very much the one at fault. Getting to hear one person's life path that would bring him to a retirement spent half-time in Southeast Asia (and in the company of much younger women) rather amazed me, perhaps because it is so easy to imagine such a character as a monster, which he wasn't. It was rather fascinating to see the embodiment of a stereotype in flesh and blood, to see a human being at once very flawed yet still very human.

I planned two full days around Angor Wat to explore the temples, and I'm pleased to say that I found this to be enough. Things kicked off with sunrise at Angor Wat on Day 1. This called for a wake-up call around 4am, which meant we were already roughing it, especially in my book.

Sunrise over Angor Wat

Angkor Wat

After a few hours at Angkor Wat, my tuk-tuk driver and I began doing the rounds of the temples. I quickly learned that there were two main architectural styles: Hindu (12th-13th centuries), marked by three large, central towers in a row; and Buddhist (13th-14th centuries), marked by entryways topped with four faces of the Buddha, one looking out in each cardinal direction. This region transitioned from predominantly Hindu to Buddhist during the height of the temple building era.

Angkor Archeological Park, Day 1

I distinctly recall an overwhelming frustration that I had been so oblivious to this clearly extraordinary culture and civilization which had flourished in what my history books referred to as the "Dark Ages," which were clearly a period that was anything but dark in this part of the world. That said, these parts had their own darkness in much more recent memory, the remnants of which still walk, or hobble, through the streets today. At the end of our first day touring the temples, my tuk-tuk driver took me to some killing fields right near Siem Reap. Here, a memorial stood to the nameless victims, their skeletons dug out of the mass graves and put on display behind glass walls. Donors who had "generously" helped fund the memorial with as little as $5 US were listed by name, such was the value of money here. It made me feel sick.

A Khmer Rouge killing fields memorial.
I've superimposed a close-up of what peers back at visitors from behind the glass panels at the top of the memorial's stairs to capture its relative emotional size, in hopes of conveying the bewildering experience of seeing this firsthand.

The emotional exhaustion was compounded by the positively overwhelming heat, which was like nothing I have ever known. Determined to see as many temples I could manage, I pushed on and plowed through water bottle after water bottle, practically swimming in my perspiration as temperatures soared through the hundreds Fahrenheit and humidity climbed steadily higher. I was rather horrified to discover that no matter how humid it felt, my handwashed clothing still dried in just an hour or two at such temperatures. I wanted to scream, how could this air possibly hold any more moisture?! At night I slept in undergarments without even a sheet and still felt cozy. Cambodia's weather showed no mercy.

On Day 2, we ventured far out from most of the temple complexes to visit Banteay Srei, the Lady Temple. With all its finely carved and well-preserved detail, this was probably the coolest temple after Angor Wat itself, and was well-worth the extra fee to venture far off the beaten path. Banteay Srei is a Hindu temple completed in 967 AD, but significantly renovated in the 11th and 12th centuries. Over the years it was forgotten, only to be rediscovered by explorers in the early 20th century.

Angkor Archeological Park, Day 2

Another highlight was the macaques we spotted along the side of the road in between temples. Apparently they're a friendly species and children often grow up playing with them, though my driver told me that they'd frightened him as a child.

Macaques like to play on the side of the roads near the Angkor temples. They will reach up and try to grab things straight out of your hands. And the weirdest thing is to realize how eerily human those hands feel.

Besides the temples, one of the coolest things I saw in and around Siem Reap was the leather carving, and honestly I regret not having splurged to pick up a piece along the way. The decorative carved leather figures were used for Sbek Thom, a shadow puppetry performance recognized by UNESCO as an Intangible Heritage of Humanity. These shadow puppets were used only several times a year for performances on important holidays. Under the Khmer Rouge regime in the late 1970s, the art was nearly destroyed, but work has been done to preserve the art over the past few decades.

Traditional Khmer leather carvings on display

To be honest, I didn't make the purchase as I'd found myself so much on the defensive trying to evade locals attempting to sell me anything and everything. I found the people really straining, especially the children. They seemed to have an uncanny ability to memorize every word you said as you entered a temple and to be able to throw it back at you on your way out in an effort to convince you to purchase from them, reminding you that they didn't have the money for school and just wanted to study. It was heartbreaking. Many of the temples had little bandstands set up where land mine victims performed traditional music with their worn-out prosthetics propped against the side of the stage. It ripped my heart out, but I couldn't afford to pay every one of these groups. And I had to bear this with the knowledge that the proceeds from my ticket sales for the visit of these temples wouldn't even reach the locals: the king of Cambodia sold the rights for Angkor Wat, Cambodia's top tourist destination, to the Vietnamese government, a neighbor and fierce rival of the Cambodians, for a period of 99 years. What a maddening world in which these people find themselves trapped. 

A land mine victim band plays traditional Cambodian music outside a temple.

Yet even when I tried to escape the sadness at the end of the day in my go-to place, a massage parlor, I was shocked to discover that the masseuse who had worked on my back for the last hour was actually a blind land mine victim! Apparently many blinded land mine victims are employed as massage therapists due to their heightened sense of touch. It's great to see that they can find work, but it made me all the more aware that in this country, there is no escaping their bloody past. On that note, I can recommend one fantastic piece of literature which helps capture the story of a family under the Khmer Rouge, First The Killed My Father by Loung Ung. If there was one souvenir I am very glad to have picked up from this country, that book is it. And reading it as I traveled through the region made the story all the more powerful.

By the time my tuk-tuk drove me to the airport on my third morning in Siem Reap, Cambodia, I was more than ready to move on to my next destination.

Recommendations: read Loung Ung's First They Killed My Father and The Lucky Child