Khajuraho

Sorry for another quick micro-post, but I'm busy touristing and don't have time to upload photos and such, and won't for at least a few days. I've left Delhi, been to Varanasi, am now in Khajuraho and will leave the day after tomorrow for Jhansi and then Agra, getting back into Delhi for the weekend. Right now I'm contemplating taking a week off of India to go to Nepal. It's still monsoon season, and that's when the best whitewater rafting on the planet (so I'm told) is to be had in the Himalaya. But all this is fluid (pardon pun). Short report: I'm healthy and happy and looking forward to more. Wow is the food good. Photos of India soon.

In Delhi

Ok, I'm safe in Delhi and beggining my first day of touristy stuff in the city. It's hot here but that's the only impression I have yet. More soon.

All about my navel

In response to some feedback I've gotten lately (thanks, by the way) I've decided to include some more subjective posts. Be careful what you wish for. So what follows are a couple of observations that have nothing, really, to do with one another. If you're just interested in travelogue, this isn't the post for you.

John Hancock Would be Very Popular

In Vietnam, every time I signed my name, without fail, the person receiving the sales slip or hotel registry would smile broadly, sometimes giggle, and usually compliment me on the beauty of my signature. They would often show it to a colleague. The first time this happened I thought they were being facetious, and the second time I thought there was some kind of joke going on that I didn't get. By the third time I entertained the possibility that they were sincere, and the fourth time, I was ready for it. But only in that way that if, for three mornings in a row, you were greeted at the front door of your job by a harlequin clown who wordlessly presented you with a paper clip and then left, on the fourth day, you'd be ready for that paper clip, and might even accept it with anticipation. But I don't get it, and I doubt I ever will. I questioned several people about this phenomenon, determined to get to the bottom of it, and they seemed coy about providing detail. "It's just very... unique" was about as much as I got.

At least two that I can recall asked me if I was an artist. I would post a copy of my signature for you to see how unremarkable it is, but it occurs that posting one's signature on the internet seems an Incredibly Bad Idea. It's a little "loopy", and I don't think my surname is particularly legible, but it's completely unremarkable.

To the Thais, my signature is sadly ordinary.

Have a Nice Day

One thing that really brings joy to my heart is the universal power of the smile. Even here in Thailand, you do run into someone every so often with whom you can't communicate. In almost every one of these situations, it helps tremendously if you just smile. That's obvious, of course, but it works so much better than you'd think. It's stunning how powerful it is at ameliorating conflict and smoothing human relations. They have no idea who you are or what you want, but they are predisposed to help you if you smile and shrug. This is so, so heartwarming to me. Sometimes I've found a situation improve radically through my patented smile technology, and I can't believe that there is conflict in the middle east. Do those people never smile?

Come Here Often?

So, I was on the fence about coming back to Thailand, but the delay in my Indian visa forced the issue for me, and I've been very glad for the time I've spent here the second time around. The biggest reason was just that it was familiar. Aside from Amy, everything has been new, new, new for going on two months solid, so it was relaxing to walk down a street in Bangkok and think, that restaurant kinda sucked, but the one two blocks over was awesome. I'm sitting right now in my favorite Internet cafe in Chiang Mai, which I only found halfway through my stay here last time. Newness is part of the point of travel, but it can be exhausting (at least for me). When even the place you're sleeping is different than the one the day before, you start looking at your shaving kit for something you recognize.

I might even plan to do this in the future: go back to Delhi once I've been there, just to feel a little sense of familiarity again.

Old man, New Tricks

I feel very old these days. Part of the reason is that a lot of the backpacker culture that I'm trafficking in is geared towards twenty-five year olds. When something reminds me of this, it makes me feel regret for not traveling when I was younger, but almost instantly the feeling evaporates when I remember that I'm here now and having even more fun than I thought I would. And that I'm doing the same things and having the same experience, except that I'm a little better equipped for it.

This was especially acute in Cambodia, where I read that the life expectancy of a male in Cambodia is only 51, and there were very few old people. That puts me well past middle age, something I wasn't ready for. I've always been keenly aware of the fact that in our "natural state" as stone age hunter-gatherers, 35 is indeed an old man; I should be a grandfather by now. This body was designed to pass on its genes with maximum efficiency on a savannah, and that plan didn't include centarianism.

But then I remember Garth Pauley was fond of quoting a study that said the common denominator amongst the world's longest-lived people was their ability to deal with new situations, their facility for adapting to change. I'm swimming in a sea of it, and the above comments on familiarity nothwithstanding, the water seems fine.

Cogito Ergo Bloggo*

I spend a fair amount of my time here working on this thing. Aside from wanting to keep family and friends updated on what I'm doing and where I am, it serves as a record for myself. When I was 18, Mike Hamilton and I toured Europe for a month. While I have a lot of good memories of that trip, I know I used to have access to much more detail. Mike and I still share jokes about that journey, but I want more of the substance of this experience to be with me in twenty or thirty years, or more. I'd like to know what that crazy young man was thinking. It's also a good way to make sense of the experience. It's fine to see things and experience them for what they are, but writing about them gives me a focal point, a motive to seek out extra detail.

And Rafting

I went whitewater rafting in Chiang Mai yesterday. Wow was that fun. I regret that I have no photographs to share, but of course it's an activity that doesn't lend itself to the camera as much. My shoulder's a little sore today from paddling. It was nothing too intense (class IV and V for those of you to whom this means something) but I can't remember this much fun. I met a wonderful young Dutch couple who invited me to join their boat, and we had a blast together. I giggled like a little girl at times as we tumbled over the rocks, walls of water surging into our tiny rubber boat. When the water was still, the Mae Ping river was typical Thailand gorgeousness: steep twisty little valleys covered in teak, strangler fig, bamboo and longhan trees- green and lush. At the end, I immediately wanted to get in the van and ride back to the top of the mountain for another run.

My visa for India is finally ready. I can't begin to describe how excited I am for this next part!


*with apologies to the blog of Philosophy Talk, the second greatest radio show ever.

Angkor, Day 3: Care and Feeding of Stone Temples

It sounds boring, but on the third day, we went and visited temples made of stone. You might say, Peej, that makes it sound much like the first and second days at Angkor. But if there's one thing you should remember about Angkor: they've got a lot of stone temples. They knew what they were good at, and man did they play to their strength.

First up, Phnom Baekang: A beautiful stone temple built at the top of a high hill ("Phnom"= Khmer for "hill")

I LOVED this sign at the bottom of the hill. Note the names of the three color-coded paths. Click on the photo to blow it up if you like.
The narrow path with all the elephants on it? Oh, no, that's not the DANGEROUS path. The DANGEROUS path is over there. If you were so silly as to risk it. Me, I'll take my chances right here on this steep, switchbacky slope full of elephants. I'm not stupid. You "thrill seek-ahs" can go over there and tempt fate on the DANGEROUS path if you wish. Fools.


Phnom Baekang is notable for its... (wait for it) Phnom-enal views of other neighboring temples. (I really crack myself up) And for the record, we took the "safety" path.

The path is a good fifteen-minute climb winding around the hill, and completely elephant- and danger-free.

The temple is broad and flat, but the staircase is quite steep. Once you're on top, though, the views are fantastic. I showed you one a couple days ago of me and Angkor Wat in the distance. Here's another one, this time looking south. You can see the mighty Tonle Sap lake in the distance.

Tonle Sap is fascinating: it's Southeast Asia's largest lake... part of the year. The rest of the time it's much smaller. It was one of the principal reasons for the rise of Angkor civilization in the first place- it's a treasure trove of easy protein and fresh water. But how does the size change? I'm glad you asked. The river of the same name (which meets the Mekong at Phnom Penh) runs out of it most of the year, but during the monsoon season (now) the river runs backwards, taking overflow out of the Mekong system and swelling the size of the lake from 2,700 to 16,000 square kilometers. Neat, huh? A few million people live surrounding the lake, and at almost no point is it more than a few meters in depth.

We went and saw several more temples that day, all of which I enjoyed. But to be honest, the heavy hitters all came the day before. At the end of the day, we headed back to Angkor Wat to see it in a different light before we had to go. So rather than talk about the minor temples, I'll take the opportunity to point out some cool stuff about the collection generally.

The photo on the right is not me accidentally taking a picture of my shoelaces. I apologize but I don't know the name of this small temple near the Baupon, but while climbing down, it occurred to me that one view here illustrates several interesting concepts. Take a look at the red stone just above my right foot. That's laterite, a kind of iron-rich clay that the Khmers discovered was lightweight and easy to dress into blocks of specific shapes, but then dried to a concrete-like hardness after being exposed to air. Most of the great structures at Angkor are made of this stuff. The problem is it's pretty ugly- pockmarked full of Swiss cheese holes. So everywhere they used laterite, it was covered in sandstone or stucco, like the rest of the stones around my feet (which are there for scale). Now, just above and to the left of my left foot you'll see two little round holes. You see these everywhere- they're leftover from the construction of the temple. Wooden poles that held the blocks in place used to fit here. Finally look at my right leg and note that with sufficient exposure to the sun, even my skin can tan to the point where it is noticeably darker than a white sock.

Renovations

The method/philosophy used at Angkor for preserving the structures is Anastylosis, a technique pioneered by the Greeks and Dutch in the early 20th century (Mark, feel free to correct me). In essence it involves trying to rebuild the structure from the collapsed pieces, replacing components with new material where the originals are unusable or missing. I think it makes sense at Angkor, where you have a lot of the original pieces that have just been knocked down by tree growth.

Here's a great example from Chao Say Tevoda, a small temple currently being renovated by a team of Chinese workers. Normally this temple is closed to the public, but they kindly left the gate open on their day off.


You can easily see the new stonework interspersed with the old.

Here's a close up of new stonework in the process of being dressed down so that it doesn't stand out so much. Very obliging of the Chinese techs to leave their wire brush there for me to photograph, so I can see how the work is being done.



At right, blocks of fresh laterite wait to be brought in to the renovated building:

There's lots of other renovation work, too. The roads often had large earthmoving equipment or gigantic cranes. Many of the temples had one or more wooden buttresses like this one holding up a section of wall.


Also, as Ta Prohm teaches us, defoliation is continual to keep the temples accessible. At first Amy and I couldn't figure out what this incredibly tall scaffold was doing in between three small temples, then we got closer and saw the tree trunk at the center. The branches and limbs had already been removed, but it became clear that felling the tree conventionally wasn't an option: no matter where you had it fall, it would risk damaging a temple. The scaffolding was there to help them disassemble the tree. The squares of latticework here are about four or five feet across; this thing was huge.

After a powerful but brief downpour, we made our way back to Angkor Wat. I lucked out and found a brief moment when no one else was in one of the outer courtyards just before the main spires, and asked Amy to take this shot on the left. The sky was still overcast from the rain, so the light was diffuse* (classic Bernd and Hilla Becher atmospherics) and the stone was reflective and slick.

When walking around the back of the temple proper, I looked up and saw a tiny patch of green on the northeast spire. Someday soon, somebody's going to have to climb up there and uproot this little tree
very, very carefully.










For our third day of roaming around the temples, we had chosen yet another means of transportation. For four dollars one can rent electric bicycles in Seim Reap. They were kind of ugly and awkward to look at, but boy were these things fun! They only went about 20mph (if that) and they were decidedly underpowered when going uphill, but since Angkor is very flat, this wasn't much of a problem. You can pedal them for a little extra oomph, or if your battery goes totally dead, but we didn't exert much effort this way. We spent several hours riding the outer circuit of temples known as the "Grand Tour", and it made for a lovely pace of travel. The roads between the outer temples were almost all tree-lined and mostly deserted (see picture right). At a dozen sites around the park, there are electric bicycle stations, where your battery can be changed out for free. We recharged twice before riding back to town to catch our plane to Bangkok.

We spent three days at Angkor, but we met several other travelers who were budgeting as many as seven. After seven days I can see how the temples might start to blur together, but I think if I had it to do over again this is what I might do. I'll have to return to this place. I hope that next time I find it in a healthier and happier Cambodia.

*scroll down in this article to see some awesome shots by my favorite photographers.

Back in Chiang Mai

I'm back in Chiang Mai, taking cooking classes and working on blog entries (one more on Angkor still coming). I think tomorrow I'll go to Pai for a bit of trekking. I took another class today and learned how to make red curries, papaya salad and steamed banana cake, plus three or four other dishes, all of which I prepared and ate. Mmmm. Don't think I'll eat again for a week. I fly back to Bangkok on the 24th and then on to Dehli on the 26th- I've emailed a couple hotels looking for reservations for that first night in town.

A couple days ago, I sat in a travel agent's office in Bangkok and she asked me where I wanted to go next after India (at the time I thought I needed an outbound ticket to get the visa, which turned out to be wrong). Immediately the answer of "Istanbul" came to mind, because that had been my plan all along. But then I hestitated. I have also begun to entertain other destinations, based on the recommendations of other travelers I've met along the way, and for a split second I nearly said "Cairo" or "Wellington" or "Dubai" or "Sydney". For just a moment, I shook with excitement. I could change gears in mid stream with no consequence whatsoever. All of these were entirely reasonable possibilities. There was no reason why not to go to one of these other places, on the merest whim. The freedom expressed in this one moment of hesitation was intoxicating. What a lucky man.

As it turned out, I bought no other ticket that day, and instead just concentrated on where I'm going in India. After Delhi, I think I'll head west to Chandrigarh by train, and then perhaps north by bus through the moutain passes to Leh and the Himalayas. Or not!

Angkor, Day 2: The Secret of Ta Prohm

On day two of the Angkor archeological park, Amy and I saw our two respective favorites: Banteay Srei and Ta Prohm. The first was sublimely elegant, the second has an aching beauty and a stunning secret, which I will reveal at the end.


We got up before dawn in an effort to see the light break over Angkor Wat, but it was overcast all day, so we watched the clouds get gradually lighter instead. Not that impressive and not really worth the lost sleep. To get to the archeological park in the dark, we arranged to hire a tuk-tuk for the day. This was a wise choice: not only would bicycling before dawn be ill-advised, the motorized transport afforded us the opportunity to visit one of the more distant temples, the intricately gorgeous Banteay Srei, (map above) or "Citadel of the Women". From the outside, it's pretty but perhaps not remarkable compared to the other temples of Angkor, and much smaller than most. But then you get closer and see what makes this one a treasure.

This photo is taken from the northeast corner, looking southwest.

After a broad view let's zoom in for some extreme detail: here you see how small the individual carvings are on this building, with my hand hovering just over the stone. As you can see, most of this work is at a level of precision more common for lacework than sandstone, and all of it has been exposed to the elements for more than ten centuries. Now that's craftsmanship.

















And even more incredible, it covers almost every square inch of these buildings:




The sheer volume of detail is nothing short of stunning. Trying to take it all in at once is a bit like trying to brush your teeth with a firehose. You have to focus on little bits or it's all a blur. Bantaey Srei is also one of the only temples of Angkor not built by a king, but by a tutor of one of the kings. Amy opined that the difference in architecture is noticeable when a scholar is calling the shots for once instead of a soldier.


Shortly thereafter (after visiting Pre Rup and Banteay Samre, which were also very cool, but I can't show you every beautiful ruin or I'll be uploading pictures for a week), we made our way to my absolute favorite spot on the trip so far: Ta Prohm, a temple and monastery built by Javayarman VII in the late 12th century. These photos will, I trust, make is self-evident why I love this place, even if its hard for me to put into words. But first a bit of explanation.

Things in Angkor look pretty run down, but it's important to realize that everything you see is heavily restored. The renovation process continues: at least half a dozen of the structures we saw were in the process of being repaired. Sometimes this consists of building wooden buttresses to support collapsing stonework, and often it involves cutting new stone to replace blocks that have cracked or disappeared. But in every case, it's about the removal of vegetation, which to the temples of Angkor is the grim reaper. For the jungle abhors the craft of humankind, and quietly endeavors against it in labor unceasing.

But in Ta Prohm... ahhh, Ta Prohm. Here, the trees are given license to war with the stone... within limits. Some vegetation is removed, but the most spectacular growth is kept in place, and the effect is remarkable.

For example: here we see what once was the causeway of the temple, dominated by a tree growing through its flagstones. Very cool, yes? Now, note carefully the smaller, slender white trunk just to the left of the darker tree in the foreground, it looks like it's coming out of the top of the wall. We're about to see that same tree from the reverse angle.

Now, the reverse angle, from the other side of that wall:

The courtyards are very small, so it's hard to get a sense of scale- no one picture can show the whole tree. The trunk of this giant soars a hundred feet into the air, and again the roots continue along the stonework for twenty yards. Why is this so beautiful? Trees are lovely, and the temples are magnificent, but surely if one is in the process of destroying the other, even by this most patient violence, the beauty of both should be diminished. And yet the whole puts a lump in your throat in a way that neither constituent could hope to. Maybe it's because here, graphically, Nature triumphs over the folly of man, at least if he neglects his creation for just a few decades. I kept thinking of how Ecclesiastes warns us about vanity, as if the trees were carrying out some kind of divine retribution.

Here's a different tree twenty or thirty yards further in:

Ta Prohm is so overgrown that large portions of it are off limits to visitors. It's also one of the most popular sites (as you can tell from the crowds in all these pictures). These factors made the structure of the temple itself very hard to appreciate. Similarly, there was some excellent carving, but most of it was smothered in thick blankets of moss. But the ooohs and ahhs all came from the intersection of ancient stone and living cottonwood (or "strangler fig", in some cases).

Every corner of this temple was incredible. There were piles of blocks that had fallen victim to some ancient arboreal assault , crumbled bits of wall only held together by root structures of trees long dead, and flagstone pathways that rippled like an earthquake had been frozen in time. The place looks like the setting of every cheesy fantasy novel* (except much cooler). In fact, scenes from the movie Tomb Raider were filmed in Ta Prohm.


The atmosphere of the place is fantastic. You feel like you're at the nexus point of something incredible- two worlds collide here and it's not a friendly meeting, yet the conflict is as silent as only stone and wood can be. Plus the trees look like they're ready to walk right off of these walls and assault Isengard. Or that they were in the process of doing so when you walked in, and stopped in place to keep their purpose hidden.

I positively scampered through Ta Prohm, like a kid in a toy store after hours. I wanted to soak in every bit of this magical, surreal place, and then hurry to the next bit of arcane beauty. The fact that it was a maze with lots of dead ends and multiple levels made it all that much better.

Don't you want to know what's behind that doorway it's guarding?

This one struck me as a restful, contemplative pose... like it's wandered the forest for a century and has returned to sit in the lotus position and share its wisdom with the seedlings.


Okay, time for payoff. Perhaps "secret" is a little melodramatic of me- it's more of a highly relevant fact that isn't immediately self-evident, but that doesn't have quite the same ring to it, does it?

When Angkor was "discovered"(cough, cough) by the French in the late 19th century, they were of course amazed by the architectural richness of the site, but as has been mentioned, all of the structures were partially in ruin except for Angkor Wat itself. Almost immediately, the Ecole Fraincaise d'Extreme Orient was set up to preserve and renovate the structures, and with a few blemishes on their record (including most hilariously, a curator who was caught red-handed trying to smuggle artifacts out of the country and still managed to later be appointed DeGaulle's minister of culture) they did a good job for over a century at preserving the beauty of the architecture. I'll describe some of the technique in the next post- it's quite interesting.

But the renovations meant restoring the structures to their original state (save that most of these buildings were probably painted), and those early Europeans evidently experienced something of the otherworldly effect that I felt when walking amongst trees-feasting- on-temples. So they made a decision to set aside one of the overgrown temples and leave it (more or less) as they found it, in the condition of being slowly devoured by the jungle, just because that look, that effect, was something worth preserving, too. Thus, Ta Prohm in the state we see above. When I learned this my heart sank and soared all at once. Every one. Every one of the dozens and dozens of temples of Angkor looked like Ta Prohm when the French showed up, with that same atmosphere that captivated me so. As incredible as Ta Prohm is, it's just a sample, a representative of a wider magic that has passed from the world, so that the temples of Angkor might survive for later generations.

I have never felt so jealous of someone born a hundred and fifty years ago. Usually, modern plumbing is enough of a reason to make me glad I was born when and where I was. I would trade plumbing, though, for a chance to wander the park as jungle, happening upon little islands of sandstone jealously guarded by mighty cottonwoods, all with that same supernatural beauty, minus a couple thousand tourists. I also wanted to reach back in time and thank the curators who made the effort, who gave us this Ta Prohm. That had to have been a weird and difficult decision, but they made a great call. Chapeaus off, mes amis.

Next up: we conclude our tour of Angkor with ancient temples, modern archeology, and futuristic bicycles!


*If it weren't for the hordes of tourists I'd be expecting to have to roll for initiative at any moment (sorry, bit of an inside joke).

Amy leaves; we are still friends; future plans

Bamgkok, August 17, 2006

It is with sorrow that I note the departure of Amy two days ago. By now she should be home from her hellish crossing (almost two complete days in length between Bangkok and Boston).

After travelling with your friend for a month spending almost every waking moment together, you get to know them much better. I can recommend with confidence to anyone who doesn't know Amy this well, you should, and if you ever have the opportunity to travel with her and you turn it down, you're missing something great. I'm sad that I won't have her insights into the cultures I explore next or her navigation prowess to draw upon. Somehow she managed to endure my somewhat more relaxed pace of travel with grace (as well as my impulse to photograph everything), and I am happy to report that we are still fond of each other. She even threatens to meet up with me wherever I am at Winter break (assuming I'm not back in the states by then). I miss her already.

Additionally, she let me win three games of Iron Dragon, beating me eight or ten times in the process. Anyone who has ever played any strategic game with Amy understands I report this statistic with a puffed up chest.

Right now I'm in Bangkok again, working on blog entries, relaxing a bit, and getting the details of the next stage of the journey (India) set. I've put my visa request in motion, and it should be done a week from today. So, tomorrow I fly back to Chiang Mai (my favorite place so far) and from there I'll move on to Pai, the place that Amy saw and loved but I missed, and hike for a bit. I fly back to Bangkok on the 24th to pick up my visa, and then on the evening of Saturday the 26th I fly to Delhi.

I hope to be caught up on blog entries soon- I know it must be confusing when these things get posted out of order. There's still at least two entries coming for the Angkor temples, but there's so many photos to choose from.

Right now I'm back in the land of searingly spicy, tofu-laden vegetable based food, and my body is loving me for it.

Long Live the King!

Angkor, Part 1: Angkor Wat

Angkor Wat: a reason to travel to the other side of the world.

The only photos that capture this size of this thing are those taken from helicopters, and then you can't get a sense of scale. This image looks east from the western Gateway. The structure on the near left is the North Library.

The Khmer empire used its massive wealth during the Angkor period to build a series of great temples and other public works at their capital north of the Tonle Sap lake. Many of these structures still stand a thousand years later, the largest and most famous of which is Angkor Wat ("Great Temple"), the world's largest religious structure. It's glorious. The Angkor archeological park consists of many different structures, from the walled city of Angkor Thom to the vast resoviors, the east and west Barays, that once watered the agricultural engine of the mighty empire. All of these were left to ruin at one time or another... except Angkor Wat, which has remained a functioning temple throughout its history, even during the disturbing civil war period and the reign of Pol Pot, when hundreds of wats were destroyed and thousands of monks put to the sword.

Here I am atop another temple, Phnom Bakheng, about a kilometer away from Angkor Wat. You can see its spires in the distance just above my head. Click on any image to see it bigger.

I'll try and leave most of the factual information to the Wikipedia link at the top of this post and focus on impressions, although it's very difficult to put into words.

Amy and I arrived in Siem Reap on the night of the 11th and settled into a hotel. By chance, we ran into our friend Verena, whom we had met on the boat ride up the Mekong, and ate dinner with her. For the first of our three days exploring the temples, we chose to rent bicycles and ride to the park, about five kilometers (3 miles) away. A bit of bad navigation sent us far off course and turned the thirty minute ride into about an hour and a half... in midday sun. Doh! The land is quite flat, though, and the roads were excellent. When we realized our mistake we finally approached Angkor Wat from the east. We first saw what appeared to be a broad river with a tree lined shore opposite. We turned left and followed this south for half a mile until the "river" made an abrupt right angle turn to the west, making me realize that this was the moat that surrounds the temple.

Taken from the southwest corner of the moat, looking north. In the distance you can just make out the causeway.

This navigation error meant that we approached the temple from the rear, and rode around the moat clockwise until we reached the main entrance at the west. Wow is it big.


What this map calls "the city" would have been where the palaces, administrative offices and such of the kingdom were found. According to Khmer custom, though, people lived and worked in structures of wood, while only the gods deserved structures of stone. Thus, the temple is all that remains.

After water and gatorade cured us of our long hot ride, we walked along the causeway and entered the inner courtyard. Many small shrines exist along the way, often to images of the Buddha that have been partially destroyed (some of the best preserved images have been moved to the national museum in Phnom Penh.) Once inside the inner courtyard, I climbed this staircase to reach the highest publicly accessible part of the temple. These monks were hardcore in that they walked down this stair with only the occasional hand to steady them. When I got to the top I learned that a similar staircase on the south side had been equipped with a handrail- that's the one I used to get down. Here's what it looked like from the top: steep, broken up and super smooth. You'd think people had been climbing up and down the thing for a millennium or something.

Angkor Wat is very difficult to describe adequately- just thinking about it is frustrating. It's big, graceful, serene, serious, and yet also relaxed and unintimidating (except for the climbing!). If you can, see it before you die. Amy and I returned to Angkor Wat each day for a little bit, in an effort to make it stick in our brains a little better, or to appreciate it on some level beyond that first moment of dumbstruck awe. I don't know if I succeeded. I get the impression you could live next to it and still have that same feeling each time you set foot in the place.

For lunch we had the fish of the Tonle Sap lake cooked in a small hill of lemongrass. Incredible.

Next up, we walked north into the park to the next large monument, the walled city of Angkor Thom ("Great City"). There's a moat of sorts surrounding the wall, and lining the causeway over the moat we met these fellas. These statues are ten feet tall, and there are at least fifty of them lining each side of the causeway. Although many of them were defaced or beheaded by subsequent conquerors, you can still see that they're carrying something thick and cylindrical, like in a tug of war. This represents an very cool story from a Hindu creation myth.* The gods and the demons make a deal: they'll team up to perform an impossible task. At the center of the Sea of Milk lies a great mountain, and wrapped around it is a giant snake. They capture the snake, and with the center of it still encircling the mountain, the gods line up on one side and the demons on the other, and they pull alternately on the snake for a thousand years, thus twisting the mountain and churning the Sea of Milk to produce the Elixir of Immortality that both sides want. As the elixir begins to appear, the gods go back on the deal and try to steal it all for themselves, thus planting the seed of the war between good and evil. I guess Amy wanted her turn at churning the milk, despite her dislike of snakes.

Once through the gates of the city, we proceeded north up the long road towards the Bayon, the temple at its center. In its day, the city would have been full of wooden structures, but now it's given over to trees, grass, and most endearingly, monkeys. These guys were awesome. I have since learned that it probably wasn't a smooth idea to get so close to these varmits, as they can carry rabies, but look at them- they're like little fuzzy people! This infant in particular took a shine to me, so much so that I was worried that Mom would get upset, but she watched me interact with him the whole time and was pretty nonplussed. They must see hundreds of tourists a day.

After saying goodbye to our hirsute cousins, we continued north to the Bayon. Nothing was going to be as impressively huge as Angkor Wat, but the Bayon does have some bas relief carvings that would be spectacular even if they weren't a thousand years old. This is one of the structures currently under renovation (more than half of the places we saw had some international team or other crawling over them), and you can see a bit of the scaffolding in this view of the southern face:
The Bayon was constructed by Javayarman VII, the greatest of the Angkor builder-kings. The carving below on the left depicts one of his naval victories over the Chams (then natives of central Vietnam), bitter foes of the Khmers who several years prior had occupied all of what is now Cambodia. Can you see the fish under the boats? I don't know what the one on the right is supposed to be, but it looks fantastic. Amazing to think that this was carved in sandstone.

























The Bayon's north face has these supercool, enormous faces, their eyes closed in meditative expressions:


At this point Amy encountered a unique language problem. Immediately behind the Bayon is another temple called Baupon (pronounced BOW-fohn), and while walking up to it, she found herself in need of the bathroom. She walked around this considerable edifice without luck, for as she asked each local "Where's the bathroom?" they would point towards the center of the structure, thinking that this foreigner with the strange accent didn't realize she was already at the "BAF-foohm". Eventually we hired a driver to take us back to where our bicycles were parked (it was the end of the day anyway, and we were exhausted), where we found one of the excellent public bathrooms. I concluded that it could have been much worse: she might have needed an emergency room while standing right next to Wat Hephepimbleedintodeth.

Once on our bikes we started riding back towards Siem Reap, pedaling hard in high spirits from all the awesomely awesome awesomeness we had beheld. I even threw caution to the wind by holding my camera out over my shoulder to capture smiling Amy on her bike.

Next: the quiet majesty of Banteay Serai and the secret of Ta Prohm.


*I've heard there are multiple versions of this story, so my apologies in advance if these aren't the details you know or read.

Phnom Penh, Ghost Town

Phnom Penh: at first glance, yet another Indochina city with a delightful blend of French and Asian architecture, containing gems such as this magnificent eight-storey stupa in the middle of a major traffic roundabout in the center of town. On the first morning, walking around the city, there was something very odd about Phnom Penh that I couldn't quite put my finger on. Then it hit me. After seeing several other large Asian cities, Phnom Penh seems sparsely populated. Oh sure, there were lots of times when crossing the street belied this sentiment, or when a sea of kids rushing off off a schoolbus at a busy intersection made it appear dense indeed. But it occurred to me as we passed a row of shops on a major street that had this been Hanoi, there would have been shops in each and every foot of street facing space. In Phnom Penh, there's a creepy amount of elbow room. I found out the population statistics later.

Phnom Penh is the capital and largest city of Cambodia, with a population of 850,000 (about the same as Boston proper, not including the surrounding townships). In 1975, the population was well over 2,000,000. Then a guy known as Pol Pot came to power in Cambodia and forcibly evacuated the entire city, relocating the population to rural work collectives, under brutal conditions. In an effort to create an authoritarian, utopian state in record time, he killed more than two million of his own citizens in four years, until the Vietnamese invaded and deposed him. Pol Pot's army, the Khmer Rouge, disproportionately sought out city dwellers and the educated for their victims, although towards the end of the regime, even loyalists were being put the sword in a widening spiral of increasingly arbitrary slaughter. Things got so bad that even the killers themselves started trying to smuggle their own babies out (as depicted in The Killing Fields), assuming that their own turn was surely coming. I won't go into most of the details about the actual deaths themselves, as these are well documented elsewhere and because I have aspirations of small children seeing this blog (if only for the photos!) except to say that the Khmer Rouge sought not to waste bullets.

Obviously, Cambodia still bears these scars- it was less than thirty years ago. When you look around the streets and you see anyone over the age of forty, a question boils at the surface of your consciousness, like some foul potion in a witch's cauldron: where were you in '78? Why did you survive? For most of the people, the answers would be worthy of our sympathy... but the vast majority of the bad guys in this story faced no justice. They're just out there. At least the Nazis had their Nurenberg. Pol Pot himself died an old man a few years ago, having never been brought to trial.

The country has a weird vibe to it. Of course, I'll never know how much of this is me projecting my own feelings about everything I've read, or how much of it might be garden variety cultural differences. The Khmer hospitality is famous, and I definitely saw that in places, but there's a... hardness to this place that is ineffibly disturbing to me, and it's not just the poverty, the beggars, or the touts aggressively hounding you for taxi rides or hotels. Even the survivors have to be affected by the strife in horrible ways. There's just so much scar tissue on this land- literally as well as figuratively. Cambodia is the third most mined country on the face of the Earth- everyone warns you repeatedly that you do not step off the path in the Cambodian countryside for fear of the landmines. The cities and tourist attractions are both rife with amputees, many of them young.*

Here's the national museum courtyard, where we saw some fantastic ancient Khmer art. We were guided through the museum by a wonderful woman who clearly had a passion for the art and artifacts, and yet had never in her forty-some years of life traveled the 200 kilometers to see the ruins of Angkor, where we would be going in just a few days, all because of an expense that we considered trivial. The many beggars on the street could not be ignored, but it was at this moment that I realized the vast income differential between the Cambodians and myself. Here was someone articulate, friendly, dressed in an ordinary Western outfit, in every sense a normal individual I would consider my peer, to whom bus fare was an insurmountable obstacle. In the space of a moment, I felt like I had moved several thousand miles further from the US.

A large number of the steles, lintels and statues of the Angkor temples have been moved here for safe keeping, such as this magnificent statue of the Hindu god Vishnu, which I wasn't supposed to photograph. If it's a painting that can be damaged by a flash, I would never skirt the rules in a museum, but this thing is stone.

There were many beautiful things to see in the museum, but it was time to gird ourselves for one of the more brutal tourist attractions of the trip: Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. I've never been to a Nazi concentration camp, but it can't feel any different than this.

Aside: we discussed visiting the genocide sites of Cambodia with our friend Verena (a fellow traveler whom we met on the boat up the Mekong), who of course had a different perspective than us, having grown up in Germany. Though very polite, she expressed wonder and, I think, a little disgust at our desire to see scenes where the worst in human nature had played itself out. She raised interesting points, and since it had never occurred to me not to go to these places (they were high on my list as soon as I decided to go to Asia) she challenged me to articulate why I wanted to see them.

The best answer I had for her was that the nature of human memory and understanding is to be tied to the senses. This is sad but true: I think I'd prefer a world where I could appreciate the distant suffering of my fellow humans even if I couldn't lay eyes on them, but we all know that's not the way it works. The person in front of you gets your sympathy, the suffering child you actually met haunts your dreams. Perhaps, too, the evil ground on which you tread may make you a more effective engine of good, if only that you might believe in the existence of that evil, remember it, and perhaps recognize it if you ever saw it again.

Tuol Sleng (called s-21 during the Cambodian civil war) was a high school in a densely populated part of Phnom Penh. The Khmer Rouge turned it into a prison and torture center in 1975 (what a thing to do to a school). Somewhere I read that the creepy thing about Tuol Sleng is how ordinary it looks: it's clearly just a high school. Everything about the architecture is mundane, until you look inside some of the classrooms on the first floor and see how they've been hastily converted into isolation cells.






All of the rooms in one building are full of boards like this one, of the photographs of the victims; the Khmer Rouge shared with the Nazis a passion for recordkeeping. The photos are relentless. There are also lots of pictures from when the facility was liberated by the Vietnamese in '79- less than a dozen people survived, and more than 20,000 prisoners were killed.

The only time in the museum I can say I liked came about by accident. We made a wrong turn at the bottom of a stairwell and happened upon a dead end, with a wall of the most uplifting graffiti I've ever seen. I know it's tough to read in this photo (click on the photos for bigger images) and it may not be eloquent, but it nevertheless made me smile to read "When this was a prison, nobody learned, when this was a school, nobody died."


The main place to which were taken to was outside the city, Choeung Ek, the site of a former graveyard and orchard half an hour south of Phnom Penh. In 1979, a vast number of mass graves were discovered here. Below on the right you see Amy walking between them the pits that have been left over to grass and flowers. In many places along the paths, rain will erode the soil and bits of clothing can be seen rising to the surface. The large stupa on the left is the final resting place of the bones found there.





















Lest this end on a purely tragic note, I offer this view of the confluence of the Tonle Sap and Mekong river at sunset, seen from the riverwalk in Phnom Penh.

Next up: the brighter side of Cambodia: the ruins of Angkor.

___


* I cannot resist the urge to politicize here, it's too infuriating. Many of the landmines in Cambodia were manufactured in the United States, a practice that was made illegal during the Clinton administration... and reinstituted in 2004 by his successor. Anyone making money that way needs to come to this country. I encourage you to find out if your mutual fund permits ownership of arms manufacturers- this is, in part, what that means.