Oh, no, Tarquin, I can't come shopping on the Kings Road today...yah, because I'm literally in Cambodia

I sincerely hope that the reference in the title is understood and appreciated, but for those in the dark, google "gap yah" and all will be clear.  Greetings from Siem Reap, Cambodia, about 150 miles from the capital Phnom Penh, 200 miles from Bangkok, and a billion sweet miles from San Francisco.  It took over 20 hours to get here, door to door, but it was worth it, because even before I took the general delight that is Cambodia into account, it hit me that this was the first time that I have really and fully been able to not think about work in God knows how long.  I still have my phone, which connects to wifi when it can (the little bastard is trying its hardest, it seems), and I’ll confess that I brought my work laptop instead of my Mac because it’s insured against things like theft and I presume sand, so I did open up one email that said something or other about one of our key investors worsening pricing in a fairly major way.  I can’t recall the details, though, and can’t bring myself to care all that much for now, so again—20+ hours well spent.  A 15-hour time difference (14 in the summer) and the languorous tropical wet season will have that effect.

Arriving here at around 11pm, it was pitch-dark upon landing and driving to my hotel.  Cambodia gets lumped in with Thailand a lot of the time, but Bangkok this is not.  The airport is little more than a large airstrip with a visa processing office, and outside of the hotels catering to Angkor tourists, there isn’t much in the way of electric lights blazing at that hour.  There are night markets, local restaurants open late, some tuk-tuks scooting around, a few bars that fill up with tourists buzzing for a drink after a full day at the temples, but at its heart, Siem Reap is still a provincial town that just happens to lie within spitting distance of one of the most spectacular ruined cities in the world.  Heading in from the airport, the air had the unchanging soft and heavy feeling characteristic of the tropics, and I could smell the wood-burning fires straight off the bat.  This, along with the red dirt road illuminated by the headlights, the breedless dogs darting around, the sprawling and dilapidated houses being slowly taken over by climbing vines and tall grass, and the humming of a million cicadas and frogs, all made for a very comforting late-night arrival.  I love the desert and the mountains and the cosmopolitan rush of a city like Shanghai, but the tropical countries are, in a word, my bag.

The draw here is, of course, Angkor, whose direct and utilitarian Khmer translation of “Capital City” reflects its status as the seat of the Khmer Empire from the 9^th to the 15^th centuries.  Most people know Angkor Wat and whatever else was used in Tomb Raider (I don’t know, because shockingly I didn’t see it), but it really is or was an entire city, with the government having cordoned off over 400 square kilometres of structures in varying states of restoration and decay.  Trying to see all of Angkor in three days would be something like trying to see all of Paris in three days, e.g. impossible.

From the top of Baphuon, which, believe me, is a decent climb when it's 95 degrees and 95% humidity outside.

“Cordoned off” is a rough approximation, though.  The entire city is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and teams from India and Japan are restoring a number of the structures, but it’s also home to any number of villages, some of which have actually been there since Angkor fell.  So Angkor is leading this weirdly layered existence—the cracking stones of the god-kings, relics of a time very much dead and gone; the villagers farming rice, selling cold drinks, and cutting hair in the shade of the banyan trees; and then, somewhere in between the two, the saffron-robed monks texting on their smartphones, the wizened old ladies by shrines set up in front of the remaining Buddha statues selling incense for a thousand riel and promising “long life,” and the children splashing and shrieking in the same moats that served as a defense against Ayutthaya thousands of years ago.  The result is to make Angkor feel simultaneously decaying and living.

To that effect, once you pay your entrance fee, you pretty much have your run of the ruins apart from a few blocked-off areas, and right now, with it being the rainy season, there just aren’t that many people.  It’s entirely possible to find yourself climbing up the side of a moss-covered ruin beneath a half-cleared thicket of trees and vines in complete isolation, save for a cackling bird or two.  On the more minor structures, there are no ropes or rails or stairs, so it’s a matter of hitching your bag over your shoulder, finding a handhold or two, and praying that your feet don’t slip on sandstone that’s endured a thousand years of extreme humidity.  Landmines also pose a legitimate risk once you really get off the beaten track.  For anyone who’s ever harbored a fantasy of stumbling across an overgrown lost city decaying, unbeknownst to the Western world, deep in the jungle, Angkor pushes all the buttons.  One can only imagine what it was like for the first French missionaries to come across it (Angkor, by the way, was never technically “lost”; even after the empire fell, the Khmers were always well aware of its existence and location and continued to worship at the temples) and see these massive structures rising out of the thick of the trees.

The ruins, apart from being expansive, are spectacular.  Rounding the corner of the moat and seeing the gates of Angkor for the first time is so exhilarating that it hardly seems real.  There are no truly great words for that first impact of the dense greens of the forest and the water, the towering palms and banyans, and the storm-grey stone that still exudes this extraordinary sense of power and size, all anchored firmly here long ago and holding court in this heavy air all through Cambodia’s dark ages, French colonialism, Japanese occupation, the civil war, and the Khmer Rouge.  The details on the walls, on every column, every terrace, every tower, still visible after a thousand years and the encroaching jungle and the damage from the war’s artillery, are incredible.  Only a self-proclaimed god-king could order up something like these temples, and indeed, Angkor Wat took about thirty years to complete (thirty years of what appears to be extremely painstaking labor...ugh).

Phinamakeas, one of my favorite temples not just because it's totally feral-looking and again, empty, but because it has an awesome name.

And then there are the little things, small things that pale next to the aged majesty of the city itself, things that I would describe as unexpectedly delightful, even though using the word “delightful” when I’m not being sarcastic makes me feel like somebody’s great aunt.  No one tells you, for instance, that Angkor is completely aflutter with dragonflies and butterflies the size of your palm, circling the towers bedecked the stone faces of long-dead kings and alighting on the moss-covered balustrades like tiny little courtesans.  They’re absolutely everywhere, not buzzing around your ears to be swatted away, not, of course, biting you, just there, a million unpaid street performers.

 No one tells you about the smell, either.  The temples, at least the ones on the main path, are all infused with this lovely fusion of the wet, earthy smell of the forest outside and the light perfume of incense quietly smoking away in front of the remaining Buddha statues.  Lest that bring to mind the cloying heaviness of incense burned inside a church or a stoner’s bedroom, it is the farthest thing from overpowering.  It is the kind of subtlety that I associate with saffron—quite unlike anything else, but delicate enough that it’s hard to put your finger on it exactly.

No one tells you how strongly you can feel that the temples are places of sanctuary, either.  Stepping inside the darkness of the grey stone halls and chambers, the powerful heat outside is quelled to something almost cool, and the noises of the forest, any footsteps, and any comments from other visitors are silenced.  For me, it brought on a rush of childhood memories of escaping the summer heat in Europe by ducking into cathedrals and churches.  Beyond the cool, dark and quiet, the temples are so still inside that you can’t help but settle into an involuntary calmness.  I’m not a spiritual person, but I won’t deny that the very atmosphere inside is something different.

So Angkor may be the stuff of photographers’ dreams, but the pictures will never have the same impact, no matter how beautiful the sunset or sunrise or if a flock of cranes is taking flight from the moat or whatever.  It’s the dragonflies and butterflies and incense-jungle smell and the feeling of momentarily cloistering yourself from the heat in the dark recesses of stone that really bring Angkor to life.

On Monday, I made what would probably rank as one of my best decisions to date and arranged to take a guide and a horse out to the far-flung and little visited ruins of Wat Atvea at about 7am in an attempt to beat the heat (jeans, close-toed shoes, and tropical heat do not mix well).  After much shortening of my stirrups to ensure that my heels actually made contact with the barrel of the tiny little Arab cross I was riding, we set off through the half-dirt half-mud roads of the countryside, ducking beneath jacaranda trees and picking our way around cows lying down for a snooze.  My guide Thon and I were the picture of diligence as we walked through the populated areas, keeping our horses to a docile walk and saying good morning to all of the shopkeepers and farmers and children, but once we hit the open road, it was full speed ahead.  Let’s just say that my horse, Coco, was very different from the tall, solid warmblood types I grew up riding, and had exactly the kind of short, fast stride you’d expect of a little fireball like him.  He was totally game for anything and did a brilliant job of weaving in and out of the angry water buffalo we ran across, hopping over the ditches where the path had crumbled away, and splashing his way through the little rivers created by the wet season.  Flying through the rice paddies on horseback, with the vivid green fields and palms swaying around me in the rising warmth of the early morning, is something I will never forget.  When we arrived at the temples, they were of course completely deserted, with only a few people harvesting rice and stringing up their clotheslines nearby who didn’t give me a second glance.

It’s hardly a surprise that the experience was so incredible.  Temple ruins, horses, and the tropics are three of my absolute favorite things, so combining them effectively blew my mind.

There are a lot of accounts of Angkor, though, and most of them are more interesting than those of some Californian girl with a degree in modern history taking two weeks off her job in banking (I mean, I’ve done my reading, but I’m well aware that the takeaway from the above is pretty much “wow, cool”).  One of the really interesting ones comes from Zhou Daguan, a Chinese diplomat who spent a year in the court of King Indravarman III in 1296, which still serves as one of the primary sources of knowledge for what life was like in Angkor’s heyday.  French explorer Henri Mahout also penned an account that, while wildly inaccurate in many ways and guilty of playing into the European supremacist leanings of the 19^th century, is interesting if you take it for what it’s worth.  So go read one of their things.

As for photos, my two underwhelming iPhone photos don’t do it justice…like, really don’t do it justice (the wifi here is also not great, so I’m working with what I have when it comes to uploading).  Again, there are many people out there with real cameras and real photographic knowledge who have done it better.  These are only meant to give a general impression, and I'll update upon returning to a place with more stable internet.

The town of Siem Reap itself is a bit of a world unto itself.  Cambodia as a country is still extremely poor, with GDP hovering just above that of Afghanistan.  In Siem Reap, however, a comparatively huge amount of money flows in from the Angkor tourism, so you have streets full of massive gleaming hotels and chic restaurants with prices on par with those in the West.  All of this is mixed up with structures haphazardly constructed of tarps, corrugated iron, and palm fronds; street vendors crowding each other as they sell unidentifiable things roasted on sticks; and half-paved streets and sidewalks full of potholes.  The Cambodians who live in Siem Reap live in buildings that run the gamut from the above sticks-and-tarps to brand-new neo-colonial villas with soaring ceilings and electric gates, and once you step outside the main urban grid, it’s straight to farm life, and the morning is full of rooster cries and the squeals of pigs.  The majority of people now have electricity, so glance down any given alley and you’ll see a family going about their business, drying spices, doing laundry, chopping vegetables for dinner, with the blare of a TV in the background.  For all the tuk-tuks and rusting bicycles, you’ll also see a surprising number of Range Rovers and Lexus SUVs, which I presume are the rides of choice for well to do Cambodians.  It’s the sort of bittersweet dichotomy characteristic of a world-famous tourist destination that happens to be located in what is still very much a developing country.

A few bits of miscellany:

-The humidity: oh, the humidity!  Yes, sometimes it stings when the sweat runs into my eyes, but this weather is so completely and totally up my alley.  Despite it being the rainy season, I have yet to be rained on and have indeed had mostly clear blue days.  One thing I love about the tropics is that a) the sweating serves as a perpetual detox and b) I can eat pretty much anything I want and it melts away.  Bonus points for hair and fingernails growing crazy fast. 

-Khmer: to put this in finance terms, if given the choice I would definitely short on my becoming fluent in Khmer in the next lifetime.  The alphabet is beautiful, but that’s all I really take away from it—it’s a lovely collection of elegant swoops and twists that happen to share the same line.  There’s also no proper Romanization of the language, so even speaking, when referring to a book, is an adventure, to put it mildly.  And while we’re on languages, I have yet to meet any Cambodians who prefer to use French over English.  After studying the history of Indochine and le Cambodge for years in my school French classes, I confess to being a tiny bit disappointed (also, my French is better than my Khmer).

-Driving: best described as the “ordered chaos” one sees in much of the developing world, perhaps slightly less so due to the fact that Cambodia simply doesn’t have that many cars (indeed, The World’s Most Dangerous Places, which was something of a bible to me at age sixteen, described Cambodia at one point as having so few cars that it “would be lucky” to have road accident statistics).  There are motopeds, tuk-tuks, bicycles, food carts attached to bicycles, pedestrians, and livestock all sharing the same space, and no one is afraid to pass each other, effectively turning the middle of the road into an anarchic no-man’s land.  I trust my tuk-tuk drivers, though, because this is what they do all day.  This isn’t their first rodeo.

-Fruit: heaven!  Between the longans, lychees, mangosteens, rambutans, and soursops, their rainbow of textures and colors all piled next to each other in the markets, I am completely spoilt for choice.  And the coconuts…well.  Well, well.  Let’s just say that if I had my way, every country would follow Cambodia’s example and have baby green coconuts for sale on every corner, just waiting to have their tops hacked off, straws at the ready.  For those who haven’t tried it, you will never want to pay three dollars for coconut water in a can ever again.