Cambodia's recent history is starkly at odds with what greeted us when we got off the plane in Siem Reap and made our way to our hotel on an extremely comfortable open-air tuk tuk. When most people think Cambodia, the first phrase that probably pops into their heads is "killing fields", but for a place with such carnage in its immediately recent past, there's no evidence, no bombed out buildings, no memorials, and nobody talks about it. (I wonder how that'll compare to Croatia, which I'm visiting soon.) You have to look deep and read between the lines, but the scars are there.
How could they not be? As recently as the 70s and 80s, 2 million people out of Cambodia's population of about 6 million were murdered or died in the Khmer Rouge genocide. More than half the population of Cham (Muslim) people were exterminated, and the ethnic Chinese population was reduced from 425,000 to about 60,000 through genocide and emigration. Whole classes of people were targeted for destruction -- professionals, the elite, all non-Cambodians, and anyone accused of sympathizing with the West. People were forcibly moved all around the country by the government; famine was the rule; and practically nobody was left unaffected. All of this ended as recently as 1991, and yet the casual tourist can spend an entire week with these sunny and immensely hospitable people and suspect nothing. When I think about it that way, it's eerie, like returning to the site of a murder to see an almost too perfect and tranquil scene.
Siem Reap is best known for its temples, the Angkor complex, but on our first day we got a peak into a completely different side of the country. After getting the lay of the land, MP and I headed to the Chong Khneas floating village on Tonle Sap, Southeast Asia's largest freshwater lake. On the way we stopped by the GECKO Environmental Center to learn a bit about the ecology of the lake and the ways in which the changing water levels affect the people living near it. As you can see from some of the pictures, the lake rises and falls dozens of feet during a season, so that everything that doesn't float must be built on enormous stilts and connected with rickety ladders. Life expectancy in these villages is extremely low, and literacy is by far the exception.
After our quick stop at GECKO, we boarded a small boat with three or four other Westerners and set out for Chong Khneas. I didn't know what to expect from the "floating village", but its name pretty much describes it. Incredibly, tens of thousands of Vietnamese (some refugees) live on thousands of houseboats that drift back and forth near each other on the lake. They have home-boats, a school boat, a few stores and workplace -boats, and even a temple boat. This is a way of life I didn't realize existed outside of the movie Water World. The name is evocative and the scenery is beautiful, but these folk are among the poorest, least educated, most unhealthy, and shortest-living people in the world.
We went aboard twice: once on a boat that serves as a combination store and crocodile farm (crocodile skin is a major source of income), and again on a larger, western-style restaurant boat where we watched the sunset and ate dinner. The beauty of the locale was a bit marred by the hailstorm of bugs. After the sunset, we rode back in a tiny little boat, which of course had no lights but the hand torch of the driver (which he only turned on once every few minutes). There are no lights and the sky was pitch black, so part of me is amazed we made it back. The whole experience was incredible: getting out there, realizing that this is how people live, and the adventure of getting back. This is something I haven't seen anywhere else in the world.
The next morning we woke up an hour or two before dawn to take part in Cambodia's chief tourist ritual: sunrise at the Angkor Wat. The Angkor complex of temples is Cambodia's most important tourist site, a group of dozens if not hundreds of temples spanning scores of miles of the Khmer Empire's historic capital. Built over centuries during the Middle Ages, these temples range hugely in size, color, orientation, style, and, most obviously, degree of conservation. Some are almost entirely ruins, more Romantically inspiring than any derelict Scottish castle; others, such as Angkor Wat, are still in very good shape.
The experience and adventure of sunrise at Angkor Wat is not to be missed. Our hotel's tuk tuk driver picked us up at 430 AM or so and drove us out of Siem Reap and into the heart of the Angkor park. After stopping to buy our two-day pass to the temples, we continued down an intensely dark road, hurtling as fast as the tuk tuk could go, the wind deafening, the sky and the rainforest around us entirely black. Gradually we arrived at a dirt patch that serves as the parking lot, and without much explanation the tuk tuk driver pointed us in a direction and said he'd wait for us. We couldn't see anything and had no idea what we were supposed to do, so we stumbled in that direction and started seeing a few people. We followed them (many of whom seemed just as confused as we were), and we reached massive stone steps, leading to a long stone path. Eventually, this path became a bridge, and, still unable to see much and tripping every few seconds on the irregular surface that more resembled boulders placed next to each other than cobblestone to our blind feet, we realized that a few meters to either side there was a broad moat that took minutes to traverse.
We kept heading down the path, getting more excited with each step. Clearly something great was in store, and the fact that we couldn't see anything (really, in the US this place would have been shut down for liability reasons) and were stumbling towards it with, by now, hundreds of people, made it all the more surreal. We approached a massive shadow, which we realized was a tall stone wall, and passed through the gate to the enormous courtyard surrounding the temple. We kept walking several hundred meters down the path towards another hulking shadow, and we saw that everybody was gathered on the banks of a lake, sitting quietly and waiting for something.
We joined them. Like everybody, we pointed our heads straight on, but in the moonless night we couldn't see anything but vague spaces where the darkness seemed more profound than elsewhere. Ten minutes passed. A bit more. And then the very first rays of the sun peeked over the horizon and began to illuminate Angkor Wat. I snapped my first photo.
Let me tell you, this picture shows about ten times as much as we could see with our eyes. It wasn't until I looked at the photo that I had an inkling of what was coming. To us, it still seemed almost entirely dark. But then a few more minutes went by, and the temple began to emerge to the naked eye.
A few minutes passed again, and the sky began to take shape, gaining depth and greater color. Dawn was coming, but the sun was still hidden. Then, in an instant, the relative silence of the scene was broken twice in quick succession: in a moment, as if the entire species had been roused, swarms of cicadas awoke and the entire moated court was engulfed in noise. Another moment passed, and a group of Buddhist monks began their morning rites, chiming clear notes from their bells and drums and welcoming the sun. We stood there for a while and just watched as dawn happened. Then we wandered around and took some pictures before joining the slow recessional of awed and tired tourists, walking away from the temple, through the gate, across the bridge and moat, down the path and down the stairs, to our tuk tuk driver, through the rainforest, to our hotel, and back for a little sleep. When I woke up a few hours later I realized, the entire thing could have been a dream.
The experience was almost more beautiful than I had thought possible, and as we walked out, the light back on and reality reasserting itself, I thought of Prospero's words from The Tempest:
You do look, my son, in a moved sort,We would return to Angkor Wat later that day, but it was not the same. The magic was the moment.
As if you were dismay'd: be cheerful, sir.
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
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