Rice is a big deal in southeast Asia, especially Cambodia where it’s been the foundation of the economy since ancient times and the main diet staple of the Khmer people. Indeed, the verb, “to eat” in the Khmer language translates literally as, “eat rice.” The thought occurred to me that as languages and dialects evolve over time, it would naturally follow that the Khmer language would include a word used mostly by children at mealtimes that translates literally as, “gee, rice again.” My favorite food is ribeye steak salted, peppered, and seared in butter to medium doneness accompanied by asparagus broiled in olive oil and sea salt and mashed potatoes prepared according to the Pioneer Woman’s recipe with lots of butter and cream cheese—I hope my cardiologist skips this post. As much as the thought of that perfect dinner makes my mouth water, if I had to eat it for every meal every day, it would start to stick in my throat much like rice is now doing after having eaten it in every possible form almost every day going on three months now.
We’ve reached the point in our journey where we sit facing each other at meals and share food-related fantasies based on favorite meals back home from which we’ve been long separated. Deveny misses the many offerings of our local Chick-fil-A especially the oreo milkshake, while Deena dreams of the Bang Bang shrimp at the Bonefish Grill partnered with crusty bread and rich, herb-flecked olive oil. Joseph and I would enjoy walking into a Cook Out restaurant and telling the cashier, “We’re gonna be here a while, and we want to run a tab.” The food in Thailand and Vietnam was creative, flavorful, and cheap, and the variety seemed to be endless. Our culinary experiences in Cambodia have been less than thrilling, and lately we’ve been enduring rice and noodles rather than enjoying them, but we remain thankful for our daily provision of sustenance.
We arrived in Siem Reap early yesterday afternoon after a five-hour journey from Phnom Penh in a thirteen-passenger van piloted by a friendly driver who honked his horn less than ten times during the entire trip much to my delight. The landscape in northern Cambodia is more lush and green than the provinces in the south mainly due to the flooding process that takes place every year after the monsoon season. The Tonle Sap Lake in the north swells to five times its normal size after floodwaters push back upstream from the south providing irrigation for the rice fields and other farmlands and requiring the majority of the countryside residents to build their houses on stilts. The silt deposits left behind by the receding floodwaters provide rich soil for crops. This process leaves the land dense with vegetation and tall palm trees with tight balls of leaves much different from the firework explosion of fronds found on the coconut palms.
Upon arrival at the bus drop off in Siem Reap, we hired a tuk tuk driver to take us the last three kilometers to our guesthouse, and we found the downtown area to be charming with French colonial buildings set among parks shaded by groves of tall old-growth trees. We turned off the main boulevard and drove the last kilometer down a dirt road lined with small shops until we reached the Wheel Garden Residence, our home for the next three days. The friendly staff swept us inside to the two-story lobby bordered by travertine wainscoting and gave us ginger beer welcome drinks and cold towels to refresh our travel weary faces. The Wheel Garden is old, but it’s been thoughtfully refurbished, and the rooms are spacious with tile floors, cream colored walls, and the most beautiful solid walnut doors I’ve ever seen in all my years of painting. They have large central panels with the characteristic flowing grain pattern of walnut, and they’ve been left natural with a smooth application of rich satin varnish. After relaxing for a while on the comfy beds, Deena and I felt like we were stealing at twenty-five dollars a night.
There’s a pool behind the homestay flanked by a well-appointed restaurant, and we staked a claim on a group of lounge chairs; so we spent the evening talking over a small meal of chicken stir fry and splashing in the pool. Tomorrow is a home school and planning day in anticipation of our visit to the temples of Angkor on Wednesday, and we’re thankful for such a welcoming place to call home for a few days as our time in Cambodia winds down.
We clicked with the tuk tuk driver who gave us the ride to the homestay on our first day in Siem Reap, and before we parted ways, we negotiated with him for an all-day transportation rate to Angkor. We settled on a fair price, and Bory looked us straight in the eyes and thanked us for the work before speeding off in a cloud of red dust. Two days later, he was right on time, and we boarded his tuk tuk at 9:30 in the morning and began our day of exploring ancient Khmer society. The ruins of Angkor are the national symbols of modern Cambodia, and their mysterious, movie-set auras draw millions of pilgrims every year. There are numerous ways to explore the buildings, including expensive group tours, bicycle tours, and multi-day passes, but as is our custom, we opted for the self-guided route using the open air tuk tuk to save money and time since we tend to get templed out fairly quickly.
We had to visit the Angkor headquarters first in order to buy day passes, so Bory took the scenic route through downtown Siem Reap along the canals with slow-moving green water and banks laced with bouganvillea vines sagging under heavy, bright red blooms. Little kids tripped over each other to wave to us as we passed by their families’ market stalls in the cool morning air. Soon we reached the open road beyond the city where newly developed hotels and businesses with pastel stucco facades lined the highway—bearing witness to a Cambodian economy that’s gaining strength. The price to visit these famous ruins has doubled in the past year, and we grumbled a little after parting with more money than we’ve spent at one time in a while, but the total cost was still a good bit less than other World Heritage sites we’ve visited such as Stonehenge and Petra—we chalked it up to the price of adventure. With our crisp, photo-graced passes in hand, Bory pointed the tuk tuk toward the ancient capital of Angkor, and we were off into ancient history.
Angkor Wat
The Angkor empire thrived from 900 to 1400 AD, and during its peak, contained a population of four million people and a strong government that ruled most of southeast Asia. The ruins of their capital speak to the wealth and power of this ancient society which was built on agriculture and dedicated to Hinduism. The religious devotion motivated massive temple building projects that lasted for decades. Other ambitious building projects included road networks and reservoir systems used for crop irrigation, and under the reign of strong “god-kings” who maintained absolute power, citizens willingly worked hard to build up an efficient, affluent society that lasted for centuries.
The gradual decline of Angkor is generally attributed to the introduction of Buddhism which weakened the god-kings’ status and produced a smaller and less-than-willing labor force. The irrigation systems silted up over time which decreased rice production, and the road networks made it easier for outsiders to invade this weakening kingdom which finally collapsed in the early fifteenth century. There’s a popular myth out there that the fantastic cities and temples were overtaken by the dense jungle and forgotten until rediscovered centuries later, but natives and outsiders have always known about the buildings, and careful restoration has taken place during the decades following the demise of the Khmer Rouge regime.
The massive temple of Angkor Wat was our first stop of the morning, and at 10:30, the legendary heat was already building with thick humidity to match. A lot of visitors come out to Angkor Wat to watch the sun rise behind the spires of the temple before heading out to see the other ruins, but this early scenario was laughable to my long-slumbering crew to whom a sunrise is the stuff of myth and fable. Bory dropped us off at the head of the promenade, and we walked down one-thousand years of ancient glory to the temple grounds, where we spent over an hour exploring and taking pictures of the arches, towers, and delicately carved reliefs on almost every surface. The spires of Angkor Wat decorate the Cambodian flag, and even though blackened and worn with age, they are riveting and prompted us to say, “I can’t believe we’re here” over and over. By the time we finished our visit, we had gone through our first two liters of water and purchased four more before meeting with Bory and heading to the ruins of the capital city of Angkor Thom and the magnificent Bayon temple.
Just another day at the office
The Angkor complex encompasses over four-hundred square kilometers of mostly thick jungle separating the ruins, and the roads between the buildings are shaded by towering trees and dense vegetation with twisting vines tying the whole mass of green together. Riding in the tuk tuk was refreshing with the cool breeze, and we could hear the whirring sounds of insects in the trees and smell the loamy scent of the jungle with a thick layer of decaying leaves on the forest floor. As we approached the Bayon temple, troops of macaque monkeys scampered along the edge of the jungle with the elder primates holding court under the trunks of huge trees. One of them was even peeling a banana which prompted me to look around for evidence of Disneyesque orchestration for which our high-priced tickets could certainly have funded.
Bory dropped us off at the front of the Bayon temple, and we walked in with open-mouthed astonishment as we tried to take in the visual assault of ancient art and religion in this Buddhist temple with Hindu influences. Huge carved faces of the bodhisattva are set in every direction, and the smiling profiles against weathered stone and the sky behind the steamy jungle gave us the feeling that we had entered the realm reserved only for hardy adventurers and well-funded archeologists, and we were thankful to be there. After wandering the temple for a while through wisps of incense smoke, the girls sought a shady corner to rest, but Joseph and I went a little farther to explore the explore the exotic terraces of the elephants and the leper king and ventured out to the surrounding city wall to see the encroachment of giant jungle trees beside ornate gates splotched with lichen and stained with ancient trails of leached lime and salts from the heavy stone blocks.
Bayon Temple
Tomb Raider
We joined the girls in the shade and drank more water as the heat and humidity continued to rise along with the surging song of the insects in the jungle. Bory suggested that we stop at two smaller temples that he liked as we gradually made our way to the final stop at the temple of Ta Prohm, and we enjoyed the elegant art and architecture contained at these two sites. After a short visit, we checked out a roadside vendor and bought more water and a ring of miniature bananas that proved to be a sweet and sustaining mid-afternoon snack.
A lot of visitors to Angkor purchase multi-day passes and spend eight to ten hours at the sites each day sometimes traveling the distances between the temples on bicycles, and I don’t see how they pull it off in the intense heat of the jungle. I suppose youth and the pursuit of a doctoral thesis provide enough energy and motivation for some, but by the time we reached the fabled temple of Ta Prohm, we were almost sapped. Bory dropped us off at the path leading to the temple, and we walked a long distance through the jungle to both the sounds of booming drums being played by a pathside band and exotic birds deep in the thick forest. The blockbuster movie Tomb Raider was filmed at Ta Prohm and it has since become the favorite temple among visitors because of its moss-covered ruins made more resplendent by crumbled walls strangled by the roots of trees as the jungle strives to claim the shrines for its own. For some reason, the smart people with botany degrees can’t decide if the larger trees are silk-cotton or thitpok and if the smaller ones are strangler fig or gold apple—I wish I could be privy to those scintillating debates.
Upon entering the main gate of Ta Prohm, all feelings of weariness left us as we beheld the culmination of fantasy conjured from years of movie magic and actual human history, and we lost track of time as we wandered in and out of dark corridors full of toppled blocks carved with smiling gods and scrolls of intricate characters. Shaded courtyards contained by stone walls buckled with the weight of huge roots and vines created scenes of intense wonder. I gave this temple the rare distinction as one of the coolest places I’ve ever been. As awe-inspiring as these temples must have been during the time of the Angkor empire, seeing them in ruin, still full of artistic power covered with the weathered green patina of centuries spent in the deep jungle, was an event my little family will never forget.
Can you see me?
We climbed into the back of the tuk tuk and told Bory to head back to the Wheel Garden residence where we anticipated anticipating jumping into the pool to get relief from the heat of the day. During the course of the ride home, I thought about all of the wonderful things we had seen that day in the jungles of northern Cambodia, and I was jazzed that I also managed to find some geocaches at the sites we visited—as close to actual treasure hunting/tomb raiding as this fifty-year-old painter from North Carolina will ever get. But I’ll take it, oh yes, I’ll take it.
Bory dropped us off, and we thanked him for driving us around ancient Angkor, and we also worked out a deal for a ride to the airport at the end of the week. The pool felt every bit as good as we had hoped, and we spent a couple of hours in and out of the water until we were driven back indoors by the sound of incessant chanting coming from a loudspeaker in the street out front which I had noticed the night before as well. I asked the restaurant proprietor about the sound, and he replied, “Somebody die. The family have a monk come and chant in front of house.” I asked how long this sort of thing goes on. “If the family poor, one day. If the family rich, many, many days” was his direct response, and since I’m still hearing the chanting as I write three days after I first noticed it, that family must be loaded. I wonder if the neighbors get together at some point and take up a collection to bribe the monk to stop.
We’re spending our last day in Siem Reap doing school lessons, writing, resting, and planning for our journey to Singapore which begins at 3:00 tomorrow afternoon. Of the three countries in southeast Asia we’ve visited, our time in Cambodia has been the shortest, but the memories we’ve made here are intense with wild beauty and human history both tragic and glorious. This part of the world is vastly different from anything we’ve ever known, and we’re leaving it with impressions of smiling stone silhouettes peeking out from ancient vines and the smiling faces of the people we’ve met who were glad we came to their country.
You made Lara proud! Miss you guys!
ReplyDelete