Touring Angkor

Travels, story deadlines, and editing work in Bangkok consumed the past month. Suddenly it’s early December and I’m approaching my three-month mark in Cambodia. I live here now, but still feel like there is so much to learn--like an entire language outside greetings, directions, and the numbers one through 20.

At home in Buffalo a month before my departure, my mom, brother and I sat flipping through TV channels. We stopped on the Travel channel, where a group of Canadian men in tank tops were in the midst of traveling the "exotic" lands of Cambodia. They actually used the term several times. I learned the 10,000 reasons to never use the word—-or consider new people or places—-exotic by second semester freshman year. It's step one in avoiding the ignorant expat moniker. One guy proceeded to introduce the concept of curly hair to the natives by pointing to his head, and shouting incessantly, "curly hair!"

He walked through Angkor Wat with a Lonely Planet guide in hand, a land mine pictured on the cover. Inside Ta Prohm, the famous temple where giant tree roots sprout from the ruins, he ran into that very man, bent at the waist, still shuffling along with his cane. The Canadian is star struck. He asked for the (illiterate) man's autograph. The old man looked at him, bewildered.

Sure, these guys are caricatures of the bad traveler. But someone decided to give them a TV show and, until I can find a way to scrub off my pasty white skin and all the assumptions that come with it, I'm just like them.

In the first weeks of October, my friend Julia flew out to visit, and we traveled northwest to Angkor Wat. While most trekked destinations fail to live up to the hype, this one exceeded my expectations. Enormous teak and bayon trees line the temple park. They seem almost as old as the buildings themselves. Outside the enormous, crumbling structures, limbless men and women and small children beg for change. It struck me that an ancient city built on the backs of slaves leaves out the poor today. A private company somehow owns the national treasure, and the $20 per day park entrance fee goes toward the profits of a firm called Sokimex.

The trip involved ignoring a lot of unpleasantries. It also involved climbing over loose stones and learning about the buildings' carvings. Apsaras—celestial nymphs—adorn many of the buildings, especially Banteay Srei, or “citadel of the women,” because, as our guide explained, the temple is modest in size but the craftsmanship exceeds all the others. They assume women built it. Plus, it’s covered in Apsaras and made of pink sandstone. We visited it in the pouring rain (the angry, multi-directional kind mentioned above) and even that failed to diminish the temple’s beauty.

On the way back to Phnom Penh, we took a boat from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh, down the Tonle Sap, the only river in the world that flows two ways, depending on the season. Whole fishing villages float on tires and empty barrels, hundreds of feet from either shore on this wide river that starts out as a lake. As commonly happens here, the government is trying to push these people out of their homes.