"Hello Ladeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!"

One again, I'm a country behind.  I'm currently in Vietnam, and have been for the past few days, but unfortunately you guys will have to wait for the gory details of the Vietnamese transportation system, because first I need to address my time in Cambodia.  That leg of the trip was added on once I realized that it made no sense to visit Thailand and Vietnam without checking out one of the countries in between.  I knew I wanted some serious beach time, so Cambodia won out over Laos.  I think I made the right choice.  Cambodia is an active contradiction.  How can a place that suffers from such extreme levels of poverty also manage to exude voluptuousness?  It's a beautiful, mixed up place, and it certainly dragged me into the confusion.

I was ushered across the Thai border with another US traveler ( a New Yorker, no less!) by one of the ubiquitous Cambodian "helpers".  You need a visa?  They'll show you where to get a visa.  You need a cab?  Oh, they've got cabs.  And tuk-tuks.  And motobikes.  Hell, they'd probably give you a piggyback ride to the next town if asked nicely.  Our Helper saw us safely through all the visa checkpoints and into a dusty Toyota Camry.  After a quick stop at a gas station (aka, a kid at the side of the road ran over with a jug of gasoline and poured it into the tank) we were on the Road to Siem Reap (yeah, there's really just the one road, paved as of 2009). The two hour long car trip immediately set the atmosphere.  There was such an impossible amount of green.  Stretching in either direction I could see crisp fields of grass, palm trees, rice patties, and emerald mountains in the distance.  There was the occasional shack, either tin-roofed or thatched, and plenty of livestock.  This is kind of area where you break for cow crossings.  As the sun set, I started to wonder where the hell we were going.  We had been on one straight road for two hours, and I could see nothing that looked like a city in the distance.  Darkness fell, clouds rolled in, and the vista was lit up by noiseless flashes of lightening.  We seemed to be outside of time and space.  Finally, we reached a crossroads, and this was the signal that we had arrived in Cambodia's third largest city.  My traveling companion and I were deposited in tuk-tuks (the tuk-tuk: a motobike pulling a cart-like thing containing one or more overly priveleged foreigners) and went our separate ways.

While my time in Thailand was delightfully organized by Cory, this marked the start of just a tiny bit of chaos.  Or not chaos, really.  More of a haphazardous wonder.  I just kind of decided to dive in.  Luckily, Angkor Wat was there to catch my fall.  Okay, just a bit of clarification, feel free to skip ahead if you already know this: Angkor Wat is actually just one of about 25 temples in the area.  It is, however, the biggest.  As in, the biggest religious building in the whole frickin' world.  So it's understandable that the whole area just sort of gets lumped under that title.  I spent three days touring the temples at Angkor, no guide, just me, a tuk-tuk, and a gazillion big eyed children trying to sell me things.  The structures are truly astonishing.  Massive sandstone slabs interlock to form monuments to ancient god-kings.  The obvious questions arise: how on earth were these materials transported?  How did they accomplish such uniform, detailed artistry?  And what the hell was up with king Jayavarman VII?  He oversaw the creation of a temple with 216 faces of a "god" who supposedly bore more than a striking resemblence to the king himself.   I mean, self-glorification is one things, but that's just ridiculous.

 

 

Perhaps one of the most amazing things about the temples is that they still exist. When the Khmer Rouge came to power they slaughtered the monks at the functioning temples, but left the structures standing.  The temples weren't left undamaged, but given the insanity of the regime it's hard to believe that more wasn't destroyed.  I guess they were too busy killing Cambodians for the good of Cambodia. While the temples have mostly escaped human destruction, they are slowly being pulled back into the jungle, wall by wall, stone by stone.  Monolithic trees have wrapped themselves around the temples, found their way inside, and are simultaneously dragging the buildings into the ground amd ripping them up into the sky. 

Since this is the rainy season the tourist hoards were slightly diminished.  Oh, they were there, but I was able to steal a few moments for just me, the jungle-temples, and the monkeys.  Outisde the temples, however, the place was mobbed with peddlers and beggers.  I knew ahead of time that this was the situation, but the scope, especially at Siem Reap, was overwhelming.  I'm not sure there's any real economy aside from tourism in the town, and the desperation for survival has led to a particularly twisted kind of child labor.  Before going to Cambodia I had made a decision not to buy anything from children - in most cases the money goes to a parent or a handler, and the more money they make, the less likely they are to be allowed to go to school.  I hadn't realized that children are basically the only people selling things around the temples.  There are children selling you water, food, scarves, bracelets, guidebooks, genocide memoirs, toys, postcards, paintings, and magnets.  These kids can count to ten in multiple languages.  They have been trained not to take no for an answer.  And this isn't even the most heartbreaking thing, no, that would be the children begging so insistently for money that they almost push you off the road, and will follow you repeating the same plea over and over and over again.  There is no good response.  You can't possibly buy from every one of them, give to every one of them.  And then there's the knowledge that it may actually be doing them more harm than good.  So you end up repeating the litany, "I'm sorry, I can't, I'm so sorry, I just can't," all day long.  To which they respond, "Why?  Why can't you?"

I don't know what else to say.  I also ate, and ate some good things, but  I think I'm going to save that for another post.

And that was Siem Reap.  Breathtaking.  Exhausting.