Three Days in the Third World

When Allie and I were getting ready for this trip, we noted that we expected the two main destinations, Thailand and Malaysia, to be "middle-class." After our week in Thailand, we re-affirmed that definition. But until we got here to Cambodia, we didn't really know what that meant. This place is poor. I mean, this place is ridiculously poor. It's fascinating for how unbelievably different it is here than what we're used to. Is it crazy that these people do not live anywhere close to our standards - or, rather, is it our standards that are crazy?

Monday - The Angkor Highlights

We began the day, as many do, with Angkor Wat, the largest of the old Khmer Empire temples and, it is believed, the largest religious structure in the world. Built in the 12th century and largely intact, it is an amazing, amazing site. It's full of bas-reliefs, cut into the stone all around the Gallery, on the outermost layer of walls within the temple itself. We walked all around the temple, up as high as we could go onto the third or fourth level, where you can get an eye-level view of the massive spires with the beautiful trees and Cambodian forest as a background. It took 37 years to complete Angkor Wat, and even knowing that, it's hard to fathom how they moved all of those stones from an upriver location down to Angkor and then built the whole thing. But it's easy to know, upon visiting, why it's considered one of the 7 Wonders of the World. Angkor Wat is that impressive.

I suppose you might want a little background about all of these temples. They were built largely between the 9th and 13th centuries, when the Khmer Empire controlled nearly all of what is now Cambodia, Thailand, Laos and Vietnam. The Khmers are the ancestors of today's Cambodian; the language spoken here is called Khmer. One of the many stark contrasts of this place is that what was, 1000 years ago, the capital area of the dominant empire and one of the most powerful civilizations up to its time, is now one of the poorest and saddest nations around. What a difference a millenium will make.

When we first got to Angkor Wat, we were immediately approached by three or four kids asking us to buy a postcard. Shoeless, knowing only enough English to ask for either a sale or another kind of handout, these kids were our first lesson in Cambodian poverty. As our guide, Ponheary, explained - it's uncomfortable to say no to these kids because they and their families really need money, but it's also uncomfortable to say yes, because to buy from them encourages the kids to keep coming back - which means they're not in school. We have found these kids at every temple and in the market area of Siem Reap itself. The ones in town have learned more English; upon learning that we're from the USA, they all tell us that Washington's the capital, that Alaska is the biggest state, and then they ask what state wé're from and what the capital is. Then we should buy a postcard! We have to insist repeatedly that we're not interested, and usually, it takes a "ok, we'll buy later" to shake the kids. That backfired once, though, when one girl to whom we said we'd buy later found us again, and when we didn't buy, out came the crocodile tears - convincing enough that we gave her a dollar to go away, only to have another kid tell us seconds later that this was her shtick. Quite the actress, the little devil...

Speaking of dollars - that's the dominant currency here. Everything's priced in dollars. The local currency, the riel, is valued at 4000 to $1. Only if your bill comes to an uneven amount will you see riel, as change. It's a little weird to be given 2000 riel as change for a buck. 2000 of anything should be worth something, and here I am with two paper quarters written in a funny language.

Back to the temples: we took a few hours off for lunch, ate at an Indian place near the market (where we met and dealt with Best Cambodian Actress for 2005), then met up again with Ponheary to visit Angkor Thom. Angkor Thom was built in the 12th and 13th centuries as the capital city, and composes many different structures. My favorite is the temple itself, the Bayon, which features 54 huge spires, each of which has a face cut into each side. It is a looming, dark, awe-inspiring temple. It's not in the same condition as Angkor Wat, but seeing the ruins is nevertheless as exciting - if not more so. The bas-reliefs here are both of some wars (almost all of the reliefs at Angkor Wat are about either wars or ancient Hindu myths - the Khmers of the time were predominantly Hindu, though today this is a Buddhist nation), but also of everyday life. So there are 800-year old carvings of a woman giving birth, of a man being chased by a tiger, and of men playing chess. It's fun to see how they thought of their own lives, and to note that a lot of what they did then is still what we do today (well, minus the tiger part). On the whole, after two days, the Bayon remains, in my mind, the best of the ruins we've seen.

Angkor Thom also features the elephant terrace, where the Khmer rulers and their subjects would enjoy various processions, parades, and victory celebrations. It's called the elephant terrace because the old wall-like structure features dozens of elephants carved into the side. Across the way are 12 tall towers, believed to have been used by dancers who would stand on ropes tying the towers together, well off the ground. The towers and the terrace were built over 1000 years ago, and as Ponheary suggested that we try to imagine the pomp and circumstance of the day, I couldn't help but note that, 1000 years later, we were standing on the very same site and glorifying these powerful, magnificient rulers, who are still revered by today's Cambodians. What will they say about us in 3005? Will they even know who we were or what we did?

That was it for Day 1. We spent the evening at the only lowlight of the day, at a dinner-and-show event in town. The food was ok, but the show, modeled after the ancient Apsara style (this was the same as performed on the towers opposite the elephant terrace), was a bit lame. The dancers would stop to chat with one another in the middle of the performance!

We got back to the hotel, and talked a bit about what we'd seen. Sure, the temples were phenomenal, but the lasting impression was the kids, these poor, poor kids, many of whom have insufficient food, no shoes, little education, and not a lot of hope. It was quite sobering - and yet it was NOTHING compared to what we'd see the next day.

Tuesday - The Real Cambodia

The temples are fabulous. They really are. They're architectural, historical and archeological wonders, and if possible, you should come out here and see them. But the temples are relics of yesterday's Cambodia. Today's Cambodia is a vastly different place...

We started out for Banteay Srey this morning, located 15 miles or so from Siem Reap. It was built in 967, it's one of the smaller temples, but considered one of the best because of the extraordinary detail of the carvings. Banteay Srey is not regular stone, but sandstone, which lends the complex a beatiful reddish-tannish color. The carvings really are special, depicting many Hindu legends, and the organization of the spires and auxiliary buildings makes for some great pictures (n.b. yes, Dad, we're taking lots of pics, but we can't upload until our return home). Between the different stones used, and that it was built well before yesterday's sites, Banteay Srey made for a great start to the morning and an interesting comparison to the biggies of Angkor.

More interesting, though, was the drive through the countryside to get to the temple. Let me explain what "Cambodian poor" means. By and large, especially outside the city, Cambodians live in one or two room bamboo huts, usually built up on stilts to avoid flooding during the heavy rains. They work exhausting hours, often on the rice paddies, and don't have much to show for it. The kids don't seem malnourished, by and large, but what few older people we see are way too thin (life expectancy, as of a few years ago, was 53 for men and 58 for women). You can see the rib bones of the cows. Again, many kids have no shoes. There are schools, and yet when we stopped to give kids pens, paper or markers (Allie's idea - bringing a little charity with us), they lit up with smiles, because they don't have such things on anything close to a regular basis. Stray dogs, men tilling fields with nothing but a plow and a water buffalo, dirt, and nothing beyond the village - that's today's Cambodia. It is unbelievably depressing. True, they have consumer goods, so it's probably not as bad as places like Niger; in other words, it's not so poor here that it makes the news. But the average salary here is $260 a year. You think you deserve a raise?!?!

So it felt very good to stop at a few points today to give out candy, pens, paper, etc. Allie's ideas, all. At one point in the afternoon, we spent about an hour in a Cambodian home, giving out these items, along with fresh fruit we bought today, drawing with the kids, making paper airplanes, sitting and watching and smiling. It clearly meant so much to them, as smiles were everywhere. It was also great for us to be able to bring a little light into their dreary lives, and a great experience to see the inside of one of these huts. Not surprisingly, it was simple, not decorated much, and unfathomably accomodating of the family of 8 (the father of which lost a leg to a land mine).

The land mines: one of the other horrors of this land is the legacy of the Khmer Rouge. The history's a bit confusing, but suffice it to say that the Khmer Rouge, which controlled Cambodia from 1975-78 and remained a vicious force until the late 1990s, was easily one of the most evil governments ever. Ponheary told us that, during the Khmer Rouge reign, each Cambodian received two shirts and two pairs of pants per year - all of which were black, perfect for a day's work in the hot tropical sun. Currency was abolished, the country was cut off from everyone else, and most notably, hundreds of thousands - if not millions - were killed. The Khmer Rouge aimed to create a Maoist agrarian state, and so anyone with ties to the old regimes or with an education was killed. That meant bad news for Ponheary's father, a teacher; her grandfather, an army commander; and her uncle, a former general. Some people were killed by being pushed into crocodile pits. It is perhaps not surprising to note that it is Cambodia that is so behind today while its Thai and Malaysian neighbors have the stronger, brighter futures. But that doesn't take away from the awful legacy of the Khmer Rouge. Oh, yeah, the land mines - they planted them everywhere, in part to terrorize and in part to keep out the Vietnamese (who controlled from 1979 until 1990 or so), and they still dot the countryside. We can't stray off the beaten path, because you just don't know what lurks out there beath the brush. (But - DON'T WORRY! We're not going anywhere like that, and the temples are all perfectly safe.)

Anyway, the other highlight of the day was our afternoon at the Floating Village. That's right, a Floating Village! Near Siem Reap is a large lake called the Tomle Sap. It lies in a massive floodplain, which in monsoon country means that the lake expands tremendously during rainy season. There are people who live, full time, on the lake, largely as fishing communities, and so these villages have sprouted up all over the Tomle Sap lake. The homes literally float, either because they're constructed on top of boats or are placed on bamboo rafts. It's an entirely normal functioning town, except that (a) it floats; and (b) because the lake levels rise and fall so dramatically, the village has to move 5 kilometers twice a year! We're here at the beginning of the heaviest part of the rainy season, so already, there are areas we saw today as completely under water that, a few months ago, were lined with the village boats. We watched a few homes get towed away toward higher ground, and if we were to go back to the same spot next week, we might not find anyone left at all. It's really cool! Everything you'd expect to find in a village, you find on a boat in this one: women rowing paddle boats full of fruits and vegetables, a travelling general store, and so on. We stopped at a fish farm to see some of the catch and to play with a python, which generally wrapped itself around each of our necks for a photo opp. Just an amazing afternoon - we thought life on Cambodian land was so different from ours, and now here we were on Cambodian waters experiencing something that we didn't even know could exist. A floating village!

And that's about it. I skipped over the smaller temple we saw after Banteay Srey, called Mabon, not because it wasn't impressive but because, well, the scenes of village life were more eye-opening. Allie noted that the temples start to blend together, which is true - but no way we're forgetting these people and the way they live.

Tomorrow, we're visiting a few more temples, including the famous Ta Prohm jungle temple. Most of the Angkor temples were re-discovered by the French in the 19th cenury, and were then covered with trees and other greenery, as they'd been largely abandoned for centuries. The French cut down most of those trees and began the restoration work, but for whatever reason, left Ta Prohm alone. So it's the "jungle temple" and supposed to be quite a sight. We'll see that, a few others, and then we're back to Bangkok for a night, before leaving for Malaysia on Thursday evening for eight nights.

If you're wondering, unlike Thailand, the lion's share of tourists here are Korean, with a good chunk of Chinese and Japanese as well. The Asian tourists come year-round; us Americans and our European and Australian counterparts tend to make it here only during dry season. Thailand, in contrast, features mostly European and American tourists.

Ok, back to the hotel for some sleep. These have been two incredible, educational, depressing and fantastic days, and we've got one more ahead of us before going back to civilization. We might have a chance to update this from Bangkok tomorrow night or Thursday, but don't be surprised if we don't check back in until Malaysia.