A country in ruins

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I arrived in Siam Reap on Friday night. As I stepped out of the airport after receiving my visa from a haughty immigration officer, I was immediately accosted by several motorbike drivers. I picked one, telling him the guesthouse Let's Go recommended. He proceeded to whine for the next 15 minutes - the duration of the ride - until I agreed to go to his friend's guesthouse instead. In retrospect the whining was rather mild.

In the last couple of days I have been approached over 200 times for money. I know that seems like an exhaggeration, but it's probably lowballing it a little bit. Most of the petitioners are little kids, mothers with newborns, and victims of landmines, all of which are fairly heartwrenching. If you don't give them money, they follow you, grab you, cry and whine. If you do give them money, two things happen - they ask for more, and a swarm of others descends on you, decrying the injustice of one getting more than all the others. At this point the whining turns to angry yelling and grabbing. It has been an exercise in patience for sure, and has substantially eaten into my travel budget (I've already spent more than in the previous 10 days in Thailand).

Emerging from chaos

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The whole situation is sad. The situation of many people in the country is very desperate. The scars from the Vietnam War and the Khmer Rouge are omnipresent, and the current Communist government seems to be more inclined to pocket the little income the country gets rather than invest it in improving the people's lives (this is a bit of speculation on my part, based on the few cambodians i talked to).

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So after a day of feeling annoyed at getting cheated and having to be constantly on guard, I finally was able to reflect on the whole thing, and understand. When your kids are starving, decorum is really the last thing on your mind.

There are definitely brighter spots. A lot of places employ and help support handicapped victims. All over the place there are blind massage places, and in most tourist locations there are bands of landmine victims playing traditional Khmer music. A couple of times I stood and watched them play for 10 minutes or so. Most of them get really excited when you really appreciate them as musicians rather than as just objects of pity - they start smiling and showing off. (For those of you familiar with the weird asian dude that plays the weird asian instrument in Harvard Square - that thing sounds way better as part of a band. These guys still look way happier than him though).

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Along the roads, there are billboards encouraging people to get rid of their guns. These are definitely not as prominent as the blue and white "People's Party of Cambodia" signs, typically located outside nice houses, with Toyotas and Lexuseses parked outside.

On the morning of the next day I woke up at 5 and got on the motorbike with my driver to begin the tour of Angkor - an ancient city (or more accurately a collection of cities) build between 900 and 1200 AD by the various emperors of the Khmer Empire. The dude that started building it apparently first proclaimed himself "Emperor of the World" - clearly after that he needed some impressive temples. After him, every new emperor had to build his own temple, and make the capital centered around the new temple. The temples are meant to house Hindu deities - mostly Vishnu and Shiva. Most of the temples follow the same basic layout, based on Hindu mythology, which consists of a central tower, surrounded by a square of four lesser towers, these resting on several galleries and forming a pyramid (there is some nesting going on too, with smaller representations of the same idea existing on each of the towers). The central tower symbolizes Mount Meru, where the gods hang out I think, and the other layers are what the rest of the world looks like. Apparently the Khmers pretty much accepted Hinduism the way it was given to them, and in the 400 years their empire was around, they didn't really interpret too much - just kept building the same way. (This should help explain why I was a bit temple-weary after the first eight hours, and opted to go home.)

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The day started with a sunrise at Angkor Wat, the biggest, coolest of the temples. The sun comes up over the temple as you approach it on a long stone walkway, guarded by lions. The area around the temple is green and flat, with cool trees and horses wandering around. The whole place is magical, though the effect is lessened by the cohorts of tourists scaling the walls. (If you go, try not to go on the weekend. That was a huge mistake). Perhaps because of the $20 a day charge, it seems a lot of the tourists seem compelled to throw their trash all over the place, despite the fact that there are garbage bins everywhere. I feel kind of sad for the people that have no concept of why doing this is awful, because as I learned from my book on Buddhism, their karma will likely result in various deformities in their future lives, or perhaps even a descent into one of the three hell levels, which are very difficult to return from.

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After that most of the day was consumed by a long, hot, sweaty walk around numerous temple ruins in Angkor Thom. The ruins are cool. A bunch of them have big stone faces. And elephant sculptures. And carvings of Shiva dancing the dance of destruction on the world. Cause that's what he does.

I had a bunch of aforementioned interactions with little kids selling $2 water and $1 sodas (really expensive for this part of the world). One girl, Vien, either was genuinely nicer, or better understood the idea of a soft sell. She came up to me when I was sitting, looking over a big pool of water, and gave me a free bracelet. then she left me alone until i called her over. She was only about 4 feet tall, and looked like she was 9, but was in fact 14, and in fourth grade in school. Apparently school is not free, and she has to pay the teacher every month. She speaks English exceptionally well (better than 90% of the people I tried to speak to in thailand). She also speaks French and Japanese with similar proficiency, and can say hello and count in three or four other languages. Goes to school 6 days a week in the morning, and in the afternoon works at the booth with her family, selling tourists drinks and food.

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Worth mentioning are Ta Keo, a tall unfinished pyramid temple, and Ta Prohm, the jungle temple (featured in Tomb Raider, as everyone will tell you).

After 8 hours of this I crashed for the rest of the day, basically sleeping for 11 hours or so (though still enjoying some excellent Khmer food). The next morning, at a much more reasonable 9am, we headed some 40 km out of town to a little temple called Banteay Srei, and then to some carvings in a river bed another 10km out. The drive was pretty cool, since a large chunk of it went through the nearby villages, on dirt roads. People live in tiny wooden huts (they can't even afford bamboo), with roofs and sides made of tried palm leaves. They each get a tiny plot behind the house which they use to grow rice. As I saw later, they are not even the worst off.

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After the temple, I took a boat tour of the nearby portion of Tonle Sap (the biggest lake in Asia or something like that). The boat meanders its way through the green, bubbly water into a floating village. First we go through the Vietnamese side, houseboats places randomly all around, pigs sitting in cages on the sides of the houses. Kids and old women paddle little boats between the houses. The only stop of the tour is a fish farm / souvenir shop, where we see a bunch of crocodiles and catfish. Then it's on to the Cambodian side of the village, a relative breath of fresh air, with much nicer "houses", "streets", etc. It is hard for me to imagine a life more difficult than this. And yet, as we pass by, I see in many of the houses people hanging out, talking, and laughing. Life goes on.

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I left Siem Reap today for Phnom Penh. The 7 hour bus ride was another glimpse of daily life here. There are few cars - mostly buses and trucks passing through, as well as bikes and ox-drawn carts for the villagers. Many motorbikes, with baskets full of little pigs strapped to the back. Throngs of uniformed kids (white shirts and blue bottoms) getting out of school and biking home. Cow herds crossing the road. Water buffalo hiding their bodies in the green pools from the merciless sun. More straw houses. Perhaps because of the lack of tourists, this looks more normal - people look like they are living their lives, finding happiness however they can.

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On the second stop, the bus was surrounded by women with large bowls full of fried grasshopers, beetles, chicken hearts, fried chicks, etc. And people from the bus actually got that stuff as a snack. I was not brave enough.

Now I am in Phnom Penh. So far it's great - clean, tourist friendly, and much less hustling. It is only the first day though.