by John Higham
Jordan, Katrina, and I all sat up straight in our seats. I knew darn well kids could go to Angkor Wat. What was September playing at?
“Why, Mom?” Katrina asked, bewildered. “Why aren’t kids allowed to go to Angkor Wat?”
“It’s too dangerous. Cambodia still has thousands of buried land mines left over from the war. Plus, it has poisonous snakes, including king cobras. If you go to Angkor Wat, you have to be really careful not to stray off the marked paths.”
“Really, Mom?”
“Why can grown-ups go?”
“We can stay on the path!”
“How old do you have to be?”
“What kind of snakes are there? How poisonous are they, really?”
“How big are the explosions from land mines if you step on one?”
“Can you look it up in the guidebook? When will we know if we can go?”
In one stroke of genius, September had sold Jordan and Katrina on the idea of going, warned them of the small, but real, dangers, obtained their promise not to wander off as they are prone to do, and scuttled my plans for hanging out on the beach in Thailand for another week.
In short, we were going to Cambodia.
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The Saga of the Exxon Valdez. If you are ever tempted to replace the engine in your car with one from “overseas” have a peek here.
17.
The Ugly Side of Humanity
January 2–January 9
Cambodia
Cambodia shook us. We had seen abject poverty in Tanzania and the Chinese countryside, but it did little to prepare us for what we would experience in Cambodia. Months after we left, I couldn’t get the images out of my head.
• • •
“Lonely Planet says don’t take the bus. They state this most emphatically,” I said.
“Why? How else are we going to get to Siem Reap?” September asked.
“Fly. The roads are supposed to be horrid. Unfortunately, judging by the price of a ticket, it appears that the airline is aware they have a monopoly.”
“Well,” September said, “we’ve survived bad roads before. Nothing can be as bad as the roads in the Serengeti, could it?”
We found a bus company operating at the main train station in Bangkok that could take us to Siem Reap. The ticket agent assured us it was only three hours to the Thai-Cambodian border, then another four hours to Siem Reap. “You’ll enjoy the ride in our air-conditioned Mercedes-Benz bus,” she told us.
As promised, we started our trip in style, but once we arrived at the Thai-Cambodian border we would never see that bus again. Our driver simply pointed vaguely in the direction of the border, saying, “Someone will meet you on the other side and take you the rest of the way.”
Three hours and 300 yards of sidewalk and 300 yards of red tape later, we were in Cambodia. “So now what happens?” I asked no one in particular.
“I guess we wait,” September replied.
So wait we did. We waited with a group of Europeans who were traveling with us, and we talked amongst ourselves. Katrina and Jordan had become savvy travelers, but the mixture of the heat and not knowing when or how we were to depart was trying for all of us. Luckily, Granny was able to keep the kids occupied looking for food and snacks while September and I tried to sort out our next move. We queried the other travelers. “Anyone know who we’re waiting for?” “Any idea how long we need to wait?” “Does anyone have any documentation, like a travel voucher?” Unfortunately, no one did.
Even though we had all paid for a full bus ticket onward to Siem Reap, many people ultimately hired private taxis for what was believed to be a four-hour drive. More than an hour later the 27 of us who remained were herded into the back of a dual-axle cattle truck.
I could easily see the road ahead from where I was perched in the back of the truck. The truck approached a bridge that went over a small river. As the bridge came into focus, I grabbed the sides of the truck in a panic, braced myself for a collision, and let out an expletive.
“Watch your language!” September demanded.
“Did you see that? There were planks missing on that bridge wide enough to swallow a tire! The driver didn’t even slow down!”
We were following a river and switching banks every so often. Everyone gradually relaxed as we became desensitized to the state of the bridges. Then the driver zipped over a bridge composed of no more than two wooden planks, each just wide enough to accommodate a tire; I wouldn’t have walked across it for fear of falling off. All the passengers collectively held their breath for a moment, but the driver zipped over as if nothing were amiss. Halfway across the bridge I found that I had unconsciously lifted my feet off the floor as if the action would somehow make me lighter.
After several hours of bone-jarring roads, September finally admitted, “Okay these roads are worse than the ones in the Serengeti.”
“I beg to differ,” I replied. “True, this is more miserable, but the difference in the Serengeti is that we traveled in a rugged Toyota Land Cruiser that was up to the task. I swear this truck has no shocks and its tires are square.”
Katrina and Jordan took this journey stoically, having had several months’ experience with uncomfortable travel. Granny, on the other hand, was having the time of her life. My mother-in-law has traveled extensively around the world, often alone on a bicycle, her favorite destination being rural Yemen. The dust, heat, and noise, and nonstop near-death bridge crossings seemed to provide exhilaration such that she commented several times, “I’m so glad we didn’t fly!” Fourteen hours after leaving Bangkok, in the wee hours of the morning, heads buzzing, we were in Siem Reap, Cambodia.
• • •
Siem Reap, literally translated, means Siam Defeated, in honor of the Khmer defeating the Thai in a bygone era. It is a now a town of seventy thousand people with an international airport and an endless row of glitzy hotels with rooms that can be as high as $500 per night. For $13 we landed in a clean, comfortable guest house with much-needed AC.
I paid close attention when school was in session that first morning. September explained, “In Khmer, a wat is a temple. The entire area surrounding this town is known as Angkor Wat and it was built during the height of the ancient Khmer civilization, which lasted from the 9th through the 15th centuries. Angkor Wat is often cited as the largest religious complex in the world. Being so deep in the jungle of Cambodia, it was unknown to the outside world until the 1860s when Europeans colonized the area.”
After the early morning history lesson we found ourselves walking down the main street that is lined with restaurants and gift shops, all catering to Western tourists. One place caught our eye because it advertised fruit smoothies made with “commercial” ice, meaning the ice was clean. As it was humid and stifling hot, an ice-cold drink sounded wonderful. We walked into the open-air restaurant and all ordered a smoothie, along with breakfast.
I’m always the first to finish eating, having grown up in a large family. Enjoying that contented, full-stomach sensation, I leaned back in my chair and watched a truck pull up in front of the restaurant. The driver hopped out and brought in a massive block of commercially made ice. He shooed away the feral dogs that were resting in the shade on the floor of the restaurant and placed the ice on the floor in the same shade that had been occupied by the dogs. As he began to hack away at the ice with an axe, large chunks of ice broke off and went skidding across the concrete floor. His assistant chased after the ice chips and dutifully placed them in a chest.
Suddenly my fruit smoothie wasn’t so refreshing.
Something I had read in Lonely Planet Cambodia suddenly took on a fresh perspective: “If you see anything being done incompetently, remember that all the educated people in the country either fled or were exterminated in the late 1970s.”
I had grown up hearing about the Cambodian genocide. But watching two people break ice on a concrete floor for fruit smoothies where dogs
had been lying while the words anything being done incompetently echoed in my head gave the events of 30 years ago a gut-wrenching clarity.
• • •
We took a “tuk-tuk” to the ruins of Angkor Wat. In Cambodia and Thailand a taxi is known as a tuk-tuk, which is a trailer pulled by a small motorcycle—a Chinese counterfeit of a Honda Trail 90. I had a Honda Trail 90 as a kid, and put a few thousand miles on it zooming all over the desert and mountains of Southern California before I even got my first zit. Now, as the five of us piled into a trailer behind one tiny motorcycle, I hoped that the brake system had been upgraded since the original 1960’s-era original. And off we puttered.
Arriving at the largest temple of Angkor Wat, we hired a young man in his early twenties to be our guide for the day. When we crossed a bridge over a moat that surrounds the largest temple, our guide had an important factoid for us.
“This is the view from the scene in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider as they enter the hidden chamber.”
I had no idea what our guide was talking about. “Is that a movie?” I asked.
Our guide was only too happy to fill in the gaps in our knowledge about such an important cinematic touchstone. Clearly smitten with the movie’s heroine, Angelina Jolie, he pelted us with every little detail about her and what she did while filming in the area. Such was his fervor that we watched Lara Croft months later when given the opportunity. I can honestly say I’ve seen detergents that leave a better film.
Angkor Wat cannot be absorbed in a few days. It had not been too many months since we had been touring cathedrals and castles in Europe. We had visited many examples of exceptional craftsmanship, from the Vatican to the Charles Bridge in Prague. None of these can compare to the scale and detail of Angkor Wat. Individual temples are spread over several square miles and enormous pagodas top every shrine. While the vastness of the complex is impressive, it is the detail that is most remarkable and the intruding jungle that gives it its character.
Clearly, the entire complex of Angkor Wat was a labor of love for an ancient civilization; every square millimeter of stone is an intricate storyboard toiled over by generations of craftsmen. As the Tomb Raider trivia dried up, we were left with an endless stream of data about what all the bas-reliefs and dancing devas etched in stone meant. As the place is immense, there was far more story than we could absorb. Think France’s Bayeux Tapestry on an exponential scale.
To make matters worse, my mother-in-law, curse her wretched Mensa cranium, has an infinite capacity for just this kind of mind-numbing detail. By the time I had heard the umpteenth story of how this elephant-headed goddess had a tug of war with a seven-headed serpent and landed in a bath of milk and sealed her power for eternity, I knew it was our turn to make up a story.
The walls of the temples are covered in carvings that tell a story. It has been my life ambition to create my own enduring urban legend and be immortalized on www.urbanlegends.com. Whoever came up with the one about the blind date that went bad where the guy wakes up in a tub of ice with one of his kidneys missing is a genius. Now that we were in Angkor Wat, I realized my opportunity was before me.
While Granny was entertaining our tour guide, the rest of us came up with a plan to carve our own legend into stone. We would place it out of sight in some obscure temple to be miraculously “discovered.” But what story to tell?
After much discussion, we settled on a storyboard carving that has a flying saucer with the Microsoft Windows logo on one side and the number 666 on the other. Then we’d show legions of people bowing down to the flying saucer and worshipping it. We would have to somehow pass our stone storyboard through a goat so that it would have that “aged look.”
Too bad our stone-carving skills weren’t up to snuff; our carving’s discovery would have made a great news story. It may yet. I may not know about stone carving, but I can use Photoshop.
The tour guide was detailing one of the storyboards while Katrina and Jordan took refuge in the shade. Seemingly out of nowhere a monkey approached Katrina and started grooming itself. Katrina sat still and smiled at the monkey. The monkey responded by showing her its many teeth. I didn’t know if the monkey was threatening her or simply returning the smile. Then I realized that monkeys probably don’t have the social pattern of smiling.
Oops, I thought. One wrong move on Katrina’s part and that monkey is going to use those teeth and take a divot out of her arm.
What happened next was either sheer brilliance on Katrina’s part or dumb luck, but Katrina responded by simply raising her eyebrows. The monkey responded by raising its eyebrows. Slowly, the monkey came right up to her and started to brush its hand on her thigh; it was grooming Katrina for lice.
The monkey must have thought that Katrina had a terrible case of the mange and had lost all of her fur. It started to inspect the (very fine) hair on her thigh, and proceeded to pinch the little hairs and pluck them out, one at a time, and then eat them.
Katrina tried very hard not to scream out in pain. Always having my children’s best interests in mind, I told her to stay still so I could take pictures. After a minute or two, just as suddenly as the monkey started to “groom” Katrina, it turned its back to her and pointed to its back as if to say, “Okay, I did you. Your turn to do me.”
So, Katrina dutifully started to brush through the monkey’s fur. Every time she tried to stop and get up and walk away, the monkey would look up at her disdainfully and point to another area it wanted groomed. I don’t think Katrina found any lice. And I really doubt she would have eaten any if she had. Katrina quickly decided it was time to start shaving her legs to avoid being mistaken for needing a good lice grooming in the future.
Exiting one of the temples, the sound of playful music beckoned us. As we approached the source, we found several landmine survivors playing music with a donation box prominently displayed. The lesson of seeing a group of amputees was not lost on Jordan, who from this point forward soberly reminded us all to stay on the path every time one of our toes happened to so much as touch a blade of grass.
No sooner were we reminded of the dangers of the landmines than Katrina found an enormous snakeskin that had been recently shed. It was intact in every detail, so that the holes for its eyes and mouth could be clearly seen. Suddenly we all became a little more careful where we placed our hands as we climbed the steep stone steps, or when we stepped into a darkened chamber.
• • •
Our tuk-tuk driver became an honorary member of the family, taking us everywhere we went. On the back of his tuk-tuk was posted an advertisement for a restaurant. Prominently displayed on the ad was the internationally recognized symbol for online addicts who need to get a quick fix: Wi-Fi.
Our driver asked where we wanted to go, and I pointed to the advertisement on the back of his tuk-tuk.
“I would like to go here,” I said.
“No, you don’t want to go there,” he said. “I can take you to a nice place. You will like it.”
He didn’t understand. I needed an e-mail fix. “I want to use their wireless network,” I said, pointing to the Wi-Fi logo to make my point. He had good English skills, but I’ve met native English speakers who don’t know what a wireless network is.
He said, “Wee Fee? You want Wee Fee?”
Wee Fee sounded close enough to me, so I nodded enthusiastically. We all piled into the tuk-tuk and were on our way to get Wee Fee. The others might be going to get food, but I had one goal.
At the restaurant we were shown in by the maître d’. I was logging into their network before we crossed the threshold of the door.
“I’m in! I’m in! I’m in!” I sang, doing a little dance.
“We are all in,” September said.
“No, no, no,” I said, as the maître d’ showed us a seat in the waiting area. “Their network. It’s wide open and fast.” I settled into a plush armchair and was downloading e-mail and looking at the news—the world was mine and I could go anywhere I pleased.
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sp; “This is an interesting place,” September commented.
I glanced around quickly, not wanting to take my eyes off my two-inch-by-three-inch screen. “Looks nice to me. Kind of fancy for Cambodia, though.” The purpose of the soft light with the reddish glow hadn’t sunk in yet.
“Interesting artwork on the walls,” Granny commented. “What kind of place have you taken me to, John?”
I glanced up for a moment at a painting. “Hmmm. It’s a neo-expressionist nude. Big deal.”
“I see you learned something about art while at the Louvre,” Granny continued, “but what will your children think?”
I knew she was goading me. Didn’t she know I was mainlining a steady stream of 1’s and 0’s? Without looking up I said, “Not much. You can’t swing a dead cat in Europe without hitting a painting of a bare breast. In the Vatican Museum, statues of naked men missing their penises are all the rage.”
The maître d’ brought us a menu. Annoyed that I had to stop what I was doing, I quickly looked through the menu and picked something out. I proceeded to go back to reading about important world events, such the scandal in Orlando where a bunch of high school boys on a Disney World field trip were put in the same hotel with a swingers club. Just then Katrina and Jordan started snickering and pointing their fingers at the artwork.
“Pointing isn’t polite—what’s so funny, anyway?” I then looked at what they were pointing at. The nude was Rock Hudson: his feather boa strategically covered his anatomy. Across the room from Rock Hudson was Chairman Mao with earrings and red lipstick. Another wall sported a painting of a very overweight guy wearing a tutu, a smile, and little else. His hairy chest would have made Bigfoot jealous.
I glanced at September. “Nice restaurant,” she said, giving me a wicked smile.
It isn’t as though I wanted to raise Katrina and Jordan in a hermetically sealed mayonnaise jar, but the restaurant’s décor was a little over the top. In less time than it takes to explain it, I realized that my own eccentricities entitled me to a lifetime of teasing for my restaurant selection. But while my eccentricities may have been learned, September’s are genetic. A couple of weeks traveling with my mother-in-law made me realize that. Regardless, the deck was stacked against Katrina and Jordan, as they were losing out on both sides of the nature-nurture thing.