by Rolf Potts
“I know,” Mr. Kim said quietly. “We don’t understand either. We think, ‘How could our fellow Cambodians do this?’
“This is why I don’t tell my children about this,” Mr. Kim continued. “I don’t want them to think about this and to feel such sadness. I want them to feel happy. I want them to think about the future, about what they can do with their lives. Cambodian people don’t want to think about this. Life is better now. We have human rights and freedoms. We don’t want to dwell on the past. We want to focus on the future now. . . .”
At the Pol Pot reservoir, Sopheng was silent, staring at the water and the horizon beyond. When he finally turned back to me, his smile seemed somehow refreshed, lightened, as if he had buried some burden in the landscape.
“Now we use the baray to water the fields and for fishing. The baray is giving back to the people,” he said. “We can’t change what’s past. We can only make sure that the future is better.”
On the first night of my homestay, I ate dinner at the CBT office and then slipped and sloshed back down the road toward my house. It was supposed to be about a two-minute walk, but in the unfamiliar dark I missed my house and continued on past more stilt houses. I could see families gathered by fluorescent light or lantern light in the paved, open-walled, under-stilt portions of their homes. In some, multiple generations were gazing at the television. In others, adults were eating, drinking, and talking around picnic tables. Here a mother carefully combed a child’s hair. There an older sister bathed a sibling, both erupting into peals of laughter. When thickets of trees appeared on my left and rice paddies stretched away on my right, I knew I had walked too far. I walked back and finally discerned the small “Homestay” sign that marked my house.
At about 4 A.M. one of the most torrential rains I have ever experienced drummed on the metal roof above me. As it went on and on, I felt like I was living under a waterfall. It was unsettling being in an unfamiliar place, with unfamiliar weather, at the mercy of strangers. After about twenty minutes, men’s voices shouted from house to house and footsteps scrambled on stairs. Then I heard splashing and urgent cries outside. I didn’t know what they were doing or what I should be doing. So I simply fretted. After another twenty minutes, the voices stopped and peace returned, but still I couldn’t sleep under the percussive pounding. Then I thought: This is not an unusual occurrence. This has been happening for decades, centuries, millennia even. You’re just part of some cycle so much older and bigger than you that there’s no point in worrying about it. This village has survived for centuries. These people have survived for decades. You’ve just become part of some huge natural whole that you were never aware of. Lucky you. Now just surrender to it and go with the flow.
The next thing I knew, cocks were crowing and sunlight was streaming through the window.
On the second night of my homestay, as I walked back to my house, children waved and called, “Hello! Hello!” Mothers holding babies smiled and laughed. Teenagers nodded as they passed on their bikes, and the men talking around the picnic tables saluted me with their beers. Even the renegade dogs yapped in a more friendly way.
On the final evening of my homestay, I lay in the hammock in my home’s ground-floor living area. Behind me Mom and Grandma were sitting on their haunches, chopping dandelions and radishes by a boiling pot, and Dad was rocking three-month-old Baby to sleep. I took out my journal and wrote:
I can’t believe this is already my last night here. I don’t want to leave. I feel so comfortable here now, so completely at home. There’s so much to love. The super kind and innocent people. The beautiful landscapes. The simple stilt house life. The kids running around playing with their makeshift stick-and-cloth toys; one kid has a red truck and that’s as sophisticated as it gets. There’s such a community feeling, everybody talking with everybody, sharing with everybody. When a huge rain poured my first afternoon, everyone worked together to carry plastic buckets of rainwater to the ceramic storage vessels and to construct a temporary dam so the soil wouldn’t erode so quickly.
And my god, the smiles! There are smiles everywhere, especially the kids with their big smiles and their incredibly bright, innocent, hopeful eyes.
The village cocks started their incongruous round of evening calls. Dogs barked. Frogs croaked. In the distance a tractor rumbled, and scratchy music wafted from speakers at a nearby Buddhist festival. The seven-year-old from the house across the way raced by on her bicycle and gave me a big wave. The boy with the red truck suddenly appeared carrying a coconut and held it out to me. Baby issued a blissful burp, and we all laughed.
“Thinking about leaving tomorrow,” I wrote, “I feel like I could cry. . . .”
For our last tour, Sopheng told me he was taking me somewhere very special, a place he didn’t usually take visitors. I hopped behind him on his trusty Honda motorbike, and he maneuvered onto the rain-mucked road once again. The road to this temple was the worst yet. There were deep pools of water separated by thin islands of exposed road that looked too slick and mucky to even attempt. But like a moto magician, Sopheng turned the handlebars this way and that, minutely steering a course between puddles, somehow avoiding the slickest spots that would have sent us flying, gunning the engine moments before we got stuck, fording puddles when that was the only way, and all with a serene smile. Against impossible odds, we didn’t topple over even once.
When we reached an especially submerged section of road, for the first time Sopheng stopped and said, “We’d better walk here.” So we dismounted. I must have been quite a sight: I had rolled up my trousers to my calves, showing a patch of alarmingly white skin between my blue socks and khaki convertible trousers. My walking shoes were thickly caked in mud. I had a red bandanna on my head and another around my throat, and I was wearing an electric blue t-shirt under a long-sleeved blue work shirt. We sloshed along on foot for about one hundred feet until we had passed the worst section.
We re-mounted the motorbike and slow-motored down a series of ever narrower, branch-littered paths, between groves of lush green trees and rice paddies. Prickly bushes grasped at us. We passed a couple of stilt houses, and a bent woman with a leathery lined face suddenly crinkled into a smile and called out a greeting. The trail ended at a dense patch of jungle, where Sopheng stopped the engine and parked. One narrow, crushed-grass walking path led to the left through high grasses and bushes. Another led to the right through similarly forbidding growth.
Sopheng took neither. “Follow me,” he said, and plunged straight into the impenetrable jungle. As I followed him, silently cursing, the barest brushstroke of a path materialized, a muddy, leaf-strewn depression. After a few steps, that depression disappeared and all I could do was try to exactly match Sopheng’s footsteps as he burrowed into a world of densely overhung, intertwining vines, bushes, and branches, sharp rocks and slick tree trunks, all crawling with slimy insects, I was sure.
Soon the trail led onto a jumble of moss-covered stones with sharp sides. As sweat poured down my face, neck, arms, and legs, everywhere sweat could pour, I gingerly picked my way over the rocks, noting the fat brown millipedes on all the smooth surfaces. We crossed into deep green shadows, heavy with the weight of damp branches, dripping ferns, wet leaves and grasses. The air smelled of earthy wetness, a musky, primordial scent.
We stepped over another jumble of rocks—me slipping on one and missing a millipede by a millimeter as I grabbed a rock to steady myself. Then we turned a corner and the foliage gave way to a clearing and Sopheng smiled. “Look!” he said.
Just behind him rose a stone tower with a huge carved face—smiling lips, bulbous nose, protruding eyes. Its appearance was so unexpected, so hallucinatory, that for a moment I couldn’t process what I was seeing.
Then it all came into focus: a single tower, thirty feet high, topped with a massive magnificent carved face, surrounded by the jungle, with no one else around for miles. We scrambled a few feet forward, then Sopheng said, “We can’t go closer than this. It�
��s too dangerous.”
I stopped and tried to grasp the moment: I was gritty, grimy, and exhausted from a day of clambering and bumping and sloshing through the jungle, surrounded by bulbous leaves and drooping, dripping branches and vines, balanced precariously on mossy, vine-woven rocks, gazing at a tower of stone blocks, placed painstakingly block by block, hand by human hand, some eight centuries before.
I laughed and Sopheng laughed, and I took out my phone and took sweaty photos. “This is incredible!” I said. “This is like a dream!”
“I found out about this temple only in 2009,” Sopheng said. “The people who live nearby told me about it. Just a few foreigners know it. If tourists don’t have a local guide, they cannot find this temple. It’s too complicated to find on your own. Even if you are standing right in front of it, you won’t see it.” He paused. “I don’t usually take people here,” he said, with a wide smile.
My last grand adventure of the trip occurred as Mr. Kim drove me from Banteay Chhmar to Siem Reap. Mr. Kim knew this was my final full day in Cambodia, and after I had waved a long and lingering farewell to Sopheng and Sokoun at the CBT building, he looked at me and asked, “When do you have to be back at Siem Reap?” Not until dinnertime, I said, and his eyes shone. “Do you want to go to the Thai border? There are two temples there I want to show you. Twelfth century. We go?”
“Of course, of course!” I said, and off we went.
We drove north through heart-stoppingly idyllic landscapes—glistening, rainwater-filled rice paddies and lush cassava fields, towering palm trees and groves of green deciduous trees, interrupted occasionally by settlements of a few dozen wooden stilt houses. For a change, the sun was shining and the sky was a deep blue backdrop for a spectacular succession of pure white clouds—streaks and puffs and mounds upon mounds.
Mr. Kim was pleased. “I was here during the war,” he said. “I was a commander here. There were many Khmer Rouge soldiers in this area.” Looking out at a landscape that moments before had seemed the very picture of purity and innocence, I struggled to absorb the idea that Cambodians had been torturing and killing Cambodians here just a few decades before, that corpses almost certainly underlay parts of this pristine ground. My mind was spinning.
“We go to the temples on the border,” Mr. Kim said. “Even just a few years ago, there was fighting there with the Thai soldiers. Many people died.”
In the spring of 2011, he explained, Thai troops had seized the temples’ grounds, claiming the areas belonged to Thailand. Cambodian troops had rushed to repel them, and for a month, artillery shells and gunfire from both sides had claimed at least fifteen lives.
“Now it is peaceful,” Mr. Kim said, “but still, there are many Cambodian soldiers there, just to make sure the Thais don’t try to move the border again.”
We reached the first temple, Ta Moan, in less than an hour. The last section of road corkscrewed into almost unimaginably dense jungle mountains that marked the border. This was the territory where Pol Pot’s troops had been based, Mr. Kim said, close enough to scurry into Thailand when necessary, and in vegetation so thick that it would be almost impossible to spot an encampment until you had literally walked into it.
Ta Moan turned out to be a sleepy site, about the size of a football field, with brown rock remains of walls that outlined one central building with some still visible decorated doorways and corridors, and half a dozen subsidiary structures. A couple of Thai soldiers sat on stones at the far end of the site, and a Cambodian border policeman and soldier stood at the near end, talking quietly. It was surprising to see these soldiers from both countries simply strolling around the grounds, and even more surprising when they sat down together and talked like old friends; a breath of hope seemed to rise in this peaceful air where blood had been shed just three years before.
The second temple, Ta Krabey, was even more moving. Mr. Kim knew the commander here, and we were accompanied by a military escort of a half dozen soldiers up a winding jungle trail to the mountainside temple grounds. Ta Krabey was essentially a single tower in a clearing about 100 feet square, surrounded by massive trees and jumbled, moss-covered stones. There was a much larger military presence here. Eight Thai soldiers were lounging on the site when we arrived. The soldiers nodded and smiled at each other, and one of the Thais greeted the Cambodians in Khmer. As they shared cigarettes and talked easily with each other, the Cambodian commander showed us bullet holes and scars from artillery fire in the temple stones.
“Now, we are friends,” he said, gesturing toward the mingling soldiers. “But a few years ago, we were shooting at each other.”
He then walked down and clapped his Thai counterpart on the back, and before I knew what was happening, I was being herded along with a contingent of Thai and Cambodian troops to a prime photo spot in front of the tower’s entrance. One Thai and one Cambodian soldier were dispensed to take photos, and the rest of us put our arms around each other’s shoulders and smiled.
“We’ll call this ‘Tourist at the Peace Temple,’” the commander said, and as his words were shared and translated, the soldiers nodded and laughed.
After a half hour of cigarette-sharing and photo-snapping, the commander led us back down the trail to a roofed, open-walled meeting area with a table where he bade us sit and brought us tea. He then disappeared for a few minutes and reappeared with a dozen of his soldiers, including the six who had accompanied us to the temple. When all had been seated, he stood and gave a speech, which Mr. Kim translated, welcoming us and telling us what an honor it was to have a foreign guest among them. He also spoke about the history of the conflict over the border temples and how happy everyone was to have peace in the area now, and how they hoped the only visitors in the future would be tourists—he smiled at me—and not soldiers.
He sat down to applause and I rose and gave a brief speech, through Mr. Kim, saying how very honored I was to be welcomed at this ancient and important site, and how tremendously moved I had been to see the Cambodian soldiers talking so harmoniously with the Thai soldiers. I told them how very inspiring that was to me, and how that kind of peace and understanding between people was the prime reason I traveled and why I believed so fervently in the power of travel to transform the world. I said I would always treasure my photo of the Peace Temple and my visit with them.
I sat down and all the soldiers burst into smiles and applause, and then, quite unexpectedly, a very young-looking soldier at the end of the table got up and began to speak. His voice quavered at first, but as he continued to speak, the words flowed out of him with a pure passion.
“I am just a simple soldier,” Mr. Kim translated. “I have not traveled far or seen much in my life. But today is a very special day for me.” He looked directly at me. “Our honored guest is the first foreigner I have ever seen in my life, the first foreigner I have ever met. I am so excited and happy to have met you and talked with you. I cannot quite express what this means to my life. This makes me think how big the world is, and gives me a kind of hope. Please when you go back to your village, tell the people about the soldiers you met at Ta Krabey. And tell them about the peace you found here. I will never forget this day for the rest of my life.”
He stopped, looking embarrassed, but his comrades burst into applause, and I leaped to my feet, pressed my hands to my heart and said, “Agung! Agung! Agung!” Then I asked Mr. Kim to say that I would definitely tell all my fellow villagers about the kind soldiers I had met at Ta Krabey and the inspiring peace I had found there. And that I too would never forget this day.
Mr. Kim dropped me at my hotel in Siem Reap at 5 P.M., and we parted with assurances that we would see each other again. I had thought I would visit Angkor Wat one last time, but instead, I decided to have dinner at the hotel and spend the night in my room. I had a day’s worth of flying ahead, but even more important, I wanted to end my stay in the place where Cambodia had come alive for me, in Banteay Chhmar. So I sat in my room scrolling through memories of the days
just past, until one scene stopped me.
On the second morning of my stay in Banteay Chhmar, I awoke before dawn to explore the main ruin where Sarun had taken me the day before. I made my way by flashlight along puddle-pocked paths to the eastern entrance and admired the bas-reliefs of warriors and dancers again. Then, just as day was breaking, I followed a footpath to the right that led past the collapsed wall and into the heart of the temple.
Alone in the ruins, I lost all sense of time. I picked my way over mossy rocks, extricated myself from clinging vines, slowly stepped up and over stairs and crumbling walls, butt-slid down precarious inclines, then turned to find a beautiful carved maiden encased in a tiny niche, an intricate carving of a Buddha under a bodhi tree, an ornamented head here, a shield-bearing torso there, a half dozen bodhisattvas buried among grasses and leaves.
I moved deeper and deeper into the ruin, sloshing through puddles, slashing through vines, clambering over toppled stones, avoiding millipedes, swatting at mosquitoes, parting branches, and plucking persistent stickers. At one point I stopped for a swig of water, and when I slapped at the whining mosquitoes that danced on my neck and hands, I slipped and slid over some tumbled pieces of rock, grabbed at branches to stop my fall, and landed just in front of a bas-relief of warriors, maidens, and fish alive in stone.
Sweat poured into my eyes, and as I mopped the stream with a sopping bandanna, I saw a stony face—lips, nose, eyes—at the top of a tower of tilting stone. I fumbled with my camera, and rain started to fall, first a pitter-patter on the forest canopy and then an insistent downpour that penetrated the branches and leaves.
I stood in the downpour and felt electrified, closer to the wild heart of life than I had been in a long time. I was sweaty, dirty, dripping, exhausted, utterly alone in the wild and connecting with things so far beyond me I could barely comprehend them.