by Don George
“Yes,” Sopheng said with a pained smile. “It is hard to believe how much suffering took place right here, to build this baray. We hear the stories. People worked at least twelve hours a day, every day, and they were fed only a little rice or soup. People were killed without reason.”
For a moment his face darkened, and he turned away. After a long silence, he said, his voice tight, “We don’t understand these things.”
Immediately I recalled a moment in Mr. Kim’s car, on the ride from Siem Reap. We had talked about Siem Reap’s main tourist sites, ancient Cambodian history and Khmer culture, Buddhism and Hinduism, and the Cambodian economy. Now he was telling me about current politics and how the government was seeking to unify the country and focus on the future after being brutally ripped apart during the Pol Pot years from 1975 to 1979.
I had been reluctant to bring up the subject of Pol Pot, but this mention seemed to open a channel in Mr. Kim’s mind. Suddenly the words streamed from his mouth.
“You can’t comprehend what it was like during those years,” he said, shaking his head. “No one who didn’t live it can understand. Before the civil war, nine million people lived in Cambodia. After the war, there were six million left. Pol Pot killed one-third of the people. One-third!
“I was lucky. I was a commander in the Cambodian Army against Pol Pot. But I know so many people who were not so lucky.
“They took all the people from the cities—educated people, teachers, office workers—and put them to work in the fields. Then in the fields, if someone got sick, they would be killed. If someone wasn’t working hard enough, they would be killed. Sometimes even if you just looked at a soldier the wrong way, you would be killed. These were Cambodian people, killing Cambodian people.”
He stared straight ahead and his tone barely changed, but his words spewed with an almost terrifying urgency.
“Pol Pot wanted to break up all the families. The Khmer Rouge would separate children from their parents. And to break them, to make them loyal only to the Khmer Rouge, they would make them do terrible things. Do you know what they did? They made them kill their own parents. They would bring the parents before the children, and then tell the children, ‘You must kill your mother. You must kill your father. From now on, your only loyalty is to the Khmer Rouge.’ If the children hesitated, they would threaten to kill the children.
“You are a father. Can you imagine? These were children!” he said and his voice suddenly broke.
And then I broke too. Huge convulsive waves of sobbing shook my body, coming from some deep well I didn’t even know I had, the tears streaming down my face, sobbing and sobbing so hard that I shook the car and the air writhed in agony around us.
Mr. Kim kept driving steadily, in silence. He never looked at me but simply exuded what felt like a kindly calm.
I covered my eyes but the tears kept pouring and the deep sobs kept racking my body. After what seemed an eternity, I finally stopped, embarrassed.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “I’m so sorry. . . . I just don’t understand how any human being could do that to another fellow human being. I just don’t understand how people could do that. I don’t, I don’t…understand,” I said, and I started sobbing again.
“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 4:00 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 before. 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 t
old 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 fathomless 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 100 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 freeze the moment: There 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 snapped some 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, and flashed 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 scene. 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 t
he 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.
