by Cash Peters
“It can take you to Angkor Wat, ten miles,” he replied in truncated English. “Is one of Seven Wonders of the World.”
“Yes, yes, I know. You told me that. But what is it?”
Running ahead of me, Tasha found about a dozen tuk-tuks lined up for hire at the roadside, their drivers chatting in a huddle, fanning themselves with newspapers.
Basically, a tuk-tuk is a motorized rickshaw. Take a seat from a disused Ferris wheel, glue it to the back of a moped, and hey presto!
Once we'd picked out a vehicle, its owner came running.
“Me want tuk-tuk,” I said. (Damn, I inadvertently slipped into Bislama there. Sorry. It's the jet-lag.) “I want to go to Angkor Wat.”
The driver watched as I took out my money3 All fares are negotiable, so you're encouraged to haggle, either in U.S. dollars or in their local currency, riel, it's up to you.
“Teuv Angkor Wat th'lay pohnmaan?”
That's your actual Cambodian for “So how much might the fare be?”
Without thinking, he said: “Muy lian”—one million riel. And of course I laughed in his face. In his face, I tell you! What am I, an idiot?
“Er, how about four?” I offered instead. “Buan.”
“Four?”
This standoff lasted … oh, all of three-tenths of a second.
“Okay, four,” he nodded, deciding to take it in dollars instead, which in this town is almost enough to retire on, and we set off.
Rrrrrrrrrrrr. Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. Rrrrrrr.
My tuk-tuk ride, though brief, was packed with incident.
At one point, two motor scooters buzzed by, the drivers carrying a long bamboo pole between them balanced on their left shoulders. Dangling from the pole, roped by its feet, was a whole dead pig.
A man to my left staggered along the sidewalk with ten plastic chairs stacked on his head. Someone else had a gong.
An old woman carrying a baby stepped into the road, then scrammed back to the curb with a yelp, a millisecond before a bus roared over the very spot where she'd been standing.
And this stuff is going on all the time. It's as if you're living in a Keystone Kops movie, only it's less funny because people could really get hit and killed.
Siem Reap has two distinct sides to it: a detached, elegant side—which is charming to look at, but not quite real somehow, given the rest of the place—and then the rest of the place, a dusty ghetto like the Old West, at once rough, tumultuous, and exciting. One minute you're in the back of your tuk-tuk bouncing past towering pagodas along a wide leaf-speckled avenue of splendid Colonial-style houses bathed in rich golden sunlight; the next, a mere block or two farther along, this brief idyll has evaporated and you descend into pandemonium, swallowed by a shimmering cacophonous typhoon of honking cars, mopeds, tuk-tuks, buses belching smoke, carts overloaded with bales of flopping hay tied into enormous spliffs, and wobbling cyclists of all ages who, if you're a pedestrian, don't necessarily seek to mow you down, but if it's a toss-up between hitting you full-on or braking suddenly, causing two thousand cyclists behind them to jackknife off a bridge, there's every chance you'll be a goner.
Horns parp, bicycle bells ring, shopkeepers unload trucks, calling out to each other as they do so and laughing; feral children—almost babies, it seems—homeless but happy, skitter unsupervised along the roadside, dusting off discarded fruit and licking it, before taking their chances and diving onto the highway into perilous traffic. I tried crossing a street myself and it's not easy. You just hold your breath and run. There are no lights or intersections, no particular code of conduct, beyond a general consensus that killing innocent pedestrians is uncool and might come back to bite you in the ass in some future lifetime. Basically, the only way these motorists will stop for you is if you're on their hood with your body scrunched up against the windshield and they can't see out. Luckily, drivers and cyclists seem to make an exception for children, navigating between the tiny trotting obstacles, graciously allowing them to make it to the other side untrampled.
Careening around corner after corner at speeds of up to twenty miles per hour, we passed terraces of odd-shaped shops piled carelessly one on top of the other like rickety beer crates. Every so often, through the haze and confusion, I'd pick out a cheerful starburst of reddish orange. Monks. A graceful flotilla of them, out for their daily constitutional. Instantly, the grimy roadside became a catwalk spectacle as they pressed on in single file against a rogue wind that threatened to drag their saffron-colored robes up about their shoulders, bald heads shielded from a merciless sun by saffron umbrellas. Nine of them in a bobbing row. Nine dancing orange pontoons. How marvelous. And how wonderfully savvy of them to coordinate their outfits with their accessories. Mind you, they were young. Additionally, in a lot of cases, meditation seems to have put them very much in touch with their feminine side—ahem—so maybe their fashion sense was not too much of a surprise. I'm guessing that the elders, having long since outgrown their obsession with style's dos and don'ts, and too old to make this daily trek into town, allow the novices to go unsupervised, keeping their fingers crossed that, by doing so, they don't fall in with the wrong crowd while they're out. After all, you know what monks are like!
Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. Rrrr. Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.
“ANGKOR WHAT?”
It's a joke. The name of a bar. Someone at the office tracked it down, thought it might make for an extra story beat if I stopped off on my way to the temple.
A lot of streets in Siem Reap don't have a name. Well, why bother, really? But Bar Street does. One of the most popular thoroughfares in town, it's calm and laid-back by day, convulsing with excitement and doused in neon by night, the sweet smell of curries drifting from the kitchens of tandoori restaurants along with the thumping beat of European music that pumps continuously out of odd windows and doorways. Located not far from the main market, this short, dusty avenue is a big draw to tourists, and, by extension, to dozens of beggars as well. The sidewalks swarm with them: small kids mostly, cloaked in the grime of the gutter, their hands outstretched, and also adult land-mine victims doing the same thing—when they have hands, that is, which is not always. Altogether, they're the country's restless conscience, hard-to-overlook remnants of past atrocities. There's still no welfare system in Cambodia, and no other safety net to catch the destitute when they drop off the social ladder, so panhandling is all that's left.
I'll be honest, some of the beggars' injuries are hard to deal with if you're squeamish. Sometimes even the cup they're holding is broken,4 that's how badly off they are, placing you in the worst dilemma imaginable. Sheer human decency demands that you give them something, brother to struggling brother. A few coins, a dollar bill, what the hell! How can you withstand such dire need? Yet you must. Show compassion, and you start a stampede. A dozen grasping urchins, sniffing a payout, descend upon you to claim their share. Rith the rice seller did his best to shoo them away from us,5 but to no avail. They simply regroup, coming back at you with even greater persistence than before.
“Pliss, mister, pliss!” Grubby hands claw at your shirt. “Pliss! Pliss, mister!”
It's heartbreaking. But also, if I'm being absolutely truthful, the most terrible nuisance, especially if you dare give money to one but not the others. At that point those angelic little faces turn quite nasty, shouting and cursing you out. Luckily, they don't speak enough English to cause real offense. All they seem to know are some generic brush-offs—the prime one being “Go fuck yourself!”—which, unless Frommer's has dropped the standards of its glossary drastically to snag the youth market, I assume they picked up from angry backpackers trying to outrun them.
The whole scene on Bar Street was quite difficult, anyway, and I'm glad I had Tasha close by to protect me.
I come across a delicate dark-haired girl in Cambodian national dress—that is to say, a dress—standing in some trees beside a board with prices on it.
“Hello, good morning, I
'm looking for Angkor Wat,” I say to her. Adding, for clarity, “It's a temple, you know,” in case she's new. “D'you know where it is?”
“Yes. Angkor Wat is over there. One kilometer and a half. You want to take trip on elephant?”
In real life, she'd know never to ask me anything so ridiculous. Of course I don't want to ride on an elephant, what a silly question. Not only are they dangerous, they're also a lot more menacing up close than they look in movies. A guy could quite easily fall off one and break something. So no—no, I don't want to take trip on elephant, thank you very much.
But, unfortunately, I'm no longer possessed of the rebellious spirit I once had. A few weeks and five shows ago, maybe. Back then I'd have refused, same way I refused to go bungee-jumping and waltzing around the rim of erupting volcanoes, but not now. To begin with, there was Fat Kid's alarming pep talk: “Be a team player OR YOUR SHOW WILL FAIL,” which, to be honest, has kind of spooked me. I've always believed that thoughts are things. Put thoughts of failure out there and you draw them back to you ten times over. The series hasn't even premiered on TV yet, but on that basis alone it already feels doomed. More than this, though, I'm weary. A creeping fatigue, sprouting from equal measures of overwork and sleep deprivation after so much intensive traveling, has left me a beaten man. Also, Jay's very persistent when it comes to these challenges. Generally speaking, by the time I've stood my ground and argued with him about why I shouldn't do something—riding an elephant, for instance—I could have gone ahead and done it already, sparing myself a whole load of red-faced frustration and Crew Looks. So:
“How much?”
“Fifteen dollars per person from here to Angkor Wat.” The girl smiles.
Interesting.
Handing over a wad of bills with the firm expectation that it will be handed back again once the camera's off, and leaving Tasha to explain to her why, and how television works,6 I scale a wooden staircase that leads to the branches of the tree, and from there onto a rickety wooden platform only slightly different from one of those tray tables you eat your dinner off while you're watching Jeopardy!
Here, using some perfunctory acrobatic skills I didn't know I had (hurray, those days at clown college are finally paying off!), I splay my legs over its spine and settle in, faking one of those maharaja poses I've seen a dozen times in old movies: head erect, back straight, limbs loose, allowing my entire body to undulate and sway in sync with the elephant's lumbering gait.
The driver, a young boy—seems no older than twelve—pivots nimbly on the creature's giant head and steers it to left or right by hitting it with a stick and repeatedly kicking its ears. Of course, if elephants had any wit at all, they'd unionize and put a stop to this. But they don't. Like me, they've been knocked down too low to stage a rebellion.
With the first drops of rain from an approaching storm spotting my face, we lollop along at tree height onto an ancient causeway lined with squat, weather-worn statues: fifty-four gods and demons, stretching from one end to the other in long snakes. Beyond them, a crumbling stone arch is set into a wall over twenty-five feet high, the entrance to the temple complex.
Kevin and Mike, his soundman, are up ahead, filming me from a different elephant.
“So what's the next step up on the career ladder as far as elephant-driving goes?” I shout to the boy. “Do you get a faster elephant?”
“Huh?”
I see Mike wince. Oops. Was that the wrong question to ask? A little tactless? Condescending?
As it is, the kid has a poor grasp of English and doesn't understand.
Maybe that's just as well.
A REFRESHINGLY BRIEF HISTORY
OF ANGKOR WAT
In 1100 A.D., the ruler of the Khmer Empire was King Suryavarman II. To honor the Hindu god Vishnu, “creator of all beings, sustainer of the universe,”7 he began construction on a new sandstone temple in Angkor, his capital city. This he called Angkor Wat, an ambitious sprawling layer cake of a thing, epic in scale, with a rectangular moat almost two hundred meters wide, pools inside and out, and all manner of cupolas, statuary, and colonnades to divert and enchant the eye. Estimated completion time: seventy-five years later.
Shortly after it was done, in 1177, the Chams, from neighboring Champa (later South Vietnam), came thundering in to kick the Khmers’ imperial ass, looting homes and temples in Angkor and setting fire to anything that would burn, which was basically everything. Everything but Angkor Wat.
Once the Chams had been chased out, in 1181, a new king, the powerful and audacious Jayavaman VII, found himself with a problem. Many of his people, faced with a decimated city and their homes and livelihoods in ruins, began to question whether the gods they'd put so much faith in all these years, and who were supposed to protect them from harm, were real. Maybe, they argued, the gods were fake: a brilliant ruse concocted by clever minds to keep society in check by instilling fear and superstition in the gullible. Maybe religion was, after all, nothing but a made-up bunch of old hooey.
Uh-oh.
Quickly, Jayavaman gathered his generals. “Damn, they're onto us!” he said.
Then, after a little thought, he did something very clever.
Rather than risk an uprising, which would have cost him his throne, he switched religions. Just like that. Dumped Hinduism, which was very god-driven and quite strict, and adopted Buddhism instead, on the grounds that it was loose and joyful and free, and you got to wear orange all the time.
Well, miraculously, and bizarrely, this simple act was enough to quell the tide of discontent in the city of Angkor and reignite religious fervor.
“Oooh!” the people said. “Orange!”
Without wasting a second, they began building a bunch of new temples,8 this time honoring Buddha, surrounding them with a ravishing new city called Angkor Thom, which would eventually become the center of Jayavaman's empire, including a great wall, an impressive moat, and with the commanding and beautiful temple of Angkor Wat at its center.
THE END
I stumble blithely through the gate of Angkor Wat without paying the twenty-dollar admission fee (natch), drawing to a stop in front of one of the most stunning monuments on Earth, a vision too big, too grand, too complex, too elaborate, too multifaceted, and too overwhelming to sum up in mere words, although, I must admit, big, grand, complex, elaborate, multifaceted, and overwhelming do come pretty close.
What it's not, though, is one of the Seven Wonders of the World. That punk Rith, the rice seller, he was dead wrong. I knew there was something odd going on there. Immediately after I spoke to him, I went out of my way to check several lists, including the Seven Ancient Wonders list, the Seven Modern Wonders list, and even, for the sake of completeness, the Seven Underwater Wonders list, and Angkor Wat is not on any of them. A calamitous oversight in my view, since, thanks to continual restoration work, Angkor Wat has remained pretty much intact, which is more than can be said for some of the other temples around here.
There's one up the road, for instance, called the Bayon, that dates back to the twelfth century and, from a distance, looks as though it was left out in the sun too long and melted. Pathways sag. Archways crumble. Musty, sharply rising staircases, treacherous if you're wearing heels, lie in wait to help less-focused tourists twist their ankles. They're held together nowadays by little more than good intentions and air, their stone blocks, carved with beautiful symbolic dancing figures, strewn discarded across the grass like Lego. It's highly precarious. One misstep, and you could bring the whole thing crashing down around you.
Within minutes, a pelting rain sets in, chasing five thousand tourists back to their buses, cheap guidebooks spread over their heads, at the same time sending a dozen or more guidebook sellers scurrying for cover beneath the trees in the parking lot.
“I wasn't expecting it to be as crowded as this,” Jay sighs, upset.
Good, clear shots are hard to come by. Kevin, a lean runner type with etched bones and a deep, knowing eye, scoots from plinth to co
lumn to window frame to crumbling doorway, grabbing what he can, mostly in vain. No matter where he points his camera, anything from a student with a backpack to a whole herd of South Korean holidaymakers, hundreds strong, gets in the way, wandering idly across the background, streaming up broken steps, along corridors, through courtyards, posing for pictures and jabbering excitedly.
Click. South Korean coach-party group photo on causeway with temple in background.
Click. French coach-party group photo with bas-relief in background.
Click. French coach-party group photo with South Korean coach-party in background.
The rain is coming down in sheets now. Scampering for shelter, I hide inside the broad stone casing of what used to be a window, and watch as, all around me, storm clouds weep gently upon the temple ruins, in a warm, timeless drizzle that somehow, and quite uncannily, bridges the centuries.
Without realizing it, I find myself standing beside a small girl panhandling for change like so many others. She can't be much older than eleven or twelve, with long, slightly scrappy dark hair falling across the shoulders of her cute floral dress. A dainty creature ignored by tourists, her large, dejected brown eyes eventually lock into mine, pleading with me to give her something.
“Me?” When this happens I'm so horrified that I turn away immediately. Though it's not the glum intensity of her eyes that troubles me so much, it's her nose.
More specifically, she doesn't have one.
I swear. There's nothing there. A blank space.
And now I'm picturing this sweet, innocent creature running through a forest glade one day, down a footpath, or alongside a river in the vicinity of her village, when—CMAA!—she steps on a land mine. Possibly an American land mine at that. The very thought of this tears a black hole in my stomach.
At that moment, forty sodden South Korean tourists come to my rescue, splashing along the causeway, hunched under umbrellas, and barge on through the doors of the temple, oblivious to anyone or anything.
