April 2007
From Bangkok, Thailand, and Phnom Penh/Siem Reap, Cambodia
"This is my first time in Bangkok. When I landed and got in the car to drive through the brightly lit streets of Bangkok after midnight, I felt like this was so different from anywhere I’d ever been: Eastern, Western Europe – Turkey – Russia, I was wide awake. I was excited to see a part of the world I’d never seen before, and to visit my friend who was working on his Fulbright.
Hong lives on "Little Arabia Street" in Bangkok, so I was surprised to be able to read something (it is incredibly disorienting to lose your literacy). It was a last taste of something familiar, before a lot of unfamiliar. We toured Bangkok under Hong's brisk knowledge of every method of public transportation (including river ferries!) We visited Wat Arun, the temple of the Dawn, one of the oldest temples in Bangkok, as well as making it up to the Chatuchak market in the north of the city (where Thais shop). For most of the day, we didn't see many tourists or white people; because Hong had learned Thai, our experience was so different. We were off the beaten tourist track, and visiting spaces that were the spaces of Bangkok residents, not visitors. The next day, when we went to the famous backpacker's Khao San Road, we found them....all of tourists! I overheard backpackers talking about where to get the cheapest food, fighting to get 3 scarves for $5 instead of $2, arguing down to pennies with the Thai. Many of these tourists come to Bangkok and stay on Khao San Road, dealing with English-speaking Thais in the hospitality industry, meeting and hanging out with other white tourists (Australian, Kiwi, Brit, Canadian), drinking cheap Tiger beer and exchanging stories about where to get the “best” authentic street food or pashminas. In a way, there is a village of international tourists within the city of Bangkok, and they barely overlap. One is a village of long cotton skirts, dreads and braids, textile bags, and bragging about how long they’ve been off the grid; the other is a bustling, vibrant city, with incredible smells and tastes and people trying to make their way.
We also were surrounded by international tourists at the Vertigo bar at the Banyan Tree Hotel. Bangkok has a mix of very poor areas and very wealthy areas - there is a slum behind Hong's fingerprint-entry, 2-security-guard-patrolled apartment; there are food stalls where you can get meatball skewers, chili dipping sauce, and some mango slices for $1 and rooftop bars like the Vertigo (62nd floor!) where you can pay $10 for a (watered-down, if I may say so) martini. The Vertigo was amazing - to see all of Bangkok spread out at your feet at night, all lit up, the bridges over the Chao Phraya - it was breathtaking under a crescent moon (it was still 100 degrees at 10pm though).
We woke up early on Monday morning to make our flight to Phnom Penh, where we spent 3 days. Hong still has family there who stayed during the Khmer Rouge and subsequent Vietnamese communist occupation, so we got to meet his grandmother, aunt, and some random family members. After Bangkok, Phnom Penh seemed quiet. BKK has skyscrapers, it’s vertical, it’s buzzing with cars and activity and lights; Phnom Penh has no buildings (that I saw) over 5 stories and few "positive" tourist attractions. There is a Golden Palace and a Silver Pagoda, as well as Wat Phnom, but none are distinctive or historically significant enough to attract tourists en masse. What Phnom Penh does have is genocide - the Killing Fields, about 15 km from the city, and the S-21 Prison of the Khmer Rouge, now a museum. Somehow this sense of loss permeates the city. We visited both of these places, first taking our tuktuk out to the Killing Fields. It was incredibly difficult to see, because several placards clearly stated what each part of the field was used for ("Here a loudspeaker was hung to drown the sounds of the dying", "Here is the tree they flung the babies against", etc). There was no sugar-coating, no careful wording, no sanitized history. Also, only 4 of 20-something mass graves have been excavated...like the concentration camps of Germany, death hangs in this place, sitting in the humid air, stirring in the trees, pressing down from the sky. Afterwards, we sat quietly, our words sucked out of us, rattling along in our tuktuk as we drove through the outskirts of Cambodia’s capital city to go to the S-21 Museum. We hired a guide, who had herself lost members of her immediate family to the Khmer Rouge. She told us that none of the Khmer Rouge had stood trial for their crimes, and that many of them had come out of the jungle in the early 80s to take back power from the Vietnamese Communists...she said, "I do not want revenge, I want to move forward." Fellow traveler and Fulbright Sarah wondered if this was because Cambodians believed in karma - I want to be understanding and culturally sensitive, but it made me angry and sad to know that a quarter of the population of Cambodia was killed and that (my Western ideal of) justice would never be served...that someone got away with killing a quarter of his own people and making refugees out of another quarter of the population...and it scared me to think how close I came to never knowing Hong. His family survived the Khmer Rouge to live in Vietnamese labor camps, from which they escaped over the border at night into Thailand, and from there sought asylum in the United States. How many Hongs will the world never know? And in these circumstances, what is justice, and who has the right to ask for it? If a society holds other ideas of justice than “an eye for an eye,” do outsiders have the right to push for a different iteration of justice? Is there something to be learned from a desire to move forward, rather than holding accountabilities from the past?
That day was really heavy, and after our trek through Cambodia's darkest chapter, we met up with Hong's aunt for dinner. A sharp negotiator, she paid a few dollars for all 6 of us to pile onto a belabored tuktuk and headed across town to eat dinner in an alley cafe. An empty garage-like room, cruelly lit with fluorescent tubes, long picnic tables in plastic tablecloth had Bunsen burners with soup broth and meatballs cooking. The waitresses brought us bowls of noodles, pork crackling, vegetables, and more meat - we were literally to make our own soup. It was really good - but hot sitting on the updraft of the burner! Hong sat in the middle, with his family speaking Khmer and his English speaking friends waiting patiently for his back-and-forth translations! Hong's uncle (we think) kept toasting us, so, after my time in Cambodia, the only real Khmer word I know is "Swa-khum!" and I hope that means “Cheers.”
On Wednesday, we went for luscious breakfast crepes, topped with dazzling fresh fruit, down the street, dropped off Sarah at her volunteering gig, and then Hong, Razz, Jeremy and I rented a driver from our hotel to drive us up to Siem Reap, a four-hour drive through the jungle next to the Tonle Sap lake that marks the heart of Cambodia. It was a beautiful drive, allowing us to see much of the countryside we otherwise would not have seen. Most of the houses were built on stilts, because the Tonle Sap floods, but in the hot/dry season, the Khmers were relaxing during the day's heat in hammocks strung up between the stilts of their homes. We whizzed through the countryside in our black Mercedes (now, when I say Mercedes, I mean, the most broken down, seats-caving-toward-the center, pleather-seated, A/C "works" style car with a Mercedes doohickey on the hood you've ever seen), and stopped for a lunch break at a beautiful open-air restaurant built over the Tonle Sap. Here we had a chance to relax in the hammocks as we waited for our food, and overlook the lake with its fishermen and water lillies.
It was really beautiful, and after eating we relaxed in the hammocks over the lake, but the road was calling us north. We got to Siem Reap at 4pm or so, and checked into our hotel, the Golden Banana (of much fame at my job...apparently no one else at a commercial real estate firm would think of staying at a gay-friendly hotel in the jungle called the Golden Banana!). It was an oasis, with a POOL! I averaged 4 showers a day in Southeast Asia, because it is SO hot and sticky and it is hard to feel clean when you have only a certain number of clothes in your bag and the weather is that hot. So I nearly got on my knees in thanks to see a pool. We freshened up, and then Hong, Razz and I went to the Angkor Mondiale hotel for dinner and a performance by some Apsara dancers. These women were incredible - wearing these intense and detailed costumes, and then standing almost still, moving only their hands and fingers in these complex and joint-defying movements! Afterwards, we went back to the pool and dove in to cool off before bed. We ended up hitting the sack fairly early so we could wake up and be at Angkor by 7am.
Angkor, oh Angkor...long on my list of places I have to see before I die, I still wasn't prepared for its beauty. It was such a contrast to see Cambodia's darkest past, and then two days later, to see Khmer civilization's pinnacle of accomplishment! Our tuktuk drove us to the gate, where foreigners pay $20/day to get in (there is no entry restriction for Cambodians, who literally drive right past the toll booth), and then we drove up to the first temple, Angkor Wat. Angkor itself is a 400-km park, with so many temples you could buy a week-long pass and still not see them all. A bunch of Khmer kings decided to build temples up there, so there are at least 20 "big" temples, and more yet undiscovered in the jungle. We came around the side of Angkor, next to the moat, and I couldn't believe it....Angkor is stunning in its size. The outer wall, inside the moat, is imposing...and then you walk through the gate (careful not to step on the monkeys, though) and all of a sudden you see the classic view of Angkor, with the beehive towers...and the sun is rising behind it. And even if you think you're going to get through it just fine, you find your breath catching in your throat and maybe (if you're like me) you tear up. It is incredible to me that this amazing temple has survived reigns both Hindu and Buddhist, has survived 1000 years of life in the jungle, survived the Khmer Rouge's plundering of Cambodia’s cultural heritage...and as Phnom Penh is haunted by its terrible past, in a way that the visitor can feel palpably, Angkor Wat overwhelms, it gives you goosebumps. You feel profoundly, immediately, that you are on holy ground, and that changes how you come to these temples. There is a quieting, a calming – you feel yourself small in comparison to this magnificent, enormous and imposing temple complex that has outlasted so much.
We walked up into the heart of the temple and climbed up into the central tower. This may sound easy, but it is not for the faint of heart (the American idea of “sue them if you get hurt” does not apply here; the safety industry hasn’t quite taken off). The stairs up to the central tower are tiny, half-stairs; the top half of my foot only fit on a stair at once. These steps are not built for fat white tourists who eat Big Macs. Or for wussy little girls who are afraid of heights! I admit I had a rough time coming down - looking at giant flat rocks just waiting for me pancake myself was a bit intimidating. But the view from the top was worth the climb...you can look out over the jungle, and see the perfect symmetry of the temple. There are several Buddhas up there (it is completely unfathomable how those ponderous Buddhas got up there, just from a physics perspective, and Angkor Wat was constructed as a Hindu temple, as the Hindu bas-reliefs on the outer walls attest, from an ideological perspective). Attending the Buddhas were several monks, who seemed to have no trouble on the stairs (the key is a sideways walk, it seems).
On our way out, after about 3 hours, we saw a group of monks removing a tree from one of the reflecting pools outside the temple. It seemed incongruous to see a monk wielding a buzz saw, dismembering a tree! Perhaps because the act was so destructive, but I admit trouble reconciling priests with modern tools, like chain saws.
We then got back on our tuktuk and headed up to the temple of Bayon, with all its faces staring ominously into the forest...smaller, and in a bit more disarray than Angkor Wat, but still beautiful...and then lunch and Ta Prohm, the "Tomb Raider" temple, and one of the few that has been completely abandoned to nature...so you climb over tree trunks and vines and giant fallen stones. The jungle seems to be slowly encroaching on the temple, but that just renders it more beautiful. There is no "path", so you carefully pick your own. I felt like an intruder, and worried about tourists coming to deface the temples or destroy them with their shoes, boots, knives, breath. As I gingerly picked my way through the cluttered maze of stones and trees, I entered into a doorway and blinked my eyes in the darkness. An old Buddhist nun came into view, and then a seated Buddha, and some lit incense sticks...she grabbed my arm and said a prayer over me, and tied a red bracelet on me. I couldn't help but smile; her smile as she tied my bracelet on was so encouraging, generous.
After Angkor, we prepared to return to Thailand. Friday saw us get on a plane and head back to Bangkok, where we hit the Southern Bus Terminal (Hong's "You have to do a bus trip if you come to SE Asia; it's required" echoing in our ears) and hopped a $4, 1st-class bus trip out to Hua Hin, a beach resort town. Perhaps because I hadn't gotten sick yet and it was inevitable or perhaps because we had the foolish idea to eat dinner in an American restaurant, both Razz and I got horribly sick, to the dismay of Hong, who shared our hotel room. I spent my final day in Thailand curled up in our hotel room, under the gently blowing (read: intermittently functional) A/C and watching Thai pop music and Al-Jazeera Asia. Another bus trip back to Bangkok, a quick shower and the final cramming of the bags, and I was back at Suwarnapum Airport, headed home."
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