Siem Reap and the Ruins of Angkor, Cambodia (Sometime January 2007)

The border crossing from Aranya Prathet, Thailand into Poipet, Cambodia, and then on to your hotel in Siem Reap, is a hoot. From the moment you leave your taxi in Aranya Prathet, you are swarmed with people wanting to help you with your luggage, find the border (duh), or answer any question, for $. You extricate yourself from that, find the visa processing line, get your documentation and $20 US in order, and a man standing right in front of the front of the line, working along with the actual official behind the desk, staples your documentation and asks you for $5 more for "special processing." (Apparently this is an improvement, since tourists in times past have been conned out of greater sums. In any case, Eric was very firm about saying that the fee is $20 and handing the official just $20 for each of us.) You cross the border and are loaded onto a government truck that takes you directly to the bus/taxi station. (This is a nice service, because you bypass the rest of your walk through Poipet, truly one of those armpit border towns, and according to Lonely Planet, full of thugs and not to be confused with the rest of lovely Cambodia.) We organized one of the taxis to drive us the six hours over dusty, pocked (by meteors, I think) roads into Siem Reap, and reminded the driver that we want to go to Shadow of Angkor guesthouse. No problem. Except that he pulls into a different hotel, at which three people come running out, start pulling luggage out of the car, welcoming us, telling us that the driver didn't know where Shadow of Angkor (which has been operating for decades) was, and wouldn't we like to look at their fine hotel? To which Eric said certainly not, pulled out the trusty Lonely Planet map, and we hoofed it to Shadow of Angkor. (This is one of the ruses used to get commissions from hotels. Another, called the "scam bus," is where on the Thailand side a guesthouse arranges travel for a busload of people crossing into Cambodia to Siem Reap. The bus drives really slow, gets there in the middle of the night, and drops its hapless passengers at the Thai guesthouse's partner-in-crime guesthouse in Siem Reap.)

Our favorite food in Cambodia is Amok. Amok is like a cross between pork, chicken, beef, or fish curry and stroganoff. Creamy, spicy yum!

Siem Reap reminded me a bit of Alleppy in India, with a canal running through the center of the town, which bustles with tourists, tuk tuks, guesthouses, shops, and restaurants. (BTW, if you have to have been colonized or a protectorate, make it be by the French. Cambodia and Vietnam have fabulous coffee, baguettes, croissants, and other pastries, as well as French-influenced architecture.) It's a nice place to hang out and it's the springboard for one's venture into the ancient town of Angkor.

(Real-time broadcast interruption alert: I'm writing this from an internet cafe in Hoi An, Vietnam. The ten-year old Vietnamese boy sitting beside me just lit up a cigarette. His inhalations and exhalations are weak, sending wafts of smoke over my way, and he flicks his ashes on the floor. I hand him an ashtray and show him, mostly through sign language, how to blow his smoke up at the ceiling. What else are you going to do?)

Sadly, but as one might suppose, there are still a lot of landmine victims in Cambodia. The disabled but talented troupe of musicians below play traditional music using traditional instruments along the road in Angkor. I bought a CD of their music.

We took about four days going through the ruins of Angkor. On our last day, our tuk tuk driver was a man named Chea Chengg. Mr. Chea was a farmer who had to hide in a pagoda and eventually joined a monastery during the war. Because he was fluent in French, the government decided he was an intellectual, only in the monastery to hide from them. That's all we got of this story! Shortly after that the tuk tuk blew a sparkplug, Mr. Chea called his son for help, his son arrived on motorbike with his little son in tow, they fixed the tuk tuk, and we got back underway. Mr. Chea is also a poet and a songwriter; some poems he showed us are about his love of his country. As Eric and I walked along a path back to the road, Mr. Chea stood under one of the ancient city gates, operatically belting out one of his songs in Khmer. That's how I'll remember him, along with his beautiful, one-toothed grin.

Here's a picture of Mr. Chea with the gas station attendant. There are some Western-type stations in Southeast Asia, but more typically you find a tiny stand on the sidewalk, holding litre bottles refilled with gasoline. Our litre of the day came from a Johnny Walker bottle.

I looked up Chea Chengg on Google and found that he and some of his stories were incorporated in a book called Vanna’s Dance, written by Maria Almudeva– van Santen . It's a children's book about a little girl named Vanna, who lost a leg in a landmine explosion, and the wisdom she gets from her godfather Chea Chengg's stories. Proceeds from the book go to Adopt-A-Minefield (http://www.landmines.org/). For more info or if you want to buy the book, see http://www.unspecial.org/UNS655/t55.html

"Excerpt
Vanna was sitting on the front step of her house. She was happy. The sun was shining over Cambodia and Chea Chheng, her very good friend was coming to see her. The older man was a wonderful storyteller. When Vanna saw him coming she jumped up, her two shiny black ponytails bouncing as she did so. «Chea Chheng!» she called excitedly. «You are here!» Chea Chheng’s face broke into a big smile. He patted her head, playfully pulling on one of her ponytails. «Your face is like the sun. It matches your pretty yellow blouse,» Chea Chheng said affectionately to the eight-year old girl.«Tell me a story,» Vanna begged.«Don’t tell me you are not tired of my stories yet,» he teased her laughing, his eyes dancing with the happiness he saw on her face.«Oh! Never!» exclaimed Vanna.«Then come sit with me,» Chea Chheng said. They sat down together on the front step. Chea Chheng began his story.The Banyan tree has heart-shaped leaves. Many roots grow down from its branches. If a root is cut, another will grow and dig into the ground. It may be a different root, but it will be just as strong. You cannot destroy the soul of something so determined to live. The Banyan tree, like a person is made of many parts that give a strong foundation. Its heart-shaped leaves look alike but each is different, like the many emotions inside a person’s heart. There was a little boy who wanted to cut down a big Banyan tree growing near his house. He knew it was very strong. He wanted to show that he was stronger. «I will destroy that tree,» the little boy said. «Then I will be the stronger one!»Every day he cut down a root. And every day a new one began growing in its place. Finally, he realized the tree was too strong to destroy, just like a person’s soul.The little boy learned from the tree to be stronger. When one part of him felt weak, he used other parts to stay strong. This is what people must do. Part of you may feel weak sometimes, but other parts will not. You must then look to these other parts. They will help you to stay strong. Just like the Banyan tree.Vanna listened attentively to Chea Chheng’s voice. It was wonderful to enter the world of his stories. They were stories of her people and of their land. To the little girl, they were full of a special magic."