skyhigh, rock bottom

We didn't plan it this way intentionally, but it was in Cambodia that we reached the midway point of our trip. And in some ways our experiences over our 4 days in that country seemed to make a perfect - and perfectly imperfect - centerpoint for our travels. In Cambodia (the town of Siem Reap, to be specific), we felt as if we were as far from our everyday lives as we are likely to be anywhere on our journey, and we reached some of the highest and lowest points of the last two months; now we can start the slow descent/ascent home.

The highs were at Ankor, among the majestic, awe-inspiring jungle-entangled ruins of the ancient Khmer empire. At epic sites like Ta Phroem, where massive roots and trees literally grew up from and down into the stones...

At Ankor Wat, which we explored at sunset...


And most of all, at Bayon, where we went on our first full day in Cambodia. It's the site that has been pictured in the title header of this blog all along, and finally climbing up among its towers in person and walking, standing, meditating among their huge, blissful stone faces felt like reaching a true milestone.


On our second day in Cambodia, we woke at 4:30am and drove to back to Bayon. There was a roadblock around it, but our driver found the policeman manning the entrance and got out and talked to him. Next thing we knew our driver was moving the roadblock. He drove up next to the temple, which was bathed in almost complete darkness, and parked, and with our flashlight leading the way, Maya and I climbed back up among the towers, the only people there, feeling as if we were discovering the ruins for ourselves in the twilight. Up there, hearing only the animal sounds of the jungle, we watched as the stone faces came to life in the light of the rising sun, and we found perhaps some little piece of our own nirvana.


And then there were the lows... Cambodia is a poor as fuck country with a dark, violent past and present - the Khmer Rouge, landmines scattered across the landscape... If we sometimes came across extreme poverty and the scars of history in China and Vietnam, in Cambodia, they were much more in our faces and seemed so much more desperate. What made it seem all the worse is that Siem Reap is a such a fast-growing tourist town and full of shocking juxtapositions between the oscenely rich - luxury hotels commanding literally thousands of dollars for a room per night - and the obscenely poor - reed-and-plastic-tarp huts housing multi-generational familes, sometimes just across the street.

- We visited a memorial to victims of the Khmer Rouge, a small wat pagoda with glass sides revealing a waist-deep pile of skulls, bones, and torn clothing: the remains dug up from nearby killing fields. When we returned to our car, our driver revealed to us that both his father and his brother had been killed by the Khmer Rouge.

- We took a boat tour of a floating village outside of Siem Reap, which has become something of the tourist draw despite - or perhaps because of - the fact that it is so astoundingly poor, full of tiny wooden boathouses crammed with multiple generations, and houses with walls of dried palm leaves and roofs of rusting tin, standing on precarious tree-stem stilts, sometimes up to 10 meters (about 30 feet) tall, above the waters, which rise and fall dramatically with the wet and dry seasons.


The families who live there do so because they don't have the money for earthen real estate and they subsist by fishing and by begging/selling cold drinks and bananas to tourists. Our guide was a very morose 24-year-old who claimed to live himself in the floating village and told us that he was supporting his two sick parents, both in their 60s, whom he lived with. He said that his two older brothers had been killed by the Khmer Rouge. Both Maya and I were skeptical at first - we've been trained after two months of travelling to suspect a scam in every sob story, and we wondered what the odds were that both our driver and and our guide here would have had family members killed by the Khmer Rouge. And we felt bad about our skepticism - as we discussed later, the Khmer Rouge slaughtered a fifth of the Cambodian population, so it was actually quite likely that every Cambodian had a fmaily member or a friend or an acquaintance who had been murdered.

- As our boat cut slowly through the water, villagers would paddle their boats up to us, begging for us to by drinks and bananas from them. On one boat, a tiny naked kid, maybe 2, stood wrapped in his/her two pet snakes, while his/her mom plaintively begged for tourists to buy bananas from her for a dollar each.

- Our boat stopped at a floating fish farm, where we found a large, waterfilled hole in the floor filled with huge, flopping catfish. We noticed more holding tanks up a short platform and walked up to see what they contained, and were shocked to find them full of at least 20 large crocodiles, lounging about in garbage-strewn waters. As we watched them, a teenager working onboard, pulled a particularly ginormous catfish from its hole and took it, wriggling, to a back area, where he hacked it into large chunks with a butcher knife. Then he carried a few of them, including the head, over to the crocodile pen we were standing over and hurled them in. The crocs lunged jerkily as the pieces landed, snapping at them, but then ignored the food and just laid there, frozen in their various positions of attack. The one thing moving in the pen, however, was the catfish's head, which was still very much alive, its gills pulsing with breath and its front fin periodically flicking in a gesture of understandable distress.

- Perhaps the most startling image of our visit to Cambodia: A boy, maybe 10 years old, wearing no shirt and with only one arm - the other, amputated at the shoulder - which he was using to row himself around the lake in a metal basin that he barely fit into, dodging fishing vessels and rocking in the choppy wake of the many passing vehicles; rowing himself between tourist boats in order to beg. Back when we were dodging scam artists in China, I had morbidly joked to Maya that once we got to Cambodia, she would look back fondly on a time when the people trying to get our money had all their limbs; watching this boy paddling away, Maya turned to me, reminded me of my joke, and said that, yes, right now she did long for those days.

While we are definitely glad to have made it to - and now out of - Cambodia, it's the one country we've been to so far that we're not sure we want to revisit any time soon.