Angkor Wat

Frommer’s calls Angkor Wat “The Disneyland of Temples.” It’s almost a good observation. What they mean is that there are a lot of people there. It’s true. There are a lot of people there—5000 visitors a day (compared, by the way, to an average of 40,000 a day just at the Magic Kingdom in Orlando)—and they come from all over. The visitors also come from all over: It is the first we have seen western tourists outnumbered by Asian tourists (the most from China, which makes sense, then from South Korea, which is a bit more surprising, very few from Viet Nam, which does make sense give how poor VN is and the enmity between the Viet and the Khmer, very few from Thailand, which is again surprising given that Bangkok is only 50 minutes away by plane and that the Thais have money).
But there’s much more to the comparison that Frommer’s, dumb to the end, misses completely. First, the layout of Angkor Wat is curiously like Disneyworld (the one in Florida, not Disneyland in California). Angkor Wat is not a single temple but a series of temple and palace complexes (including one actually called Angkor Wat, just the way NY refers to both a city and a state) just as Disneyworld is not a single amusement park but a series of amusement parks, supplemented by some minor attractions (water parks, Downtown Disney, a mini gold course). Second, tooling around AW in a tuk tuk—we had one driver the whole time—felt weirdly like driving among parks at Disneyworld. The roads were by far the best we saw in Cambodia and there were various routes among the temples, much as there are among parks at DW. (Need I add that tooling around in a tuk tuk felt like typical DW ble3nding of transportation and entertainment ride?) Third, just as Disney’s different parks have different themes (animals, movies, future worlds), so do Angkor’s. Angkor Wat proper is the icon, with its towers gracing the Cambodian flag (Mickey’s ears?). Angkor Thom, particularly the central temple of Bayon, has face towers (towers with faces carved into them). Ta Prohm, where any Cambodian will proudly tell you is where Angelina Jolie filmed Tomb Raider, is marked by the very interesting decision to preserve the temple in the form it was when the French archeologists started restoration work in the 1930’s. It’s famous for the trees growing amid and around the ruins. So, somebody might object that AW and DW are fundamentally different because DW was built to be a tourist attraction and AW was built for very different purposes (to celebrate a bunch of 8th to 14th century Khmer kings, most of whom were named Jayavarman). True enough about DW, but the truth is a bit more complicated about AW. AW was, of course, originally built out of some combination of religious devotion, both Hindu and Buddhist, and egomania. It is also true that AW never disappeared. It’s not a Knosos (or a Machu Pichu?) that had to be rediscovered. But AW had largely fallen apart, even as a few monks continued to use it, and it was not until a bunch of French archeologists in the 1930’s started to restore the parts that had been abandoned that AW became a tourist attraction. Of course, not a lot of tourists visited during the Khmer Rouge years or in the decade plus that followed—but every Cambodian regime, including the KR. has treated AW with respect as a symbol of lost national greatness to be restored. Since 1990 or so, there has been a concerted effort to make AW a tourist attraction. Siem Reap, the town closest to AW, feels as if it was air dropped in to Cambodia, probably from Australia. (The excellent breakfast we had at the Hotel de la Paix, in downtown Siem Reap, included an excellent bagel with cream cheese, capers, and smoked salmon.)
All that said, Angkor Wat is magnificent. The pictures, not just mine but all the pix I’ve seen, do not do justice to the temples. I don’t say this in a trivial sense: part of what makes AW spectacular is its size, particularly its depth. Pictures simply don’t give a sense of how big it is, not just the whole set of complexes, not just at individual temple complexes but even at individual temples.
We did not get a guide other than our tuk tuk driver, even though all the guidebooks recommended it. Instead, we bought a book on AW, better produced than the photocopied books sold on the streets of Hanoi but still just $5 in full color thanks to total disregard for property rights and royalties, a curious twist to a post Communist country. From what we overheard of what guides told their guides, we regretted our decision not for a moment. Even the half century plus of university teaching could not get us interested in what year Jayavarman VII built Preah Khan or accounts of which battles are depicted on the temple friezes. It’s not that I wouldn’t like a good guide. I would love to hear something about the difference between the Angkor temples and some of the cathedrals and abbeys that were built at more or less the same time. I would love to hear a discussion of how Buddhism emerged out of Hinduism and what the implications were of that emergence for notions of kinship, the relationship of religion to social life, the relationship of kings to their subjects. I would truly love to hear a discussion of how archeologists go about reconstructing ruins and the inferential process they use to move from their view of the ruins to their imaginative reconstruction of the societies that constructed them. But all of this is probably to say that I want a charming polymath to show me around. I’m sure such a person exists but I doubt that he 9or she0 is showing around tourists at $15 a day.
I think I forgot to mention in my last post—about Phnom Penh and the Khmer Rouge—what might be the most astonishing fact about Cambodia and as good an indicator as you could find that it’s been fucked over. The ATMs dispense dollars. There is a national currency—the riel, 4000 to the dollar. So far as I could see, it is used only to give change. So, if something costs $3.50—prices are all listed in dollars—and you pay with a five dollar bill, you get back one dollar bill and 2000 riels. It is also impossible to convert Cambodian riels into other currencies. The Khmer Rouge actually abolished money for a couple of years in Democratic Kampuchea, but I don’t think this is what they had in mind.
We’re now back in Bangkok after a week on the beach in Thailand and headed home in a couple of days. I’ll probably post two more times, once about the beach, once to answer some comments, but I might not do either until we get back.

Phnom Penh

Who gets the title of “Most Fucked over Country of the Last Half Century?” Afghanistan has to be in the running. So does Rwanda. But it’s very easy to make the case for Cambodia. Start with five years of military dictatorship from 1970-1975, accompanied by civil war and American bombing. (For a couple of those years, the bombing was particularly heavy because Cambodia was not a signatory of the Paris Peace Accords and the US military didn’t have any place else to bomb.) On April 17, the Khmer Rouge arrived in Phnom Penh and, before the day was out, started evacuating the city. Within three days, the population of the city, someplace between one and two million on the morning of April 17 (much of that consisting of refugees from the American bombing) was down to between 1000 and 20000, all Khmer Rouge functionaries. The Khmer Rouge years (Democratic Kampuchea, 1975-79) were an experiment in radical egalitarianism, probably inspired by the Chinese Cultural Revolution, gone dramatically bad. Rice shortages, the forced relocation of city people to the countryside, a campaign against expert privilege (including doctors and possibly engineers), the elimination of Western medicine, and some political executions resulted in well over a million deaths, by some estimates nearly two million deaths, in a population of about eight million. So far as I can tell, starvation and a lack of medical care, rather than executions, accounted for the majority of deaths. I haven’t seen any estimates but my guess is that the executions were under 10%. But this, you might say, is moral nit picking and, indeed, it is. The Khmer Rouge years are astonishing but so are the years since, albeit in a different way. Cambodia was “liberated” in 1979 by an invading Vietnamese Army. (Remember that Viet Nam was a Soviet ally and Cambodia an ally of China, which promptly but briefly invaded Viet Nam after Viet Nam invaded Cambodia). Now, the Cambodians did not and do not like Viet Nam or the Viet Namese—long squabbles over rights to the Mekong exacerbated by bad treatment of Khmer minorities in Viet Nam and Viet minorities in Cambodia. On the couple of occasions we asked Vietnamese about Cambodians, their answers seemed proto-racist (“They’re darker with curly hair.”) and if we had talked longer or had better communication skills I would probably be comfortable dropping the ”proto” part. When we asked Cambodians about Vietnamese, the dislike was equally palpable: “They’re taking our jobs” which was far worse than anything anybody had to say about Americans who, whatever our country might have done in the past, now spent money in Cambodia. In any event, the Viet Namese imposed Communist regime (as distinct from the Khmer rouge Cambodian Communists) stayed in power for a decade before UN supervised elections. But, during this time, the Khmer Rouge continued to operate, mostly on the Thai border and with Thai, American, and Chinese support—a weird ménage a trios if ever there was one—because each dislike the Soviet Union (and therefore Viet Nam) than they disliked each other. The UN supervised election was won by the party of King Sihanouk and established a constitutional monarchy. Sihanouk promptly installed his son, the head of his party not as prime minister but as co-prime minister with one Hun Sen, the head of the Viet Nam backed communist party that had been the runner up in the election. Fast forward a couple of years and Hun Sen is no longer a communist, so far as I can tell, but does manage a coup in which he gets rid of the Sihanouk son. Hun Sen is still in power and has managed to combine the worst of communism and capitalism: limited civil liberties with plenty of poverty, low rates of education, high rates of corruption and massive inequality.
Phnom Penh is now repopulated, sort of. The downtown is organized along a wide boulevard, filled with embassies and other impressive looking building but largely empty of people, and the water front. The water front is filled with restaurants, hotels and stores. Some of the restaurants and hotels look very modern, in a W sort of way, which makes sense given that nothing is more than 20 years old. But the waterfront is also lined with beggars, men without legs (they all say they lost them in land mine accidents) and women with infant children asleep by their sides. It is a public display of poverty unlike anything we had seen in Viet Nam, Laos or Thailand. When we drove out of town—to the Killing Fields—much of the city began to look like a movie set, with houses, just like in a real city, but with empty fields stretching back behind them.
The tourist attractions in Phnom Penh are the Royal Palace, built by the French for the king around 1900, a kind of Bangkok Royal Palace lite, and torture. Right, torture. We went, as, so far as we know, does every other Westerner visiting PP to the killing fields and to S-21. The killing fields are not a metaphor (as, I think, the term was used in the movie of that name). They are a place—there may be several, even many, similar other such places—where the Khmer Rouge took political prisoners, a term used very broadly as it included, most dramatically, even infant children, to be executed. The place, fields, maybe a couple of acres, on the outskirts of Phnom Penh where a series of mass graves were found in 1979, is now marked by a small museum and a glass tower enclosing, on various levels, clothing found beside the grave and skulls. (In this case, by the way, the pictures actually do more than justice. The tower itself is not all the impressive and the various tiers, basically wooden shelves, mitigate some of the horror that we would have otherwise felt on seeing skulls piled 20 feet high.) S-21 is the former middle school, close to downtown Phnom Penh that was used as a prison and interrogation area for political prisoners, a weigh station en route to the killing fields. It is now a museum, mostly displaying pictures taken by the Khmer Rouge themselves of the roughly 20,000 prisoners who passed through, only a handful of whom survived. The picture of a tourist bus just outside a barbed wire fence is from S-21.
Nobody denies that massive numbers died during the Khmer Rouge years. This isn’t Brazil, as my brother describes. Quite the reverse: Peple are absolutely preoccupied with the past. Just about anyone over 35 or 40 has a story to tell about parents or other relatives lost and just about everyone we talked to willingly told his story, usually in what seemed to us a remarkably calm, emotionally flat voice. (Admittedly, we did not meet any rural people or, for that matter, even talk to many women.) What’s weird, though, is that in the insistence to document there is an almost absolute refusal to explain. At the Killing Fields, one plaque contains a sentence saying that Pol Pot (the head of the KR) should have examined the failures of his economic policy rather than blaming foreigners. (Sounds like it was written by someone pro Viet Nam.) Another couple of plaques showed the structure of the Communist party leadership in the late 70’s but made no effort to connect anything about Communism to the “genocide.” A third plaque, outside the building, next to a tree that was apparently used to bash babies to death, was the angriest statement we saw—apparently written by a Buddhist, it seemed to blame what happened on evil, a concept I do not find particularly useful. (Is it a Buddhist concept? No idea.) At S-21 the efforts to document were intense—picture after picture, but with no commentary and even less effort to explain than at the Killing Fields. No place was there any mention of the American bombing, no place was there any mention of the tensions with Viet Nam (except to note the part of Viet Nam in ending the Khmer Rouge regime), and certainly no place was there any effort to think about radical egalitarianism and what it meant. Moreover, there even seems to be a reluctance to talk about the Khmer Rouge. Time after time we heard people say that Pol Pot did this or Pol Pot did that (including in a little town on the Tonle Sap that it is unlikely Pol Pot ever visited). Occasionally we saw references to the “Pol Pot clique” but that’s about as close to a social analysis as anyone got. Pol Pot was a real person who seems to have turned into a myth. Somebody (maybe our driver to the killing Fields?) told us that his son doesn’t believe the stories—just like American kids learn to show they’re grown up by saying there’s no Santa Claus, except, of course., that there was a real Pol Pot and he was the anti-Santa Claus. Nobody even asks how many deaths were the result of purges, how many the result of famine, how many the result of civil war, how many the result of the disappearance of conventional medical care for four years. Now, I sort of understand this reluctance: It’s dangerous. Even after the Vietnamese invasion, the Khmer rouge didn’t disappear. Some defected to the new regime and were greeted more or less warmly. Even Pol Pot himself remained at large until 1997, and then only to be overturned by a coup within the remaining Khmer rouge itself a month before his death (possibly from natural causes). Many Khmer rouge operatives and even some leaders have now been reintegrated into Cambodian society. Easier to demonize—quite literally—Pol Pot than to confront what happened. Maybe it makes sense, but I doubt it. Where are the truth and reconciliation commissions when we need them?

Rivers

Hi all,
Sorry I’ve been so slow to post. After leaving HCMC, we spent three days (with limited internet access) wandering through the Mekong Delta in the general direction of Chau Doc on the Cambodian border. From there we spent two nights in Phnom Penh (also with limited e-mail access) and two nights on a boat with a lot of French people heading up the Tonle Sap (a Mekong like river) toward Siem Reap and Angkor Wat (and with no internet access at all). We spent three nights in Siem Reap and are now on the beach in Thailand looking out over a magnificent seascape.
I’ll post something about Phnom Penh later (general theme: Cambodia is a candidate for the title of most screwed over country of the last century) and something about Angkor Wat after that.
1. After a bit too much time looking at floating markets and floating villages, after a bit too much time hearing about how to make rice cakes, we spent one great afternoon bike riding through the Mekong delta near Can Tho. The population density felt not much different from that of an American suburb, with lots of people wandering around (it was just before Tet), lots of houses, some little more than thatched huts, others pretty substantial—with a boat in every garage-- and plenty of cows, ducks, chickens, There were paths for bikes and motorcycles, but not for cars. But it was all astonishingly lush, with little streams, patches of dense tress, open rice paddies. The first ten pictures are all from the Mekong, about half from the bike ride.
2. After two nights in Phnom Penh, we got on the Toum Tiew, a ten cabin boat that goes back and forth up and down the Tonle Sap between PP and Siem Reap. Although the food was terrific—lots of fresh fish—this was not a luxury boat. We think that the Captain, dressed always in whites, was sent over from central casting. Serge Prunier--Directeur generale, Commissaire de bord, Commandant a bord du Toum Tiew (I quote his business card)—is a French ex-pat, married to a Cambodian, has been living in Cambodia for 17 years. In a boat filled mostly with French speakers (12 of 18 passengers) he did simultaneous translations of himself, replete with apologies for his poor English. His chain smoking confirmed that he has not been in France for a long time. The trip, like much else we have done, was bizarre. We didn’t go very far: because it’s dry season, we could go up Tonle Sap, the river, but not Tonle Sap, the lake, which makes up about half the distance from PP to Siem Reap. For the rest of the trip we went by speedboat. (Actually, we went by two speedboats since the motor to the first speedboat conked out about half way across the lake and another had to come to get us.) Most of the time we were on board, we were anchored at Kampong Chhnang (the two h’s are not a typo), a dusty little town with absolutely nothing of interest. Even the demonstration of how to dry fish—the town’s biggest business—had to be called off on account of Tet. The highlight/lowlight of the trip was an oxen cart ride—tow oxen and one driver per passenger—from a landing someplace on the Tonle Sap to see a Wat of no particular interest. (You can see Captain Serge on the back of a little red motorcycle herding the oxen drivers. I tried to get a picture of him riding while smoking but it turns out to be hard to take could photos from the back of an oxen cart.) If we were inclined to such things, the experience would have been humiliating. Since we are not, it was kind of amusing, both to us and to the villagers who watched us parade by.
3. Both in the Mekong and on the Tonle Sap, we were in the hands of tour guides. I had arranged the tours in the Mekong both because it’s a hard area to travel in and because I was concerned (probably rightly) about Tet. On the Tonle Sap, it was an unavoidable part of the boat trip. Silly way to travel. The guides told us stuff we were not interested in—like how to make rice cakes—but, despite an anthropological tone to the tours (lacking any real sights talk about how to dry fish?), left out just about everything we would have been interested in. That said, when we came to the border of Viet Nam and Cambodia, we had a problem. Naomi’s visa had been stamped with an exit date of Feb 4 (instead of Feb 14). The border guard on the Vietnamese side wanted to send us back to Saigon to fix the visa. But we had a guide with us—a specialist, no less, in running Westerners across the border on the way from Chau Doc to Phnom Penh. And with a little hard work on his part, plus one hundred dollars from us, we got through. We could not have done it on our own and it was certainly worth listening to another three demonstrations of how to make rice cakes.

It's starting to feel a lot like ...

Frommer’s: “Avoid travelling during the Tet Holiday. … Tet is a Christmas and New Year’s celebration rolled into one, and everyone is going ‘over the river and through the woods.’ …. During this time, many tavellers find themselves stranded, hotels completely full, and roadways crowded with traffic and revelers.” Maybe. Some stores are already starting to shut down and many more have signs up that they’ll be closing for 4 days starting the 13th. (Tet falls on the 14th this year.) I took Frommer’s seriously and worked hard to make sure we would be out of Viet Nam by the start of Tet so, on the13th we will be on a boat up the Mekong to Phnom Penh and Cambodia. What Frommer’s (and the other guidebooks) neglect to say is how much fun it is to be in Ho Chi Minh City the week before Tet.
Despite everything we had heard, the traffic in HCMC is nowhere near as bad as in Hanoi nor I sthe pollution. There are a few more beggars in HCMC than there were n Hanoi but even in HCMC the numbers are hardly large. But HCMC also has some areas, including the dozen or so square blocks in District 1 where the large hotels (our included) all stand, that some genuinely prosperous. Gucci, Seiko, Caravelli, Esprit, Versace and dozens of stores selling silk are all on the very upscale street that leads from our hotel by the river (the Majestic, an art deco leftover from 1925) to the central square dominated by the opera house and flanked by the Caravelle, the 1950’s built hotel famous as a hangout for American journalists during the war. It’s disorienting: We fought a war to stop a communist takeover, right? We lost, right? The communists won, right?
The most interesting sight in HCMC, with the possible exception of the war remnants museum, is the Reunification Palace, the building constructed by Ngo Dinh Diem after his own air force bombed the colonial era Governor’s Palace that stood at the same site and had been taken over by Diem as his first presidential palace. There is a famous picture of an NLF tank rumbling though the wrought iron gate around the palace on the day in 1975 that Saigon fell/was liberated. It’s a sixties style building, including something that looks suspiciously like a rec room in the residential are, and would not be out of place in Brazilia. What’s astonishing here as, less strikingly in Hue, is to see so recent building—no excess of the 17th or 18th century French monarchy here—converted to a museum stuck in time. The helicopter, meant for a quick escape, sitting serenely on the roof just adds to the sense of being frozen in time.
We’ve been eating well but are starting to get sick of Vietnamese food. We found a branch of Quon An Ngon in HCMC, the same restaurant we ate in a couple of times in Hanoi ad that features street food in a various “mini-kitchens” with guarantees of sanitation that the street stalls do not make. What’s fascinating about the restaurant is that it’s one of the few places we’ve been that attracts both foreigners (it’s at the top of the ratings in Trip Advisor and also featured in Lonely Planet) and locals, a range of the Vietnamese middle class, some dressed up for a big evening out, some dressed hardly any better than the scraggly Westerners at neighboring tables. We also ate one night in our hotel, a massive buffet of sea food (oysters, sushi, sashimi, Pacific style lobster, tiger prawns) as well as various other dishes and all the wine (Australian, not great but a big improvement of Dalat Red) you could drink. For a bit under a half million Dong (about $25, including tax and tip) it seemed like a deal to us. We thought it might seem high to the locals but, to our surprise, we were half the westerners in the restaurant and there were two large groups of Vietnamese (one of about 20, the other about 30) there getting a slightly early start on Celebrating Tet. When we poked our heads in the next night, it was full and entirely Vietnamese.
The street our hotel is on, Dong Khoi, is lined with lanterns and lights. At the Opera House, Dong Khoi intersects with Le Loi, also lined with lanterns and lights. Parallel to Dong Khoi is Nguyen Hue, the center part of which is closed down as workers fill the closed off part with various statues of tigers—it’s the Year of the Tiger—and flowers. At night, the streets are jammed with motorcycles out on family expeditions. A motorcycle pulls up to the intersection. Dad stays on or, sometimes, mom. The kids are coaxed out in front of one of the plastic or blow up or plaster tigers. Mom, or sometimes Dad, takes a picture of the dressed up kid. Other people pose in front of other displays, usually holding up two fingers in what Winston Churchill would have called a victory sign and what people my age call a peace sign. What the sign means to the smiling Vietnamese who seem to use it almost universally in their poses remains, at least for me, one of the mysteries of the inscrutable Orient. (The pictures are blurred, not by intention but because our camera needs a longer exposure to take pictures at night. The blur might, however, give a better feel for the whole thing than a better camera would.)