I'm no geologist, but sometimes I love to study rocks.
Like last week, when I had a torrid three-day love affair with the stone remains of Angkor's dozens of Hindu temples. The sprawling ancient metropolis, probably the world's largest pre-industrial city, is mostly mystery now, its massive religious constructions the only pieces a millennium has handed down to us. We can meet the smiling four-faced towers of the Bayon temple in Angkor Thom (right), but can never know at what they smile.
I armed myself with two guidebooks and a history book, determined to put the laterite and sandstone into historical context; I knew that without them temple fatigue would set in after one day. (India taught me that.) The thing is, even scholars who spend entire careers studying and reconstructing the temples to understand Angkor are very ignorant about the society that built them. Inscriptions are incomplete and biased. There's no serious glimpse of Angkor beyond the realm of Gods and Kings.
And that's fine; I wasn't expecting to find absolute knowledge/understanding of Angkor in the space of three days. I just wanted to be a bit more than a tourist looking for photos and that overrated adjective "exotic."
One of the best things about Angkor's temples is not mentioned in any of the guidebooks: They are excellent and unusual exercise. Photos and scholars won't tell you this, but it's a very good reason to explore Cambodia's ancient history. They are not, and never will be, handicapped accessible. But they are, if you want to shed a few pounds and lots of water, a full-contact sport. Embrace the heat and sweat, beware twisted ankles, and climb the stone jungle for days.
The temples were made of stone and are/were home to Hindu Gods (usually Vishnu or Shiva); now they are mostly home to the jungle. Strangler trees can grow on, through and above stone. There is no stopping life in the tropics. Some of the temples - most notably Angkor Wat - have been fully reclaimed by and for people, and Cambodians claim the whole region as their greatest patrimony. But the jungle will always be Angkor's true heir.
The true beauty of Angkor's temples is in what time has done to them. They must have been mesmerizing just after completion, between the 9th and 13th centuries, often sparkling with white plaster finish and accompanied by a full roster of statues (looters have stolen many through the centuries). But I found it hard to imagine their former glory when what is visible today is so overwhelming -- the colors, the architecture, the improvised accretions of time and jungle (left).
It's impossible to exaggerate the complexity and wealth of Angkor's architecture and carvings. Photos are meager substitutes, alas. Angkor's line of rulers had three things today's leaders and builders rarely have: unlimited power, construction schedules measured in decades rather than months, and a virtually unlimited supply of slave labor.
While touring the temples, I kept telling myself that the fact modern
societies so rarely construct sublime buildings that will last a
millennium has as much to do with political rights as it does with
a lack of imagination. I hope I was lying to myself. Slave labor shouldn't be required to build a city of Angkor's caliber.
I grew fond of walking both through and around the various temples. Each angle revealing new colors, shadows and sculpted lintels and pediments. The original layout and symmetry of each structure is easier to grasp when you do more than walk through central passageways and glance left and right.
A one-day tour of Angkor is insulting. A three-day tour is reasonably respectful. I think four days would have been ideal for the 22 temples I took in, but time wouldn't allow me to stay one more day. True Angkor adventurers could comfortably explore 35 sites in five days, I think. Many people would probably find five days in Angkor to be painfully gratuitous at best, suicide at worst. Perhaps it's natural to enjoy the present more than the past. Shopping malls are certainly more understandable and accessible than Angkor. Still, a tour of Angkor should be mandatory for all those can afford it. Call me eccentric, but I would much rather stumble through Cambodia's humid heat than an air-conditioned mall if this cascade of sculpture is waiting for me, nearly 1,000 years after it was carved for the Gods:
There are certain questions I have never expected to be asked. One of them is:
"Would you like to go to a cockfight Friday?"
It was the specificity of the question that surprised me last week, when Fong, a mototaxi driver who drives me around Phnom Penh sometimes, asked me. This was not an abstract proposition; if I wished, I could actually attend a cockfight and no one would throw me in jail for my morbid curiosity.
And so, of course, I hopped on Fong's motorbike and went across the Tonle Bassac to an island stuck between that river and the Mekong river. With the city behind us, I prepared myself for a debauched scene. I was not disappointed.
I learned a few things almost immediately after sitting on a wooden bench a few feet from the ring, a padded cement circle underneath a galvanized steel roof propped up by wooden posts. (All with only two walls to shield the scene from the tiny dirt road running alongside it. As if anyone in the neighborhood didn't know why dozens of motorbikes are parked there everyday and men can be heard breathlessly shouting for 2-3 minutes only twice every hour.)
Cockfighting is illegal in many parts of the world for very good reasons. To witness men priming roosters into anger by holding their faces inches from each other, and then to watch them carefully tape spurs to the roosters'legs, is to watch something deeply twisted. The fighters are weighed and hefted and showed to the crowd. The ring's owner steps up and announces the fight, the cocks' "trainers" mist water all over them to cool them off for the action, and then: within three minutes the cruel duel is complete, and one of the roosters is either dead or twitching severely in the dusty dirt ring.
I'll admit the two fights I saw were exciting: What's more viscerally exciting than a fight for survival? But why anyone, save the most inveterate gamblers, would return to the scene day after day is beyond me. (Fong knew most people there, and they knew him.)
It is one thing to choose to eat chicken (or any other animal) and accept the suffering that meat-eating almost necessarily entails. It is another to entertain oneself with, for example, elephants in a circus, when it is very clear that elephants do not like being in circuses. But it's a whole order of magnitude worse to essentially force an animal to kill another in order to take pleasure in and profit from the spectacle.
But Fong told me cockfighting is more sophisticated than simply sizing up two birds and picking one. The birds are imported from countries' around the world, he said, and each rooster's origin can be surmised from the size and shape of its head. Each national breed, apparently, has different strengths. (American roosters are particularly ferocious and victorious and are occasionally imported, he told me.)
The sport has been around in Cambodia for at least a millenium, probably a Chinese cultural import. Roosters can be seen battling each other, surrounded and egged on by men, in certain bas-reliefs on Angkorean temples. The sport's old age is probably the central reason efforts to outlaw the practice appear futile.
I can't resist one paragraph on the legal status of cockfighting in Cambodia. Conversations with Fong yielded the following bewildering information, which offers a perfect window into Cambodia's "the rule of law."
-Cockfighting is illegal in Cambodia.
-If specific information about the cockfighting ring became public knowledge, the owner of and enthusiasts at
the ring would be very, very unhappy. I learned this after taking out my camera; Fong was sure
to tell the crowd that no photos would appear in The Cambodia Daily. We all had a good laugh.
-Cockfighting is filmed and televised in Cambodia once a week.
-Nearly every bettor/spectator at the ring was a soldier or a policeman. (In civilian clothes -- except
for one soldier who walked into the hut with his rifle during the second duel and began cheering
on the action.)
The lesson here: Cockfighting in Cambodia will not be ending any time soon.
On the first Friday night of each month hundreds of expats (i.e., white people) assemble in a bar named "Elsewhere" to drink and carouse and be seen. In any western city, the scene would be completely unremarkable, a typical gathering of 20- and 30-somethings looking for escape/entertainment/sex/love via the usual social lubricant: alcohol.
But the party is very remarkable, because Elsewhere is not in New York. It is in Phnom Penh -- which must be the NGO capital of Southeast Asia. Nearly everyone at the party is, in some way or another, probably living in Cambodia to try and do good. Watching do-gooders flirt and drink and then jump into and couple in a bar-side pool is odd, to say the least. But when it's all happening in a swank French colonial-style house with a plush yard protected by high walls, and when virtually all the Cambodians in sight are moto-taxi drivers standing just outside the property's gates, the scene grows surreal, even shocking.
It is an informal NGO industry party, a collective release (both therapeutic and indulgent) by a small army of people who must be very frustrated by their line of work. I know I would be.
Name an NGO, it's here: from World Vision International to the World Health Organization to the World Wildlife Federation, from Norwegian People's Aid to Kampuchea for Christ International. Every member of the "UN Family" is represented here, all part of the world's biggest bureaucracy. Hundreds of local and international NGOs you've never heard of compete with missionary zeal (some literally) to remake this broken land, "building capacity" by empowering "local stakeholders." Hundreds of young, educated and unattached westerners move to Cambodia to donate their time to help this country shed its awful recent history.
The only silver lining to thirty years of war is an endless stream of donations flowing into a country that, thanks to the Khmer Rouge and the film "The Killing Fields," has nearly become synonymous with genocide, poverty and "a good cause." Cambodia is full of the world's do-gooders.
It was odd to realize - in Sri Lanka, just after the December 2004 tsunami - that charitable development is an organized industry like any other. Competition for funding is intense and the services provided to the needy must be packaged and sold to donors -- who effectively act as customers buying a product (new primary schools, AIDS prevention, cleft lip operations) they can trust.
To borrow corporate language to describe NGOs is not to denigrate their value. It's only to recognize how NGOs halfway around the world from Americans - who will probably never visit Cambodia - bridge the distance to ensure their survival. Without stable income, how can any organization complete its mission?
But often I wish all of Cambodia's foreign NGOs would lower their overhead costs by pooling their budgets and programs together. Centralized, coordinated infrastructure building! No redundant programs, needless competition and unseemly flag waving! But wait a second - that would essentially turn the NGOs into...a government. And Cambodia already has one of those, and it barely functions.
The Cambodian government can't stand on its own. Wandering Phnom Penh's quiet streets south of Sihanouk Boulevard, which are lined with the signage of NGO headquarters, it's easy to remember that 50% of the Kingdom of Cambodia's annual budget is provided by foreign governments and international donors such as the World Bank. And it's easy to think that Cambodia has not one government, but hundreds - that each NGO functions as a tiny fiefdom offering piecemeal salves to a people who rarely feel the presence of their country's official government.
Yesterday I learned the private bets I've been quietly placing with myself could make me a rich man. I could, during my remaining days in Cambodia, bet on the sky.
As it turns out, there is a thriving rain betting industry here during the monsoon season. (I should have guessed this, with so many men sitting around doing close to nothing while so many clouds build overhead.) The game is known here as "phnal tuek phleang," and those who play it are called "rain punters," according to a recent Agence France-Presse story.
It's as simple as it sounds: You bet on what time it will rain on any given day, or how much it will rain during a specific period of time, or whether a piece of paper will be soaked by a certain time of day. Odds are calculated according to weather conditions that spotters - freelance meteorologists - report to bookies via radios.
It may sound easy to look at the sky and guess when a gathering storm will empty itself. But I assure you: it is not. During the last seven weeks I have never once accurately predicted when rain will fall. The nastiest clouds will wander off leaving nothing, or the edge of a cloud will suddenly arrive with a small shower and then scuttle off, or a friendly looking cloud will suddenly transform into a drainage pipe's worst enemy. After weeks of frustration (and leaving my poncho at home), I gave up, leaving the fate of clouds to...the clouds.
Rain betting is illegal in Cambodia. Which means nothing, of course. And how could you enforce the law, anyway? Follow anyone who looks at the sky too pensively? Arrest anyone who has placed a bucket on a rooftop? And in a country where betting on cock fights and fish fights is rampant, authorities have more important things to worry about. In the world of gambling, what could be more harmless than betting on clouds?
It's an ancient tradition, apparently brought to Cambodia by Chinese immigrants hundreds of years ago. But technology has modernized the game, thanks to cell phones and handheld radios and internet weather forecasts. But in my experience, no technology in the world can possibly track monsoon season rains closely enough to guarantee a sky gambler success. It is impossible to predict a monsoon season sky here -- and that is exactly why rain betting will never die: there will always be money to be made, whether by the bettor or the bookie.
It reminds me of Sri Lanka, where betting seemed even more culturally embedded. The best gambling game I ever heard of in that country, or anywhere, has to be this: Two or three or however many birds are sitting on a fence. Which one will fly off first?
There is so much money to be made in this world.
One of the reasons I love to live and travel in very unfamiliar places (i.e. poor, non-Western places) is that they force me to ask myself questions that I often evade in the U.S. At home, familiarity often leads me to complacency, the false feeling that the world makes sense. But South and Southeast Asia don't leave much room for complacency - the region's sheer intensity forces you to confront its poverty and chaos and wonder how it all came to be. Asia poses many questions, but doesn't offer many answers -- to me, at least.
Last week, finishing my meal at a Phnom Penh cafe's wooden lunch bar, I suddenly began closely watching the restaurant's staff work with surreal bemusement. It's the stance my mind takes from time to time in aimless moments. Simple questions pressed into me:
What is this place? Who are these people/objects? Why are they moving and what is their point? The questions became reflexive, turning themselves on me, making me feel just as strange and pointless for being there asking them. Wanting answers, all of them. And I thought: I am a perpetual child, covering the world with question marks. That is the natural state I return to. It is as though the names I have learned for things - wall, Cambodian, coffee mug, fan - expose their essential mystery, and I think: I do not know, cannot know, how these things came to exist before my eyes, weak eyes passing through thick fog.
And then later that night, I came upon this passage in Saul Bellow's "Henderson the Rain King":
The world may be strange to a child, but he does not fear it the way a man fears. He marvels at it. But the grown man mainly dreads it. And why? Because of death. So he arranges to have himself abducted like a child. So what happens will not be his fault. And who is this kidnapper -- this gypsy? It is the strangeness of life -- a thing that makes death more remote, as in childhood.
I think Bellow goes a bit too far here in saying the awareness of mortality is the root of all of our confusion. But that doesn't make him wrong. When I think I am curious like a child I am partly right; there is real continuity between my sense of wonder, say, 15 years ago, and today. And that's a good thing. I don't want to lose that childlike wonder. But mostly I am lying to myself, pushing myself away from the awareness of death into ignorance, the false comfort of a never-ending childhood.
Sometimes, even though I'm not sure where it is anymore, I miss home. The way its familiarity can put all the questions to bed. Perhaps this whole rambling post is just proof that I am tiring of travel, that my own country finally seems to hold more than foreign lands seem to offer. But I'm sure six months after I get home I'll be staring at maps again, wondering what other places in the world might throw me for a loop.
Cambodia's streets carry clouds of dust, but it's impossible to know just how wretched those clouds are until you rent a motorbike and drive through them for five hours. I agree with this simple and highly scientific equation, which I have just formulated:
Motorbike + Speed + Time + Road = Filth.
But despite returning to Phnom Penh with blackened forearms and facial stubble, I had no regrets last Saturday after making the 230 kilometer round-trip journey to the lushly forested Kirirom National Park, southwest of the capital. All on a puny 100 cc motorbike that would make any Harley aficionado point and laugh.
My last significant experience on a two-wheeled motorized contraption was when, aged 12 or 13, I drove a dirt bike completely through a neighbor's wooden fence and then collapsed into a semi-conscious daze. (I did yard work for weeks to pay that debt off.) But how could I resist a simple fact of life here: I can put $3 and my passport on a table and get a motorbike for an entire day, no questions asked.
My lack of confidence was not helped by being pulled over by two cops 30 seconds after leaving the rental business. I impulsively followed my Dutch friend and day-trip companion Paul as he mistook a green left-turn arrow for a full-on green light. Suddenly Phnom Penh's finest/worst were hard at work flagging us down and demanding $5 or else -- what? But I paid, very aware that my "ticket" required no paperwork whatsoever, just bills placed carefully in a binder underneath a tree.
People I work with at The Cambodia Daily advise sticking to a few simple rules to evade extortion: never get off your motorbike because it signals weakness. Tell the cop you want his boss' name. And my favorite: Tell the cop you can only give him, say, $1 now, and then write down your employer's address and tell him to drop by tomorrow to pick up the money you owe him. Absurd, but apparently it has worked.
Cambodia's streets are largely lawless, but there is one notable exception. If you are white and driving a motorbike, you are more likely to be pulled over to pay off traffic cops - reverse racial profiling that's understandable given the cops' salaries. How can I complain? I had just got hold of a motorbike for $3 carrying no license. And I desperately wanted to get the hell out of Phnom Penh.
Cities suffocate everyone, eventually. Phnom Penh may be urban Asia lite and surprisingly green, but it still leaves me gasping for open space after ten days. And so we took to the road, flimsy helmets and all, zipping by the airport into the paddied countryside.
I had traveled through it before, but in buses -- so I had no idea how black exhaust can slowly built a film of pollutants on one's face, despite a helmet's pull-down face guard. Sounds bad, but it's barely noticeable when you're traveling tight-lipped down a road at 30 or 40 or 50 miles an hour, trying to steal glances at gorgeously green scenes. Never was quite sure how fast I was moving, thanks to a broken speedometer.
After collapsing into a bar chair after a dusky return to the city, I realized two things: Riding a motorbike for hours is surprisingly tiring, and terrible for postures. And I was filthy.
I hate to think this as hundreds of people in the region fall victim to floods and their attendant illnesses, but I really enjoy South and Southeast Asia's monsoon season. From May to November, it waters the paddies, gives life to the tropics. It turns the sky into cinema, like this:
In Kandy, Sri Lanka, where five years ago I first met the season, every day offered a predictable drama: between 4 and 5:30 p.m., the world would be flash-flooded, suddenly hosed down, completely drenched. We'd watch the clouds roll in, build up, and bet on their delivery time.
But here in Cambodia, nothing about the sky is predictable. The rain might wake you up, put you to sleep, interrupt your sidewalk meal, give you a reason to stop working and stare through windows. You might feel it coming, you might be ambushed. It could be gentle - a tease - or it might it might flood your vehicle to a stop in the middle of the street. (This nearly happened to my taxi in Siem Reap.)
I love watching the clouds pile up through an afternoon, guessing how long before they empty themselves onto the earth. I love the way sudden downpours transform drab buildings into protected pockets of luxury; they are shelter, and that is the point. Something between me and the sky. Even if it's a boat:
But most of all, I love the monsoon sky's dynamism, how it becomes a highway of clouds constantly changing. They, multi-layered, swirling, brooding, provide a dramatic backdrop to the day -- until they become a dramatic foreground. Then we run for cover and enjoy the show.
Amazingly, the rain has never struck while I was riding a moto-taxi. It has exploded while I was in a tuk-tuk (3-wheeler taxi with roof), though. The driver pulling over to unfurl canvas walls and tie them to the taxi's frame to create a raincoat, and me peering through tiny cloudy plastic windows to watch Cambodia's dust turn into mud.
A laborer in Kep, the lazy coastal village I visited last weekend, takes a break in the sunny lap of his new best friend, Yeah Mao, the "Black Grandmother" who is believed to protect travelers and fishermen along the coast. Kep's only true landmark, the naked statue sits atop a pedestal at the end of a tiled spit of land jutting into Kep's harbor. She needs a full-body makeover.
