Salon Wanderlust | Under the spell of Angkor Wat

T A B L E_T A L K
Discuss your most memorable trips, travels or visits in the Wanderlust area of Table Talk

R E C E N T L Y
Where the hula goddess lives
By James D. Houston
A sensual, sacred site in Hawaii
(03/02/98)
Cajun Mardi Gras
By Margaret Spillane and Bruce Shapiro
Singing, dancing, drinking and other mayhem in rural Louisiana
(02/27/98)
Looking for Kathmandu
By Jeff Greenwald
Gossip, chickens and sex in Nepal
(02/26/98)
Landing the Big One
By D.T. Max
Fishing and frolicking in Cabo San Lucas
(02/25/98)
Arigato, Nagano
By Cintra Wilson
Weird TV, naked hot springs and the big heart of Japan
(02/24/98)

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Under the spell of Angkor Wat

Under the spell of Angkor Wat
THE MONSTROUS AND THE MAGICAL COEXIST
IN CAMBODIA, EMBODYING OUR PLANET'S
TRANSCENDENT GRANDEUR -- AND PUNY MUTABILITY.
BY JEFF GREENWALD | SIEM REAP, Cambodia -- There are certain sounds that must have been ubiquitous and comforting to far-flung travelers of every age. The sound of ice cracking, maybe, or the pealing of bells; a steamship blast, or the whistle of a train. Here in Siem Reap, 125 miles north of Phnom Penh, it's the prattle of CNN. In every outdoor restaurant and guest house lobby, live Academy Awards nominations coverage (not to mention Penisgate, the Olympics and Iran) competes with the geckos and frogs, creating a buzz of background noise that satisfies both the cerebral cortex and reptilian brain. The TV shimmers as I write -- a long umbilicus to a distant planet.
Beyond the Diamond Hotel, the Cambodian jungle gleams beneath the full moon. Less than five miles away lies Angkor Wat, where hundreds of sandstone apsaras -- celestial maidens, each one subtly different -- dance before the moonlit towers of the monument, as they have done for eight centuries. I, meanwhile, labor by the glow of a desk lamp decorated with an illuminated plastic bunny. It's classic Asia kitsch, far from UL approved. After 10 minutes, the plastic rabbit is hot enough to fry an Easter egg.
(There's a weird little relationship here. Earlier, watching the moon rise above the spectacular monument, I realized that from this near-equatorial perspective the Earth's satellite appears canted slightly onto its side. As a result, the visual pattern formed by the seas and craters is different from what one sees in the northern latitudes. Instead of a man in the moon, the people of South Asia perceive a rabbit -- and I have to admit, it's a pretty good resemblance.)
Siem Reap seems to have changed little since my last visit here, almost exactly five years ago. The same kids leap and splash in the river, the same women squat by their baskets of pineapples, paw-paws and tamarind. I easily relocate my favorite bar, where bottles of Angkor clink beneath a halo of Chinese lanterns. Strange, how a place one visited so briefly and so long ago can seem so instantly familiar.
And it was the same with Angkor Wat. Passing through the western gate, I remembered with absolute clarity the tightly fitted stones of the enormous (and seemingly endless) causeway, the cows grazing by the lotus pond, and the ranks of delicious apsaras with their adolescent breasts, pendant earrings and Dr. Seuss hairdos.
What's different about this visit is that I'm with John Sanday, the Kathmandu-based architect who lately escorted Prince Charles through the palaces of Patan. Charged with conserving the temple of Preah Khan (one of the main sites within the sprawling Angkor complex), Sanday is an expert on the 8th-to-14th century Khmer ruins. This afternoon he led me on a grueling tour of Southeast Asia's most famous ruin, describing the construction and deterioration of Angkor Wat's stonework in great detail.
Cambodia -- if what Sanday says is true -- has never experienced a major earthquake. The toppled stones and broken lintels that fill the Angkor ruins were not unseated by tremors. More gradual forces brought down those walls: water seepage, salt crystallization, the serpentine invasion of roots. The end result is a rather artful decrepitude, a kind of conspiracy between earth and monument. Stated less poetically, it's like Jeff Goldblum at the end of "The Fly": a weird hybrid of organic and inorganic elements, monstrous and heartbreaking.
The ruins at Angkor cover an area of 77 square miles. Many are being conserved or restored; some are still overgrown by jungle, just as André Malraux found them in 1923. (Malraux was expelled from Cambodia for looting Angkor's sculpture; he would return years later, as French minister of culture.) The big cheese of these monuments, of course, is Angkor Wat itself: a single gigantic Vishnu temple, built in the early 12th century by a Hindu king named Suryavarman II.
Even in this day and age, certain monuments have an almost metaphysical power. If you enter Angkor Wat at just the right time -- before the tourists arrive, the vendors set up and the land-mine victims arrange themselves along the broad sandstone causeway leading to the central towers -- it overwhelms you. It wipes your slate. You forget you ever heard of cloning, or anthrax, or Monica Lewinsky. Something echoes back to you, though you haven't made a sound. Lotuses bloom in the reflecting pool; a breath of incense trails the air; an ankle bracelet rattles behind you. Along the inner gallery walls, exposed to the rising sun, the bas-relief apsaras gesture with seductive smiles. The air seems perfectly still, and your eyes sting in the climbing light. It's vivid to the point of transcendence: you and Angkor Wat, alone at last.
It's like winning the lottery, you think to yourself, or getting stuck in an elevator with Janeane Garofalo.
An airplane whines by, snapping the moment. And when the spell breaks in Cambodia, it stays broken. The beggars and waifs and water-sellers filter in, tugging you back into these last stumbling years of the millennium. How impossible it is to imagine the place in its heyday: back in the 1100s, when the vast open courtyards were filled with wooden houses, animals, shops and cafes. Of those lives, nothing remains; time has annihilated all but the stone. In the harsh sunlight, there is something unsettling about the naked lawns of the Angkor Wat compound. Like so much of Cambodia, it seems inhabited by ghosts.
And here's the rub: Despite the charms of Angkor, Cambodia is not a charming place. The civil war that drove millions of people to the killing fields in the 1970s and 1980s was not an isolated incident. From their earliest records, the Khmers have been a warlike people, obsessed with battle and victory, torture and death. They fought the Vietnamese, the Thais, the Chinese. Sometimes they lost; often they won. The glorious Angkor reservoirs and monuments, Buddhist temples included, were built by captured slaves. Angkor Wat alone represents at least 30 years of hard labor. Knowing this, I admit to a nagging sense of guilt. The Chinese and Burmese use slave labor today; will future generations gawk in admiration of their efforts?
N E X T+P A G E+| Land mines beneath the peaceful surface


T A B L E_T A L K Discuss your most memorable trips, travels or visits in the Wanderlust area of Table Talk R E C E N T L Y Where the hula goddess lives By James D. Houston A sensual, sacred site in Hawaii (03/02/98) Cajun Mardi Gras By Margaret Spillane and Bruce Shapiro Singing, dancing, drinking and other mayhem in rural Louisiana (02/27/98) Looking for Kathmandu By Jeff Greenwald Gossip, chickens and sex in Nepal (02/26/98) Landing the Big One By D.T. Max Fishing and frolicking in Cabo San Lucas (02/25/98) Arigato, Nagano By Cintra Wilson Weird TV, naked hot springs and the big heart of Japan (02/24/98) Browse the Feature archives		Under the spell of Angkor Wat THE MONSTROUS AND THE MAGICAL COEXIST IN CAMBODIA, EMBODYING OUR PLANET'S TRANSCENDENT GRANDEUR -- AND PUNY MUTABILITY. BY JEFF GREENWALD \| SIEM REAP, Cambodia -- There are certain sounds that must have been ubiquitous and comforting to far-flung travelers of every age. The sound of ice cracking, maybe, or the pealing of bells; a steamship blast, or the whistle of a train. Here in Siem Reap, 125 miles north of Phnom Penh, it's the prattle of CNN. In every outdoor restaurant and guest house lobby, live Academy Awards nominations coverage (not to mention Penisgate, the Olympics and Iran) competes with the geckos and frogs, creating a buzz of background noise that satisfies both the cerebral cortex and reptilian brain. The TV shimmers as I write -- a long umbilicus to a distant planet. Beyond the Diamond Hotel, the Cambodian jungle gleams beneath the full moon. Less than five miles away lies Angkor Wat, where hundreds of sandstone apsaras -- celestial maidens, each one subtly different -- dance before the moonlit towers of the monument, as they have done for eight centuries. I, meanwhile, labor by the glow of a desk lamp decorated with an illuminated plastic bunny. It's classic Asia kitsch, far from UL approved. After 10 minutes, the plastic rabbit is hot enough to fry an Easter egg. (There's a weird little relationship here. Earlier, watching the moon rise above the spectacular monument, I realized that from this near-equatorial perspective the Earth's satellite appears canted slightly onto its side. As a result, the visual pattern formed by the seas and craters is different from what one sees in the northern latitudes. Instead of a man in the moon, the people of South Asia perceive a rabbit -- and I have to admit, it's a pretty good resemblance.) Siem Reap seems to have changed little since my last visit here, almost exactly five years ago. The same kids leap and splash in the river, the same women squat by their baskets of pineapples, paw-paws and tamarind. I easily relocate my favorite bar, where bottles of Angkor clink beneath a halo of Chinese lanterns. Strange, how a place one visited so briefly and so long ago can seem so instantly familiar. And it was the same with Angkor Wat. Passing through the western gate, I remembered with absolute clarity the tightly fitted stones of the enormous (and seemingly endless) causeway, the cows grazing by the lotus pond, and the ranks of delicious apsaras with their adolescent breasts, pendant earrings and Dr. Seuss hairdos. What's different about this visit is that I'm with John Sanday, the Kathmandu-based architect who lately escorted Prince Charles through the palaces of Patan. Charged with conserving the temple of Preah Khan (one of the main sites within the sprawling Angkor complex), Sanday is an expert on the 8th-to-14th century Khmer ruins. This afternoon he led me on a grueling tour of Southeast Asia's most famous ruin, describing the construction and deterioration of Angkor Wat's stonework in great detail. Cambodia -- if what Sanday says is true -- has never experienced a major earthquake. The toppled stones and broken lintels that fill the Angkor ruins were not unseated by tremors. More gradual forces brought down those walls: water seepage, salt crystallization, the serpentine invasion of roots. The end result is a rather artful decrepitude, a kind of conspiracy between earth and monument. Stated less poetically, it's like Jeff Goldblum at the end of "The Fly": a weird hybrid of organic and inorganic elements, monstrous and heartbreaking. The ruins at Angkor cover an area of 77 square miles. Many are being conserved or restored; some are still overgrown by jungle, just as André Malraux found them in 1923. (Malraux was expelled from Cambodia for looting Angkor's sculpture; he would return years later, as French minister of culture.) The big cheese of these monuments, of course, is Angkor Wat itself: a single gigantic Vishnu temple, built in the early 12th century by a Hindu king named Suryavarman II. Even in this day and age, certain monuments have an almost metaphysical power. If you enter Angkor Wat at just the right time -- before the tourists arrive, the vendors set up and the land-mine victims arrange themselves along the broad sandstone causeway leading to the central towers -- it overwhelms you. It wipes your slate. You forget you ever heard of cloning, or anthrax, or Monica Lewinsky. Something echoes back to you, though you haven't made a sound. Lotuses bloom in the reflecting pool; a breath of incense trails the air; an ankle bracelet rattles behind you. Along the inner gallery walls, exposed to the rising sun, the bas-relief apsaras gesture with seductive smiles. The air seems perfectly still, and your eyes sting in the climbing light. It's vivid to the point of transcendence: you and Angkor Wat, alone at last. It's like winning the lottery, you think to yourself, or getting stuck in an elevator with Janeane Garofalo. An airplane whines by, snapping the moment. And when the spell breaks in Cambodia, it stays broken. The beggars and waifs and water-sellers filter in, tugging you back into these last stumbling years of the millennium. How impossible it is to imagine the place in its heyday: back in the 1100s, when the vast open courtyards were filled with wooden houses, animals, shops and cafes. Of those lives, nothing remains; time has annihilated all but the stone. In the harsh sunlight, there is something unsettling about the naked lawns of the Angkor Wat compound. Like so much of Cambodia, it seems inhabited by ghosts. And here's the rub: Despite the charms of Angkor, Cambodia is not a charming place. The civil war that drove millions of people to the killing fields in the 1970s and 1980s was not an isolated incident. From their earliest records, the Khmers have been a warlike people, obsessed with battle and victory, torture and death. They fought the Vietnamese, the Thais, the Chinese. Sometimes they lost; often they won. The glorious Angkor reservoirs and monuments, Buddhist temples included, were built by captured slaves. Angkor Wat alone represents at least 30 years of hard labor. Knowing this, I admit to a nagging sense of guilt. The Chinese and Burmese use slave labor today; will future generations gawk in admiration of their efforts? N E X T+P A G E+\| Land mines beneath the peaceful surface