Cambodia is Ruined, But Not Wrecked

Visiting ruins can get old fast. After the initial thrill and put-yourself-in-their-shoes imagining wears off, I find sometimes that each new site begins to look like the last.

Not so at Angkor Wat. We spent three transfixing days of total-immersion temple hopping. I was ready to return there on the day after we left. I can hardly wait for my next visit.

It’s not just the grand scale of this ancient city that impresses. At nearly every stop, we were stunned and re-stunned by the massive stones and the symmetry and the echoes of a great civilization.

The other thing that kept running though my mind was how, over eight or so centuries, countless forces have conspired to destroy the place—from armies to jungles to weather to tourism to poverty to younameit.

Yet despite its struggles, Angkor Wat is far from wrecked. You can’t wreck it.

Some people might be able to go there and not visualize it in its heyday, when no metropolis on earth could match it. It was as big as Rome.

Or maybe you could lessen the magic by rushing things, trying to squeeze the whole complex into one or two hot days, rather than seeing a little bit at a time, at different times of day. Even if you did go too fast, though, I doubt you could wreck it.

I was moved by the way Cambodia seems to have resisted the temptation to, say, build a high-rise hotel across the moat from the central attraction. Likewise, it would have been easy enough to justify a banner over the entrance to the Bayon, announcing that the reconstruction had been made possible by a generous grant from, say, Citibank.

So far the country has made more right choices than wrong ones. The town of Siem Riep has been allowed to become tacky, but that’s several miles away. Kids are permitted to hawk postcards outside the entrances to certain sites, but once we were inside they never approached us. Lots of treasures have been looted or vandalized, and yet Angkor Wat still dazzles. Even the temples that have crumbled and been left that way are charming. I doubt I could get tired of it.

Cambodia is Bumpy

After glimpsing the country briefly from Preah Vihear, we re-entered Cambodia at the Aranyaprathet – Poipet border crossing. My dad remarked that the experience reminded him of an old New Yorker cartoon in which a thunderstorm stops at a state line in the Western U.S.

Road quality changed abruptly between Thailand and Cambodia. Here’s an image, borrowed from a BBC webpage, of the highway we traveled. Five hours of vibrations and dust and close overtaking nearly did us in. Luckily, there wasn’t much traffic—nearly as many oxcarts as engine-powered vehicles.

Until we reached Siem Reap, that is. The home of Angkor Wat might as well have been another country. Brand new pavement instead of potholes. A gleaming hotel every few hundred yards. We didn’t so much notice the fall of darkness as we did the rise of neon.

If we had flown in and flown out of the country, we couldn’t have said we had been to Cambodia. But I’m also glad we didn’t have to return to Thailand by car.

Cambodia is Vacant

My parents flew across the Pacific to see us. We planned an excursion to Cambodia. Their first view of it was from the edge of a tall cliff. This vantage point, called Preah Vihear (Khao Prah Viharn in Thai), has a profile similar to a sinking ocean liner. The bow points skyward at a fairly sharp angle. At the tip is an ancient temple.

The Thai-Cambodian border at that point is effectively formed by the rim of this escarpment. An international court awarded the disputed temple site to Cambodia some years back, so technically we were already in the country as we climbed the steep steps from the Thai side up to the ruins.

The monument itself, relative to others in the area, is nothing too special. But the effort to reach it was more than rewarded by the view of a wide plain that revealed itself when we were just one step away from the cliff edge. If we didn’t know better, we’d have said the country looked as peaceful as the sea on a windless day.

Alas, the nearly roadless expanse in front of us appeared empty and serene partly because it’s chock full of landmines. Few people choose to live in that part of Cambodia, for fear of losing a limb. Development there proceeds only as quickly as the demining efforts, which is to say not very quickly.