Trang is Tranquil

I hadn’t been much to the Andaman Sea before last week, when I ferried out into it for about an hour to a square island with sheer cliffs on all sides. The only habitable spot on Koh Laoliang is a beachlet, 500 meters wide and 100 meters deep. An entrepreneur puts up a handful of safari-style tents six months a year.

Nobody at all lives there in the rainy season because the waves are generally too rough to land a boat. The island’s lone permanent structure is a tall metal pole supporting four large speakers, an early warning system paid for out of the flood of international donations following the 2004 tsunami.

It was Thanksgiving, our office had several days off in a row, and a group of friends from work had flown down to Trang on one of the last flights out before protesters closed the Bangkok airports. We had booked two nights on the island, but as there were a few minutes before our ferry departed the mainland, and the future was uncertain, somebody bought two cases of Heineken.

We passed our days doing what people do when they don’t know how much longer they have: kayaking, card playing, snorkeling, rock climbing. When the time came to return home, the sea wasn’t cooperating. Our group and one other planned to take the ferry back to Trang, but riding a long-tailed boat out from the island to meet it, and docking with it, looked like a challenge.

The solution was for the boatmen to wade next to a kayak, pulling us away from the beach one at a time, until everyone in our group was aboard the long-tailed boat. They said they would have to come back for the second group. Understandably, the boatmen were in a hurry to return for them, so we weren’t too concerned when they rushed us onto the ferry after (rather forcefully) coming up alongside it. What we hadn’t understood was that the long-tailed boat had been damaged in the collision, thus stranding the second group until another boat could be found. The ferry didn’t wait.

Our trip home was otherwise uneventful. We stopped for a couple hours at a lovely hot spring. A cute little kid, no more than six or seven years old, took all of our orders flawlessly at the local food center. Nobody was even bothered too much about having to take the overnight bus because the Bangkok airports were still closed. We didn’t know what tomorrow would bring, and frankly didn’t much care.

Malaysia is Multicultural

On the 4th of July in Kuala Lumpur, no fireworks went off that we were aware of. But the design of the Malysian flag looks much like America’s, so at least that part was familiar.

Coming from Bangkok, our first impression was that we were in a much more developed place—efficient, centrally planned, proud of its successes. Seeing only the capital, we couldn’t tell how evenly Malaysia’s wealth is distributed, but KL’s streets and sidewalks at least looked in much better shape than what we’re used to.

At first glance the signs in Malay offered no clues. But after a few minutes, words and meanings began to pop out, like used to happen with those hidden-picture drawings as a kid. “Sentral” was obvious enough as the word to describe the main bus station; likewise, it wasn’t surprising to see “Polis” marked on the door of a car with a flashing light on top.

The hotel posted a welcome to a group of “eksekutifs” and offered a “cyberjaya” for anyone wishing to use the internet. Another term that quickly made itself clear was “dilarang,” as it was generally followed by a long list of no-no’s. Not only are flower picking and littering prohibited in a public park, it seems, but also writing and peddling and perhaps kissing.

Somebody suggested we visit the Highlands, which sounded refreshing. Soon we were suspended in a sky cable car, looking for monkeys in the rainforest below us. I looked forward to hiking around the top of the mountain when we finished the two-mile ride. Instead we found ourselves surrounded by casinos, amusement parks, and hotels that would have been right at home in southern California or southern Florida.

I had no idea such a familyfuncenter existed in Southeast Asia, and perhaps unfairly, I didn’t expect to find casinos in a Muslim-majority country. But Malaysia turns out to be many countries in one. A museum we visited the next day in Malacca featured displays on the various eras of the past six or so centuries: Sultanate, Portugese, Dutch, British, Japanese, British again.

The mixture shows up clearly in the food offerings. Crossing Malay and Chinese food produces a cuisine called nyonya. The many curry and roti shops made me feel I was in India.

Not only is Malaysia the former centerpiece of colonial power in the region—“Whoever is Lord in Malacca has his hand on the throat of Venice”—but since independence about 50 years it has spent some of its natural resources prosperity on “kontemporari” symbols of achievement to go along with its “tradisional” attractions. The Petronas Towers were briefly the world’s tallest buildings. The federal government’s activities have been moved to a shiny new showcase city about 15 miles from both the capital and the airport, presumably because concentrating too many of the country’s aktiviti-aktiviti in one place is dilarang.

Uthai Thani is Out of the Way

It’s the kind of provincial capital where the dogs don’t get up from the middle of the street when they see a van coming. As we got close to town, maybe only ten kilometers to go, a little kid at the back complained that he really couldn’t hold it any longer. The driver stopped. Somebody slid open the side door so the kid could pee at the edge of the road.

My hotel’s proprietor stopped at the circuit breaker as we walked down the hall, to make sure my room’s electricity was turned on. It wasn’t the hotel I expected to stay at. I planned to go on that evening to an even smaller town, near a wildlife sanctuary that I found by accident on the Web. But a late start from Bangkok meant I missed my connecting bus, so there I was in Uthai Thani.

Shortly after settling in to the room, I got a call from the owner of the place in the small town. She was worried I’d gotten lost. That same kind of thoughtfulness radiated from her the next day when we finally did meet. She welcomed me for nearly an hour, talking in Thai of things we both really were interested in, not just about the weather or how long she’d been in business.

Here I was thinking that I’d come to surround myself with the beautiful landscape and its biological diversity. But the main attraction turned out to be this beautiful human being. She invited me to have dinner with her and her husband, the deputy mayor. We ate home cooking, not restaurant food. I felt more like a relative than a guest.

Then out of the blue appeared a fellow speaking English in an accent I didn’t recognize right away. This was Mark, from the Philippines, who teaches English to the youngsters in town. He explained that the school board couldn’t afford a native speaker, but were happy to pay him double the salary of the local classroom teachers, along with free room and board and the use of a motorcycle.

The only downside is that he doesn’t speak much Thai and nobody in town speaks much English. So when a roundeye like me shows up at this lovely little roadside resort, Mark wanders over and dives in to the conversation that he’s seemingly starving for. I didn’t mind. He soon had me in stitches with a story of being hospitalized after eating a pound of crabmeat at one sitting.

I had to smile, too, when we ended up going together to an unusual temple that sits a little way outside town. Even though he’d been there before, he couldn’t remember the way, and so thought it best to pay somebody to take us. Finding a driver was easy enough, but explaining what we wanted to do then fell to me. The newcomer helped translate for the local.

We made it. Wat Tham Khao Wang was gorgeous. The style and the building materials were like no temple I’ve visited in Thailand. If the monks there are the ones who keep up the extensive gardens surrounding the pond, I wondered how they also had enough time to pray and meditate. Should you find yourself in the neighborhood of Ban Rai, I recommend stopping by. Better yet, ask around for Mark and see if he wants to come along.

Koh Kood is Damp

Rainy season came early this year, but we went to the islands anyway. Our speedboat left from narrow finger of Thailand that pointed us toward Koh Kood along a route parallel to the Cambodian hills in the distance. Not that we could see those hills. The downpour kept us from even raising our heads. After an hour on the water, in spite of the boat’s canvas roof, we were all soaked to the skin.

Luckily the sun broke through just as we arrived. The owner of the cottages we’d booked was waiting for us with a warm seafood lunch. Seven of us passed a long weekend exploring the island, splashing around in a freshly recharged waterfall, or playing Scrabble indoors whenever the monsoon returned. (Little did we realize that a cyclone was hitting Burma at the same time, about 1,000 km to the northwest.)

Everyone else in the group speaks Thai better than English. So I struggled to keep up with the conversations, and surprised myself with how quickly the total immersion helped me pick up new words. Even the Trivial Pursuits-style games and the Scrabble were easier than I expected. If I keep traveling with this gang, I could get fluent pretty fast.

But I suspect we won’t return to this island unless we can get a sunshine guarantee. During the boat ride back, the skies opened again. Umbrellas were useless. We found the best sitting position was the one they recommend on airplanes “in the unlikely event of a water landing.” By leaning forward and grabbing our ankles, we retained as much of our body heat as possible.

By looking down we also could ignore the suspicion that our boat driver was lost. He finally cut the engine and admitted that without his familiar landmarks he wasn’t sure. We waited about ten minutes while the rain pelted our backs. Some people no doubt had now begun to find their prostrated position was also convenient for praying.

Happy ending. A fishing boat crossed our path, we were pointed in the right direction, and the mainland appeared just in time for the sun to shine again.

Mae Hong Son is Muddy

Up in Thailand’s northwest corner, at the end of a road the t-shirts claim has 1,864 curves, is a little town of about 8,000 people. It’s hilly country, full of views and tribes.

A few of us flew there on a long weekend, looking to find fresh air and other things that are rare in Bangkok. We were the only ones on the flight.

Our guest house was also quiet. We weren’t sure what tourists do in Mae Hong Son, other than perhaps recover from their journey along the winding road.

As we strolled around town, we spotted signs for a guide service advertising “uncomfortable tours” and “bad jokes.” Soon we were riding in the back of the guy’s uncomfortable pickup truck. He pointed out some cows with huge horns. They were wearing wooden cowbells. “Why do the cows here have to wear cowbells when they walk on the road?” he asked us. None of our guesses was correct. After we gave up, he said, “because their horns don’t work.”

The guide’s twin boys came along on the tour. They looked about five or six years old. Both had shaved heads except for a topknot that hung halfway down their backs. In the old days, lots of children wore that traditional hairstyle as a way to protect the spirit in their heads, known as kwan. Now you don’t see it much. We didn’t ask the guide about the topknots, nor did he make any jokes about them. Kwan is serious stuff.

We ended up at a hot spring. Workers wearing green uniforms offered us a choice of mud mask or full body mud wrap. They painted the mud on our faces and then we washed it off after about 20 minutes. Now we are much more beautiful than we were before. No joke.

Vientiane is a Village

You don’t have to go far to find the village at the heart of Laos’s capital city. Within walking distance of our hotel, cooking fires spiraled smoke from behind countless homes. The temples I saw during a short run in the direction of the airport looked to me like real working religious communities, being swept by regular monks. These were not the kind of shrines that attract tourists or that house senior clergy.

Our group had arrived for a small-town event, a friendly soccer match between counterparts from the same organization. The hosts in Vientiane had lured us Bangkok folk north with the promise of a big post-game feast. True to their word, they roasted two buffaloes to feed the many players and spectators.

That morning, before crossing the Mekong and entering Laos, we’d wandered among local specialties at the morning market in Nong Khai, the Thai town closest to Vientiane. I skipped buying chicken fetuses (still half in the shell, feathers still wet), but happily breakfasted on Vietnamese baguettes (Hanoi is the same distance from Nong Khai as Bangkok is).

Next to the market is a handsome temple known as Wat Pochai. The painted scenes of daily life inside it seemingly cover every Thai and Lao custom. Quite a lot of prime wall space is dedicated to a Loch Ness-like phenomenon near Nong Khai known as the Naga fireballs.

These weird glowing orbs pop up from the middle of the river (or is it just beyond?) every full moon night in October. Some skeptics insist that the fireballs are not really projectiles from a serpent’s mouth, but rather methane gas escaping from the river bottom. But try telling that to the 200,000 spectators who show up to watch.

Likewise, I knew better than to press too hard for details about the healing balms and oils that were being sold outside the temple. Based on smell alone, these products told me they would remedy whatever ailments resulted from our soccer match. I took advantage of a buy-two-bottles-get-one-free offer.

As it turned out, our hotel in Vientiane was across the street from a massage shop. It appeared to be closed on the morning after the game, but a teammate inquired whether the opening time posted on the door was really the opening time. A few minutes later, three of us from the Bangkok squad were flattened out on adjoining mattresses. The hands that kneaded out our aches and pains felt as if they’d been strengthened in the village.

Nakhon Si Thammarat is Nifty

What I’ll remember longest from staying three days at a wildlife conservation center down south are the swatting, flirting, pajama-clad Thai middle schoolers. Pre-adolescents seem to play in a primal way, no matter what country they come from.

This group of 20 or so had come for a weekend camp of the get-to-know-nature variety.

My friends and I had flown to Nakhon Si Thammarat from Bangkok to enjoy a lovely government-run patch of forest facing the Gulf of Thailand. We also hoped to spot two unique local species: crab-eating monkeys and pink dolphins.

Dinner for overnight guests at the center was served at long picnic tables under a shelter. The kids switched places throughout the meal, as if sitting next to a new person somehow provided them with purer, healthier oxygen. Their banter wafted over to us.

Suddenly they leapt up as one, called by some unseen force. Later we saw that the counselors had harnessed their creaturely natures and were leading them in songs and games about the importance of preserving wilderness.

We joined in on the tail end of their gymnastics, then retired to our quiet bungalows for some adult conversation. Electricity flows to this remote spot, but not television or mobile phone signals, so talking to each other was our only entertainment option. A nice change from Bangkok life.

The next morning a local fisherman toured us along the coast in search of the monkeys and dolphins. We spotted both, about five minutes apart, just at the time we were tempted to turn back because the scenery was beginning to get monotonous. Our excitement, to an outside observer, probably looked like we were back in middle school.

Saraburi is State-of-the-Art

After I told the bus driver the name of the famous, ancient wat I was planning to visit in Saraburi Province, he told me to keep my eye out for a grand archway. Buddhist temples here generally announce themselves with an arch on the main road, even if they’re set way back and out of sight.

Soon I spotted the place. It was clear from the entrance that just because it was old didn’t mean the place was out of date. Not only was the temple’s name proclaimed in large letters, but also—if you look closely at the picture you’ll see it below—the address of its website appeared prominently.

Wat Phra Buddha Bat indeed felt modern and hip. It’s been rebuilt several times in the nearly 400 years since a hunter found a footprint in limestone that was thought to have been left by the Buddha himself. In the meantime it seems to have become a popular place for young men to enter the monkhood, which most Thai men do, even if only for a short period. The three-month Buddhist lent that began recently is a common time of year to undergo this rite of passage.

So the wat was packed with two or three hundred teenagers and 20-somethings. I showed up just before noon, as they were filing out of a huge meeting hall, having just finished their final meal of the day. Their alms bowls were already washed, and they had a short break before afternoon studies began. A few brave ones stopped to chat with me as I sat at a table with my journal.

This little glimpse of temple life was great fun for me. The castle-like structure that houses the footprint itself was impressive, but somehow less special than watching the comings and goings of Buddhism in the 21^st century.

Kanchanaburi is Calm

Back when I first lived in Thailand, my old friends Hose and Vinnie passed though the country and we made a hilarious trip to the land of waterfalls and death railways known as Kanchanaburi. As I recall, we had adventurous plans on striking out for the province. Instead, we spent most of our time at one restaurant on an island in the middle of the River Kwai, re-living our school days. We had plenty of stories to last us, and the food was excellent.

This past weekend included a national holiday on Monday for the Queen’s birthday. I decided to head back to Kanchanaburi to see what I’d missed. A work friend wanted to go too. His sister has a place there. He’d never visited it before.

We traveled in his car. Neither of us had any goals. The air was clean and the mountains were tall and we drove at normal speeds along the pleasantly winding roads, stopping whenever we felt hungry.

Near our breakfast spot, elephants crossed the road three times, led by their mahouts. A couple hours later, we each had a bowl of noodles near a lovely seven-tiered waterfall, where loads of other Bangkok tourists had come to picnic. Two or three meals after that, we found ourselves at the edge of a small town square, watching teenagers circle slowly on their motorcycles, flirting furiously while pretending to do evening errands for their families.

In lots of ways this trip was just as slow and uneventful as my earlier one. I thought about something Thailand had taught me back then. At the waterfall, a few young monks were using one of the small falls as a slide. Dressed in their orange robes, they climbed it again and again, inventing new ways to slip down it each time.

On my earlier trip, we had shared a train compartment with some older monks. All of them were smoking cigarettes, in spite of what we were sure were rules prohibiting monks from such behavior, especially on public transportation. To this day, Hose and Vinnie jokingly urge me to beware of corrupt monks on trains.

What struck me again is that most monks are in fact just regular guys. Buddhism, at least as it’s practiced in this country, doesn’t seem to worry itself too much with the sacred. Surely, rituals and rules are central, but so, it seems, are walkmen and Marlboros and the occasional afternoon spent playing in the water, with no goals other than seeing what evolves.

Chantaburi is Filling

A bunch of us took what in college we would have called a roadtrip to an eastern Thai province, where the specialty is tree fruit. As we would have said during college, we grubbed.

Morning, noon, and night, the menu called for durian, rambutan, and mangosteen. These delicacies have a relatively short season, so you have to get them while the getting is good.

A friend from work has a friend who has an orchard, so we went straight to the source and dove in. All of our senses quickly overloaded.

It rained quite hard. We watched the downpour from beneath a classic Thai-style house, built on stilts. The “ceiling” above us was just high enough to accommodate the cab of a pickup truck. We stooped. Diesel oil mixed with fresh-picked fruit to create an odd fragrance. The durian tasted like cake frosting.

After dark, we clubbed. Unintelligible lyrics pulsed in time with some cleverly wired spotlights. The projectors were mounted on spinning, twisting gyroscopes. Nobody danced—today’s Thai hipsters prefer standing at tall tables, shimmying slightly, pretending they can hear each other. Rather than talking, I found it easier to send text messages to the people across from me.

Prices in the provinces were only half what we pay in Bangkok, so it was easy to eat pretty much continuously. Sleep was the only thing we didn’t get enough of. But hey, what are roadtrips for?

Beijing is Picturesque

To my Western ear, the names of the city’s major attractions often sound hard to take seriously: the Forbidden City, the Temple of Heaven, the Gate of Heavenly Peace, the Hall of Supreme Harmony (not to be confused with the halls of Central Harmony and Preserving Harmony).

I mean, some of these classical superlatives you’d swear came straight out of National Lampoon, or some similar attempt to spoof Chinese culture. I am not making up the following labels on the various halls and sub-palaces that I passed during my wanderings around the Imperial Palace and the Summer Palace:

Literary Profundity

Beneficent Causation

Mental Cultivation

Eternal Safety

Tranquil Longevity

Reason Enhancement

Scrupulous Behavior

Proper Places and the Cultivation of Things

Earthly Tranquility

Heavenly Purity

Character Cultivation

Lasting Brilliance

Accumulated Refinement

Veranda for Rest Quiet

Eternal Peace

Endless Mists and Clouds

Chamber for Reading the Classics

Jade Islet in Spring Shade

Studio of Painted Boat

I saw no sign of plazas or monuments named after people. However, each sign did contain a modern twist. In small letters at the bottom were the words, “made possible by the American Express Company.”

Beijing is Patriotic

Saying that this could be the Chinese century has become a cliché, but the people there did strike me as no nonsense and all business as they leap forward. I was impressed by the resolute expressions on even the uniformed workers along the roads who are paid to hold signs reminding drivers to slow down. They stared at me as though the success of China, Inc. depended on them.

Throughout most of my lifetime, it’s been true to say that the country’s best years happened long ago. Even now, the tour buses seem never to unload in front of anything built since the late 1700s. Foreign visitors seeing only those spectacular (though somehow also quaint) attractions might reasonably conclude that China hasn’t had much to brag about in the meantime.

But when those same foreigners stop to look at who else is getting off tour buses, they realize that their fellow sightseers are now likely to be from inside the country, and that these domestic vacationers are not only doing lots of bragging, they have money in their pockets to back it up.

Patriotic tour packages are apparently now all the rage. Wherever I strolled as a tourist, I was surrounded by large herds of Chinese. They were shepherded along by guides jabbering away on portable microphones, and carrying tall, uniquely-colored pennants, the better to keep their charges in line.

Tiananmen Square fills every morning and evening with proud Chinese wanting to see an honor guard raise and lower the national flag. The people walking beside me at the Summer Palace had their shoulders thrown back. I couldn’t help contrasting the feeling of purpose with the last few years’ news from the United States, with its stutter-stepping over Iraq, and its red-state-blue-state divisions.

There’s only one direction and one color in Beijing. For better or worse, the entire enterprise seems to know where it’s going.

Beijing is Determined

I had heard about dust storms coating Beijing with a thin layer of yellow grime. People had told me that Chinese often spit on the sidewalk. As our plane landed, my British seatmate pointed out the window at the grey morning and said, “See, the pollution here makes you think you’re walking around in a black-and-white film.”

Yet the stories all turned out to be wrong. Or at least they weren’t true this past week. It was a fine time to visit China.

The sun warmed and brightened everything—by mid-afternoon, I was peeling off my sweater. The tourist spots, anticipating next year’s Olympic Games, all seemed to have just been washed and painted. In the air were the smell of fresh cut grass and the “snow” from shedding poplars.

No matter where I went, in fact, trees were nearby. Greening campaigns have resulted in row after row of closely spaced trees, planted in part to reduce the effects of increasingly frequent sandstorms in the city. Seeing them on my way in from the airport was another reminder that the Chinese make no little plans. When they want to do something, they really do it. Big tree farms, grand boulevards, imperial palaces: everything is on a much grander scale than I’m used to.

It’s been that way for some time. While clambering along a lonely stretch of the great wall, I kept thinking about how remarkable it was that successive administrations continued to fund such a kooky project. They no doubt had many chances to say “OK, that’s good enough,” or “we don’t really need to protect that province,” but apparently they never did.

As we drove out of town toward our hike, the friend I was visiting remarked that the highway we were on had been completed only a few weeks earlier. After we turned off toward the hills, he noticed a few places where shortcuts had been built since the last time he had gone that way. At several intersections, he pointed out men standing next to large earth moving equipment. “Those guys and their machines are for hire,” he explained, as casually as if they were parked there selling ice cream.

A few hours later, returning to the freeway, we joked to each other, “Was this road here this morning?”

Koh Si Chang is a Lotus

Platforms for natural gas exploration dot the Gulf of Thailand along the eastern seaboard. Enormous tankers anchor offshore, making for vistas that resemble Texas more than Thailand. It has become an awkward place to put an island.

But Koh Si Chang makes for a lovely daytrip or overnight, despite the busy industrial harbor it helps shelter. The hour’s ferry ride snakes through freighters flying flags from around the world. On arriving, passengers step onto a pier lined with markets (all those superships have to get their fresh vegetables and beer from somewhere). Up the hill, a Chinese temple looms. There’s not a beach in sight.

I visited on a weekday at the tail end of Chinese New Year. The temple seemed a timely place to begin a tour. Volunteers at the top of the serpent staircase offered me several opportunities to accumulate merit and good luck in the coming year. My small donations also earned me various scrolls and the reading of my name over a loudspeaker.

Having gotten my future sorted out, I settled into appreciating the present. The seaward side of the island was much emptier than the side with the ferry landing. I had the place to myself, aside from a young couple in full wedding gear who were taking pictures with a handsome boardwalk and the beautiful open ocean as a backdrop. I spent nearly an hour prowling the headland.

Such views were apparently what drew a few generations of Thai kings to the island, back in the 1800s when they would sail down the river from Bangkok, and then out into the gulf. Today, their former palace grounds make for nice strolling. They include a hillside stupa where King Rama V liked to meditate. It’s still a good place to contemplate life, for being beach-free also means that the island is jet-ski-free.

In fact, as I ferried back to real life at the end of a long travel day, my attitude was so altered that I took no notice of the floating factories on either side of the boat. Koh Si Chang is like the lotus flower that blossoms out of the mud, rising above defilement and suffering.

Lopburi is Lucky

They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. But that adage doesn’t always apply to travel.

Mostly because I didn’t really know where I was heading, I ended up spending a dandy day at Wat Khao Wong Phrachan in Lopburi province. I never would have never found (or even attempted) the place had I brought a guidebook along.

Most people go to Lopburi, about three hours north of Bangkok by train, to see the monkeys. The Khmer-style ruins in the center of town are crawling with the tame little critters. Before I left home, I glanced at a Lopburi website, which briefly listed a temple about 25 kilometers from the city, “surrounded by shady trees and beautiful views of nature,” near the province’s highest mountain.

What the site didn’t say was that “near” the mountain really means “at the top of a flight of about 3,000 steps.” Even after hopping off a local bus and riding the final few kilometers by motorcycle taxi, I still didn’t realize that visiting the temple would involve any climbing. At right is the view looking back from the halfway mark.

Luckily some entrepreneurs sell water along the way. The mountain was one of those whose summit looks closer than it really is. See for yourself: can you spot the temple up top in this picture? Happily, the 360-degree view, and the pleasant breeze, was a fine reward for the sweat required to reach the highest point.

And when I finally got back to the main road, it turned out that my motorcycle man doubled as a seller of banana fritters, making the unplanned day that much sweeter.

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.