cambodia is calling

Angkor Wat is one of the few places in the world where real life looks like the movies and where even the highest expectations exist only to be exceeded.



Our late night arrival in Siem Reap definitely lived up to our expectations in that it was hot and tropical and the absolute opposite of where we'd spent the weekend before. (Freezing our toes off at an ice festival in Northern China.)



On an Angkor Wat visit you quickly discover that there is driving that needs to be done. In fact, the temples of "The" Angkor Wat are but one grouping in an area absolutely teeming with beautiful temples. The sites closest to the tourism-fattened city of Siem Reap are a twenty-minute drive away while temples devoured by jungle can take almost two hours to reach.



Travelers can reach these temples in a number of ways. Some rent bicycles on the cheap and spend their days in a dusty haze of fatiguing adventure. Still others take a dusty, and dirt cheap, ride on the back of a motorbike. Others spend a little more cash for a tuk-tuk and battle the dust with a handkerchief held to their mouths. Still others splurge on a car and driver and regret their choice only when it comes time to hazard unpaved roads (in a Toyota Camry) because the driver's worried that without taking a short-cut they won't make it to the next temple before sundown.

You can guess which option we chose.



It's safe to say that this trip to Cambodia really struck both of us as something incredibly special. The experience of seeing the temples - in their varying states of grandeur and decay - was beyond wonderful and belongs on anyone's Life List of Places to See. These structures are of a scale that is difficult to imagine without literally standing at their foundations and struggling to see it all with one set of eyes.



The stones - and therefore the temples themselves - are covered in finely carved illustrations. They seem too beautiful and too well-preserved to be real. Different temples have different stories to tell but the imagery throughout the sites is consistently gorgeous. And awe-inspiring. Leave me alone for a year with a piece of stone and a chisel and I still wouldn't have a clue how to take a material that is strong enough to build buildings and finesse it into the delicate wrists and ears of Angkor Wat's female forms, the apsaras.



Several of the temple groupings have been unceremoniously ravaged by nature and serpentine tree roots are now as much a part of the structures as the original stones. The effect is mesmerizing because most of us have only seen this sort of thing in the movies or imagined it in fictional fantasy worlds where ancient temples have been hidden from the rest of the world by misty jungles. But these places exist. They're not just in books and movies and on Disney's Jungle Cruise. They are in real jungles, in the very real country of Cambodia, and they will blow your mind.



So will the lives of the people here. If you visit the outlying temples and spend any time driving through the countryside you will share the roads with mopeds, and cows, and shoe-less children riding bicycles that are a head and a half taller than they are. You will see the simple thatched homes - on risers about 8 feet off the ground - under which naked children chase chickens while still other kids play alone in rice paddies and puddles.



These are poor people and they live in very poor conditions - but you'll notice that they still send their kids to school. And these kids make it home along the roads, riding their oversized bikes and balancing brothers and sisters, on their way back to lives that are very different from what most westerners are fortunate enough to consider normal.



This is the poorest place we have ever been and yet it is also one of the best. Truly, one of the best. The treasures of Cambodia, the treasures of these people, are such a bounty of man-made miracles that you can only hope one day they'll bring a modicum of prosperity to those who call this country home. But I'd imagine that as tourism increases, and the numbers of visitors continues to swell, things will have to change or the temples won't last.



When you visit these places now there's a freedom that's difficult to swallow. There are very few barriers or blockades, and the temples become giant three-dimensional mazes. On our visit to Beng Mealea our driver had us climbing over and through the ruins, squeezing into corridors and exploring spaces that seemed straight out of adventurer's tales. I'd be shocked if it stayed this way - this unrestricted - and from what our driver told us, the numbers of visitors are only increasing.



During your visit - depending on the hour of day and which temple you're visiting - you can sometimes find yourself with a few minutes alone in a quiet corridor or maybe catch a perfect photo sans other tourists wandering through. But turn up for sunset or sundown at one of the traditional places to watch the occasion, and you will find yourself surrounded by an international gaggle of surprising proportions.

Not that the gaggle doesn't come in handy. Especially when someone neglects to bring a flashlight for crossing Angkor Wat's moat at the pitch-black hour of 5:00am and still doesn't have a flashlight when it's time to locate the lotus pond from which to watch the sunrise. (Note to self: bring flashlight next time.)



Then as the sunrise comes and both Angkor Wat and the gaggle are illuminated, it's a toss-up over which of the unveilings is more awe-inspiring. Angkor Wat and it's very recognizable silhouette? Or the large number of people who will quietly huddle around a lotus pond before dawn just to see that silhouette?



Cambodian cuisine is also worth a try and might best be described as the sweeter, milder cousin of Thai food. Siem Reap is teeming with good restaurants although visiting the town market might give you pause in all matters food-related. Vendors sit foot-to-gill with tubs of squirming fish while sharpening their blood-caked cleavers. There are piles of parts better left unidentified, and vendors catch catnaps between bags of separated egg yolks and small walls of bok choy.



But this is Cambodia. Cambodia with its tuk-tuks and its temples in the trees. Cambodia where it's hot and sticky and there's always dragon fruit for breakfast. Where temples have giant faces and flights of stairs so steep and so thin that you need to prostrate yourself to climb them. Where there's dust and there's beauty and there are more stones than you can count.



This is Cambodia. And this is one of my favorite places in the world.