Chapter 22

Land Mines and Temples

Phnom Penh, Cambodia

June 16

The most disturbing aspect of the whole Surfer’s Paradise incident was the fact that I endangered Kara’s life in the first place. But beyond that, what bothered me most was how insidious it was. One moment Kara was happily bobbing in the surf. The next moment, she was heading out to sea. I didn’t expect dramatic music or a guy in black robes with a sickle, but the line between a happy day at the beach and life-wrenching tragedy was so fine that Kara never even knew she was in danger.

Anyway, after that, I had infinitely more respect for ocean currents and riptides, and whenever we went to the beach, I watched the kids like a hawk. Of course, the moment I mastered that particular facet of child safety, Willie decided to leap recklessly down a flight of stairs and break his ankle. That gave me an opportunity to survey various aspects of the Australian medical system (radiology, orthopedics, and physical therapy), and once again, I was amazed how much cheaper and more efficient health care is overseas than it is in America.

By the time Willie was off his crutches, we were obliged to consider our next move. It was hard to believe, but we’d been in Australia for nearly six months. Our visas were about to expire and the school term was winding down, so we had to decide whether to renew our visas and settle in Sydney for the rest of the year, prolong our world tour, or just go home—wherever that was.

The answer came to me one day while I was watching the news. There was a report from the small, enigmatic nation of Laos—a country that had been closed to foreigners from 1975 until the early 1990s. Due to its seclusion, Laos still retained many of the fabled charms of old Indochina, and I wanted to see it before its inevitable modernization.

“What would you think about stopping in Laos for a few weeks on the way home?” I asked Devi.

“Sure,” she replied with a shrug. “But why Laos?”

“I saw something on television, and it looked like a wonderful old-fashioned place.”

“Okay,” Devi said. Then she instantly added, “But, if we’re going to Laos, we should go to Cambodia, too.”

Uh-oh. This was the type of reckless badinage that kicked off the whole around-the-world adventure in the first place. Furthermore, Devi’s lightening-quick reply suggested that she’d been plotting a Cambodia expedition for some time.

“Why do you want to go to Cambodia?” I asked.

“To see Angkor Wat,” she said, referring to the famed twelfth-century Khmer ruins. “It’s supposed to be one of the wonders of the world.”

“Isn’t there some sort of factional warfare going on in Cambodia?” I asked. “Something to do with the Khmer Rouge?”

“No, it’s pretty stable now, and the tourist areas are supposed to be safe.”

“Are you sure, Devi?”

“Yea. There are only a handful of Khmer Rouge guerrillas left, and they’re hiding out in the jungle somewhere. It’s really not a problem.”

“I also read something about land mines.”

“That’s true,” Devi replied. “There are land mines everywhere in Cambodia, but I’ve looked into it, and as long as we keep to well traveled roads and paths, there’s nothing to worry about.”

“And there’s no fighting going on there?”

“Not where we’re going. I checked.”

Three weeks later, we found ourselves standing on the blazing hot tarmac of Pochentong International Airport in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Devi’s father—who zips around the world the same way other people run to the corner store—decided to join us for the Cambodian adventure. We were happy to see him, and since Betty had returned to America shortly after we arrived in Sydney, we were also glad to have some help with the kids.

As we walked through the airport, I couldn’t help noticing that there were very few tourists. In fact, there were so few visitors in Phnom Penh that we paid almost nothing to stay in a brand-new Intercontinental Hotel, and we had the place practically to ourselves.

Phnom Penh itself was a real eye-opener. The streets and markets were bustling despite the one-hundred-degree heat, but vestiges of Cambodia’s troubled past were everywhere. After all, it’s been fewer than twenty years since the Khmer Rouge marched into town, annihilated any citizen with any education, and exiled everyone else in the capital to the countryside. That massive dislocation and the resulting famine caused at least one million deaths—roughly the entire present population of the city. Needless to say, Phnom Penh hasn’t fully recovered from the holocaust.

Devi and I discussed whether we should take Kara and Willie to see the infamous “killing fields” of Choeung Ek or the Tuol Sleng School where tens of thousands of ordinary Cambodians were tortured and killed. Initially, I was for it. I thought it might be a good object lesson about “man’s inhumanity to man.” But Devi convinced me, rightly I think, that at eight and nine years of age, the children were too young to understand what happened here and that showing them a pile of eight thousand skulls wouldn’t serve any purpose beyond horrifying them.

Besides, we didn’t really have to seek out the horrors of war. They were all around us. When we took a taxi to Phnom Penh’s huge Central Market, all of its entrances were staked out by ragtag bands of twenty or thirty maimed war veterans. Most of them still wore army shirts, and every one of them was missing at least part of one limb. As we tried to push the children inside, they swarmed around us, begging, smiling with crooked betel-blackened teeth, and holding their stumps up for inspection. It was a ghastly, Night of the Living Dead experience.

It wasn’t only war veterans who were maimed either. It seemed as if one out of every twenty or so men, women, and children in Phnom Penh had at least one of their hands or feet blown off by land mines. There were amputees in every shop and on every street corner. Devi wanted to do something aside from handing out a few hundred riel here and there, so we decided to buy all our homecoming gifts at a handicraft center that rehabilitated mine victims.

When we walked inside the little shop, there was only one salesgirl sitting behind the counter. She was a strikingly beautiful girl of fifteen or sixteen with refined features and lustrous black hair that hung halfway down her back. When Devi asked her how much a particular purse cost, she grabbed a crutch and hobbled out from behind the counter. She wore a long embroidered Cambodian skirt in gorgeous shade of purple, and beneath the hem, she had only one foot. I don’t know why, after all the dismembered people I’d seen that day, this particular girl struck me so poignantly. It was probably her tender age and delicate beauty and the fact that my own daughter was standing nearby. Maybe it was just the cumulative effect of seeing so many desperately poor, brutally maimed children all in one day. Whatever it was, I had to step outside to regain my composure.

We stayed in Phnom Penh long enough to see the city’s main attractions, then we flew to Siem Reap, gateway to the vast Angkor ruins. Siem Reap is only a hundred miles from Phnom Penh, but land mines, marauding highwaymen, and roving bands of guerrillas made it far too perilous to travel by road.

Our guide to Angkor, recommended by the hotel, was a polite young fellow named Kim Huch³⁴. Huch knew the vast ruined city of Angkor like the back of his hand—most importantly, where the minefields were. Our first morning in Angkor, we were all walking toward the colossal Bayon Temple, when Huch approached me with a look of great discretion. He pointed toward Lucas, who was sitting in his travel stroller and said, “What’s wrong with the little boy.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“What’s wrong with his legs?”

It took me a second to figure it out, but then I realized that Huch had never seen a stroller before, and in a desperately poor country where thousands of children are crippled by land mines every year, he naturally assumed it must be some sort of wheelchair. When I told him that Lucas could walk perfectly well and that most able-bodied American three-year-olds were pushed around in strollers, he shook his head in amazement.

Bayon Temple was an immense agglomeration of fifty grey stone towers set in a wide forest clearing. Its walls were adorned with nearly two hundred, huge, moon-faced heads of the Hindu god Avalokitesvara. Built near the end of the twelfth century, when the Khmer Empire was at the zenith of its power, Bayon’s narrow staircases, tumbledown passages, and countless secret rooms, make it a wonderful place for children to explore.

In one small chamber near the heart of the temple, the kids stumbled upon a tiny, wizened old woman with a shaved head and black betel-stained teeth. This old soul, who was only slightly taller than nine-year-old Kara, squatted in the shadows all day, tending a modest Buddha shrine and peddling incense sticks to any visitor who happened by.

Needless to say, all three kids immediately wanted to fire up some incense, so I obliged them with a small donation. The tiny guardian of the shrine helped each child light a stick and make something approximating a proper oblation before the Buddha image. Her gnarled, veiny old hands formed Lucas’s chubby fingers into the traditional Buddhist prayer position. Then Lucas bowed and placed the incense stick at the base of the statue. When he toddled out of the shrine room, I asked him, “What were you doing in there?”

“I gave a stick to the Doo-dah,” he said with a beatific smile.

“Why did you do that?” I asked.

“Because it makes him happy.”

After Bayon, we visited Ta Prohm, the “jungle temple.” To get there, we had to walk half a mile or so through the dense tropical foliage. Here, we were walking in the footsteps of the nineteenth-century French explorer, Henri Mouhot, the first Westerner ever to set eyes on the fabulous Angkor ruins. I imagined the thrill Mouhot must have felt when he reached the end of this very path, pushed aside the extravagant jungle foliage and saw before him a magnificent ruined temple with low square stupas, long graceful colonnades, and countless friezes depicting a pantheon of Hindu gods, demigods, and demons. Then as now, the temple structures were intertwined, heaved up and rent asunder by roots and vines as thick as a man. Fifty-foot strangler figs grew up from the rooftops, their stout roots clutching the delicately carved temple walls like giant squids. Tropical weeds and epiphytes grew from every crack in the stonework making Ta Prohm a particularly beautiful symbiosis of art and nature.

For some reason—probably to prevent looting—we were escorted about the premises by a silent Cambodian soldier. He roused himself lazily from a hammock when we first arrived and followed us around halfheartedly until he was satisfied that we were harmless. Other than him, though, we were all alone in the jungle temple, and this added to our sense of adventure. We spent several happy hours exploring the ruins while Devi’s father deciphered the ancient Hindu legends set forth in the intricately carved tableaux.

In the late afternoon, we moved on to Angkor Wat itself. Constructed eight hundred years ago as a vast funerary temple, Angkor Wat is surely one of mankind’s most formidable architectural accomplishments—on a par with Egypt’s pyramids and the Taj Mahal.³⁵ Its sheer scale is dumbfounding. We approached the outer ramparts on a wide stone causeway spanning a two-hundred-foot moat. This is undoubtedly one of the world’s most dramatic entrances, but it was only a prelude to the colossal courtyard inside. This enclosure, the size of several football fields, was spanned by an elevated stone promenade that lead to the huge central temple. I don’t know exactly how long the promenade was, but it took the kids more than five minutes to run full bore from one end to the other.

The central temple’s most dramatic feature is a long colonnade encompassing its entire perimeter. The interior wall of this colonnade is covered all around with a bas-relief depicting battle scenes, processions, gods, demons, and nagas³⁶ from the Ramayana and other Hindu epics. The frieze, which covers all four walls of the central temple, is several hundred meters long, and I can only imagine how many artisans spent the better part of their lives carving it.

Angkor Wat had no barriers or signs and only a few disinterested guards, so we could pretty much wander around at will. We rambled down long porticos once reserved for the royal priests of Shiva, and clambered up a perilously steep and crumbling staircase to the top of a decrepit pagoda. From there we could gaze out over Angkor Wat’s courtyards across a perfectly flat landscape of green fields and palm trees studded with ruined towers, man-made holy mountains, and tumble-down temples. Far below, children played hide-and-seek and peddled antique bicycles through the ruins. Peasant women did their laundry in the old imperial moat, and cattle grazed and lowed amongst some of the world’s greatest architectural treasures.

It was hard to imagine now, but eight hundred years ago the very pagoda where we stood marked the spiritual and political epicenter of a rich and powerful empire that stretched more than a thousand miles from the South China Sea to the Bay of Bengal. Now it presided over some scattered ruins interspersed with rocky cow pastures and a few impoverished villages. I couldn’t help thinking of Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias,” and I said aloud, “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works ye Mighty and despair!”

Kara looked at me like I was nuts, and said, “What are you talking about, Daddy?”

“Oh, it’s just an old poem about a king who thought he was the most powerful man in the world. In the end, though, the only thing left from his reign was his broken statue with an inscription saying how great he was. Everything else was covered in sand. It’s sort of like the Khmer king, Suryavarman II, who built Angkor Wat. He thought he was a god and that people would come to pay homage to him until the end of time.”

“We came here all the way from California to see his temple,” observed Kara, “and he probably never even heard of California.”

“I suppose you’re right,” I said. “Maybe in the end, things worked out better for Suryavarman than they did for Ozymandias.”

Kara took my hand and nodded sagely. “You need a different poem,” she said, keeping me honest as usual.

³⁴ As in many Asian countries, Cambodian family names come first, given names second.

³⁵ Also funerary structures

³⁶ Mythical snakes