360 Degrees Longitude

Cambodia shook us. We had seen abject poverty in Tanzania and the Chinese countryside, but it did little to prepare us for what we would experience in Cambodia. Months after we left, I couldn’t get the images out of my head.

“Lonely Planet says don’t take the bus. They state this most emphatically,” I said.

“Fly. The roads are supposed to be horrid. Unfortunately, judging by the price of a ticket, it appears that the airline is aware they have a monopoly.”

“Well,” September said, “we’ve survived bad roads before. Nothing can be as bad as the roads in the Serengeti, could it?”

We found a bus company operating at the main train station in Bangkok that could take us to Siem Reap. The ticket agent assured us it was only three hours to the Thai-Cambodian border, then another four hours to Siem Reap. “You’ll enjoy the ride in our air-conditioned Mercedes-Benz bus,” she told us.

As promised, we started our trip in style, but once we arrived at the Thai-Cambodian border we would never see that bus again. Our driver simply pointed vaguely in the direction of the border, saying, “Someone will meet you on the other side and take you the rest of the way.”

Three hours and 300 yards of sidewalk and 300 yards of red tape later, we were in Cambodia. “So now what happens?” I asked no one in particular.

So wait we did. We waited with a group of Europeans who were traveling with us, and we talked amongst ourselves. Katrina and Jordan had become savvy travelers, but the mixture of the heat and not knowing when or how we were to depart was trying for all of us. Luckily, Granny was able to keep the kids occupied looking for food and snacks while September and I tried to sort out our next move. We queried the other travelers. “Anyone know who we’re waiting for?” “Any idea how long we need to wait?” “Does anyone have any documentation, like a travel voucher?” Unfortunately, no one did.

Even though we had all paid for a full bus ticket onward to Siem Reap, many people ultimately hired private taxis for what was believed to be a four-hour drive. More than an hour later the 27 of us who remained were herded into the back of a dual-axle cattle truck.

I could easily see the road ahead from where I was perched in the back of the truck. The truck approached a bridge that went over a small river. As the bridge came into focus, I grabbed the sides of the truck in a panic, braced myself for a collision, and let out an expletive.

“Did you see that? There were planks missing on that bridge wide enough to swallow a tire! The driver didn’t even slow down!”

We were following a river and switching banks every so often. Everyone gradually relaxed as we became desensitized to the state of the bridges. Then the driver zipped over a bridge composed of no more than two wooden planks, each just wide enough to accommodate a tire; I wouldn’t have walked across it for fear of falling off. All the passengers collectively held their breath for a moment, but the driver zipped over as if nothing were amiss. Halfway across the bridge I found that I had unconsciously lifted my feet off the floor as if the action would somehow make me lighter.

After several hours of bone-jarring roads, September finally admitted, “Okay these roads are worse than the ones in the Serengeti.”

“I beg to differ,” I replied. “True, this is more miserable, but the difference in the Serengeti is that we traveled in a rugged Toyota Land Cruiser that was up to the task. I swear this truck has no shocks and its tires are square.”

Katrina and Jordan took this journey stoically, having had several months’ experience with uncomfortable travel. Granny, on the other hand, was having the time of her life. My mother-in-law has traveled extensively around the world, often alone on a bicycle, her favorite destination being rural Yemen. The dust, heat, and noise, and nonstop near-death bridge crossings seemed to provide exhilaration such that she commented several times, “I’m so glad we didn’t fly!” Fourteen hours after leaving Bangkok, in the wee hours of the morning, heads buzzing, we were in Siem Reap, Cambodia.

Siem Reap, literally translated, means Siam Defeated, in honor of the Khmer defeating the Thai in a bygone era. It is a now a town of seventy thousand people with an international airport and an endless row of glitzy hotels with rooms that can be as high as $500 per night. For $13 we landed in a clean, comfortable guest house with much-needed AC.

I paid close attention when school was in session that first morning. September explained, “In Khmer, a wat is a temple. The entire area surrounding this town is known as Angkor Wat and it was built during the height of the ancient Khmer civilization, which lasted from the 9th through the 15th centuries. Angkor Wat is often cited as the largest religious complex in the world. Being so deep in the jungle of Cambodia, it was unknown to the outside world until the 1860s when Europeans colonized the area.”

After the early morning history lesson we found ourselves walking down the main street that is lined with restaurants and gift shops, all catering to Western tourists. One place caught our eye because it advertised fruit smoothies made with “commercial” ice, meaning the ice was clean. As it was humid and stifling hot, an ice-cold drink sounded wonderful. We walked into the open-air restaurant and all ordered a smoothie, along with breakfast.

I’m always the first to finish eating, having grown up in a large family. Enjoying that contented, full-stomach sensation, I leaned back in my chair and watched a truck pull up in front of the restaurant. The driver hopped out and brought in a massive block of commercially made ice. He shooed away the feral dogs that were resting in the shade on the floor of the restaurant and placed the ice on the floor in the same shade that had been occupied by the dogs. As he began to hack away at the ice with an axe, large chunks of ice broke off and went skidding across the concrete floor.

His assistant chased after the ice chips and dutifully placed them in a chest.

Something I had read in Lonely Planet Cambodia suddenly took on a fresh perspective: “If you see anything being done incompetently, remember that all the educated people in the country either fled or were exterminated in the late 1970s.”

I had grown up hearing about the Cambodian genocide. But watching two people break ice on a concrete floor for fruit smoothies where dogs had been lying while the words anything being done incompetently echoed in my head gave the events of 30 years ago a gut-wrenching clarity.

We took a “tuk-tuk” to the ruins of Angkor Wat. In Cambodia and Thailand a taxi is known as a tuk-tuk, which is a trailer pulled by a small motorcycle—a Chinese counterfeit of a Honda Trail 90. I had a Honda Trail 90 as a kid, and put a few thousand miles on it zooming all over the desert and mountains of Southern California before I even got my first zit. Now, as the five of us piled into a trailer behind one tiny motorcycle, I hoped that the brake system had been upgraded since the original 1960’s-era original. And off we puttered.

Arriving at the largest temple of Angkor Wat, we hired a young man in his early twenties to be our guide for the day. When we crossed a bridge over a moat that surrounds the largest temple, our guide had an important factoid for us.

“This is the view from the scene in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider as they enter the hidden chamber.”

Our guide was only too happy to fill in the gaps in our knowledge about such an important cinematic touchstone. Clearly smitten with the movie’s heroine, Angelina Jolie, he pelted us with every little detail about her and what she did while filming in the area. Such was his fervor that we watched Lara Croft months later when given the opportunity. I can honestly say I’ve seen detergents that leave a better film.

Angkor Wat cannot be absorbed in a few days. It had not been too many months since we had been touring cathedrals and castles in Europe. We had visited many examples of exceptional craftsmanship, from the Vatican to the Charles Bridge in Prague. None of these can compare to the scale and detail of Angkor Wat. Individual temples are spread over several square miles and enormous pagodas top every shrine. While the vastness of the complex is impressive, it is the detail that is most remarkable and the intruding jungle that gives it its character.

Clearly, the entire complex of Angkor Wat was a labor of love for an ancient civilization; every square millimeter of stone is an intricate storyboard toiled over by generations of craftsmen. As the Tomb Raider trivia dried up, we were left with an endless stream of data about what all the bas-reliefs and dancing devas etched in stone meant. As the place is immense, there was far more story than we could absorb. Think France’s Bayeux Tapestry on an exponential scale.

To make matters worse, my mother-in-law, curse her wretched Mensa cranium, has an infinite capacity for just this kind of mind-numbing detail. By the time I had heard the umpteenth story of how this elephant-headed goddess had a tug of war with a seven-headed serpent and landed in a bath of milk and sealed her power for eternity, I knew it was our turn to make up a story.

The walls of the temples are covered in carvings that tell a story. It has been my life ambition to create my own enduring urban legend and be immortalized on www.urbanlegends.com. Whoever came up with the one about the blind date that went bad where the guy wakes up in a tub of ice with one of his kidneys missing is a genius. Now that we were in Angkor Wat, I realized my opportunity was before me.

While Granny was entertaining our tour guide, the rest of us came up with a plan to carve our own legend into stone. We would place it out of sight in some obscure temple to be miraculously “discovered.” But what story to tell?

After much discussion, we settled on a storyboard carving that has a flying saucer with the Microsoft Windows logo on one side and the number 666 on the other. Then we’d show legions of people bowing down to the flying saucer and worshipping it. We would have to somehow pass our stone storyboard through a goat so that it would have that “aged look.”

Too bad our stone-carving skills weren’t up to snuff; our carving’s discovery would have made a great news story. It may yet. I may not know about stone carving, but I can use Photoshop.

The tour guide was detailing one of the storyboards while Katrina and Jordan took refuge in the shade. Seemingly out of nowhere a monkey approached Katrina and started grooming itself. Katrina sat still and smiled at the monkey. The monkey responded by showing her its many teeth. I didn’t know if the monkey was threatening her or simply returning the smile. Then I realized that monkeys probably don’t have the social pattern of smiling.

Oops, I thought. One wrong move on Katrina’s part and that monkey is going to use those teeth and take a divot out of her arm.

What happened next was either sheer brilliance on Katrina’s part or dumb luck, but Katrina responded by simply raising her eyebrows. The monkey responded by raising its eyebrows. Slowly, the monkey came right up to her and started to brush its hand on her thigh; it was grooming Katrina for lice.

The monkey must have thought that Katrina had a terrible case of the mange and had lost all of her fur. It started to inspect the (very fine) hair on her thigh, and proceeded to pinch the little hairs and pluck them out, one at a time, and then eat them.

Katrina tried very hard not to scream out in pain. Always having my children’s best interests in mind, I told her to stay still so I could take pictures. After a minute or two, just as suddenly as the monkey started to “groom” Katrina, it turned its back to her and pointed to its back as if to say, “Okay, I did you. Your turn to do me.”

So, Katrina dutifully started to brush through the monkey’s fur. Every time she tried to stop and get up and walk away, the monkey would look up at her disdainfully and point to another area it wanted groomed. I don’t think Katrina found any lice. And I really doubt she would have eaten any if she had. Katrina quickly decided it was time to start shaving her legs to avoid being mistaken for needing a good lice grooming in the future.

Exiting one of the temples, the sound of playful music beckoned us. As we approached the source, we found several landmine survivors playing music with a donation box prominently displayed. The lesson of seeing a group of amputees was not lost on Jordan, who from this point forward soberly reminded us all to stay on the path every time one of our toes happened to so much as touch a blade of grass.

No sooner were we reminded of the dangers of the landmines than Katrina found an enormous snakeskin that had been recently shed. It was intact in every detail, so that the holes for its eyes and mouth could be clearly seen. Suddenly we all became a little more careful where we placed our hands as we climbed the steep stone steps, or when we stepped into a darkened chamber.

Our tuk-tuk driver became an honorary member of the family, taking us everywhere we went. On the back of his tuk-tuk was posted an advertisement for a restaurant. Prominently displayed on the ad was the internationally recognized symbol for online addicts who need to get a quick fix: Wi-Fi.

Our driver asked where we wanted to go, and I pointed to the advertisement on the back of his tuk-tuk.

“No, you don’t want to go there,” he said. “I can take you to a nice place. You will like it.”

He didn’t understand. I needed an e-mail fix. “I want to use their wireless network,” I said, pointing to the Wi-Fi logo to make my point. He had good English skills, but I’ve met native English speakers who don’t know what a wireless network is.

Wee Fee sounded close enough to me, so I nodded enthusiastically. We all piled into the tuk-tuk and were on our way to get Wee Fee. The others might be going to get food, but I had one goal.

At the restaurant we were shown in by the maître d’. I was logging into their network before we crossed the threshold of the door.

“No, no, no,” I said, as the maître d’ showed us a seat in the waiting area. “Their network. It’s wide open and fast.” I settled into a plush armchair and was downloading e-mail and looking at the news—the world was mine and I could go anywhere I pleased.

I glanced around quickly, not wanting to take my eyes off my two-inch-by-three-inch screen. “Looks nice to me. Kind of fancy for Cambodia, though.” The purpose of the soft light with the reddish glow hadn’t sunk in yet.

“Interesting artwork on the walls,” Granny commented. “What kind of place have you taken me to, John?”

I glanced up for a moment at a painting. “Hmmm. It’s a neo-expressionist nude. Big deal.”

“I see you learned something about art while at the Louvre,” Granny continued, “but what will your children think?”

I knew she was goading me. Didn’t she know I was mainlining a steady stream of 1’s and 0’s? Without looking up I said, “Not much. You can’t swing a dead cat in Europe without hitting a painting of a bare breast. In the Vatican Museum, statues of naked men missing their penises are all the rage.”

The maître d’ brought us a menu. Annoyed that I had to stop what I was doing, I quickly looked through the menu and picked something out. I proceeded to go back to reading about important world events, such the scandal in Orlando where a bunch of high school boys on a Disney World field trip were put in the same hotel with a swingers club. Just then Katrina and Jordan started snickering and pointing their fingers at the artwork.

“Pointing isn’t polite—what’s so funny, anyway?” I then looked at what they were pointing at. The nude was Rock Hudson: his feather boa strategically covered his anatomy. Across the room from Rock Hudson was Chairman Mao with earrings and red lipstick. Another wall sported a painting of a very overweight guy wearing a tutu, a smile, and little else. His hairy chest would have made Bigfoot jealous.

I glanced at September. “Nice restaurant,” she said, giving me a wicked smile.

It isn’t as though I wanted to raise Katrina and Jordan in a hermetically sealed mayonnaise jar, but the restaurant’s décor was a little over the top. In less time than it takes to explain it, I realized that my own eccentricities entitled me to a lifetime of teasing for my restaurant selection. But while my eccentricities may have been learned, September’s are genetic. A couple of weeks traveling with my mother-in-law made me realize that. Regardless, the deck was stacked against Katrina and Jordan, as they were losing out on both sides of the nature-nurture thing.

For a moment I considered leaving, but hey, we had already ordered, and the restaurant had a big serving of Wee Fee. “Yeah,” I said, “I like it, too.”

I was careful to sit next to September throughout dinner and to put my arm around her. As the walls were plastered with paintings of men in high heels and corsets, there was no sense in giving anyone the wrong idea. Through dinner I contemplated the bigger picture of Cambodia’s recent history and what it meant to be able to display a painting of Chairman Mao in drag in a public place. I think Cambodia will not only survive, it will thrive.

We had considered taking a boat down the Mekong River to Phnom Penh until we learned that one full of Western tourists recently capsized, Vasa-style. It seems that tickets for seats on the boats are for Western tourists, and the locals are put up on the roof. My best guess is that the captain keeps taking passengers and loads them onto the roof until water is near to lapping over the sides of the boat.

As we had already covered inverted pendulums and Archimedes’ Principle after the Vasa museum, I resisted the urge to have another science moment on the subject and we simply decided to take the bus to Phnom Penh. We met a nice Australian family that was spending a few months traveling around Southeast Asia. They had come to Siem Reap the day before we had via the same route from Bangkok.

“So,” I asked, “how about those bridges? They must not have been too bad or you wouldn’t be here now.”

The father spoke up. “When we came through, one bridge was totally out and had apparently collapsed only minutes before we arrived. We were stuck for hours until it could be repaired, and then all the crew did was lay wood planks across the river. The planks were no wider than the width of a tire.”

“Ah, yes. I think our driver hit that bridge at 40 miles per hour. I nearly wet myself. And yet, here we are doing it again.”

“Well, a fair measure of crazy is doing the same thing twice and expecting a different outcome,” my new friend snorted, “but I suppose you need to be a bit crazy to be on a walkabout for an entire year with your kids.”

Once in Phnom Penh, all the horrid traffic we had previously witnessed worldwide suddenly seemed sedate and orderly in comparison. In China we observed that the fanciest cars seemed to have the right-of-way at intersections. In Phnom Penh this was no longer subtle, putting the average person at a huge disadvantage, because the average person was on a moped. Rather, the average family was on a moped. At the same time. I never knew that a 50cc moped could carry a family of four and their shopping all at once, but I have the pictures to prove that not only can it be done, it’s common.

I don’t think anyone could ever really be prepared for Phnom Penh. From the insane traffic to the child beggars sans clothes and sans the occasional limb, it is not for the faint of heart. It is also a city full of beautiful people.

On one particular Sunday we meet Prak. He had very good English skills and became our guide around Phnom Penh. We learned a lot about Cambodia and its people from Prak. “My wife is very lucky,” he said. “She has a good job making clothes in a factory owned by the Chinese.”

So the Chinese were outsourcing their manufacturing to Cambodia, and the jobs were considered high-paying work. That put a lot of things into perspective.

In Siem Reap I had purchased a biography, Stay Alive My Son, from a seven-year-old amputee who was going from restaurant to restaurant selling books. Over the next several days I read Pin Yathay’s captivating-in-a-horrific-sort-of-way experience of the brutal Khmer Rouge genocide in the latter half of the 1970s. Now I had the opportunity to ask Prak about this period. He matter-of-factly itemized the number of family members he had lost in those years.

“No one was safe from the horrors of that time,” Prak explained. “Everyone over 30 years old has many family members who died.” The juxtaposition of being in a nonthreatening environment, say a bustling marketplace, and gazing into someone’s eyes and having them calmly discuss their harrowing experiences with openness and frankness was very unsettling.

I can recall Walter Cronkite reporting the Vietnam War’s daily body count on the evening news. After the war ended, strife in the region continued for a number of years. Half a world away, I fretted about getting my driver’s license as Phnom Penh fell to a Communist-inspired faction called the Khmer Rouge. In later years, stories about Pol Pot and atrocities at a place called the Killing Fields gradually began to be told on the world stage. But I understood little about how the fabric of an entire culture was torn apart until I visited Phnom Penh, spoke with Prak, and read Pin Yathay’s story of how he lost first his parents, then his siblings, then his children, and finally his wife.

In the years Pol Pot was in power, the Khmer Rouge tried to establish a purely agrarian form of communism where the entire population worked on collective farms. To accomplish this they tried to eradicate all traces of modern life. In a matter of days after the fall of Phnom Penh, all cities nationwide were permanently evacuated at gunpoint and the people herded into the countryside. With no planning or infrastructure in place for such a dramatic change, the resulting chaos and famine were inevitable.

To control the population, the Khmer Rouge marked anyone with an education as an enemy, as educated citizens were the most capable of overthrowing the new government. The Khmer Rouge cannibalized its own citizens by systematically exterminating doctors, engineers, teachers, skilled technicians, and the like. Some escaped into neighboring countries, but most were ruthlessly killed, often by starvation, as it was the most economical method. In the most extreme examples, simply carrying a pencil was proof enough that one possessed an education, and hence the carrier was sentenced to “re-education,” which could mean being quietly taken out into the jungle and bludgeoned to death, another economical method of execution.

The net result was that during their reign, the Khmer Rouge took a functioning and prosperous society and thrust it back to the Stone Age, destroying an entire culture in the process. By some estimates, during the Khmer Rouge years of 1975 through 1979, approximately one-third of the population of Cambodia was exterminated or died of starvation or disease.

For me, the experience of visiting the sites of the Khmer Rouge killing machine around Phnom Penh was a world apart from other places we visited where misery and death had been inflicted on a mass scale, such as Poland’s Auschwitz or Japan’s Hiroshima. I think that in part this is because time has erased the visible wounds in Europe and Japan. Time has not yet been able to work its magic in Cambodia.

For example, we visited Phnom Penh’s Genocide Museum, which is housed at the site of the former High School 21; this school was converted into a prison and torture facility during the Khmer Rouge years and was referred to as simply “S21.” As we approached the gate of the S21 compound where the Khmer Rouge coerced “confessions” from its enemies, we were greeted by a beggar. This was not an ordinary beggar, but a survivor of the compound we were visiting. He had been tortured by having acid thrown in his face, and his crooked arms and legs looked as if they had been broken but had never properly healed. His horribly disfigured face was little more than dislocated clumps of flesh and his eyes were vacant windows of milky white scar tissue; you simply could not look into his face and not gasp out loud.

At the S21 Genocide Museum we spent time in classrooms that had been converted to places of torture. Graphic photographs that hung on the walls were yellow and fading, but enough detail remained to communicate the intent. A sign on the wall, a relic from the prison, read ENDURE YOUR PUNISHMENT WELL.

“I can’t help but compare this to the Peace Memorial Museum at Hiroshima,” I said, looking at the faded yellow photos and documents.

“The museum in Hiroshima is an impressive building with multimedia displays to tell a story that needs to be told. The Japanese have invested a lot of money to ensure the story is preserved and told well. Here, with no glass in the windows, there is nothing to protect the photographs on display from the humid tropical environment. Without investment of some kind, in another decade there may not be anything to preserve.”

“Preserving history,” September summarized, “is a luxury of the well fed.”

It was the same situation at the Killing Fields. To see the Killing Fields, you must hire a tuk-tuk and drive for a half-hour down a rutted, muddy dirt road through a neighborhood of squatters’ hovels, and when you arrive you pay a couple of dollars to a man sitting in a small wooden shack built with all the structural integrity of a child’s lemonade stand. In the center of the site is a pagoda housing a few skeletal remains, but mostly the Killing Fields is simply an open space. Supposedly the human remains in the mass graves have been exhumed and the site is simply the location where bodies once lay. However, human bones and bits of clothing were protruding from hard-packed dirt trails through the fields that were the graves of thousands of victims. The many feet that have walked through have worn off the topmost layer of soil, exposing the remnants of those who perished.

Seeing the realities of Cambodia was a hard lesson for two young kids from suburban America. But finding this kind of experience is the reason we had left the comforts of California. As I reflected on our time in Cambodia, I was ashamed that September had had to coerce me away from the beaches of Thailand.

… after that, our tuk-tuk driver took us down a very dusty and bouncy road to the Killing Fields. First, we went inside a small room with a very high ceiling, where there were skulls lined upon shelves that went up, up, up. I was sad to see that so many people were killed. Once outside, we walked on a path that went by lots of empty graves. Dad soon realized that on the path there were human bones showing in the packed-down earth. They were all over. Not just one here, one there, but the bones were as common as rocks.

I overheard Jordan saying to Katrina a few days after we left Cambodia, “You know that man we saw at the museum who had acid thrown in his face? Some things you remember even though you wish you didn’t have to.”

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Cambodia suffers about two land mine accidents every day. De-mining efforts are underway, but at the current rate, it will take over a hundred years to rid the country of this scourge.

17.

The Ugly Side of Humanity