Phnom Kulen has deep historical import to Cambodians, as the birthplace of the Khmer Empire. It’s the site where King Jayavarman II proclaimed independence from Java in 802 AD. It also has a Buddha carved out of the mountaintop, a river with a thousand penises, and a waterfall. No way we were missing all that.

Getting There

The drive out was beautiful, but also our furthest outing from Siem Reap, at about 90 minutes of driving. You have to go in the morning, as the road to the mountaintop is one way: up until 11:00, and then down afterwards. We stopped on the way to take advantage of the gorgeous view of the jungle stretching on seemingly forever.

Land Of A Thousand Lingams

Shiva is considered by many Hindu as God #1, and along with Brahma and Vishnu makes up the Trimurti, the Hindu Super Friends. Iconically, Shiva is portrayed as a lingam, the age-old phallic symbol, representing his boundless power and cosmic energy. *sigh* I remember when that’s what my lingam represented. At least I still remember.

Kbal Spean, or The River of a Thousand Lingams, is part of the Phnom Kulen National Park and is the first stop on our way to the mountain top. It dates back to the 11th Century, with some of the individual carvings dating to the 9th century. Clearly, there was some Shiva love going on here organically before it became a taxpayer-supported art installation.

The river starts from a spring, and the spring is considered holy even before the water flows over the lingams and sanctifies everything downstream. There were quite a few pilgrims, many of them Indian tourists, anointing themselves with spring water and leaving offerings.

Kbal Spean, irrespective of all that lingam, or maybe because of it, is a lovely, peaceful setting.

The lingams here are reduced to icons, circles within squares. Some are embedded within larger squares with an opening, symbolizing the yoni, together representing the totality of all existence. Sounds about right.

Angkor-era temples utilized the combination of lingam and yoni as their primary design conceit, with the central square representing the lingam and the primary entrance representing the yoni.

Approaching The Mountain

We can drive to the mountaintop where there are steps up to the temple and the big carved Buddha. The approach is lined with stalls, as it seems all entrances to tourist attractions are anywhere on the planet.

But the stairway up is spectacular, ornate, and beautifully maintained. It’s $20/person for non-Cambodians to enter, and you can see where the money goes.

The Plateau

Up the stairs and past the stalls is a plateau before you take the steps to the big stone Buddha.

The Buddha

Up the last set of steps to the Preah Ang Thom pagoda. The pagoda sits atop a massive sandstone boulder and houses a 25′ long carved directly out of the stone. Dorothy passed on the final climb. At least I brought her pictures back.

The Waterfall

The steps to the falls are, shockingly, lined with vendor’s stalls. Did not see that coming. Just past them is a small upper waterfall that feeds the big falls below them. This spot is popular with families with small children, as it’s super accessible and the water doesn’t really pool. Maybe four to five inches deep at most, as the water heads straight over the edge to become the big waterfall.

After a long, steep set of metal steps you reach the valley floor, where the action is. This is as much a plunge for locals as it is a tourist attraction, and both groups mix happily together. There are changing booths and lockboxes available for $1 USD each.

The water was pleasantly cool on a hot day, as opposed to heart stoppingly cold, and I got in to mid-thigh. Dorothy was pretty tired from the day’s hiking and climbing, and made the right call to sit the falls out. She waited near the parking area with Khun, and I went down with nothing in my pockets. I didn’t know I could have parked my things safely and gotten all the way in.

I may have missed my chance to stand under the fall, but the setting was gorgeous, and that’s the tallest waterfall I’ve ever been that close to at ground level. The tallest of the two falls is about 60 feet. Which isn’t even close to truly tall waterfalls, but was plenty majestic up close.

And that wraps up Cambodia. Next stop, Hanoi, which, I have on the best authority, Rocks.

Bayon

Possibly even more than Angkor Wat, the massive Buddha heads of Bayon are the single most iconic image of Cambodia. Even if you don’t know they’re in Cambodia, you recognize them.

Interestingly, the Angkor-era temples are the only part of Cambodia that the Khmer Rouge didn’t systematically destroy. Rather than seeing them as evidence of moral decay, as they did the arts, or a threat, as they saw the sciences, the temples represented the strength and power of the Cambodian people, the state to which the Khmer Rouge wanted to restore the nation.

So they let them stand, as exemplars of what the Khmer had once achieved and what they should aspire to in the future. Which is just plain weird on its face, as the regime wanted to return Cambodians to an imagined, “pure” agrarian past, but had murdered anyone capable of building monuments to the glory of the proletariat.

But I don’t suppose they took power on the back of the unassailable logic of their arguments. Thanks to that twisted logic, we still have Angkor Wat and Bayon, among many, many others, to appreciate today.

While Bayon has no moat of its own, like Angkor Wat, it sits in the exact center of Angkor Thom (Great City in Khmer), the final capital city of the Angkor empire. And Angkor Thom has a moat. A really big moat, three kilometers on each side. Angkor Wat’s moat encloses a site of about two square kilometers. Angkor Thom: nine square kilometers.

Angkor Thom and its temples, like Angkor Wat, all date from the 12th century, the Golden age of the Khmer Empire.

Also, while Angkor Wat had “Beware of Monkey Attack” signs, we never actually saw any monkeys there. Not so Angkor Thom. The temples had monkeys, the roadside jungle had monkeys. There was no shortage of monkeys on this visit. Besides us.

The Gates

Both Angkor Thom and Bayon are squares oriented to the cardinal directions: North/South/East/West. Bayon has four gates, one on each side, and the city of Angkor Thom has an extra gate, the Victory Gate, on the East side.

Angkor Thom’s gates are impressive structures of their own, irrespective of what’s going on within the city’s walls. We entered the South Gate and got our first glimpse of the imposing giant Buddha heads. Each of the four gates is topped by four Buddhas, each pointing in a cardinal direction. The bridges that lead to them depict the Hindu story of The Churning Of The Sea Of Milk. Because of course they do.

We’ll skip over the plot elements that brought our protagonists to this dilemma, but the gods and the demons needed to collaborate to churn the Sea Of Milk in order to extract the Nectar Of Immortality, which was achieved, somehow, by pulling on the Naga Vasuki, a giant god snake. The gods took the head and the demons took the tail. And they lived happily ever after.

One side of the bridge shows the gods pulling Vasuki from the head and the other side of the bridge shows the demons pulling from the tail. As you traverse the bridge, you travel through the gate that the four-headed Buddha watches over. It’s a pretty monumental passage, and it’s impossible to be unmoved by it. Much like the soaring Catholic churches meant to awe the peasants, the gates to Angkor Thom proclaim to all who pass through them the power and piety of their creators.

The monumental Buddha heads stand watch over each gate.

Magic Happens Here

As built, Bayon had 54 pagodas with four faces each. That’s 216 big Buddha heads. 37 of the pagodas remain. Which is still a lot of Buddha heads.

There’s something weird about seeing in person a thing you’ve seen in pictures over and over. I remember visiting MoMA when we moved to New York and seeing Starry Night for the first time. There was so much depth and detail that the reproductions couldn’t capture, it was disorienting. I simultaneously felt like I knew it well and had never seen it. Same with Monet’s Water Lilies.

And same here. The images of these heads are so iconic, seeing them in person was like seeing two things at once, the photographs in your head like a scrim over the real thing right in front of you. But the scrim fades, and you’re left with only the reality, which is breathtaking. If I was capable of emotions I’d have had some. There were feels all over the place, and I could almost sense them.

Just like Angkor Wat, every surface is pavéd with decoration. It’s not all there now, but it’s clear there was no unadorned surface when it was built.

Some of the friezes are really big. Really, really big.

Ta Prohm

If someone asked you to close your eyes and picture an ancient temple being reclaimed by the jungle, you’d be imagining Ta Prohm. Part of that is because the whole trees-growing-through-temples thing is so iconic on its own, but also because it served as one of the primary locations for the 2001 Tomb Raider movie.

Which makes it similar to some of the Star Wars locations we visited in Tunisia. What made those sites interesting wasn’t that they’d been in the movies. It was that they were so alien in their natural state that they qualified as outer space movie sets. Who doesn’t want to visit a place like that?

So it is with Ta Prohm. I have no more interest in it because it was in a movie than I did in the Star Wars sites (which I didn’t even want to see initially, as I thought they were only of interest as movie trivia). What’s interesting about Ta Prohm is the vibe that motivated the filmmakers to use it as a location. That seemed worth checking out.

The whole thing has a distinctly Tikal ambiance, another place where the boundary between jungle and temples is porous. Here though, it’s not the general encroachment of the jungle, it’s the opportunistic nature of the local spong trees. Ta Prohm was built without mortar, leaving room for the spong trees to take root in the loose stones.

The effect is spectacular.

Preah Khan

We had one more temple on our itinerary, but at this point we had both museum eyes and museum legs. I confess we didn’t spend much time at Preah Khan. It looked like the outbuildings at Bayon or Ta Prohm, not having a distinctive feature of its own, like the big Buddhas or the spong trees.

How jaded are we? But we had put over three miles on Dorothy’s recovering limbs that day, which was enough. There. It’s her fault.

Local Monasteries

In addition to the Angkor-era temple complexes, Siem Reap is blessed with a slew of in-town neighborhood monasteries. Open to the public, the grounds and buildings tend to be both lavish and peaceful. We visited two of them, because what else are we doing, but we could have made them a tour of their own.

Preah Prohm Roath Monastery

A mere five minute walk from the Sturm und Drang of Pub Street sits Preah Prohm Roath, the Disneyland of monasteries. Built in 1915, it’s known for its lavish grounds and an enormous golden Buddah that lives in the main shrine, which is from 1945. The buildings and grounds all still seem shiny and fresh. Especially compared to the Angkor era temples, all at least 900 years old.

Surrounding the Buddha shrine building was a 360 degree gallery of friezes.

The outdoor sculpture garden is amazing. Like a Hindu version of El Castillo de Los Duendes in Oaxaca, but with fewer Keebler elves.

Wat Bo

Wat Bo is a little older than Preah Prohm Roath, having been built in the 18th century. It’s just across the Siem Reap river from Pub Street and the night markets, nestled in a comfortable, active neighborhood. It’s not as elaborate as Preah Prohm Roath, or as goofy, leaning more into its quiet beauty. It’s a lovely afternoon stop.

But every building was over the top in its own way. It’s impossible not to be charmed by an aesthetic built on the concept of More. It spoke to us directly. And loudly. If we had a coat of arms it would read Si Aliquid Est Bonum, Melius Est. If Some Is Good, More Is Better.

Sitting in their cool gardens is a pleasure on a hot day. Which is all of them.

Tikal Walks Into A Sidebar

So this is that thing I do where I find some flimsy excuse to jam in a story from our past that’s tangentially, at best, related to something from our current travels. In this case, I’m using Ta Prohm’s comparison to Tikal to shoehorn in the tale of our 30 minute trip to Tikal, in the year of our youth 1985.

I have to start by confessing that at this moment I have no pictures of our Tikal trip. I thought I’d finished digitizing all of our photos in the run up to launch, but I missed the albums with our Guatemala and Tikal photos. I’ll send them out when we get back to Chicago, but I’m probably 7-8 months away from being able to add pictures to this post.

In our late 20s we were able to cobble together enough shekels for our first real vacation, the kind that can’t be done in a car. Dorothy had a textile book called Guatemala Rainbow, and all of the photos were of people wearing these ridiculously vibrant textiles, rather than just pictures of fabric. We wanted to go where people wandered around dressed up like that. There are worse ways to pick a destination.

We decided to get there by buying a package tour to Cancun. It was cheaper than just buying the airfare, and they let us extend our return date. We blew off the hotel portion of the package, which gave us two weeks to get to Guatemala and back to Cancun for our flight home.

And that was the extent of our planning. We didn’t know how we were going to get to Guatemala, we didn’t have any accommodations arranged, we didn’t even know exactly where we were going once we got there. We’d made a half-hearted attempt to make plans, but this was pre-internet, so making those arrangements long distance was hard. This was why travel agents existed, but we rejected the notion of planning the entire trip to the day. We’d wing it. What could possibly go wrong?

On the eve of our departure I called the State Department hotline for their Guatemala assessment. I’d waited until the last minute on purpose, as I expected we’d dislike the recommendation. We were traveling on the eve of their first putatively free elections, and expected there would be tensions. We were correct.

The hotline told us that we needed to: avoid a list of specific cities, the bulk of which were on our to do list; check in with the consulate the moment we landed to provide our detailed itinerary, which didn’t exist; avoid travel at night, which was the only stricture we could follow; and be prepared to be robbed at gunpoint, although kidnapping was deemed unlikely. But not impossible.

On mature reflection, we decided that if a State Department warning existed for tourists traveling from Iowa to New York City, it would sound about the same. And that as hardened, streetwise New Yorkers, we could handle whatever Guatemala threw at us.

What could possibly go wrong?

So we flew to Cancun, rented a car and drove to Chichén Itzá, where I had to get rescued from the top of the pyramid, kept going to check out Mérida, and decided that we’d get to Guatemala from there, so we ditched the rental car (its own story) and grabbed a flight.

We deplaned in Guatemala City, got the last rental car left, and headed to nearby Antigua, getting lost on the way in the dark. No GPS. We stumbled into Antigua and drove around until we found a nice looking hotel. They had a room for us.

That was our protocol for the whole trip. No plans, play it by ear, everything will be fine. We constantly saw tourists who’d made plans, or thought they had, struggling. The hotel they thought they’d reserved didn’t have a room. The guide they thought they’d arranged never showed up. And here we were, happy idiots, blithely blundering into repeated good fortune. It made stupid look admirable. And also set a lifetime of travel preferences. We still don’t like to overplan. Although we are slightly less intrepid than our 20-something selves.

And that’s how we planned to get to Tikal. The highway through the Peten jungle hadn’t been built yet, so the only way to get there was by plane. We figured we’d spend a couple of days there, get to Belize, spend a few days on one of the cays relaxing, and then get back to Cancun for our flight home. Easy, right?

We tried to figure out how to fly from Flores, the nearest airport to Tikal, to Belize, but what information we found didn’t make any sense, so we reckoned we’d make arrangements in the airport when we landed. Worst possible case we’d take a bus, as it was only about 140 miles. Worst worst possible case, we’d rent a car or take a taxi.

The only information we had was on a gas station style folding map. On the back it had a matrix of cities, showing the distance between them and the driving time. Except our map clearly had an error for Flores-Belize City, as it showed a travel time of twelve hours. No way that could be correct. That was just over ten miles/hour for the whole distance. Impossible.

Dorothy hadn’t had much plane time prior to this trip, so she was a nervous flier. Still is, a little bit. As we’re waiting in the terminal in Guatemala City for our flight to Flores, she’s checking the tarmac, afraid we’re going in something tiny. She’s relieved when we’re finally called to board, as the only plane out there is a big jet. Not so relieved when we hit the tarmac and walked behind that jet to a plane so small it had been completely hidden from view.

But all good, we fly to Flores on our little plane and no one wets themselves. A win is a win. I go to the desk in the terminal when we land to make arrangements to fly to Belize in a couple of days. To be told that there isn’t a flight in a couple of days. There’s one the very next morning and another four days later. The first flight meant we wouldn’t be able to visit Tikal, the entire point of this escapade, and the second one meant we wouldn’t have time in Belize, and if there was any hiccup we’d miss our flight back home from Cancun.

So I asked about buses or taxis, and was told that the twelve hour map estimate was about right, as it was mostly a dirt road. Or would be about right if the road was open. Which it currently was not, having been washed out in the recent rains. I’m a clever boy, so I ask about flying back to Guatemala City and getting to Belize from there. To be told that the flight to Guatemala City from Flores is the return flight from Guatemala City to Flores. Which happens twice a week.

Very reluctantly, we booked a flight to Belize for the next morning. Now all we had to do was find a place to stay, since we hadn’t made any arrangements in advance. We tasked our taxi driver with finding us a hotel, but he’d heard our saga. He told us that if we left at seven in the morning, he could drive us to Tikal, about 90 minutes each way, and get us back to the airport in time for our flight. We’d have about half an hour at Tikal, but that sounded better than missing it completely.

What could possibly go wrong?

The actual town of Flores is an island in Lake Petén Itzá reached over a narrow causeway, just barely above lake level. Our driver navigated us into town and left us at a hotel with rooms. We’d see him in the morning. The hotel was… interesting. We got to the front desk to check in by walking across the cinder blocks on the floor, as the first floor was a little lake all its own. Like a lake fractal. Lake, at every level of magnification.

We were given a room on the fourth floor, walkup, obviously, and assured that the water ran several times a day. How very convenient. It happened to be on right then, so we filled up a couple of buckets so we could flush the toilet.

Dorothy was a little beat up by all of this, so I ventured out into town to find some victuals and return with dinner. When I got back she was shaving her legs in one of the buckets, a fierce, desperate attempt to bring order and civilization to a disordered, uncivilized situation. Perhaps the single most Dorothy moment ever, and the picture of her that will probably flash before my eyes as I’m dying.

Sure as shootin’, our driver picks us up at seven. We leave our luggage safely minded on the first floor cinder blocks and make our way. We get our promised thirty minutes at Tikal, which, on the one hand, awesome, but on the other, sad. We deeply regretted being unable to tour Tikal properly.

OK, we head back to our hotel to pick up our luggage and go to the airport, which is right on the mainland side of the causeway. Except the causeway is blocked by the military, who explain that part of the causeway had collapsed since we left three and a half hours earlier, and no one was allowed on while it was being rebuilt.

I’m not at all sure what our driver said, but we were allowed to pass, and maneuvered delicately around the skiploader, with only the lakeside wheels in the water. We fetch our luggage, inch back across the causeway, and get dropped at the airport with moments to spare. They should have been ready to call boarding.

If our plane had been there.

But it wasn’t. It was late. As it turned out, six hours late. We sat in this tiny provincial airport for six more hours. We could have had a full day at Tikal.

*sigh*

We did get our three days at Ambergris Cay in Belize, in a hut right on the beach, just a few minutes to the reef. That was exactly the tonic we required after the tsurris of our aborted Tikal visit. It was glorious. Although we got to and from the Cay on a de Havilland Otter seaplane, which made Dorothy positively nauseous.

But because we’re apparently incapable of learning, we had one last gasp of stupid before we returned home.

We flew from Belize City to Cancun, and could have done the simple, obvious thing and stayed in Cancun overnight to take our flight the next day. But Cancun is boring, and Tulum, this was long before it got built up like it is today, was only a 90 minute drive south. We rented a car so we could spend the day on the beach at Tulum, overnight there, drive up in the morning and make our flight, no problem.

What could possibly go wrong?

We drove to Tulum, parked at a hotel by the highway, checked in, dropped our luggage off, and got into our rental car to drive the short distance to the beach and the ruins. Which car would not start.

We were able to get locals to push us and got the car started. With no promise that, if we turned it off again that it would restart, or that we could draw enough folks to get a push start. So we returned to the hotel. Dorothy grabbed the luggage while I gunned the engine in neutral.

We drove back to Cancun with my foot never leaving the gas. There wasn’t a lot between Tulum and Cancun in those days, so the car dying on that road would be bad. In the dark, since it was an unlit highway. And, because there was clearly some headroom left for agita, the most driving rainstorm I have ever, to this day, driven in. The rain was coming horizontally.

We made it back to the airport to return the car, where much arguing ensued. All of which I lost. First, I had nicked a bumper on a high curb, making a U-turn to get into the airport without letting off the gas. And of course, when the agent went out to check the car, it started right up, undercutting my entire argument.

Fine. Whatever. We had a cabby take us to the nearest place with an empty room, and we made our flight home without any additional drama, self-inflicted or otherwise.

We’ve been to Guatemala three times now, because we love it so much, but on this adventure I’d rather go to places we’ve never been before. But we just discussed, when we do the South America portion of our travels, stopping off at Tikal on our way back. 30 minutes didn’t do it.

As with most places we’ve been, there’s also a clear distinction between goods manufactured for tourists and the real deal. There are artisans working in purely traditional forms, but there are also a lot of local makers who are taking traditional methods and subject matter and mixmastering them through a modern sensibility. Both of those are sweet spots for us, so it was a treat when we were finally able to see what’s truly going on here.

Which observation requires what is becoming a standard disclaimer on our Cambodian trip: Except for all that genocide.

We’ve had to come to grips on our travels with both the impact of active, ongoing fuckery (Cuba) and the echoes of past colonial fuckery (everywhere else: Mexico, Morocco, Tunisia, Turkey). And sure, if you’re an honest American you have to respect all the hard work put in to extinguishing Native American culture.

That’s certainly the closest analogue I have any direct knowledge of to what the Khmer Rouge did to Cambodian culture. But you can look away from the Native American genocide. I’m not saying it’s morally defensible to do so, I’m just saying it’s possible. Obviously. Lot’s of people do.

But you can’t look away in Cambodia. It’s too recent, only 46 years past, and there’s something about the compressed nature of the extinction level cataclysm that still reverberates today. In only four years, Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge eliminated upwards of 90% of Cambodia’s artists and intellectuals, either by starvation or execution. Unsurprisingly, this feels like the unspoken organizing principle underlying all of modern Cambodian society.

And it is literally impossible to ignore it when having a discussion about any form of Cambodian culture, as the arts were particularly and specifically targeted by the regime. All forms of pre-revolutionary arts were banned and their practitioners rounded up. The only art that was permitted was that which explicitly supported the Khmer Rouge political agenda.

So when we talk about modern Cambodian art and its relationship to “traditional” forms, we have to understand that those traditions are a fever dream imagined by a shattered people, a few surviving artists recreating what they could recall of their past, filtered through their suffering and trauma. It’s a testament to Cambodians’ strength that these arts exist today in any form at all, but that doesn’t mean we can pretend that there is an unbroken chain in their traditions.

One of the byproducts of this history is that Cambodia is rife with collectives and social organizations, which pair supporting traditional crafts with supporting at risk populations. In addition to training artisans to keep endangered crafts alive, they offer a range of services, including financial support, child care, nutrition support, banking services, and distribution capabilities. These organizations are prominent in Cambodia because they are necessary.

All of this is why our search for craft villages (“Where do they make the reed mats?”) has come to nothing. If certain crafts were once centralized by geography, as is the norm in many parts of the world, that’s no longer the case here. Those village-based networks were destroyed, and the social organizations that have arisen to care for both the crafts and the crafters don’t have a location specific focus. They help people where they can.

Having said all that, which is, admittedly, a lot, there’s a wealth of beauty to be found in Cambodian arts and crafts once you get past the tourist trinkets.

Weaving

Weaving is a big deal here. They’ve been making sophisticated ikat patterns for centuries, and they are home to the Golden Silkworm, a particularly Cambodian beast that produces an exceptionally fine silk. The art form has, of course, been painstakingly recreated, but it is currently thriving.

The high end of the market is spearheaded by Golden Silk Pheach, which replanted the devastated population of mulberry trees that the Golden Silkworms need and ranches their own silkworms. I think they also massage the worms’ bellies and sing to them. For all that, the Golden Silkworms are dramatically less productive than the standard issue white variety, which produces about three and a half times the silk.

Which is just one of the reasons that pieces from Golden Silk Pheach are far out of reach for us. Scarves start at $500.

The other bespoke silk native to Cambodia is Lotus Silk, which isn’t true silk at all. It’s made from the filaments of the lotus stem, painstakingly harvested a strand at a time by hand. Preferably by eunuchs anointed in oil, but hard times require sacrifice. Lotus Silk scarves are about $300, so… bargain?

We’re obviously shopping well below that level, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t beautiful things made of excellent materials. In fact, we’ve had to remind ourselves that we’re spending ten weeks in Bali and Java, ground zero for batiks, so we shouldn’t go overboard here. I suspect that most of what we return with will be fabric. As is usually the case, it seems.

Reed weaving is also a big thing here. We thought we’d found a collective to visit when we did our Angkor Thom tour, but we never located it. However, we were able to find Salasusu, a shop representing a village weaving collective right in the Old Market in Siem Reap, of all places. And man, did they have beautiful things.

It doesn’t all have to be art. The local styles used on behalf of plastic housewares are their own form of art. We’ve added these to our collection of Plastic From Around The World.

Ceramics

Confession: the ceramics here did not initially sing to us. Too subtle by half, for our garish aesthetic.

Then we found the Khmer Ceramics & Fine Arts Centre, which is funny, because it’s all of two blocks from our apartment. It’s a maker space for local ceramics artisans, with all of the necessary equipment and materials. And there were plenty of pieces there that resonated. We didn’t load up like we did in the Maghreb, but we’re delighted with what we found there.

Clothing

This was another area where we had to remind ourselves not to go crazy, with Vietnam and Indonesia up next. But that was hard to remember, as the clothes here are vibrant, varied, and inexpensive.

Plus, we both packed clothes we knew to be on their last legs, so we could replace them with fun, new things. We could make that wardrobe swap entirely in Cambodia, but we have exerted heroic self control to keep our powder dry for our next stops.

Jewelry

The jewelry hasn’t leapt onto us here, but Dorothy is nothing if not determined. There will be jewelry.

Prints

Again, not a ridiculous amount of depth, but that’s what careful shopping is for. We found a shop whose proprietor made linoleum woodblock prints, which he started making after an electrical accident cost him both arms just below the elbow. Honestly, it’s amazing to think of “I’ll start making art now” as a response to that.

We also found a local artist who had a lighthearted, cartoony take on all the Hindu and Buddhist mythology. Charming.

Leather

While there were a few shops that specialized in leather goods, the real action here is with the punched leather shadow puppets. Curiously, we found the two best makers in the Art Center Night Market, which was otherwise mostly manufactured tourist stuff. And that’s why we’re not on a tourist cadence. It takes time to dig deep, in all contexts.

Wood

At first we thought this distinctively grained wood was coconut, but it’s a local palm called the Sugar Palm. We’ve only seen it used for housewares, although it’s reputed to be used for sculpture, as well. We just haven’t run across any.

The Commercial Arts

Graphic design, product design, and signage all absolutely count as art. There’s always entertaining examples on the street and in the stores.

Cambodia has not disappointed. Let’s take a look at the performing arts.

Apsara Dance

When you think of traditional Cambodian dance, and I know you do, Apsara is what you’re picturing: slow, graceful movement with fingers curved backwards, hyperextended elbows, bent knees, arched spine, preternatural balance, and toes flexed upwards. Seriously, they could make sandwiches with those toes. Apsara has a distinctly Small House Of Uncle Thomas vibe.

There are a number of dinner theater establishments offering Apsara performances, but one stands out for both its rigor and its distance from the tourists of Pub Street, the aptly named Apsara Theater.

We were some of the only solo attendees, as two full buses threw up their contents into the theater. I’ll confess to being ambivalent about the big tours. It just feels a little weak to me, to come all this way and then insist on being cocooned for the entire experience, docented from place to place with everything curated for you.

But the alternative is what we’re doing, which I acknowledge is hard. Finding your way around without help, when you don’t know the language and don’t know how things work, is fundamental to the joy we find in our experience, but we’re not wired like other people, and what we’re doing is often exhausting, even to us.

Those busloads of people could have gone to EPCOT Center, but they put themselves out to go somewhere truly foreign to them, and they chose to do so in a way that didn’t induce panic and the sweats. They are, in their slightly different way, fellow intrepid travelers, and good for them for figuring out how to have this experience and enjoy it.

Honestly, I blow hot and cold on whether our approach is arrogant or brave. It’s felt pretty brave so far, as we’ve been able to pick up a modicum of local language wherever we’ve been, which allows us to avoid Ugly American Syndrome and navigate with some grace. Shit, Dorothy even learned to read Arabic when we were in the Maghreb.

But it feels more arrogant here, as neither of us has been able to learn more than a couple of words of Khmer. It’s the hardest language we’ve encountered so far. We learned more French, which is saying something. So we wander around with our English and hope to get by.

Which has absolutely not been a problem so far, and no one’s treated us like parasites. I’m not at all suggesting that you should skip Cambodia if you can’t learn Khmer. English is the second language here, after all. It warms my heart to see the French forced to struggle with a foreign language in one of their former colonies.

But the absence of anything like a basic vocabulary in the local tongue definitely makes it feel like we’re careening about, heedless of the locals and demanding to be met on our terms. We’re headed to Vietnam next, which uses a Latin alphabet, so that helps. But it’s a tonal language, which I’m pretty sure is going to fuck us up. The journey continues.

The Apsara Theater experience required checking our shoes at the door. There was something deliciously illicit about being barefoot in a public space. It felt naughty.

The evening featured traditional Khmer cuisine and dances in three genres: traditional Apsara, village dances, and Reamker dances. Here’s the thing about all three styles. They’re all, for different reasons, ex post facto manufactured culture. They are authentic because Cambodians have all agreed that they are.

But the history of Cambodian dance is the history of Cambodia, with all of its triumphs and tragedies. Let’s start with the Apsara.

Apsara is actually the term used for the divine water nymphs in both Hindu and Buddhist mythology, depicted in statues and carvings throughout the Khmer kingdom. They are usually posed as if captured mid-dance.

In the 1950s, Cambodia’s queen took in a performance at a provincial primary school where the students recreated poses from the Apsaras of Angkor Wat. She decided to create what she imagined the original dances were like, with costumes to match the carvings. Her granddaughter, who started training at five, became the first professional Apsara dancer in modern times.

That’s the reason the dances are so slow. They’re basically choreographed to move from one Apsara pose to another. The dances as originally conceived have become set in stone, like the temple carvings that were their source material, replicated perfectly down to the last precise finger curl.

An entire culturally resonant art form built on grade school children voguing for the queen. You can’t make that shit up.

Our visit to Angkor Wat was after this performance, so we had an excellent context for viewing the wealth of Apsaras that pavé the temple. The dances made so much sense after viewing the actual carvings. Obviously, no one knows the exact shape of the original Apsara dances, but you can certainly see how the modern form plausibly derived from the source material.

The village folk dances performed today are also creations. As the dances died at their source, teachers and professional dancers recreated them in the 60s in order to preserve them. But these dances are an interpretation of the originals, documented and locked down to be unchanging over time. They are not genuine in the sense we usually give to that word. Many of them don’t even qualify as recreations, as they were conceived from whole cloth by city choreographers imagining village life. Even those have become part of the official canon of Cambodian dance.

Finally, the Reamker dances. Reamker is the Cambodian Buddhist take on the Hindu Ramayana story, with different dances representing different parts of the saga. The epic includes giants, monkeys, mermaids, princes, and, of course, princesses.

As a dance, the Reamker dates back to the 13th century. Has it been executed in an unbroken chain since then? Probably not, although I can’t find anything definitive about it being recreated, like the village folk dances. Unlike the Apsara dances, though, which are truly sui generis, the Reamker is a real dance with a lineage centuries old.

The Reamker stories are like the rest of the Hindu narrative canon: stuffed full. They read like they were written by a coked up middle schooler. “*sniff* OK, so this shapeshifting demon he’s got like, ten heads, and he falls in love with a pretty human princess and abducts her. *sniff* And then, and then, this monkey god, who has, like powers, comes to help with his army of monkeys *sniff* but he’s met by like an army of mermaids, so the monkeys and the mermaids have a war, *sniff* but then the monkey god and the mermaid queen fall in love. *sniff* They rescue the pretty human princess, but the prince thinks she did it with the demon, but she didn’t. *sniff* He’s just a dick. *sniff* And there’s a giant. *sniff*”

Which is the actual plot of the Reamker. And is hardly special to the Hindus and Buddhists. Hand a coked up middle schooler the Bible and see what you get. Everyone’s creation myths are… logically suspect. Don’t even get me started on Turtle Island.

Whether imagined from stone carvings, created by modern choreographers, or established as legitimate court art, all of the Cambodian dance forms share something in common. They were destroyed by Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge in 1975. All forms of pre-revolutionary art were banned, including and explicitly traditional dance. 80-90% of the entire Cambodian population of writers, artists, and dancers died in the first three years of the regime, either by starvation or execution.

Cambodian dance today is a shadow of a shadow, recreated forms that had to be painstakingly recreated again, by the few dancers who survived the regime. It’s a funny cultural patrimony, making up in a stubborn insistence on its relevance what it lacks in authenticity. Maybe it’s made up, but they’re claiming it as their own and fuck you if you have a problem with that.

I do not. The beauty of Cambodian dance isn’t in its historical accuracy, but in the fierce commitment of Cambodians to, finally, speak for themselves.

Shadow Puppets

Guess what? Traditional Cambodian shadow puppet theater was also destroyed by the Khmer Rouge and manually recreated by the few surviving practitioners after the regime fell. So it enjoys the same “authenticity” issues as the dances, or, honestly, every other fucking art form here, all of which the Khmer Rouge methodically burnt to the ground.

Of course, as is the case all over the world, “traditional” art forms don’t have to be murdered. They can die of natural causes. Even before the execution, shadow puppet theater was declining in Cambodia, as a natural byproduct of the distractions and allure of creeping modernity. New is shinier and better than old.

But I think we make a category error when we fetishize authenticity. Culture is a living organism, and while we are right to preserve what UNESCO refers to as Intangible Cultural Heritage, we are wrong to insist that it be preserved in amber. Cultural change is a form of agency, permitting peoples to decide for themselves what matters and what doesn’t.

There’s no question that pre-revolutionary shadow puppet shows enjoyed a wide range of content, but the version we have today, recreated by the few shattered puppeteers who survived the purge, is limited to retellings of the stories in the Reamker. I suspect that’s because those were the puppets that made it through the civil war intact, either through random dumb luck or a concerted effort to prioritize the safety of the Reamker puppets.

There are two styles of shadow puppet theater, both done with puppets made of punched leather. There’s Sbek Thom, which uses large static leather sheets manipulated with sticks, and Sbek Touch, which uses smaller, articulated puppets with movable limbs and changeable facial expressions.

These days, no one does the full Reamker story, which historically played out in villages over seven or more nights by traveling puppeteer troupes. We get excerpts now, which is fine. As tourists go, we have a pretty substantial attention span, but not like that.

An Australian And A Malaysian Walk Into Cambodia

There are several established shadow puppet troupes in Cambodia, two in Siem Reap and one in Phnom Penh, but none of them have regular venues. They mostly tour. While there are multiple dinner theaters offering Apsara dances in Siem Reap, there is only one venue for shadow puppets, the Bambu Stage, which offers a couple of shows a week and has their own troupe of puppeteers they’ve trained themselves.

We got there early and had a long chat with the proprietress, who shared their history. Her husband is a Malaysian event planner who worked with an Australian theatrical producer and museum exhibition designer. They had worked together for some years in Australia, gotten bored, and were looking for something fresh.

They thought there was opportunity in Southeast Asia and picked Cambodia seemingly at random. They bought a restaurant and converted it into a shadow puppet theater for tourists, and then hired and trained puppeteers to perform.

But here’s the kicker. They then wrote their own shadow puppet plays.

Before the performance I asked our hostess about the Reamker plays, and she said they didn’t do those. They did a little twirling about with the large Sbek Thom puppets at the very beginning, but then switched to the smaller Sbek Touch puppets for the full performance. I asked what the source material was for the play, and the answer was village stories.

This turned out to be a village story like the ones from the Apsara dance performance: completely made up. But worse in this case, because it was made up by an Australian and a Malaysian.

It’s hard to know which was worse. The cultural appropriation that rendered the performance an unmistakable act of minstrelsy, the participation of actual Cambodians in said act, or the fact that it was aggressively, irredeemably bad.

The plot of this village story, which could have had some origins in the villages, although the shadow puppet version we saw was from whole cloth, was thus: A shrewish wife orders her husband to take their buffalo to the rice paddies for water. On the way he meets a drunk who also has a buffalo. They share drink and wager about whose buffalo is stronger. The drunk puts up his rice paddy. The other man puts up his wife. The buffalos fight, and the drunk’s buffalo kills the other buffalo. They return to the village so the drunk can claim the shrewish wife as his own, and she beats both men until they run away.

This was framed to us before it began as a feminist parable about the strength of women in the household. Sure. But that wasn’t its worst sin. There was ten, maybe fifteen minutes of story that had been padded out to almost an hour. I didn’t know it was possible to be both limp and overstuffed at the same time. I mean as a person, sure. I’ve been in that condition repeatedly. But I’m not used to culture shaped that way.

The puppets were fine and the puppeteers did what they could with the material. But we felt a little dirty afterwards. Even the most careful of travelers can be tourist trapped.

Afterwards they let us play with the puppets, which was fun. Sadly, that’s about as far as the fun went for this experience.

Hammams are a distinctly Muslim invention, deeply embedded in the cultures of our last leg: Morocco, Tunisia, and Turkey. But that won’t keep me from searching for the equivalent wherever we go. I’d done my homework before we got here and determined that the closest local equivalent to a hammam would be a body scrub at one of the many spas that dot the landscape here like measles after a Kennedy.

With Dorothy safely tucked in and recovering, I felt comfortable abandoning her the next day to cash in on my research. The Secret Eden Spa offered body scrubs and a tuktuk ride in both directions, making it an easy call. I also added a massage, which is not a usual component of my hammam experience. There are plenty of full service spas in Muslim countries that have hammams, and even the traditional hammams upsell massage services. But they’re not part of the core hammam experience, and they tend to be priced for Westerners, putting them out of reach for us.

Not so Cambodia. A two-hour full body massage at Secret Eden was only $22.50. Adding a second masseuse for the Four Hands experience was an additional $5, which is crazy. Every massage menu I’ve ever seen sensibly doubles the price for Four Hands (I am an aficionado of massage menus, if not massage).

Given how I felt after a) five weeks of packing and moving boxes and furniture, b) approximately 36 hours of transit time to get here, and c) the stress of managing both the hospital experience and Dorothy’s fear and pain, two hours of Four Hands and an hour of body scrub seemed the very least the universe could muster in recompense.

The Four Hands delivered. It was like they were synchronized swimmers and I was the pool. Sometimes they worked in concert, each taking a leg or one side of the neck/shoulders axis of evil. Other times they worked in counterpoint, one at my head and the other at my feet, for example, snapping me like taffy. But always in delicious rhythm.

With my nonexistent Khmer (I know the words for Thank You and Sorry, which is actually most of what I have to say) and their iffy English, the only phrase we could agree on was “No cry.” I think it was meant as a question, making sure I was OK, but I took it in the imperative, as a challenge. “Do your worst, imperialist running dogs, I’ll never tell you where the microfilm is hidden. You’ll see no tears from me!”

The only tiny blemish on an otherwise perfect experience was that twice one of the masseuses grabbed my belly, gave it a playful shake, and enunciated in her best English, “Baby.” Which I’m sure in retrospect was Khmer for “Sweet abs!” That happened in Istanbul, too, where the nice man hamamming me locked onto the handles, looked into my eyes soulfully and asked “Kebab?” It’s almost like they’re trying to tell me something…

The reason I thought that the body scrub was the closest local analog to the hammam was exfoliation. The hammam bath always entails exfoliation, ranging from luxurious (Morocco, Turkey) to indifferent (Tunisia). I figured since you could get a body scrub for an hour, it would land on the luxurious side, and it did. At least the exfoliation part.

This was basically another full hour of massage, just with grit in the massage oil. The compound came on cold before friction fixed it, so that was exciting, but the whole experience was lovely. Obviously a gentler massage than the Four Hands, but I wouldn’t have wanted something that intense with sand. Or coffee grounds, or whatever it was. The menu didn’t say. I’d signed up for exfoliation, not flensing, so it was fine.

But the payoff was going to be the bath afterwards. That was the hammam experience I’d actually come for, so imagine my dismay when I was led naked to a shower and left to my own devices. Cool water, low pressure, and nary a loofah or cloth in sight. The mixture had pilled all over my body, not just the obviously furry parts, but even my arms, which are hardly bearlike. The only option I had was to rub my skin under the weak stream of water and literally pull the clumps off.

While I made slow progress on the parts I could reach, no way would I be able to de-pill my back, so I hollered for help. My masseuse returned and did my back, but when I turned around to ask for a tool of some kind so I could finish she made horrified eyes and violently shook her head No, and I replied in kind. Of course, I’d had no such thing in mind. She scampered off and I was left to pluck at myself like an ostracized baboon.

So that was kind of a fail. As pleasant as it was, the massage was too light to be useful, because of the exfoliant, and the cleanup fell well short of my dreams. It’s possible that another scrub, like their salt scrub, wouldn’t pill, but it was the hammam experience I was chasing, and that clearly isn’t the local custom. Not that I couldn’t find someone who’d take money to give me a bath, but that would be a different professional. And way more than $12.50.

On the asset side of the ledger, I was objectively very, very smooth.

At $27.50 + tip, two hours of Four Hands will be a weekly treat for me while we’re here. I mean, that’s eight hand-hours at less than $3.50/hand-hour. That’s the duty-free crack of wellness culture.

The only coda on this is that after three hours of massage, I came home still obviously tired from all of the stressors of the previous days but super relaxed. I laid down at 6:00 PM for a nap and got up for the day at 3 AM. It will clearly take a few days to work this all out.

The most spectacular effect of the design is the sun rising directly over the central tower on the equinoxes, but that’s only the most visible part. Allow me to lean on Wikipedia:

That’s a lot of action, but there’s tons more. Adding the heights of the two sides of the central tower gets you 365 in the Cambodian measurement unit, the hat. The moat’s measurements correspond to the number of thousands of years in each of the four time periods in Khmer cosmology. The distance between steps in the central sanctuary is 12 hat, matching the number of lunar cycles in a year. And that’s just scratching the surface. It’s a long list, making Angkor Wat one of the most sophisticated representations of time in the ancient world.

Entirely by accident, we’re in Siem Reap during the spring equinox. All enjoying it required was being up and ready to go for our 5:00 AM tuktuk to Angkor Wat. Reporting for duty!

The Angkor National Museum

Our first stop was actually the day before our Angkor Wat visit. It seemed like a good idea to get a little grounding in what we were about to see before we careened about the temple, so we paid a visit to the Angkor National Museum, a five-minute tuktuk ride from our apartment.

The museum wasn’t actually all that large. The vast majority of the artifacts from Angkor Wat are still in Angkor Wat, which is for the best. But there were some choice pieces, and a fair amount of context to help us understand what we’d see the next day at the temple itself. It was a very digestibly sized series of exhibits, which was nice, given that Dorothy’s recovery from her fall was still an ongoing process.

The first gallery, after a brief video introduction, was the 1,000 Buddha Gallery, named after a similar gallery at Angkor Wat. We didn’t count, but I’ll take their word for it. There were a lot of fucking Buddhas.

We both thought that the highlight of the museum was the collection of intricately carved lintel pieces that had come from Angkor Wat.

My personal favorite was the respect shown to a prosperous physique. There was a time when my profile was hot. Sadly, that time was centuries ago.

There was also a nice scale model of Angkor Wat. We felt fully equipped and ready to hit the temple at dark o’clock the next morning.

Angkor Wat At Dawn

We got up at 4:00 AM to be ready for our tuktuk pickup at 5:00.

Our driver knew a back entrance that was used for the handicapped, as it allowed the tuktuks to get much closer to the temple complex. Dorothy’s cane, to say nothing of her obvious limp, qualified us. Like White Privilege. Score!

We got there at 5:20, with sunrise scheduled for about 6:10. Of course, that’s when the sun rose above the horizon. It would take another full hour before it crested the central pagoda.

And the payoff…

The sharp-eyed amongst you will notice that the sun doesn’t appear to be rising directly over the central pagoda. This is how I discovered that I had Location Services turned off on my phone’s browser. When I asked the date of the Equinox, it gave me the answer for Chicago. Because of the time difference, the same celestial event occurred in Cambodia… the next day. We were there the day before the Equinox.

Which is fine. We may have missed the crushing crowd of hippies and the crystal energy hoo-hah of the actual Equinox, and a fraction of the raw, reckless beauty of the sun rising over the central pagoda. But there are sunrise tours of Angkor Wat every day of the year for a reason. It’s an amazing experience, and while we (I) may have felt a little foolish, we didn’t feel shortchanged in the slightest. We still witnessed sunrise at Angkor Wat.

The Temple

Angkor Wat is considered the Eighth Wonder of the Ancient World. Of the original seven, the Pyramid at Giza is the only other Wonder still standing, although we did visit the ruins of the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, so that kind of counts. If Egypt is ever OK to visit, maybe we’ll complete our Wonders of the Ancient World bingo card.

There was an upper story, accessible by steep stairs, with what is reputed to be an awesome view. I’ll never know.

Having been rescued from the tops of pyramids twice in Mexico, I uncharacteristically chose not to ascend. See? I can larn things.

While the structure of the central temple with its three pagodas is rightfully the site’s showstopper, the whole place is rich in details that reward close inspection.

The Apsaras

The Apsaras are the celestial dancers that are pavéd all about the temples. If you didn’t know any history and just walked through Angkor Wat and you were asked at the end, “What was that all about?” you’d answer “Tits.” And that’s not just me. Dorothy also saw it as a temple to breasts. Fine. There are way worse things to worship. Looking at you, Ba’al.

The Apsaras are also the inspiration for the traditional Cambodian Apsara dances, which were actually created in modern times using the Angkor Wat carvings as source material. We went to an Apsara dance performance the week before visiting Angkor Wat, which turned out to be super helpful, as we had a context for what we saw throughout the temple.

Here’s one of the clearest examples, as it relates to the dances. You can see all of the hallmarks: the flexed toes, the fingers curved back, the careful balance, and even the costume. These are all elements that were picked up from the carvings to create the dances.

This etching also tells the story of how Angkor Wat wasn’t finished when King Suryavarman II died. The above is from a gallery all of whose etchings were sketched in and never finished. Here’s another interesting unfinished piece. The medallions on the right have been completed, with the ones on the left just roughed in. In the top row, second from left, you can see the beginnings of the whorled pattern from the completed medallions.

Here are more of the etched Apsaras.

In addition to the etchings, completed and otherwise, the Apsaras are most prominently represented by bas-relief carvings. They show off a riot of costumes, elaborate headdresses, and mid-dance poses.

The Grounds

Beyond the temple itself, the site has extensive grounds and structures around its perimeter.

The Fucking French

A day trip isn’t complete without a shout out to the fucking French.

Angkor Wat has been in more or less continuous use since its 12th century construction. Successive waves of rulers and religious sects have all claimed the temple at one time or another, reusing it, repurposing it, and redecorating it. It’s been something of a palimpsest over the centuries, bending to the whim of whoever currently claimed control of it.

Well, that process looked entirely too naturelle for the French to tolerate, so they decided it should be stripped back to its “original” state. But who could possibly have the gravitas, the knowledge, the wisdom to make such nuanced distinctions? Mais bien sûr, les archéologues français. Who proceeded to remove everything that didn’t look “authentic” to their refined, French eyes, leaving the bowdlerized Angkor Wat we have today.

I know the French didn’t invent bloodless violence, but I think it’s fair to give them credit for perfecting it.

Dorothy, by the way, believes I should say something nice about the French, since I’m constantly berating them for being so very French. Fine.

Baked goods. The tasty residue of French fuckery is bread and pastries. I hope everyone feels better now that we’ve put a happy face on French colonialism.

Here’s Dorothy and our driver, Mister Lim, on our way back after a mostly successful adventure. Completely successful, if you overlook the whole Equinox thing.

The night markets, and there are several of them, open at 6:00, and I hit the area at about 6:30. I stayed until about 10:30, and the neighborhood, unsurprisingly, hots up as the evening progresses. Our host suggested that there would be produce available at one of the night markets, but I never found the right one.

In addition to the main night market, which seemed fairly modest, I found the crafts night market, which was epic in scale. The knock on the tourist area crafts is that they’re not always authentically Cambodian, including Chinese and Vietnamese imports. More than that, though, the sheer quantity of merchandise in the crafts market means that most of what’s there will be tourist crap, but we’ve developed a good eye for locating the gold amongst the dross. I was obviously just scouting, so a proper visit, and a more thorough report, awaits Dorothy’s recovery.

With the choices being spa, restaurant, and bar, I partook of a little of each. I enjoyed a mani-pedi for $12, at a place that looked a little disreputable compared to the glitzier spas in the area. But everyone needs to make a buck, so I spread the love. Both mani and pedi were fine, but the polish was artlessly applied. I actually had the polish on my fingers removed.

Next came dinner, which was a plate of vegetable fried rice for $1 and a to-go order of spring rolls for Dorothy at a regal $1.50. Not a fine dining experience, but an experience, which was the point.

Finally, a cheap drink. All the bars seemed to have $1 well cocktails, and not much beyond the well. You can’t win the lottery without buying a ticket, so I picked a bar, grabbed a $1 gin on ice, took a seat, and proceeded to have the highlight of my night market visit.

Because shortly after sitting down a lovely young Cambodian lady sat down beside me, draping herself casually about me in a manner that suggested genuine fellowship and good feeling. She was very friendly, told me her name was Emily, and asked if I’d buy her a drink. I have seen this hustle before, so I knew to ask how much her drinks cost. A whopping $3. Sure. It’s my role as a visitor to fuel the local economy, and it would, at worst, be entertaining to see how this played out.

So she sits down with her drink, gives me a flirty look and says, “Let’s play a game.” It would undoubtedly be a game I didn’t want to play, given that I had genuinely sat down to have a cheap drink and soak in the local atmosphere (which I appeared to be doing in spades), but I wasn’t given a chance to respond. She hopped up, went to the bar, and returned with… a Connect Four set. She actually meant that we should play a game.

This turned out to be the most charming bar hustle I have ever encountered. She did not take her Connect 4 casually. We played 9 games. She won five, I won three, and we drew once. One of my wins was the last one, which she clearly lost intentionally. I suspect my other two wins were also at her discretion, although she was more subtle about it. But maybe not. She seemed genuinely angry when she lost, and also took the draw poorly.

And that was it. We played Connect 4, I spent a total of $6 on a pair of drinks for her, and I went home. She makes money on her overpriced drinks, and that’s all she was about. The bar had been pretty empty when I sat down, but more couples of, shall we say, disparate ages were seated as we played. None of them were playing Connect 4. It’s like she’d peered directly into my soul and understood that the thing that would fulfill my dreams and fantasies was not an evening with a lovely Cambodian lady but a playdate over games.

I felt so, so seen.

Deep Cuts

The punchline to this story, as if it was somehow lacking in punchline, is that when I got home I slurred to Dorothy, “I met proshtitoots.” This was not technically correct, as there was only one of Emily, and I have no idea where she landed on the Bar Hostess spectrum. It’s not like she was trying to upsell me.

That line was a deep cut quote, going back to our days in the Kensington neighborhood of Brooklyn.

Picking up the pieces after the collapse of our hosiery company, I wound up working for a guy who had been a senior protocol official in the Ford administration. He was obviously well connected and he’d married into money, so he was scratching the entrepreneurial itch. He’d bought the US rights to an Australian product, day-glo colored sunscreen, and my soup-to-nuts product launch experience was just what he needed.

We’d start by importing some of the Australian product to get us going, but I had to build the US business. Branding, packaging, product formulation and manufacture, FDA approval, product launch (at Bloomingdales, natch), photo shoots and press and promo. I was back in the game.

When we get back to the States I’ll update this with product shots from my archives, but here’s a picture I scraped from Etsy. Haute 80s.

In the buildup to the US launch, I had been in constant communication with the Australian owner, a lovely man named David. By Telex, for those keeping score on the technology timeline. So, after smoke signals and before email. David decided to spend the week before the push to the Bloomies debut in NYC with me, working hand in hand.

I’d enjoyed working with David long distance, but he was my business boyfriend for that week. Smart, funny, resourceful, genuinely kind and helpful. He was a delightful collaborator.

We’d pulled off a successful Bloomies launch together, and David was headed back to Sydney the next morning. He suggested we go out for a celebratory dinner, which couldn’t have been a more welcome proposition. We went to a high-end Chinese restaurant, ordered dinner and a drink, and I called Dorothy from a payphone to let her know what David and I were up to and that I’d be home a little late, in a few hours tops.

Then I learned a new thing.

In addition to the famous admonition to “Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Mom’s. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own.” I could now add a fourth: “Never match an Aussie drink for drink.” You will lose.

I lost.

I honestly have absolutely no idea how many drinks we had. It was, unquestionably, the most I have ever had to drink, to this day. With no identifiable close second. A drink at the Chinese restaurant was followed by… several more? Then we went to a bar. Or two. Or more. I don’t know.

Finally, we wind up back at his hotel for a nightcap at the hotel bar. What’s a night out without a nightcap? We’re sitting at the bar, but mostly I’m trying not to fall off the barstool, with David to my right. Swear to god, at this point I’m just trying to focus my eyes. I have no idea what time it is, among other things I don’t know, but I have yet to check back in with Dorothy because I may have forgotten she existed. Or how to use a telephone. Or what a telephone even was.

Before you know it, the two seats to David’s right are occupied by a pair of stunningly beautiful women. Even more magical, they were friendly! And personable. That just never happens. By focusing carefully on the mirror behind the bar, I could see that they were all having a wonderful time chatting together.

I thought it might be helpful if my ears worked, so I mustered all my focus and was able to listen in on their conversation. David was asking them what they did, and one of them replied that they were in the entertainment business. What kind of entertainment? They staged parties. David asked if they were public or private parties, and was told that they were strictly private. He asked how much it might cost to attend one of their parties.

And that’s when the lightbulb finally went on. These lovely, charming, friendly women were prostitutes. And unless my deductive powers had completely abandoned me, David seemed to be negotiating with them.

When he was satisfied with the price, he turned to me and said, “What do you think, mate? I have a couple of frangers in me room.” “David, that’s awesome. What’s a franger?” “A condom, mate.” “Oooh, David, I don’t think I can.” Which I’m sure I meant in every sense.

David turns back to our companions and begs off. “I’m sorry ladies, but I have an early flight in the morning, and I don’t think it’s a good idea.” They turned on me. “What about your friend?”

I did what any red-blooded American man would do in the same situation. I panicked. “Ah, right me. Yes. Well, the thing is, David here is headed back to Australia and he needed cash so I withdrew my limit from the ATM to give to him and now I don’t have any money and can’t get any more.” That’s pulling it out of the ditch, am I right?

“Oh, that’s not a problem. It’s just turned midnight so it’s a new banking day and there’s an ATM right there in the lobby.” As if I could remember my PIN. I think I looked at the floor and muttered an “I’m sorry,” and they walked off. I felt like I’d let them down.

But I did realize that a crucial piece of intel had just been casually dropped. It was after midnight. I’d last spoken to Dorothy seven hours ago, telling her I’d be home in a couple of hours. Very not good.

I made my goodbyes to David and sluiced myself into a cab, whose cabbie thankfully knew exactly where I was going in Kensington, as I promptly passed out. He poured me to the curb and I staggered into our apartment. Dorothy was up, watching an Elvis movie on TV, and pretty rage-filled. I slurred out “I met proshtitoots” and told her my story.

She decided that punishing me was unnecessary, as she sensibly predicted the epic hangover I had inflicted on myself. There was nothing she could do to me worse than what I’d just done to myself, so no reason to throw pointless labor at the problem.

It took two days to fully recover. And I’ve never drunk with an Aussie since.

By the way, after the successful launch of Le Zink I heard that Marvel Comics was for sale, and I convinced my boss that we should own a comic book publisher. I spent a year working on our offer, deep diving on Marvel’s financials and coordinating the legal team. It was down to our bid and Ike Perlmutter’s at the very end, but they went with Ike. That’s how close I came to owning Marvel.

The failed purchase of Marvel did lead directly to my starting a new imprint for DC Comics, but that’s another story. Which I promise to tell.

There are several floating villages a stone’s throw from Siem Reap, but those locations are so heavily touristed that their economies rely as much on tourism as fishing at this point. We decided to go a little further afield to witness something closer to a lifestyle unaltered by an onslaught of barangs (the Khmer word for light skinned foreigner, whose literal translation is “French” – I’m not sure if it’s impossible to tell us apart or if it’s just not worth the effort).

Kompong Khleang is a little more than an hour’s drive from Seam Reap, which is enough of an extra lift that it’s much less visited than the closer villages. They’re still concerned about the impact of tourism, as they should be, so there’s a $20/person charge for tourists to enter the area. While that fee includes a boat ride out to the open part of the lake, most of those funds are used to stabilize the economy, which can, shockingly, be whipsawed by weather outside the normal pattern. Like that happens.

We’re here during the dry season, so the lake is at pretty much its lowest point all year. During the monsoon season the Mekong River overflows, pushing water downstream to feed Tonlé Sap. The lake rises as much as 26 feet at the height of the season, so people either live in houses on tall stilts or aboard makeshift houseboats which simply rise or fall with the level of the lake.

Getting There

The ride there was thoroughly enjoyable, as we got an excellent tour of the countryside. We used Khun, the same driver our Airbnb host sent to get us from the airport. Khun’s English is excellent, and we never tire of hearing how handsome he is. He also refers to us as MadamSir, one word, which is charming. I think, going forward, that we will adopt MadamSir as our collective noun. “Look! It’s a MadamSir of Mark & Dorothy.”

More than anything, though, he knows his way around, even though he’s technically a driver and not a guide. For example, we hit a stretch of road where all of the roadside vendors appeared to be selling pieces of sugar cane, all cut to the same roughly 8-9″ length. Khun pulled over to pick one up for us, and it was nothing of the sort.

What appeared to be sugar cane from the car turned out to be kralan: young bamboo that had been hollowed out, filled with sticky rice, black beans, and coconut milk, and grilled. You peel the bamboo back, tear a piece off to make a spoon, and dig in.

I don’t know if that description makes it sound delicious or not, but it was. Dorothy has already found a recipe.

The Village

The village on the lakeside, as opposed to the literal floating part, is all structures up on stilts. The dirtside part of Kompong Khleang is dominated by a massive, sparkling Buddha, which stands watch over the village.

As we headed towards the open lake, the tributary we were on was chockablock with small-scale fishing.

Here’s a thing about Buddhist fishermen: their beliefs prevent them from killing, so they pull the fish up with nets and let them die of asphyxiation while they thrash in agony. “Dude, my hands are clean. That fish died of natural causes.” Wow. That’s the Buddhist Shabbos Goy. “Hey, I didn’t turn on any lights.” What’s a belief system without loopholes, to fool your deity of choice?

The open lake, with the actual floating village, beckoned. When we got to open water we asked how deep it was, and the boat driver stuck an oar in until it hit bottom. About a meter.

Punch Line… To The Worst Joke Ever

You’d think the gentle aquatic life that’s been pursued for unknown generations would be immune from much of what goes on “outside.” Silly you.

Besides the obvious impact of climate change on the Tonlé Sap biosphere, and the desire of upstream neighbors to build dams, there’s the small matter of genocide. I swear, you cannot lift a rock in this country without some Pol Pot atrocity scuttling out. It’s all still so fresh here.

For reference, our Civil War ended 160 years ago, and plenty of folks are still salty about it. There are, shall we say, issues still unresolved. World War II ended 80 years ago, and there are pretty obvious echos still reverberating. Some days more than others.

The Pol Pot regime, and the genocide it carried out, ended in 1979. That’s only 46 years ago. There are plenty of people alive today who knew plenty of people who weren’t alive by the time the regime was ousted. In the four years they were in power, the Khmer Rouge killed between 1.5-3 million Cambodians. And don’t forget that Pol Pot was brought down by Vietnam, which occupied Cambodia for a full decade after “liberating” it. At least they learned something from the French.

How exactly did this play out in Tonlé Sap? Vietnamese fishers had lived on the lake for generations, but Pol Pot sent them back to Vietnam, after destroying their identification papers. Vietnam took them in as refugees during the Pol Pot years, but wouldn’t repatriate them, as they couldn’t prove they were Vietnamese. They went back to Tonlé Sap after the Khmer Rouge fell, but Cambodia wouldn’t recognize them without papers, either. They live now in the floating villages because without papers they’re not permitted to own land.

Tonlé Sap is, in no small measure, a floating homeless encampment.

Because of the Khmer Rouge.

There’s no such thing as ancient history.

But even current history hates them. When we were out on the lake, I asked Khun about the Vietnamese presence in the floating villages, as I knew they’d been there for generations, and their presence had left footprints. For example, the pontoon boats were an innovation they brought with them when they came down the Mekong, and they’re everywhere now.

Khun lowered his voice like we could be heard in the middle of the lake, and explained that the Vietnamese presence on Tonlé Sap was troublesome, and something they didn’t like to talk about. Vietnam has harbored imperial dreams for the region for decades, and would love for Cambodia and Laos to be annexed into a Vietnam that, bulked up, could better withstand pressure from China and other geopolitical actors.

That’s a sensible desire, unless you go about it like you’re trying to annex Canada. It’s left the Cambodians deeply distrustful of Vietnam, down to being chary of the poor, lake-dwelling Vietnamese who were originally ratfucked by Cambodia.

I wasn’t expecting a day on the lake to leave me feeling heartbroken. They say travel is broadening, but it’s hard to know what that means until you’ve been broadened.

By the way, Khun had suggested at one point that he take us to tour the Killing Fields. We can’t imagine a more horrific way to spend time than hobnobbing with the ghosts that occupy the Killing Fields. I’d sooner take an Auschwitz tour.

But the ghosts are everywhere here. Good luck trying to avoid them.

I knew that Southeast Asia was a hotbed of tattooing, but I wasn’t sold when I looked for traditional Vietnamese tattoos. Lots of tigers and dragons, clearly meant to appeal to the tourist market. I knew I’d find rich traditional work if I dug deep enough, but what I saw initially didn’t really speak to me.

Not so traditional Khmer tattoos in Cambodia, also known as Sak Yant. These are more like the Berber tattoos, in that they are both visually stunning and have a significant cultural lineage. Sak Yant is more closely associated these days with Thailand than Cambodia, but its origins can be traced to a common source: the Khmer kingdom when it included the territories of both modern countries, around the 9th century. Some references place the origins in Angkor Wat, in what is now Siem Reap. So getting a Sak Yant here feels right. This is the source.

But like my Berber tattoo, getting it done right was more important than just getting it done. There are plenty of tattoo parlors in the Pub Street area offering traditional bamboo tattoos, and I’m sure they’d have been delighted to do something that looked like a Sak Yant at my request. Fortunately, I was able to find the Federation of Khmer Sakyantra, dedicated to both the art form itself and the rituals and traditions that inform the art and suffuse it with meaning.

What’s different about a Sak Yant tattoo? Many things. For starters, it’s a whole process. It begins with an offering. I was told to bring: 7 types of fruits, 10 lotus flowers, 5 candles, 1 pack of incense, and ៛10,000 riel ($2.50) to put on the fruit. They offered to put the package together for me for $20, but I thought I needed to fulfill my own quest.

Second, Sak Yant tattoos are not just artistic expressions. To quote the Federation, “they embody spiritual beliefs, offer protection, and serve as powerful symbols of personal and communal identity.” So you don’t walk in and tell them you want a Hanuman on your ass. Instead, you have a conversation with the Sak Yant Master about who you are, where you are on your life path, and what your goals are. They then decide what type of symbol you should get and where it should be applied. Again, to quote, “The Sak Yant tattoo is not just a decoration but a personalized talisman designed to align with the wearer’s life path.”

Then there’s the process of receiving the tattoo itself, which is highly ritualized. It starts with the offering and a blessing, and then mantras are chanted during the tattooing, infusing the design with spiritual energy and blessings. It ends with a final blessing from the Master himself.

The tattoo can be done with a modern machine, but I opted for the traditional bamboo, done by hand. It takes longer than the machine, is more expensive, and is, by repute, more painful, but it’s the way it’s been done for centuries. There is no excuse for half stepping through life.

Design

The first step is choosing the Yantra. When I sat down they had brought out many books of designs, so it was clear they’d permit some agency. If a client loved something they felt was inappropriate I’m sure they’d say so, but that’s not how I wanted this to go. So I explained who I was, why I inked, where I was in my life, where I was headed, and what I valued.

Without a moment’s hesitation my guide pulled out a specific design and told me it would go on my shoulder. I looked at literally a single design. That was the guidance I was after. It’s the first time I’ve gotten a tattoo without any initial design considerations on my part, but it was the right way to Sak Yant.

Once he walked me through the meaning it was clear he’d made the right, best choice.

Offering

We then prepared the offering I’d brought: fruit, lotus flowers, incense, candles, and a small cash offering.

Set Up

Execution

And away we go.

The bamboo tattoo is supposed to be more painful than a tattoo machine, but I’m not sure that was my experience. It was… different, but I’m not convinced it was worse. It’s slower, so the same amount of work takes longer, but even there I’m not sure it’s net worse.

The needle on the bamboo stick doesn’t go as deep as a tattoo machine does, so I think that’s a vote for the bamboo, painwise. That’s also why bamboo tattoos are reputed to fade faster than mechanical tattoos, but I don’t think that’s an issue for me. Let’s just say that anyone offering me a lifetime guarantee at this point is getting a good deal.

It also felt like the fast, repetitive nature of the tattoo machine inflamed the skin around it more than the bamboo, so that’s another vote for bamboo. And then it turns out that the healing process is completely different for the bamboo vs. the tattoo machine. You can’t get a machine tattoo wet for 10-14 days, but I was cleared to swim next day. It still needs to be kept from the sun that long, just like with a machine tattoo, but it’s barely sore to the touch. The aftermath of a machine tattoo feels like a nasty sunburn, but the aftermath of the bamboo tattoo doesn’t feel like anything at all. I’ll be sleeping on that shoulder tonight.

And there was a subjective element, as well. Until I’d had the bamboo experience, I was unaware how industrial the tattoo machine felt by comparison. It seems now like a surprisingly pure expression of late-stage capitalism. “That’s a lovely little thing you’ve got there, bucko, but there’s been an Industrial Revolution and that bamboo shit don’t cut it. Here, let’s hook that fucker up to an engine and see how brutal we can make it.”

So I guess that’s all the votes for bamboo. Who knew?

This shows just how slow and methodical this process is, compared to the jackhammer of a mechanical tattoo pen.

Blessing

And… done. Nothing left but the final blessing. This is with the Master of the entire facility. He gets involved at the very end to perform the final blessing and lock everything down so it is all done to code and everything works properly. He threw stuff at me and chanted, so I’m pretty sure it worked.

Of course, nothing is explained to me, but for some reason the blessing ceremony involved the Master spraying me with water like I was the cat that Buddha desperately wanted off the table. While chanting.

You’ll notice that I’m sitting with my legs out and ankles crossed. I had been instructed to sit in the lotus position, but there is no part of me that bends like that anymore. Sadly, this was my closest approximation.

Once I was thoroughly soaked, the lotus flower petals I had so meticulously dismembered came home to roost. Also, there was chanting.

I am tattooed and blessed, with my tattoo fully activated with a spirit who will stay with me and watch over the tattoo to make sure it’s doing its job, protecting me as I travel the world. I’m sure my Berber tattoo and my Sak Yant will be talking to one another. I hope I’m able to sleep through the racket.

To a great extent, I built what passes for my career on this ability, along with writing. Those were the two things I did well enough to warrant a paycheck. I’ve been planning and organizing for so long it seems like part of my nature. And there’s a small part of our lives, managing the logistics of our travel, that still calls for that skill. Planes, trains, automobiles, and Airbnb.

But except for those occasional travel-related bursts, our days serve as an active rebuke to the entire notion of planning ahead. We pretty much wake up and decide what to do each day. We cannot recommend it highly enough.

For the past eight months, as we’ve been Stateside, I have been thrown headfirst back into the world of multivariate critical path management. Which has been almost exactly as much fun as that description makes it sound. It turns out that when I’m not engaged in planning and management as the daily wallpaper of my job and life, I find it kind of unpleasant. Being good at it doesn’t really reduce the sting.

The first six of our Stateside months were spent preparing our new apartment in Chicago. If we’re going to use that as a safe harbor and break from travel, it’s important that it be done when we next come back. It won’t be much of a rest if we return to more move-in projects.

Plumbing, electric, tile work, demolition, repair… Figuring out when tradesmen could execute their piece, how we needed to order their work, planning when we could slide in the pieces we were tackling ourselves, coordinating with the building. I was basically the general contractor on a small construction project.

We had about a month at the end of the process where we could just chill, which was nice. We got to enjoy Chicago a little bit, and we feel really good about the choice. There’s more than enough going on to keep us entertained during our annual summer US sabbatical, and when we’re all done traveling it’s a city well set up for oldsters.

For the last five weeks we’ve been in Temecula with Dorothy’s parents. They’re 92 and 88, and have finally admitted that their massive house is more than they can manage. They’re moving to Tucson to be near Dorothy’s sister, and their house needed to be cleaned and staged for sale. They’re flipping their expensive California property for a smaller, cheaper Tucson property and banking the difference, which they need. They haven’t done a great job managing their finances.

They’ve been in their current home for 24 years, and they’ve accumulated as much stuff as you’d expect, or more, all of which seems to hold some sentimental value for them. Prying them off of every tool, every stick of furniture, every Christmas decoration they’ve ever owned has been a grueling, unrewarding series of arguments. 20 boxes of holiday ornaments, most of which haven’t been put up in years. It was demoralizing.

But all of this was going on while we’re trying to strip the place down so it didn’t look like a Grandmacore stage set and cleaning it so it didn’t look like no one had ever cleaned it. And managing the various vendors and tradesmen who were doing the heavy lifting that we couldn’t. Figuring out what order to execute, when it’s safe to put new curtains up, making sure the outside windows and screens don’t get washed until the landscaping is done…

It’s a lot, made worse by the effort required to help people who don’t want to be helped, and who fought us every step of the way. I think the worst of it is that Dorothy and I pride ourselves on not wasting experience. When bad things happen, we’re dead set on figuring out what possibly useful thing we can extract from the episode. Even the arguably worst thing that has happened to us, the collapse of our successful business when we were in our 20s, served up useful perspectives on, if nothing else, how to avoid getting fucked like that in the future. There’s almost always some positive you can take away from even the worst situation.

But very rarely, every so often, you walk outside your front door and a meteor hits you. It came from nowhere, you didn’t do anything to cause it, and there’s nothing meaningful to take away from the experience. It was just a bad thing, and all you can do is rub some dirt in it and walk it off.

I could relate all of the arguments and stupidity and self-sabotage, but it wouldn’t mean anything. There’s nothing to be learned from it. Except, at best, the limits of filial piety. So we’re rubbing some dirt in it and walking it off, leaving a clean house and taking away a few bruises as souvenirs.

Our job was to prep it for sale and then skedaddle, and we’ve done both. There’s still the nightmare of actually moving that Dorothy’s sister is going to have to manage, but we got the elders as far as we could. Our hands may be tied, but they’re clean.

Which, thankfully, brings us to the first stop of our third year of travel: Cambodia. We arrive slightly beaten up, ready to relax and explore, and delighted that no more complex logistical challenges await us. Now we can just live day to day, as we’ve intended all along.

Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.

Since out first stop is Cambodia, it made more sense to leave from LAX than go back east to leave from Chicago. So pretty much the moment the photographer left we headed to LA. Our dear friend Bob Rossoff lives in LA, and he graciously drove down to Temecula to rescue us.

Photography was on a Monday and our flight was Wednesday evening, so we arranged two nights in the lovely Royal Pagoda Motel in Chinatown.

Which, whatever its kitsch exterior suggests, was actually fine.

Bob docented us through our brief LA stay. We took a walk in Griffith Park, we went to Sherman Oaks, where I grew up, for pastrami and chopped liver sandwiches, and Bob showed us an art installation he’d done beside the LA River. We also walked around Chinatown, which was weirdly silent. Bob explained that many of the businesses had failed to make it past lockdown, but the whole effect was of a Chinese Potemkin Village. Somehow it was charming, in a way I’m sure native Chinese abhor, ridiculous, as the entire Chinatown esthetic was created by two white architects who had never been to China, and disturbing, as the desolation made it feel like a post-apocalyptic hellscape where only the architecture had survived.

Choo Choo! Next Stop Singapore…

But not before fucking up the LAX airport experience. Remember how I started with how great I am at planning and organizing? Apparently that skill needs to be used more often if I expect to still apply it at a high level.

I’ve fucked up calendar timing for a flight before by being sloppy about time zone shifts, so I’m now super careful to doublecheck that time zones are correct for both arrival and departure locations. Not so careful, apparently, about checking the actual times. My calendar entry said that our flight left LAX at 5:00 PM, whereas the actual time was 10:05. Not entirely sure how that cog slipped, but I’ll add Check Your Fucking Tickets to my Paranoid Departure List. Which also now includes Make Sure Your Airline Hasn’t Gone Bankrupt.

But, of course, we didn’t arrive at the airport at 5:00. Bob dropped us off at 2:00, leaving us eight hours to kill at LAX. Which is a lovely airport, but it lacks about seven of the eight hours of entertainment we needed to fill. Especially since, given the lateness of the departure, Singapore Air’s ticket counters didn’t even open until 4:00. So the first two hours were spent in the modestly appointed public area of the airport.

We walked a lot. All the way to Singapore, it seemed.

Which was our transfer point to Cambodia. After about 18 hours in the air we were looking forward to a six hour layover at Singapore. Genuinely looking forward to it, as Changi Airport in Singapore is world renowned as the Disneyland of airports. Maybe looking forward to it a little less, after having to cool our heels at LAX for eight hours, but still. A treat.

And it only modesty disappointed. It turns out that some of the most amazing features are outside the security perimeter in the public parts of the airport. And while we technically had time to leave and reenter, it would also mean clearing immigration for Singapore, which we hadn’t planned for. No clue what the paperwork and bureaucracy requirements were. Better, even with six hours between flights, to not tempt fate.

Which still left plenty to do.

The first thing you notice about Changi is its sheer scale. It’s the third busiest airport in the world by passenger volume, handling almost 70 million passengers a year. Plus us.

The next thing you notice is how very, very green it is. There is an absurd amount of plantings. And water. And art. There’s pretty much an absurd amount of everything.

There’s also a large, impressive two story butterfly garden. Because of course there is.

I know nothing at all about butterflies, other than that they’re pretty, so there’s nothing clever or insightful about this. It’s just pretty pictures of pretty things. Shallow.

However, I did just finish the ninth book in the Veronica Speedwell series by Deanna Raybourn, about a Victorian lepidopterist who solves crimes with her swashbuckling beau. Which books are an order of magnitude better than that description makes them sound. Highly recommended high quality, lo-cal reading.

There’s a fair amount of video-based art, most of which was impressive in both conception and execution. Here’s a multistory installation that I think is part of one of the duty-free stores, even though we watched it for awhile and didn’t catch any branding.

Here’s Dreamscape, an installation that pulls it all together: plantings, water you can walk on, koi, and a digital sky.

And finally, our white whale: The Wonderfall. A four story digital waterfall that was outside the secured area. We never even saw it from a train. We are suffused with regret.

But all things must pass, even Changi airport, so we finally board our flight to Siem Reap. Where for one last time we get to truly enjoy the hostess uniforms for Singapore Air.

This is not a great photo, but as I was positioning myself for another attempt, Dorothy helpfully pointed out that taking multiple pictures of Singapore’s airport security infrastructure wasn’t my best idea.

Khmer, You

For accuracy’s sake, I should point out that that’s a visual pun. They pronounce it k-my. For decency’s sake I should delete it. Obviously. I’ll get right on that.

While we’re correcting pronunciation, we say kam-bo’-dee-ya, but they say kam-bo-djee’-ya. Pretty close to Kampuchea, as they were affectionately known during the Pol Pot years.

This leg is all Southeast Asia: Cambodia, Vietnam, and Indonesia. With the exception of Hanoi, we’re staying away from capital cities on this tour. So no Phnom Penh, or Ho Chi Minh City, or Jakarta. The big capital cities rarely seem to represent the best a country has to offer.

For Cambodia, we’re four weeks in Krong Siem Reap, home to Angkor Wat and all the rest of Angkor, which was the seat of the Khmer kingdom from the 9th to the 15th centuries. Angkor Wat is just the largest and best known temple in the area. But Krong Siem Reap itself has plenty going on, as it’s become one of Cambodia’s primary cultural centers. Plenty for us to explore in our four weeks.

We got into our Airbnb at about 7 in the evening. Dorothy passed out instantly, and my dinner was the rest of a bag of airport trail mix. Before I fell asleep standing up, I asked where the closest ATM was, which was about a half hour walk each way. I’d downloaded the local Uber equivalent, Grab, so I could very easily have called a tuktuk, but I was still pretty muzzy and I’d forgotten that was an option. I was going to walk, but our lovely hostess took me there and back on her scooter. That’s service.

With a fresh One Million riel in hand I went home to pass out, too. Knowing that I’d have to wake up to nasty exchange rate math. Up until this point we’d been mostly lucky on exchange rates. 10:1, 100:1, 20:1… those are all pretty easy to do in your head. But the riel was 4,000:1. One million riel was only $250. You can figure it out, but it takes some effort.

It turns out that almost everything here is denominated in USD. I have no idea why. It’s kind of weird. Anyplace that takes credit cards not only prices in USD but charges in USD. Cash transactions can be priced in riel or dollars, but they’ll take both. I still have to do math, since all of the bills in my pocket are riels, but it’s mighty convenient to have things priced in USD. You do the math once at the end, and not every time you’re trying to figure out what something costs. It is a little disorienting, though, to pay for something in riels and get change mixed between riels and USD, depending on what they have in available cash.

After we’d been here for a few days our hostess offered me one of their scooters, which seemed like an obviously bad idea. The traffic here, a mosh pit of cars, trucks, scooters, bikes, and tuktuks, reminds me of nothing so much as Mumbai, in the sense that it seems to be governed by the laws of physics rather than the rules of the road. Is there space for your vehicle? It’s clearly meant just for you.

The confounding thing is that while it looks random it clearly isn’t, or there would be pileups everywhere. Which means that there are implicit rules governing traffic that everyone has agreed to follow, but for the life of me I can’t decode them. I’ve watched every merge in every tuktuk we’ve been in, searching for the cues used to let you know it’s safe to insinuate yourself into traffic, and nothing. They are communicating, somehow, but I’ll be damned if I can figure out how.

No scooter for me. I would be a danger to myself and others.

Here’s an unexpected local oddity, what we refer to as the Fuck It Outlet. “Sure, fuck it, plug in whatever you like. I have the slots.”

We’ve never been anywhere where there wasn’t a standard that all devices adhered to, but everything that plugs in here has a different plug. If you can figure out the proper orientation.

Truthfully, I didn’t even know a universal outlet existed. Travel is broadening!

Our apartment is charming. We’ve had apartments in Morocco that were more ridiculously over the top, but this one has a generous layout, gracious amounts of storage, and lovely furnishings. We need a few things for the kitchen, but nothing serious. The host is responsive and the onsite staff is superb (the day after getting my scooter ride to the bank I walked literally a quarter block to the corner minimart to get water and ice, and when I turned to come back she was right behind me. She’d followed me to carry my bags back. I suspect she thinks I’m not safe alone). We’ve had a lot of accommodations that were just fine, but this one is actively good.

We’re a little outside the city center this time, so we’re not smack in the hurly-burly. We stayed three months in the Medina in Marrakech, and one takeaway is that we don’t need to be at ground zero for Action. The Medina was a little jangly.

We’re about a 45 minute walk to the heart of Siem Reap, but only about ten minutes by tuktuk, at less than $2. Grab is fast and convenient, and transportation is ubiquitous, so we’re fine with someplace a little quieter.

The weather has been surprising. Yes, it’s in the 90s every day, but there always seems to be a breeze that takes it down a notch, and the evenings have been lovely. It’s a little like the climate in Chetumal, only less clammy. We’ve been warned about the weather here, and it may well get bad, but we’ve been pleasantly surprised so far.

Rub Some Dirt In It And Get Carted Off

We wake up to our first full day ready to conquer Cambodia. We’re flush with cash, the morning is leavened with a cool breeze, and we’re a 25 minute walk to the grocery store. What’s not to love?

We stopped for breakfast on the way, our first local meal. The setting was delightful and the food was delicious. We felt relaxed for the first time in months, and talked about how ready we were to slide back into what has become our preferred rhythm for daily living. I definitely feel most at home now when we’re not at home.

Down the back stairs we go, ready to grab the day by the throat, but the day had other plans for us. About 3-4 steps from the bottom, Dorothy’s foot slid off the side of her sandal, twisting her ankle and tumbling her down the stone stairs to land face first in the dirt. This was like her stumble coming off the train in Tunisia, but obviously, at first glance, much, much worse. I was behind her on the steps and watched the whole thing, helpless to do anything.

We drew a crowd, including our waitress, who said she was calling her boss. Someone else said they were calling for help. We lost about ten minutes until I figured out no one had called for transportation to the hospital yet, so I dialed up Grab to get a car to the nearest hospital.

Meanwhile, we’d managed to get Dorothy turned face up. She was obviously in a lot of pain (I recognize the sound, sadly), but I also knew how terrified she was about her replaced knee. That’s what had caused the stress in Tunisia, worrying that she had damaged the artificial joint and convinced the next step would be medevac back to the US. There’s not a lot of soothing you can do to alleviate a fear like that. We’d just have to get her to the hospital where they could check her knee and address the gash on her shin.

The tally: busted lip, bruised jaw, bruised and swollen knee, badly sprained ankle, a ragged gash that would definitely leave a gaudy, Frankenstein scar, and road rash on hands, arms, face, and legs. So, date night.

The Grab car showed up in a few minutes, and with the help of the crowd we got her laid down across the back seat with only the expected amount of screaming. Our waitress had climbed into the car to help at Dorothy’s head while we were managing her feet, and then closed the door on herself and accompanied us to the hospital. Unexpected.

Once there, Dorothy was taken care of quickly. Someone dressed the gash pretty much right away. It took a little longer to get an x-ray and a doctor to review it, but all told I think we were there for no more than an hour. We’d have left skid marks in a US ER.

The x-rays were negative. Dorothy was cleared to lose the fear so she could focus on the pain. Don’t knock it. One less thing to worry about, especially the worst thing, is a win.

No stitches for the gash, which kind of surprised me, but I think it might have been too ragged to stitch. They cleaned it and dressed it, and everything else was a rounding error.

My only complaint about the hospital was the weak sauce of acetaminophen and ibuprofen they prescribed. This called for opiates, dammit. Fortunately, we don’t leave home without.

The other thing that happened while all this was going on was that the restaurant’s owner showed up, a lovely woman who took charge, communicating with staff and translating for us.

When we were all done she drove us to a pharmacy to get a cane and then took us back to our Airbnb, where our kind scooter hostess helped manhandle Dorothy up the stairs.

I’d like to report that, like our other hospital experiences on our travels (Mexico and Tunisia), Cambodia’s system was clean, efficient, and cheap. I can vouch for clean and efficient, but I have no idea what it cost, as the restaurant’s owner paid for everything and refused to let me reimburse her. While we were driving around to find a cane she shared her life story, which included the information that her husband was a very successful manager at Dow, and that she only ran her restaurants and hotels to provide jobs and education for her employees. I think she was trying to let us know that paying for our ER visit wasn’t a financial burden.

I’m sure that at least some part of her response was fear-based. An American Karen had fallen and hurt herself at her restaurant, which must be terrifying. We didn’t present in any way as troublesome, reassuring her that the blame was on Dorothy’s sandal and not her stairs. And she seemed genuinely kind and concerned. But there had to be at least a soupçon of let’s-just-keep-this-from-getting-out-of-hand.

It’s hard to overstate the level of kindness and care we received from strangers, from our waitress to her boss to the bystanders. Not exactly how I wanted our first day back in the saddle to go, but affirming nonetheless.

I’d reached out to our host while at the hospital asking if we could be moved closer to the ground floor so Dorothy didn’t have to manage getting up to the fourth. Our scooter hostess had prepared an apartment on the second floor, and when we got back helped move our things down. Thankfully, we hadn’t been there long enough to move in, so we just threw everything that had been strewn about back into suitcases, and she carried most of them down for us. Young and strong.

The new apartment is a tad smaller, but that’s fine. The other one seemed kind of pointlessly large. But we are missing the washing machine that our first apartment sported. There’s a laundry service a scarce half block away that returned beautifully folded laundry same day for $1/kilo. A week’s worth of laundry was $3. Why would we do our own laundry?

The barber is also just around the corner.

As exhausted as I was at this point, we still hadn’t made it to the grocery store we’d set out for in the morning. Despite the fatigue, I decided to take the 25 minute walk. I’d tuktuk back when I was laden.

On the way I ran across a kiddie car rental lot, which we’ve seen variations of in many countries. It never fails to charm.

We didn’t know how Supermarket the place we’d been told to go would be, so Dorothy sent me with a pretty deracinated list, assuming there would be few options. So “rice,” “coffee,” and “cooking oil,” as opposed to “jasmine rice,” “French roast coffee,” and “olive oil.”

The grocery store was a shiny new two story marvel, the equal of any Carrefour in North Africa.

So many choices, and no one to help, as Dorothy was fast asleep at home. I was overwhelmed, like Borat with cheese. I soldiered on manfully and was even able to buy fruit for breakfast, but I totally failed at veggies. Other than onions all the vegetables looked alike to me. But not in a racist way.

The Local Mercado

Everywhere has something like the Mexican mercado, sometimes open air, sometimes covered. The place where the locals buy fruits, vegetables, meats, spices, housewares, and lunch. It took us a minute to locate the Old Market, around the corner from the night markets downtown, but it didn’t disappoint. It’s an entire square block, with everything you could want. I think shopping for fresh groceries in the mercados may be our favorite activity when we travel.

I went a couple times on my own before Dorothy was stable enough to manage the narrow aisles and tight quarters. I spent a lot of time texting her photos of produce so I could bring her what she wanted.

Streetscape

There’s always interesting things to see just walking and driving around wherever we happen to be.

The Royal Independence Gardens are known for the colony of bats that live in its trees, specifically Flying Foxes, so named for their red fur. Bats being nocturnal and all, we expected to see them sleeping during the day, but they were super active. And screechy.

The Royal Independence Gardens are basically the front yard of the Royal Residence. Which is every bit as ornate as you’d expect.

One more thing. The cats here are mutants. They have this weird thing going on with their tails. There’s the odd freak with a normal tail, but 99% of the cats here have either ridiculous, stubby tails or, more likely, a bizarre kink. I know, Jerry, you have a bizarre kink, too, but no one wants to hear about it.

Follow Up Care

The ER we went to for Dorothy’s extravaganza had been strong on right now but weak on later, so we thought a follow up visit to check the wound would be prudent. Her ankle and knee were both healing nicely, and she was even starting to get some side-to-side action on the knee. But that wound was troublesome, and we needed to know if it was healing OK, and how long we should keep it bandaged and moist before letting it have air exposure.

Our host provided the name of the nearest local doctor/hospital: The Golden Queen. That sounds about right. They specialized in women’s issues, but they also handled the normal range of injuries and such. We were in and out in half an hour, which included the cleaning and dressing of the wound, a detailed and thorough consultation about caring for it while it healed, and a bonus Tetanus shot for good measure.

Oh, and a bill for $22.

But we live in the greatest country in the world. And don’t you ever forget it.

We now have a path forward on all of Dorothy’s various recoveries. It’s probably going to be at least another week before she’s ready for any serious sightseeing, but we’re arranging some car sightseeing for a few days from now.

And we’re here for four weeks. While that’s a short visit for us, we have plenty of time to see what needs to be seen, and no reason to begrudge the healing time. We have ordered our lives to have nothing but time, so when something like this happens we’re not derailed.

Just slowed down.