It's ten o'clock in the morning and the temple children are working.
"Hello mister! One dollar!"
"You buy from me, okay?"
"You come back from temple, I remember you!"
Not actually allowed inside the major Angkor ruins, they mostly ply their wares from shady trees and shabby shacks surrounding the temples. Their friendly smiles belie their sharpness. For the tourist who shows their annoyance, they have snappy comebacks.
"You buy scarf, one dollar! You buy cold drink, one dollar!"
"No! I want nothing!"
"You buy nothing, one dollar!
Still inexperienced in the art of the hard-sell, the nicer you are the more they'll leave you alone. You can then slowly work your way through them to the temple. Khmer people are by nature extremely shy. This goes double for rural areas like Siem Reap near the Angkor ruins. Local moto drivers, the hardest of nuts, will not trouble you if they see you refuse another, which makes it hard to hail a ride if you change your mind.
Only the locals who work in the ruins are allowed in:- Cleaners and maintenance staff, lounging wherever the stonework throws a shade; monks strolling serenely, flashes of orange through the cramped cloisters; guards, nervously armed sixteen-year olds; and policemen, often trying to make a buck by selling their badges. For the average Cambodian the entry fee is prohibitive: USD$20 for one day, when most would be lucky to earn USD$40 a month.
Angkor Wat is the most impressive and best preserved of the Angkor Ruins. It is also the largest, which helps it accommodate the crowds of tourists who jam its corridors and climb its stairs every day. Every part of it used to be decorated with intricate carvings and bas-reliefs before years of conflict allowed looters to surreptitiously strip statues and artifacts to sell on the archaeological black market, but you can still see the ubiquitous apsaras - celestial nymphs - and miraculously intact terrace-long bas-reliefs adorning walls.
These stone murals are a major feature of Angkor, and even their orientation on the walls is heavy with religious and historic significance. They almost exclusively depict battles, some mythical, some real. Examining all of them with a photocopied guidebook, I learned more about Hindu Mythology than I'd ever wanted to know. The armies of heaven, hell, and earth are in turn slaughtered as Rama/Vishnu/Shiva, returns in different incarnations with different numbers of arms to deliver divine thrashings, like the Dalai-lama of whup-ass.
Some time before 1200AD - 50 years after Angkor Wat was built - the official religion changed from Hinduism to Buddhism and a wave of revisionism swept through the Angkor empire, hastily turning Vishnus into Buddhas and inspiring the construction of the Bayon - the second major Angkor ruin - with its 54 Buddha-heads smiling in four directions.
There is more to Angkor than just Angkor Wat. Lasting almost a thousand years, Angkor was once a metropolis of over 1 milion Khmers. Powerful kings and skilled artisans built monuments to themselves - the legendary temples - that would dwarf European efforts for 500 years. Jayavarman 7 for instance, built identical temples Preah Khan and Ta Prohm, one dedicated to his father and the other to his mother; proving my ex-girlfriend wrong by having parental issues and still getting somewhere in life. Preah Khan is in pristine condition, while Ta Prohm has been 'allowed' to remain an overgrown ruin for the purists who want a 'jungle temple' experience. There are over thirty buildings to visit in a complex that can be seen from space. Each building has a different history and function, and were part of a network of waterways and reservoirs that supported the empire's agriculture.
The temples provide for the Khmer people even now, bringing in regular harvests of tourists and foreign money, sorely needed to rebuild their shattered country. Contrary to popular belief, the ruins were never 'lost' after the Khmer capital moved to Phnom Penh, but were used constantly for religious ceremonies until civil war made the area unsafe in the 1970s. Over three million people are believed to have died at the hands of the Khmer Rouge. Disease, starvation, and land mines claim more every day, even though the nation is officially 'at peace'. The majority of Cambodians live in rural areas, and farm either fish, rubber, or rice. However, by a strange twist of international trade, imported American rice - subsidised heavily by the US government - is cheaper in Siem Reap than the local produce.
Tourism is a lucrative business in a country where two US dollars can buy a large meal for two. No one knows this more than the government who collect hefty money from visas, passes, and now boat tickets on the Tonle Sap. Unfortunately, it is likely that much of the money will not get passed on to the public, as the government under reinstated Sihanouk is reputed to be as corrupt as it was before the Khmer Rouge came to power.
To their credit, entrepreneurial Cambodians have been quick to tap the tourist vein by themselves.
"Helloonedollar!" the temple children yell at me, with a big grin and a wave. It is hard to resist the urge to rescue even the seasoned ones, and smuggle them home in hand luggage so they can be brought up western-style; perhaps in a country where babies are simply worth more.
I tried to strike conversations with them, and am now sure that the only English they know is 'Helloonedollar' or simple variations. Thankfully, they are not as cynical or hard-headed as seems at first. In fact, they seem to believe they're simply saying 'hello', and are certainly taken aback when rebuffed. Their eagerness to play games with me at the expense of their trade confirmed that these children were still children.
They're brought out to the temples by some very hard-to-catch characters. Seeing a little girl with a forehead mark signifying traditional medical treatment, and hearing her hawk up some sailor-size spitballs, I offered her a cough lolly from my bag. Before you could say 'menthol', a man came out of nowhere and barked at her in Khmer that must have meant: 'get back in your box'. The girl hurried to her 'territory', the man - likely her father - went back to his shady rest spot, and I beat it; the man watching me as I passed through the temple to meet my driver.
Every day, Sith - my driver - and I strained his 150cc moto travelling the road between Siem Reap and the temples; probably the only motorway in Cambodia which doesn't have potholes. Motos are the utility pickups of developing nations. You can fit a family on one, use it to cart livestock, and perform many other feats of moto-batics. The road toll is controlled by a 40kmh limit, and shocking roads that often force a much slower speed. After zipping around the temples we dined at his favourite buffet eatery, where the price started at 1 USD per head and fell every time we went there.
With such great budget places all around Siem Reap, it's hard to imagine a 'bigger end' of town, but it's certainly there - or at least being developed. Siem Reap is a country town undergoing incredible change. The Lonely Planet Guide described internet access as almost nonexistent. Yet here I was, three years after publication, faced with e-cafes every ten steps. Four-and-five-star hotels are popping up all along the scarred strip of road between town and airport. At the very top end is the Grand Hotel D'angkor, around USD$500 per night, held in such high esteem by the locals that newlyweds customarily have their wedding night in a suite, and both families save for a lifetime to pay the bill. Near the other end are the guesthouses, where USD$15 will still get you a two-bed air-conditioned ensuite room and breakfast in the morning.
No matter where you stay, it will still be miles above what your average local calls home. It's no secret that conditions are bad in Siem Reap. Poor health services and nutrition means that Cambodia is a nation of thin young people. Throughout my trip I was extremely self-conscious of how old and fat I was in comparison. Ten minutes out of town, and the places are worse. Children often die, are orphaned, or sold to free space and bring money into the little wooden cubes their families call home.
The San Kheum Orphanage between the airport and Siem Reap is one of many places, in the absence of visible government action, that endeavours to save them from these fates. The Norwegian owners of my guest house sponsor the orphanage and one of its children, and invited me to visit with them. We arrived as the boys and girls practised the graceful 'apsara' dance that had existed since some clever sort thought up apsaras over a thousand years ago. If the children near the temples evoked any protective instinct in me, the kids at the orphanage had a ten-fold effect. Incredibly shy and quiet, yet curious and friendly at the same time, they crowded around me to see their group photo in the small screen of my digital camera, and I was smitten. I wanted to rescue every one of them.
The little girl sponsored by the Norwegians at Earthwalkers Guesthouse looked longingly at the dancers from the sidelines. She had polio and couldn't join in as her leg braces would make for a very robotic apsara. Bruno and Martin rescued her from her family on the banks of the Tonle Sap lake.
"When we fount her she couldn't walk, she had cholera, she was starving. It was bad, marn. Now she doesn't want to go back."
Tonle Sap is South-East Asia's biggest freshwater lake. It is also very shallow. In the wet season it balloons out to 10000sqkms, but in the dry season it shrinks to 2500sqkms, leaving those who depend on it for food literally high and dry. From the air, Tonle Sap at full capacity looks like a flood plain. Treetops of submerged forests line underwater roads, plied by assorted boats like waterworld highways.
It was at a floating coffee shop that formed part of the floating village that Sith asked me to explain the difference between 'Catholic' and 'Christian'. It turned out that a few of his friends had become Catholics, but seemed awfully secretive about it. Or at least, they could not explain the essence of Catholicism. Putting my Lutheran education to good use for the first time, I described Anti-semitism, the Crusades, Protestantism, the Reformation, and the problem in Northern Ireland on the back of a Catholic Church brochure.
I also made sure to highlight the church's charity work in Siem Reap, and Sith took it all in with good humour. When I asked why he didn't join he said,
"They give school, they give medicine, yes. But they say: 'you no Khmer [traditional] medicine'. They say 'you no go medicine man', 'you only go hospital'; 'You no go pagoda'."
Apart from the Catholic church in Siem Reap, there is a floating version on Tonle Sap, in the semi-buoyant, satellite lakeside town of Chong Khneas; where the ferry from Phnom Penh lands. Children spend their recesses running out of the church classroom and launching into the water from the Virgin-Mary-blue bannisters on its hull.
Passing them in the boat, I remembered that it had been a lifetime since I'd checked my email or heard a mobile ringtone. I had, since landing, only seen jungles, temples, rice fields, and blue sky, uncluttered by roads or power lines. I knew now why they smiled so freely, despite surviving odds that make the western middle-class balk. The temple children had rescued me.
