Take-Aways

You may have seen pictures, read or heard about the splendour of Angkor but nothing can ever prepare you for the actual site. It’s a mind-boggling combination of elegance and size, harmony and impact with modernity hardly interfering with it. Coming upon it you feel like you are the first person to discover it, despite the other people there. They are all dwarfed by the frenzy from the jungle and the silence of the stone. What is it that makes a place in a particular time know a glory that the world has never seen only to find it in ruins a few centuries later? Is it comforting or scary to know that some time everyone’s turn will come both on the ebb and flow of the wave? Is it good for a country to have that history? To have the best they can contribute to the world already behind them? Or does that make them complacent and arrogant, all the more when in the present things are not as good. I think this about Cambodia but I also wonder about my own country. We are so proud of the things we really had no hand in and that we rarely live up to. All I know here is that if Cambodia did not have Angkor there would be little to hold on to, to keep going. People with such history should not be reduced to begging. And yet both exist side by side in the ruins of Angkor. To see the major temples you have to drive around a 32km loop at least and at each stop children run at you and follow you with cries of “buy from me.” They are relentless, well coached and insistent. They know that if they ask you long enough your resistance will bend. They break my heart and harden it at the same time. What is the right thing to do? How can you let yourself be touched and softened by the rocks and resist the people? And yet, is it really the right thing to encourage this trade in sympathy and guilt, particularly when it involves children that really have no choice? I have decided that my attitude is not to give to children but it’s exhausting to say no and with every rejection I dished out I only felt that much smaller and more arid. By the end of the day I could take no more of it. Sometimes I wonder if tourism is a blessing or a curse for the country that lives off it. How much of your soul and essence do you have to sacrifice to hoard in the crowds? Angkor is truly a wonder of this world, a testament to an advanced, proud and aesthetic civilisation. It is on this country’s money, flag and beer and it must make every Cambodian intensely proud. I wonder if what my Swiss friend told me is true. Apparently, of the ticket’s proceeds, only 10% go to the upkeep of the monuments. The remainder is, opaquely, managed by a petroleum company and the government. So much so that next to every single temple there is a sign mentioning the country that has assumed responsibility for its financing. It is a fitting symbol. Even when, as in the temple of Ta Phrom, huge roots are strangling the stone and whole secular trees grow out of the rooftops. Gods that used to reign supreme are now thrown in a melee of piled stone covered in green moss. Nature is claiming back every nook and cranny of this monster human intrusion to the jungle. More so in fact as it still standing there shows true achievement and the endless endurance of these people in th efface of a dire history. It is also a symbol of everything that still needs fixing in this country. The big stones, the vast monasteries, the intricate carvings of Buddhist and Hindu origins, the water reservoirs that look like endless lakes and Angkor Wat itself, are proof that anything is possible.