Grand Tour

I switched hotels this morning. My friend Stuart had recommended a place and I figured it was worth a shot. Where the bus, which took me to Siem Reap, had taken us was a new part of the town, just down this one road that had nothing going on but hotels, totally isolated from everything else. While driving down to the new hotel, I saw a city. From my tuk-tuk I saw bars and restaurants and shops, there were monuments and stores and a river. The hotel I was now staying at was right by the old market, just down a dirt road but still only a few blocks from the center of town.

Today I visited the sequence of sites known as the Grand Tour. This includes the further and less well preserved sites. Some of these were temples created by the same king that created Angkor Thom. To see the temples still broken was very cool. I got some great shots of the jungle creeping back in. There were also much fewer people at these sites because they are more spread out and not as frequently visited as those I saw yesterday. These sites had a very discovering ruins kinda feel. They were not nearly as thoroughly restored and a couple were left exactly as they were when the French first saw them 150 years ago.

Police in Cambodia only make $30 per month so they all have second “jobs.” I started talking to one who was on duty at the temples and offered me a guided tour. I gave him more than I should have but he seemed to know what he was talking about, was interesting, and his English was impeccable. He had grown up in the area and really loved the sites. He was a good story teller and it was pretty cool until he got too into his religious philosophies and the coincidence of numbers, comparing the numbers of fingers to celestial and religious symbols, even if he had to add a couple to make things work. His stories took a decided turn for the interesting when he told me he had joined the Khmer Rouge at the age of 14. He then switched sides under the new government and eventually became a policeman.

The Khmer Rouge had done a number on the sites. They destroyed any Buddhist symbols they found. The heads of stone statues were smashed, metal figures were buried in the fields and bullet holes pepper the wall. To this day, people still go out in the fields with metal detectors looking for artifacts to sell to the international market. I knew a Cambodian years ago who had bought a Buddha statue from a monk which was supposedly dug up. I’ve heard of pieces offered to tourists by police guarding the site. My guide’s current job was to now patrol the area and chase off looters.

My guide eventually explained that he believed Pol Pot was not completely responsible for everything that went on under Democratic Kampuchea and most of the problems Cambodia faced were because of the king that supported him and the Vietnamese that occupied the country after the Khmer Rouge. Probably to be polite, he didn’t mention the US bombings and US backed government of Lon Nol, both of which certainly helped Khmer Rouge recruitment in response.

He showed me a couple of his bullet wounds. I would be surprised if he hadn’t killed in his past. I couldn’t press too many more questions as Cambodian’s don’t feel comfortable talking about that time. There is still debate whether that period of their recent history should be discussed in the schools. Because of the number of people involved and the number lost, the only way for them to move forward is to not hold blame.