The issue now was money. I was the only one with a card that could work in Cambodia, and the two times I had tried it in Phnom Penh I had failed. Of course, this was pathetically mere user error, and when I finally figure out the correct option to choose, we were once again in the money.
The night was cool and there was a festive feeling throughout the tourist area of Siem Reap. This part of town could have been anywhere in South East Asia, any tourist area in the world, really. The strange and thrilling aspects of Cambodia were mostly kept at bay outside the brightly lit, well-kept bars and restaurants. It was a glowing oasis in the dirt and destitution. There were paper-white parents and their little children, older teens dressed in the sad fashions instituted by western pop culture and fragile old couples whose sensibilities would not have survived the realities of the surrounding country, but here in Siem Reap they were perfectly at ease. I felt a sense of comfort at these familiar surroundings, and also a sense of disappointment. It was an uneventful evening.
The next day we headed out with the crowds to see what we had ostensibly made this trip to see, Angkor Wat. It was impossible not to find a tuk-tuk to take us there, and we joined an entire entourage of tuk-tuks headed in the same direction.
The title temple, Angkor Wat, we saw first. As we entered the park we saw the tops piercing through the forest canopy. When we turned a corner and began following the moat that borders it, this marvelous structure slowly entered the frame and was soon laying before us like the skeleton of a once eminent king.
Once eminent, but now crawling with little parasites who fed on its extinguished glory, smoking cigarettes, taking yottabytes of photos and shouting their oohs and aahs across its hollow, though no longer hallowed, halls. Jeff and I, just two more little germs out to discover what has already been discovered and lost again, bought a beer a piece at the crowded and obnoxious market located not 10 yards from the magnificent bridge and crossed the moat into one of the grandest examples of ancient architecture in the world.
We spent two days wandering through the various other temples scattered throughout the park, occasionally stumbling across a quiet pile of rocks towards the rear of the park where a quiet contemplation of the religious beauty was possible. There was the Bayon, a crumbling old temple reminiscent of a drip sandcastle with tipsy stupas adorned in each of the four cardinal directions with large, smiling faces. There was Ta Prohm, untouched in regards to reconstruction and restoration, where large trees literally grow out from the fallen stones, giving the temple a magical quality I had previously only experienced in my dreams. This is probably why it was featured in the movie Tomb Raider, and also the reason for the flood of people that poured incessantly through the entrance, eddied in crowds around the main attractions then rushed on through the rest of the temple. It was amazing to see...the temple I mean, not the human sewage flow.
We had one final day in Siem Reap before we had to begin our two day journey back to Ho Chi Minh City. While we had paid for a three day pass to the temples, we decided against returning for a third day. We had, with our own eyes, witnessed the glory of Angkor Wat and dozens of secondary buildings surrounding it. We had seen the beautiful Khmer script engraved in the rock walls, the graceful Buddhas posed enigmatically in dark, cool chambers and atop towering walls; we had seen the tourists and their trash, the little children selling useless junk in jittery flocks like pigeons; we had seen what we had come to see and had no desire to return.
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