Angkor What?
Siem Reap, Cambodia

Yesterday, after they pulled my backpack from the dusty bus compartment, I gave it a good patting off. Then I buckled, walked, and plopped down at--"That guest house no good. Very noisy. Japanese there," the moto driver told me right before my plopping. Indeed the guest house was full of Japanese and Japanese books, and it was cheap. But it was quiet.

The Japanese are the number one tourist group in Cambodia. Their government does nice things, like build roads and help with Angkor Wat's numerous restoration projects. I like the ones at my guest house. They don't talk to me, and when they do, it's only a moment before they look back down at their little anime books. And did I mention they're cuddly? And they let me sleep?

Sleep so I could get up early. Early so I could get to the world's largest religious site before the sun did.

No problem. The guesthouse owner had a motorbike driver waiting for me at 6 a.m. and we zoomed through the cold streets six kilometers north of town. I paid my $20 day pass fee and we were soon revving around moats and millenium-old stone structures to my first planned stop. They used to do it by elephant.

I followed the "established" one-day itinerary, the one started, I think, by the French, some time after they "discovered" the site. Because the gate of Bayan faces east, tourist logic says that's the place to start. Ta Prohm is shrouded in jungle canopy because the trees have grown like snakes into the very structure of the temples, making it dangerous to cut them down. The third place, Angkor Wat itself, faces west, so that's the place to see the sun set, they say. Made sense to me. Lonely Planet said I might be smart to reverse the order to avoid the rush.

I know what the world's most popular travel book series is. I see the people who read it as gospel truth. I knew what they'd be doing. So I stuck to the original plan. I would see the sun rise where the French tourists did.

I won't try to immortalize Angkor. The task is too great, the path too well-trodden. I can only give my personal anecdotes.

Bayan was quiet at 6am. I beat the tour guides even. As I wandered under the spires with bodhisattva Avolokiteshvara's giant faces peering out in the four cardinal directions in my every periphery, I got a second wave of awe (the first being the motorbike ride itself through the ancient streets). I made my way to the center. An ancient buddha figure was draped in an orange robe under an umbrella. I did not enter. The umbrella was guarding against the torrents of bat guano dropping from the chirping mammals in the tower. So I looked at the Bas-Reliefs instead.

As I moved to the other complexes in the Bayan area, I began to see more and more orange-robed monks and white-robed nuns wandering around. I meditated near a few and then they moved off. I followed them. When I came over the next crumbling wall, my whole field of vision was filled with milling orange figures. I smiled. They smiled. An older gentleman with a staff shaped like a seahorse came up to me.

"This is my chopstick," he said, holding out the stick and laughing. "I mean, my stick."

We began a long discussion about what was going on. He told me this was the fourth day of their annual nation-wide pilgrimage to this holy site, where the Khmer kings of old had held their temple rites. The oldest monks were in their fifties and the youngest were fifteen.

"One tousand, two hundred tirty monks are here," he said. "Last night, we slept over there. Tonight, we sleep over here," he said pointing to the forest floor.

A crowd of smiling faces and orange robes was gathering. One of the monks interjected with what I presume was a question about my religion with, "what are you?"

The older monk butted in good-naturedly. "He is human being. You are human being. I am human being. We are all human being."

Before I knew it, I was talking to several of them and the older monk had vanished. The discussion turned to their alms bowls, which they all had slung around their necks on straps. For their noon-time meal, the monks go to the community for food. The monks cannot kill, drink or have sex, but if someone gives them meat, they're obliged to eat a part of it before giving the rest back.

The discussion turned sexual when the monks confirmed that they could not touch or be touched by women. They could not even look a woman in the face. I interjected some third-gender sexual politics when I asked if they could touch someone who doesn't consider him/herself either gender, like a native American berdache. Third gender did not compute.

"Could you touch a ladyboy?" I asked.

"As long as the person was born a man, we can touch him."

Certainly the early dogmatists behind this strange Buddhist rule had no idea that people--especially surgeons and feminists--would break the gender binary.

In addition to all those monks, there were about a thousand nuns too. A twelve year old boy hugging a random temple Buddha told me in his perfect English that there were a 1,700 nuns. While leaving that enclave and returning to the tourist grounds, I saw the congregated monks listening to a Dharma talk. The older monk with the staff was in the front of a long line, beaming. I beamed back and we exchanged small waves goodbye.

The rest of the day, I traipsed around, fending off vendors and beggars, occasionally giving in. I lasted seven hours in unusual heat and body-withering sun. When I asked a ticket checker how he was at midday, he said simply "hot."

I'm not sure I liked paying the $20 entrance fee because Angkor is managed by a Vietnamese oil company and I don't like where the profits are going. It's like buying Kraft Macaroni and Cheese knowing that Phillip Morris owns the Kraft brand. Still, if this oil company will employ the locals to walk along the roads and sweep the nonexistent debris from the dirt shoulders, then it can't be all bad for Cambodia. I just wish more of the money was going back into Angkor. Though every fifth temple had some restoration activity going on, it certainly wasn't enough. Resurrecting this complex site from the clutches of the jungle takes more than just corporate accountability.

At least Cambodians get into this national treasure for free. But the thing I wonder is...why did the Cambodians get so upset last year when the Thai people claimed they had just as much right to Angkor as the Cambodians? They're both Khmer people. When did all this nationalism get in the way? Certainly neither Cambodia nor Thailand existed in their present forms when the Khmer empire began to crumble and this site receded into the trees. What gives?