Destination: Cambodia

Movie: The Killing Fields

Guidebook: Footprint Cambodia Handbook

Book: Khmer: Lost Empire of Cambodia by Thierry Zéphir

People always ask a traveler, “What was your favorite destination?”  I have found something to love about everywhere I go, so choosing a favorite might be difficult.  However, I can answer without hesitation that the place of my travels that stays in my heart and mind is Cambodia.  I might feel quite different had I gone to busy and sometimes sad Phnom Phen. Instead I focused on Siem Riep and the temples of Angkor Wat.

The landscape of varied green trees and rice paddies all misty like a water color painting.  The romantic and relentless twining of fig tree roots around gray rocks that once were sturdy walls, now tumbled into abstract sculptures creating ponds for croaking frogs. The enormous and intimidating heads towering above the yellow-clad bicycling monks at Ta Prohm. The delicate carvings in golden stone at Banteay Srei, the Woman’s Temple.

I would like to find a book that reflects the Buddhist calm of the country (I constantly caught myself thinking, “How can they smile so much with such a dreadful recent history?”) and the beauty of the countryside. For now I am stuck with books that tell the stories of the worst days of Cambodia. Americans tend to freeze Cambodia in the years after the Vietnamese War. We have a sense of remorse and guilt, but the history is deep and rich before that time.

A Little Ancient History

I hope that  people planning a trip to Cambodia, or people who just want to learn more about Cambodia, will be able to find this wonderful little history. From the full-page black and white photos of carving details in the front of the book to the tipped-in full-page color pictures in the center, Khmer: Lost Empire of Cambodia is a visual delight.

But just as appealing, it tells you things that ordinary guidebooks gloss over or ignore entirely.  I learned, here, for example, of the importance of water use in the ancient kingdoms, and how dereliction in tending the canals ultimately led to the downfall of the Khmer.  The book helped me sort out the many periods of battle with the Thais, the relationship with the land that is now Vietnam, and dozens of other little facts that enhanced my trip to Siem Riep. And for such a small book, it does an excellent job of covering the complexities of the Hindu and Buddhist religions and the back and forth of their influences in the Khmer kingdom.

The 127-page book not only shows page after page of illustrations of the art work in the temples, but aerial shots and maps to help you sort out what was where. A good index and plenty of footnotes and suggested reading makes it almost a scholarly work, but never dry and boring. The author, after all, studied and teaches at the Ecole du Louvre. No doubt all the archaeology that continues in Cambodia has drawn some new conclusions in the ten years since this book was published [this review was written in 2009], but when you are dealing with a civilization a thousand years old, nothing essential changes in ten years.

Finally, without this book, I might not have known about the beautiful, delicate Banteay Srei, which has only recently become available to tourists when I visited Cambodia. I wonder what one fact that you discover might be the most important in your own exploration of the ancient kingdom?

Practical Guidebook

There are more good travel guidebooks to Cambodia now than when I went there in 1999, but I learned much about the history, art and architecture of Cambodia from the Footprint Cambodia Handbook . The other books I read were about grim history and war, and I did not record their titles.

Yet To Be Read

• When Broken Glass Floats by Chanrithy Him, a memoir of what the Cambodians refer to as the time of Pol Pot.
• First They Killed My Father by Loung Un
• The Stones Cry Out: A Cambodian Childhood 1975- 1980 by Molyda Szymusiak and Linda Coverdale
• Cambodia Now: Life in the Wake of War by Karen J. Coates. This one sounds very promising, and I am hoping my library has it, because the price is quite high.

A MOVIE

A must, of course, for the wartime memory, is the movie The Killing Fields, with Sam Waterson. Our guide in Cambodia pointed vaguely in the direction of the killing fields near Siem Reap–the famous ones are near Phnom Phen–but didn’t want to take us there, because he felt it was best NOT to remember.

Photos by VMB, who apologizes for the pre-digital quality. All rights reserved.