Sketches from Siem Reap

Buddha meditating with Naga as the protector - If only I could spend the whole day in the Angkor National Museum, more sketches would have been added to the notebook for reference.

It’s close to midnight and so many things are running through my head. Work starts tomorrow night and then there’s that meeting for another trip to Chiang Mai for work, classes and those darn Spanish conjugations…

What is really bothering me is how much I miss the atmosphere in Siem Reap. The  sights, food and drinks, the air (though dusty but not hazy), the crispy edible insects… but oddest of all, I miss the people the most. Although I was cheated by swindlers in temple sites, harassed by desperate child peddlers, constantly followed around by other tuk-tuk drivers offering me rides, mistaken time and again for being a Cambodian even though I took pains to look like a foreigner… all these and yet I miss it.

It’s been a while since the trip but there are nights when I stay awake wondering why. I suppose that knowing their violent and sad history has something to do with it.

By morning, when I wake to go for breakfast, I am cordially greeted by the Front Desk staffs as I walk pass them to get to the cafe. While quietly having my meals, they would quietly approach me, shyly asking for my opinion if the meal is agreeable. The never failing and always punctual Mr. Kea, our tuk-tuk driver for the duration of our journey – who, despite all those long hours and biting hot sun, never lost his smile even once (except when he thought hard about something I would ask him). The children who followed me around, cajoling to begging me to buy whatever they are selling – anything at all starting from one dollar. The many landmine victims I would encounter as I walk around the ancient sites, playing musical instruments, making beautiful & haunting music with whatever limbs they have left just to earn a few dollars to survive. My heart still goes out to them.

Ta Keo, the mountain temple : One of the top most challenging ancient sites to climb up to! Later saw a shirt in the night market stating - "I survived Cambodia" and out of some 4 sites printed on it, Ta Keo was mentioned~! Coincidence? I think not!

Their faces are etched with the many memories of how their earlier generations were taken from them without warning and without mercy. The nation which crumbled in the hands of one man because of an ideal gone wrong and the 2 million who died over of it, leaving behind survivors who are physically and/or emotionally crippled, scarred, helpless, desperate… Children who are growing up not knowing their grandparents and are struggling to survive by selling on the streets, bootleg copies of books, postcards and all sorts of other curios.

I am glad that they have all those marvelous ancient sites left for them to look forward to. How magnificent their past must have been, judging from the many intricate and sometimes impossible stone masonry. Just reading back into the notebook I kept of that trip makes me feel like a part of me is still back there.

This is going to take me some time to figure out on how I want to write it. They should be remembered well because they need it. Their desperation is just something else. I just hope that with whatever meager vocabulary I have, I won’t make their existence seem like a passing remark.

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