exquisite indonesia

imagine a tourist from indonesia arriving in san francisco. in the airport, she turns to the couple behind her, asking them for a hotel recommendation. after chatting for a while, they offer to drive her to the hotel themselves. on second thought, once in the car, they invite her to come home with them. they make her food and take her out to see san francisco.

the tourist heads on to berkeley. on the bart ride there, she's asking about hotels. a mom and son invite her to hop in their cab, and take her to a hidden jem themselves. it's delightful, with old-fashioned architecture and artifacts from the gold rush in california scattered everywhere. it's got a lovely pool. the hotel staff bring hot tea and leave it on the table outside her room every morning. in the evenings there are symphony practices and people gather to listen, drinking tea and chatting in the courtyard.

in the daytime, her new friends take her by motorbike to museums, hidden hang-out spots, and markets with dozens and dozens of stalls of bizarre foods and lovely fabrics. people at the hotel invite her on their lunch hour to go to the local square for modern dance performances.

indonesia's been sorta like this. hard to imagine the reverse happening, for an indonesian tourist to america. but i've had to push myself to keep up with all of the invitations. my third night here, i walked into an old hotel with a gamelan performance - traditional balinese music - with everyone drinking tea in a lantern-lit hall, antiques everywhere. it was honestly magical, an experience that felt as if it could happen nowhere else in the world, only in java. so much of southeast asia looks so similar in respects to places elsewhere in the world that it is delightful and unexpected to come upon places that feel singular, unique, untarnished.

Wanders through rural Cambodia

We flew into Siem Reap, Cambodia to explore the Angkor Wat temple complex. Because of the sprawling nature of the temples, the best way to see them is to hire a tuk-tuk (moborcycle-drawn buggy) driver for the day who will take you to the temples and wait for you while you explore. We met our driver, Sopheap (Pheap for short), when he picked us up from the airport and we liked him so we hired him for all three days of exploring. Angkor was great. But the best part of being there was modern-day Cambodians.

On the third day after visiting a few more temples we drove out to his village. We stopped first in the nearest town and he let us walk around the market for a little bit. We bought some incredible rice and coconut waffles for 6 cents each. Most of the people there were really warm and welcoming but it was apparent that some locals weren't psyched to see tourists leaving the well-tread tourist track.

Moving onwards from the village we went out a bumpy dirt road to the pagoda. A new monk was being initiated, and a day and a half-long party was winding down as we arrived, but there were still nearly 100 people wandering the temple grounds or sitting in a communal hall.

Our guide first brought us to the temple where there was a very beautiful Buddha and some 40 plus incredible paintings on the walls and ceiling depicting the life of the Buddha and some of his former lives. As we walked around the room, he told us the story by interpreting each painging for us. His friend was one of the main painters. Pheap said that each painting cost about US$100 and had been paid for by donations from the villagers. Quite impressive considering that an average daily wage is just over $1. (Even in the city where there are better tourism jobs, people still only usually make between $40-60 per month). Guides are the exception: they make $20 upwards a day. But the license costs $1200 US, an enormous sum, so only the wealthier Cambodians can afford to secure guide licenses for the ruins.

Finally we made our way to the central room, to meet his grandmother and maybe 10-15 other older women. With our guide doing all the translating, we learned that his grandmother was 82 and others there were 83, 79, 80, etc. They were all freshly shaved and in the white robes of women devoted to studying the Dharma in the later years of their life as they approached death. We were invited to join their circle, and they specifically said that they wanted to get a good look at us, to see what a white person's face looked like up close. They asked our ages and all laughed when they learned that Daniel is younger than I am.

Next, off to meet his family. The road got progressively worse and we had to get out to walk for a part of it. His sister made us some food and we sat and talked for a while again using our guide as the translator. After lunch, his grandmother joined us while Pheap disappeared on a long errand for 30 or 45 minutes. Daniel and I of course spoke no Khmer and they spoke no English.

The grandmother started grabbing her breasts and pointing at my breasts while saying something in Khmer. We couldn't figure it out. She was able to ask if I had children, and I laughed and said no, no baby. Eventually, she lifted up her bra and pointed quizzically at my breasts again. I figured out finally that she couldn't understand why I was so skinny and yet had a chest ... you get the picture. It was pretty funny and sent us all into a fit of laughter.

Then Pheap's sister brought out her wedding pictures. We later learned that about 500 people had attended the wedding, which cost about $2000 (yes, that's a lot of money here). When our guide came back more and more people filed in until there were maybe 12-15 family members circled around us.

Someone pointed out, quite bluntly, that we must be very rich to be able to travel like this. Daniel took initial offense: he doesn't even crack the 5-digit annual salary line! In the states he'd hardly be considered rich, or even standard. But of course we realize that by most of the world's standards, we are rich. What a trip. Living on $12 a day, which is a Cambodian's weekly salary.

heart of darkness

Phnom Penn, the capital of Cambodia, was interesting. It's the only capital city I've ever visited which remains largely unpaved. The main streets are clogged with motorbikes and intimidating to cross, especially considering that you still have to look both ways when crossing each part of a divided busy road. Yes, even a divided road is still only a suggestion of which direction you should be going even when the majority of traffic is only going one way.

We went to two memorials/museums dedicated to remembering those individuals killed by the Khmer Rouge during the Pol Pot regime. The first one was the Killing Fields, just one of many mass grave sites throughout Cambodia. About 8000 bodies have been recovered from this site but it is still being excavated. Skulls are laid out in a tower in a temple as a memorial. Most of the graves were the size of a hotel bathroom or smaller. A few of them were marked off and had painted wooden signs that said "Mass grave, 83 people", "Mass grave, 108 women and children, all naked", Mass grave, 115 people without heads". Another sign marked a tree as "Execution tree where soldiers beat children".

The most disorienting thing about the place was that it was totally peaceful, as if we'd gone for a walk in the local park. I had expected to feel immense amounts of energy in the space, most of it negative, or heavy, or sad. But there was nothing but a lightness, and serenity, to the place. Which contrasted so sharply with the feelings I had internally.

Later, we went to Tuol Sleng, a prior high school converted into a prison during the Pol Pot regime. Over 12,000 people died there between 1975 and 1979; only 7 survived. People were tortured to extract confessions in this site, and we walked through room after room, viewing the cells, the mass torture rooms, and, perhaps worst of all, the large rooms downstairs reserved for more "important" prisoners - and usually involving more brutal forms of torture. When the prison was liberated by the Vietnamese, they took photographs of the remaining victims in the rooms. Today, one stark, giant black and white photo hangs on the wall, documenting the corpses, covered in their own blood and sitting on the beds which still remain in the rooms (cleaned, of course).

Equally heart-rending was walking through room after room with thousands of black and white pictures of all the prisoners. Each prisoner had a mug shot taken when they were admitted. There were a few pictures of people after torture or clearly sufferng from starvation, but most were simply individuals upon arrival. Some smiled; others looked afraid for their lives. There were boys too young to attend school, grandmothers and grandfathers, mothers holding infant children.

Two million dead. And the masterminds, like Pol Pot? Most escaped with no jail time. Even Pol Pot, finally sentenced in a mass trial in 1999, died four months later in relative peace.