Vietnam/Cambodia 2005: Travels of a former business journalist

Khmer Dance School

Last week I visited a Khmer Dance School, the Apsara Arts Association. It's not the main Dance Academy - the one that got alot of attention after it started to revive classical Khmer Dance after the Khmer Rouge holocaust , when Khmer arts and culture (along with millions of people) were destroyed. This is a smaller school, set up six years ago. It  is aimed at promoting traditional Cambodian arts and culture, but also aims to help orphans and kids with poor families; some kids' parents have HIV/AIDS; one of the kids has HIV.  One girl is only about three years old!  The head of the school hopes to take them overseas to perform.

The kids were so impressive. I wish I could upload MPEG video so you could hear the music while the boys and girls danced.  The boy in the photo below is going the "Monkey Dance."

The school isn't well advertised, but I was invited to watch the practice session by Reach Sambath, director of the journalism program at the Royal University of Phnom Penh.  Sambath had taken his students there to interview the schoolkids as part of a reporting project. (I'll be working with the students in a couple of weeks when I conduct a radio workshop at the university.)

Angkor Wat is amazing

  Angkor Wat is as stunning as I had imagined.  Until you come here, you can’t imagine  that poor, corrupt struggling and seemingly hopeless little Cambodia was once a massive kingdom (the Khmer Empire) that ruled over most of Southeast Asia, including what is now Laos, most of Vietnam, and parts of Thailand and present day China. 

The temples were built from the 9th century to the 14^th century, and were the religious and political center of the empire.  Then the jungle swallowed them until a French explorer stumbled upon them in the late 19th century and restorations began.

You need a good four or five days to see the hundred or so massive temples spread across northwest Cambodia. Angkor Wat is actually the name of only one of the temples, which I find more beautiful than the Pyramids, because of their setting in lush forest and because they are so much more ornate.

 

Temples are full of bas relief carvings from Hindu and Buddhist mythology, despite the wear and tear on the sandstone, the pictures are still stunning, even if they are covered in lichens.

This bas relief is from the wall of Elephant Terrace, a big viewing deck where the kings would watch processions and elephant races. Here is  me in front of Elephant Terrace.

A carving you see in many temples is the Apsara dancers - celestial dancers created from the froth when the gods churned the oceans to create the elixir of life.

The myth of the Churning of the Ocean of Milk is another amazing bas relief in the Angkor Wat  Temple …it shows a battle between gods and devils who look like they are engaged in a massive tug of war on the seas.

One of the iconic temples of Angkor Wat is the Bayon – and its dozens of towers with huge faces carved on all four sides. (look closely)

 

Inside Preah Kahn, a smaller temple.

 

And now for something totally different: After you’ve spent the day in the twelfth century Khmer kingdom, leap ahead into teh 20th and enjoy a meal at Pyong Yang restaurant, in Siem Reap (the tourist boomtown next to Angkor Wat). Waitresses imported from North Korea perform North Korean dance numbers in between serving kimchee and noodles.

Mass Transit

I arrived in Cambodia after living in a country with the most advanced public-transport systems in the world. Japan:  land of the bullet train, bafflingly punctual trains, subway stations with Bose speakers in the ceilings, commuter trains with video displays of the weather, taxi drivers with white gloves and news tickers, cars with multilingual talking navigation systems.

Here is MASS TRANSIT in Cambodia:

Going up the highway from Phnom Penh to Siem Reap

One level up.

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Here is how kids outside the city get to school

Kids in the city getting picked up from school. (There is a school next to my hotel so I see this everyday).

Mass poultry transit

I have a driver, Tai, who charges me $20 a day, and drives a used Toyota Camry.

I wouldn’t want to drive here.  The roads here are a slow chaos of cars, trucks and motorcycles, often not going in the same direction. Accidents happen. If I have to cross the road I go slowly and pray the motorbikes will veer around me. This is the view from the front seat of the Toyota, driving through downtown Phnom Penh.

If you just dash across town, hop on the back of a motorbike. Seats rent for 1000 to 2000 riyals – that’s what I paid and I am probably getting overcharged, but it is still only 25 cents and 50 cents. (photo coming)

I haven’t seen any space vans or Honda Odysseys.  This is family travel, the Cambodian way.

Heading back home after a family event.

Shalom and G'day from Angkor Wat: My first traffic accident in Cambodia

They aren't selling falafel in Angkor Wat...YET (judging by the strips of hotels lining the streets of nearby Siem Reap, they'll be selling falafel and KFC and everything else). But I did meet a14 year old girl hawking 25 cent bracelets, whose name was Shalom. She's the one in the picture below, in the yellow shirt and wearing a hat.

I still have no idea why her parents named her Shalom,  but I'll get to that later. 

I'd just come out of the temple  called Banteay Kdei (Kdei is pronounced like G'day so it is easy to remember for Aussies).

I was sitting in the used Toyota Camry, my driver Tai ready to take off, when all  of a sudden I hear a THUNK on my side of the passenger door. I look out and see two dusty legs, lying, not moving, in the dirt next to the car.  Basically, a young guy speeding along on his motorbike, slammed right into the car.  MY first full day as a tourist and I am already involved in a traffic fatality. 

After five minutes or so, the poor fellow started to move, and a crowd formed,  some friends picked him up, and he could stand, though he was weaving back and forth and his nose was bloody.  Once he got his head clear  -- it was determined by a British doctor/tourist who happend to be nearby that he was OK, there was quite a bit to do involving the police.  It was clear the accident was his fault so he had to go back to his village and collect money for the $30 fine (in Cambodia the currency in use is dollars, even though the Cambodian riyal is used for small transactions). My driver was also wondering who was going to pay for the damage to his car...which would cost about $30, a small fortune in these parts.

As they sorted things out, a bunch of little souvenir seller-girls swarmed me, first to sell bracelets (You buy two fo dollah!) then just to chat. 

One was wearing little earrings of little crosses and said she was Christian went to a Christian school. She asked me what my religion was. I said I was Jewish. "Jurish?" she said. I said it was similar to being Christian (well, it's all relative...and Judaim is more similar than Buddhism is to Christianity).

I asked her name, and she said her name is Shalom. 

I asked her to spell it, thinking it was a Khmer (Cambodian) name that sounded  like the Israeli word. She said S-H-A-L-O-M.  Before I could say anything, she said:

"Israel. It's from Israel. It means peace and hello and goodbye." 

I asked how she got the name, and she explained something about her father, but that part of her English I couldn't pick up, so its still a mystery how Shalom-with-the-crucifix-earrings got her name. 

Anyway, Shalom and her friends took me over to a nearby lake to chat while my driver dealt with the police and the poor fellow who just destroyed his motorbike and his village savings.  I was more worried about the chickens pecking about in the dust, since seven people have just died from bird flu in Vietnam, and there are unreported bird deaths in Cambodia.  BUT I couldn't do anything because I was surrounded by eight charming kids, who were putting free bracelets on my wrist and chatting me up. Chatting with tourists seems to be their main education.  These kids are multilingual. THey speak conversational English. They can count and hawk in Japanese (I tested them), German, Spanish, Italian (that's like Spanish, they said), and French of course ("un petit peu" said a seven or eight year old scarf-hawker at a another temple when I asked if she could speak French)

After fifteen minutes they booked me for a return trip.

I headed back to the car, speeded up the accident-resolution by offering to pay for the car repairs, and Tai and I headed over to Ta Prohm, the next temple. More on that in the next post.