we did it our way in Siem Reap

      In February 2015, we left for Siem Reap, Cambodia. We slept there four nights, and then returned to Taiwan to sleep one night in a hotel in Taoyuan and one night in Taichung. I wrote journal only one during the trip (on the plane going there) and did no reading of the books I brought with me choosing to glace at an American baseball magazine I bought at the airport and Ancient Angkor, a book I bought from one of the many children selling outside temples for $10 us; I could have gotten it for $1 if I had waited.

      The first day we arrived at dusk, were picked up in a Mercedes Benz van along with five other Taiwanese and were driven by our exclusive driver and tour guide to the first of nine restaurants, four of them buffet. Despite eating food deemed safe from contamination, Leona and I still had diarrhea from stomach virus, hers beginning Thursday night and mine the night we returned to Tao-yuan where I spent the night with terrible chills. Siem Reap is a poor, dusty city of ramshackle houses mostly built on stilts. The places we ate were all tourist spots, mostly Chinese and South Korean.

      For five days, the tour guide, a native Chinese-Cambodian, gave a running commentary, in Mandarin, from his front passenger seat with Leona and I in the first row behind and the other five tourists in the third and fourth rows. No one besides the guide and Leona said hardly anything the entire trip. Occasionally, Leona translated for me; occasionally I understood what he was saying in Mandarin. The tour guide couldn’t speak a word of English. It is my biggest regret of the trip that the tour guide was obviously so informed and loved talking but 99% of it was lost on me.

Visually, and physically, the forty temples we visited with hundreds of structures attached was dazzling and taxing; there was a lot of climbing stone stairs and pyramid walls. There were a million scenes that could be sat at and contemplated and hundreds of thousands of carved images on the sandstone temple walls to inspect; too many to pay close attention to in only a few days. All the thousands of bare-chested women carved into the stone were different in facial expression or gesture, but all had the same sized exposed breasts; only one had a skirt that was half-parted. All the Hindu turned into Buddhist mythology was chiseled into everything, even boulders in the wash of a river. The ruins of building blocks and statues lay scattered around the ground buried and caked with soil; dozens of temples were falling apart. A few were refurbished by the goodwill of international donors and United Nations support in this World Heritage Preserved Site. 

Back in Taiwan, there are still two weeks until the Lunar New Year vacation ends and I return to my class at American Eagle on Feb.24th. I have a head start on controlling my weight thanks to the stomach virus from Cambodia. I bought a bottle of Cointreau at duty-free at the airport but we gave it to Ellen and George as a gift.

     On March 30, 2015 I was sent an e-mail from Ravi, the man I met while walking up the brook with stone carvings to the ruins of temples in Siem Reap, Cambodia recently. He told me he was responsible for Red Cross charity from India and I believed him. Anyway, I am proud to have met a person I can respect unconditionally; it is rare in this day and age.

we did it our way in Siem Reap

we did it our way in Siem Reap
look how happy we were!
cannot ruin it with complaints
so what that the guide knew no English?
so what that i could not grasp the Mandarin?
only one concession i needed:
a tuk-tuk to the night market
without a tisk
to the happy balcony at once
we
like two flickering ivory moths 
singling out nothing, blaming no one
two Tin-Tin's along lumpy Cambodian roads 
red dust flying in our adventurous faces
doing it our way
choosing the place, the date, the return...
next time colonial British facades in Rangoon 
excite me more ancient Khmer tombs
all irrelevant in the sunshine of our noon
in killing fields void of flowering scents
our love still in bloom