Angkor Wat

St. Patrick's day will be spent on a bus to Phnom Penh, and then celebrating in a city I never knew existed pre-5 months ago. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

The ride from Koh Chang to Siem Reap took upwards of 14 hours, beginning at the crack of dawn and ending with us passing out with the moon high above our heads. I got a turn on the dinky red plastic chair in the front of the aisle stuffed with backpacks and extended legs. The others fell asleep, their heads bobbing and jerking with the bumps on the road. I put on my ipod, not feeling at all sleepy, and set my eyes on the road ahead. Cambodia is much dustier than Thailand - a thin layer of covers every leaf, every roof, every shoulder. As we pulled out of the bustling mess of a border town, the horizon became farther away than the dusty sky. Few trees grew in this barren stretch, and those which did looked lonesome. Of the vehicles lumbering down the dusty red gravel roads, some motorcyces, one or two cars, most were large brown tarp-covered trucks carrying secrets - boxes of coconuts, guns, people? I had never been on a bus with open air windows, fleck-filled breezes, a cigarette hanging out the tired driver's lips... I was ecstatic with what was to come. Every ten or fifteen jolts, there was a big swerve. The road would detour slightly to the right in a half circle before returning to it's straight, endless path. It was on these small detours that I would clentch my teeth and my toes and my fists, fearing the bus would actually tip over. I imagined myself squashed at the bottom of a pile of strangers, in a town called Middleofnowhere, Cambodia. My music saved me from insanity.

Next morning, we found ourselves on rusty old bicycles without gears, gripping grandma-style handlebars and smiling toothily into the passing wind. Siem Reap contrasts its surrounding countryside like Vegas contrasts the desert that surroundxs it. Enormous, glamourous hotels run by Koreans, Vietnamese, and French owners, streets lined with cookie cutter sidewalks, cleancrisp fountains...a city out of it's place. We rode down a palm and ficus lined boulevard toward our long anticipated destination: Angkor Wat.

When we paid our $20 to get into the ancient city, (lines of sweat dripping down our backs), we parked our bikes in the shade and dove into the intense sunlight. We decided that none of our pictures of eachother could be normal. Robbi, Karin, Peter and I either had to be jumping, the photo of us caught in mid-air, or dancing. Wandering around the crumbling edifices, though, I found myself forgetting tht I even had a camera - stumbling around in the rubble and trying to feel what the places might have felt like 900 years ago in their heyday. Gold. White. Shining. Busy. Elegant. And now - brown, rustred, stony-lipped faces crumbled in half, empty, and smelling of basement air.