An Otherworldly Experience

Back at Borann, I dispelled the heat of the morning’s excursion with a bath, splashing water over myself from a huge earthenware jar, “the traditional Khmer way,” the inn’s brochure said. It was definitely more romantic than using a plastic bucket. I took a nap afterwards, my tired legs propped up on the Toblerone-shaped pillows. At half-past-two, Mr. Ho and I ventured out again, stopping by Café de La Paix where I had a late lunch of sushi and lime smoothie. Thus fortified, I returned to the touk-touk, giving Mr. Ho free rein to decide where we should go next.

If Angkor Wat fell below my expectations, Bayon far exceeded them. Those giant stone heads whose eyes followed you wherever you turned, vacant, and for that reason prone to be filled in by your imagination with all sorts of expressions. The patina of the centuries had turned some of them sinister in appearance, far from benevolent as one would expect of the Buddha or Avalokitesvara.

From Bayon, Baphuon was only a stone’s throw away. I made my way there, still feeling the stony stares on my back. Dusk was fast approaching so I didn’t dare venture far inside. Instead, I followed the elevated walkway in front of the ruins, decorated with pillars shaped like rows of elephants and carvings of cherub-like beings albeit with haunting, rather than cherubic, faces.

On the other side of the road from Baphuon several reddish-brown stone towers were lined up, like a row of sentinels, mirrored off a pool of water left by monsoon rains. Surrounded by weeds and dwarfed by trees, and left alone at that late hour by tourists, Prasat Suor Prat, as they are called, seemed desolate. I left quickly after taking a few shots with pasintabi (seeking permission and offering respects) to the guardian spirits of the place.

With dusk upon us, I found Mr. Ho at the parking lot and told him that I was ready to go back to Borann, my mind already brimming with thoughts and images from the afternoon of exploring. Driving past Angkor Wat, we saw crowds assembled around the moat, waiting for the sunset. There was a fairground atmosphere to the place, with some families picnicking on straw mats, and vendors milling about. In contrast to the morning crowd at the temple, this one was made up mostly of locals. How lucky these people are to have such easy access to an illustrious historical monument, a World Heritage Site no less, I thought.

Back at Borann, Mr. Ho and I arranged to meet at five o’ clock the next morning to catch the sunrise at Angkor Wat. With a few hours still ahead of me before bedtime, I quickly changed into my swimsuit and headed for the inn’s pool. Earlier at lunch, when I’d told Mr. Bon that I planned to take a dip that night when it was cooler, he was surprised, saying that most of their guests preferred to use the pool in the midday heat, to cool off. Nonetheless, as I let myself down into the water that evening, I heard a couple of male voices approaching, conversing in French. And so I shared the small pool with who could have been the only two other guests in the villa, so quiet was the place. The water was balmy and slightly salty, and floating on my back, I could make out the faint white smudge in the sky where the moon was hiding behind clouds, and the occasional bats swooping past overhead. I made a few laps on my side of the pool, venturing now and then to the deep end, where I couldn’t possibly reach the bottom without fully submerging my head while clinging to the edge of the pool. Soon the two guys—lovers?—left and I was able to claim the whole place for myself. After half an hour, I rose from the water and headed back to my room with its slightly musty smell of stone. Later, having showered, I ordered a meal of chicken amok and lime juice from the kitchen. I’d eaten a lot less than usual throughout the day, so when the food was delivered to my room, I promptly dug in, scalding my palate on the delicious, freshly cooked curry, which as far as I could tell, had egg and a lot of herbs thrown in. Satisfied and satiated, I curled up in the bed with Peter Matthiessen’s Birds of Heaven my book companion for the Yogyakarta-Singapore-Siem Reap trip, which—in what must be a testament to how much I was enjoying myself—had gone largely unread. Before long, in fact, unable to keep my eyes open, I put the book aside and slid under the bedcovers. It was nine o’ clock in the evening, the earliest I’ve gone to bed in a long while.

(May 2007)