The Weight of Expectations

I arrived in Siem Reap at seven o’ clock in the morning aboard the Jetstar flight from Singapore. After dropping my things off at Borann, my Siem Reap getaway, I quickly jumped into the touk-touk that Mr. Bon had arranged for me, eager to see as much of the Angkor ruins as possible in my two days in town. After picking up a cappuccino and croissant at Le Grand Café for breakfast—my budget flight did not offer free meals—and orange juice for my driver, Mr. Ho, we quickly set off for the monuments. The ride to the temple was a delightful surprise, the stretch of classy hotels downtown giving way to the woods where the monuments are nestled. Soon, the road guarded by huge trees forked into two, either way skirting a placid lake, which turned out to be the moat surrounding my destination, Angkor Wat.

Truth to tell, I felt somewhat let down by my initial foray into the temple. Perhaps it was the scale of my expectations—gleaned from reading the accounts of travel writers like Pico Iyer and Tiziano Terzani, among others, of their own experience of it—which left room for nothing but disappointment. Possibly too, it was the constant stream of tourists, some of them in large tour groups, that made it all but impossible to experience the temple with quiet contemplation. For there were, after all, a few moments when I was left alone in an empty corridor and the ancient stillness whispered to me: "This, this is how Angkor Wat is meant to be experienced." And surely, mid-morning wasn’t the best time to see the temple, sans the flamboyant colors of sunrise and sunset. That morning in particular, the sky was a washed-out white, a terrible background for landscape shots.

Which is not to say that my first glimpse of Angkor Wat left me completely cold and unmoved. The elaborate friezes stretching around the temple’s walls and the shrines of Buddha you stumble upon unexpectedly in the darkened halls--those vignettes, I loved, and made the trip worthwhile after all.

(May 2007)