Cambodia

It's an appealing jalopy of a country, steaming and clanking, with odds bits and pieces of its past flying off in the dust, and currently fueled almost entirely by the mighty engine of industrial tourism.

Cambodia is an old country, but young, too. The great Khmer empire dominated Southeast Asia from the ninth to the fifteenth centuries, but now half the population is under the age of 15. Urban gerontologists will be bored here, for Pol Pot murdered most of the city people for the crime of having been educated. From 1975 to 1979, Cambodia lost a third of its six million people through disease, starvation, mass execution---often bludgeoning, to save money on bullets---or from being worked to death in the fields by Maoist lunatics.

There are individual and collective memories of that savage time. Yet most Cambodians---the survivors, the eager and busy young people---seem to be looking ahead. An American who lives in Siem Reap thinks the skull-and-crossbones image of Cambodia is perpetuated largely by the foreign press and by NGOs that think they need it for their fundraising.

While the Cambodians' need to move on has to be respected, the West cannot afford to forget its complicity in one of the century's most horrendous genocides. It was the Nixon-Kissinger carpet bombing of eastern Cambodia, along with the joint U.S.-South Vietnamese invasion, that recruited hundreds of thousands of Khmer soldiers, who believed they were joining a movement for independence, not the mass murder of their own people. And after Pol Pot's removal from power in 1979 by the Vietnamese, the West kept this despot and his land-mine-planting guerrillas going for more than another decade in western Cambodia, as a check on the Vietnamese. As an American here, you just want to slink away.

Most Cambodians, however, want you to stay. Beyond a shaky garment industry that's vulnerable to changing trade agreements, Cambodian income is largely dependent now on tourism. Two million visitors came to Siem Reap last year, almost double the number of the year before. Like Joe and me, they came to look upon and often climb over the the dozens of Khmer temples, of which Angkor Wat is only the magnificent centerpiece. Hotels and restaurants have opened by the dozens. The center of Siem Reap, a city of about 100,000, feels more like Cancun than Asia. At night, it's carnival time in the teeming---and steaming---open-air cafes and restaurants. You can get Khmer fish amok or a club sandwich, a pineapple shake or Beer Lao, a lady massage or a man massage. Most of the tourists are Asian---Korean, Chinese, Japanese---or European. You hear an American or Canadian accent once in a while, but this place is a bit out of the way for them. And then there's that Killing Fields image.

Through a fortuitous mix-up, Joe and I ended up in a hotel that's about as far as you can get from the Cambodia of the 1970s. Viroth's Hotel is run by a young Frenchman, Fabien Martial, who also has a nearby restaurant with the same name. Viroth is Fabien's Cambodian boyfriend. After another hotel reservation fell through, we sought the Internet help of Martin Dishman, a friend of two friends of a friend of ours in San Francisco, and Martin speedily booked us at his friend Fabian's small hotel. It's pure Miami South Beach, and it's a wonder. Our air-conditioned room---the daily high here is at least in the mid-90s---is both so comfortable and so lovingly stark, so Ian Schrager-in-the-heatstroke-belt, that we were barely able to unpack our shabby little possessions fast enough to get them out of sight. There's a gorgeous small-tiled swimming pool of many shades of blue, a third-story rooftop breakfast terrace under thatch, and---best of all---a staff that has been unfailingly helpful in arranging for rides or a guide or a mixed-fruit shake. We were able to remember the day manager's name, Nirong, because Nirong could do no wrong. All this for US $50 a night.

Joe and I are adaptable, and while at Viroth's we had to adapt up, in other ways in Cambodia we have had to adapt down. The country is really ramshackled. It's poor and it shows. The roads are a mess and traffic is chaotic. In Bangkok, you look twice each way before crossing the street; here you look five times. Cambodia also has more animals on motorbikes. That's what I said. Cambodia tied a Lao record for most riders piled onto a motorbike---five---but set new records yesterday when we observed the following: four people on a motorbike, the woman at the rear end clutching at her side the feet of several live upside-down ducks; and two large live hogs, hogtied, on their backs, resting atop a metal frame on the back of a speeding motorbike. We also saw a pickup truck with twelve people in the back seated atop cargo that spilled out onto a metal tailgate extension, four people in the cab, and one on the hood. And this truck was moving right along.

Along many of the dusty roads, along with the fruit and vegetable stands, are vendors with shelves stacked with bottles we thought were filled with amber cooking oil. But the plastic and gas bottles, we learned, are filled with gasoline. These places are gas stations. Joe saw one where all the containers were Johnny Walker bottles.

The people here are mostly gentle-natured in that Southeast Asian way we've so happily gotten used to, but the hardness of the urban poor is all around us, too. Joe hates it that we can't buy a postcard from every skinny kid who approaches us. The guidebooks say don't encourage the hard sell, but you constantly fear that if you don't buy this child's temple-photo book or that child's bottle of hot Coke, the kid won't eat tonight. We don't know that. What we do know is that the Big Hustle is bad for everyone's dignity, if probably necessary for some people's stomachs.

NGOs, often justly criticized for their posh staff lifestyles and sometimes wasteful ways, are probably doing good work in Cambodia. Anything should help. We haven't seen that close-up, but we have met a few non-NGO ex-pats who impressed us a lot. A French hotel-staff trainer named Geoffrey, staying at Viroth's, is sponsoring the education of an orphan. This is especially worthy, for the "socialist" government hasn't built any significant social safety net. (On a street in the restaurant area, we saw a physically handicapped band of musicians playing for donations; some appeared to be land-mine amputees.) We came in on the tail end of a cocktail-party fundraiser at the John McDermott Gallery, which features the American owner's gorgeous platinum prints of temple scenes. McDermott raised over $10,000 for the Siem Reap children's hospital.

Helping McDermott and his wife was Martin Dishman, whose bar is just across the street. We had heard about Martin from John Finn and Art Desuyo, pals of Peace Corps old boy Mike Learned. John and Art have provided Joe and me expert guidance on navigating aspects of Bangkok and Siem Reap. They alerted us that there was this fabled character in Siem Reap who had opened the first gay bar there and we had to track him down. Tracking Martin down was about as hard as tracking down Rick Blaine in Casablanca, to whom Martin has been compared. He's a presence here.

Homosexuality in much of Southeast Asia is not stigmatized. Buddhism has no opinion about it and neither do the governments. The governments are trying to crack down on child sex trafficking. And we have read of gay farang men caught with gay Asian adult men and victimized in police extortion schemes. But apparently this is rare, and gay life in Thailand is open and healthy, and gay life in Laos and Cambodia are not quite so open but pretty okay otherwise.

Martin is a nice-looking, forty-something American with alert blue eyes and a quick mind who figured out back in Indiana that he was attracted to men, and realized a little later in San Francisco that he especially liked Asian men. He worked in the hotel business in Thailand and, ready for some independence and seeing an opportunity when it stared him in the face, he opened the Linga Bar just over two years ago. On a busy bar and restaurant street that's closed to cars, Martin's place has a chic-but-comfy San Francisco feel to it. The customers are a mix of young and old, foreigner and Cambodian. You do see some Cambodian lads cadging drinks---and perhaps other assets---from farang gents of a certain age. But Martin stays out of that. He says he just sells food and drinks.

There's a lively warm feeling about Martin's place. You sense that it has been a liberating influence in people's lives. (The name is the Sanskrit word for phallus---a middle ground between the Blue Parrot Bars of the U.S. in the 1950s and the gay restaurant in Bangkok---oh, those irrepressible Thais--- called Eat Me.) Martin is plainly adored by his staff and customers. He is mister gay-go-to-guy in Siem Reap.

Martin also owns a one-luxurious-unit "boutique" hotel called The One Hotel Angkor, where he asks $250 a night and gets it. (Web site www.theonehotelangkor.com.) He's talking about opening another place in Luang Prabang and maybe eventually move to that quieter Lao scene. It would be hard for a lot of people to imagine Siem Reap without Martin. But even Rick left Casablanca when the time had come to move on.

Another impressive man we met in Siem Reap is Riem Bundrath. He was our guide for two days, at the standard rate of $25 per day. He accompanied us to Angkor Wat, Bayon and other temples---see Joe's pictures, which will be up soon. In addition to answering nearly all our questions about Khmer history, art and architecture, this small, sad-eyed, thoughtful man was open and forthcoming about his own life and philosophy. The temples were grand and mysterious, but the most memorable moment in the two days was yesterday, late afternoon, when we were all three hot and tired, and sat down to rest near the top of the Bayun temple.

This eleventh century wonder is said by the Lonely Planet Guide to be one of the most "mysterious"of the temples. But we found it's bas reliefs of Khmer daily life illuminatingly mundane, and even humorous, with a scene, for example, of a woman butcher working hard and scowling at her husband, who is off to the side smoking a water pipe. The mystery, we guessed, was in the huge smiling stone faces on four of the lotus-blossum-shaped towers. What were these faces smiling at?

Riem---whose father, if we heard Riem correctly, was murdered by the Khmer Rouge for eating a piece of fruit---sat and told us the story of the Buddha and his enlightenment. We heard about Siddhartha and his restless youth, his search for a "better way" to live morally and earn a better future life or even achieve nirvana. We heard the entire story in about 20 minutes---the turtle as an incarnation of Buddha that walked on lotus blossums, the cobra that spread its head to protect the Buddha against a rainstorm---and the way the Buddha's followers, like Riem, who was a monk for three years, can find peace and acceptance when life is very hard. We thought Riem thought we needed to hear him tell us this story, and we did.