Meaningful travel experiences often change how we see the world and ourselves. My journey to Angkor Wat became one of the most meaningful travel experiences of my life.
I meet this driver named Mac. Tells me he’ll do the job cheap as long as I don’t blab to any of the drivers. We shake hands on it, and there we go flying through Old Market. By this time I’m so enlightened that even a pile of dog shit, of which there are many, seems like a beautiful gesture of sacrifice. I’m already talking foolishly about coming back and adopting a bunch of kids. Every time you say “aww,” they multiply. Everywhere you look, there’s so much color, so much poverty, all in the same places together like they can never be apart. The street vendors and their carts, saffron-robed monks walking the street burning sticks of incense, boys and men holding their bowls for alms, blessing the little shops with a prayer each time they receive their daily rice. Rabid dogs follow traffic at random, barking all frothy and snapping at the tires, which spit back clouds of dust, sitting stunned, gnawing their tails and spinning around as little children stare all liquid-eyed from behind their mothers’ wrapped skirts; the motherless sauntering freely, afraid least of all of the epic of motorbike traffic, the deadliest game there is. But here they are, urchins in their play kitchen, the streets, their secret world. Somewhere beyond the morning rush of burning cloves and motor oil, swallowed by the jungle, a kingdom of peace and serenity, a place once forgotten by the loving eyes of man and woman, somehow, but everyone knows how easy it is to get distracted, forget about one of the greatest things man has ever built, until a Frenchman in khakis comes around taking pictures, exploring the woods with hoots of excitement, while lackeys stand around giving each other glances like “I don’t see how this old temple is going to give us more rice.” You get caught up in the fields, the rice patties. Staring at your phone and getting bad service. Like, “Hello? We have the most beautiful temple in the world! Get your ass over here now!” Perhaps they were simply waiting for the moment to capitalize on a market upswing. “Angkor What? Oh, Angkor Wat. Yeah, we’ve had it for a while. Need to buy a ticket and rent a tuk-tuk. How much? FIFTY DOLLAR!” But until then, the city falls into a long, gloomy silence. Or perhaps not so gloomy at all. Laid to rest, in peace. Trees sprouting through walls and flowers growing wild in the courtyards. The carved stone statues become roosts for birds and perches for monkeys. Saffron-robed monks sweep between the gnarled roots of the banyan tree, which spreads its fingers through the soil around the crumbling city, eating away at what remains of a primordial energy, a granule of dust at a time. The jungle eats us, as well as our gods and places of worship; the city itself is a metaphor of life and death. The flag of an empire and its descent into ruin. The rest of the world carries on, searching for progress, identity, industry. But when all else fails, run to the jungle. Forget the world. Sweep the leaves.
Now I’m here in the back of a tuk-tuk, officially declaring myself renegade to Interpol, flaunting the risk of being locked inside a military prison for the rest of my life without media privileges. I have a stamp on my hand and a couple of dollars in my pocket. What other direction is there left but forward? Is this what they mean by faith, Alyosha? Why does it have to always come so close to the edge? Perhaps this is the trigger-point that’s needed before I unleash some mystical superpower, have lights shine out of my eyes and fire shoot out of my ass while great clouds of heaven and hell darken and illuminate the skies. Why else would you have taken me here if not to give me an ending? I thought you were giving me true love, but I can see now that you’ve given me lawn duties instead. Let’s say that I come with nothing then. Let’s say that I join you. I just want you to know that I give you my heart. I can’t trust anything now. I don’t trust my eyes; I can’t think my way out; I’ve lost all of my skills. What more do you want? Where’s my special moment? The one where I find a tree growing from a stone wall and hear the sound of birds and gentle streams and finally shut up and just listen. . . I’m almost in it, this moment before death when I see the thing that I was finally meant to see right before I die, fall face-first into a lotus pond. Hey Diane! You know what? It is one of those things you should see before you die! Hey Diane! We’re goin’ inside the temple. What?! Diane screeches. I wanna see them whatchamacallits before I die!
There’s a bridge that stretches over a moat, which forms a flowing blue square around the temple. In front of me is an outer wall where behind and beyond rise a quincunx of towers reflected in the waters as a procession of monks in robes the color of kumquats make their way before a king. I stand in a place where long ago even the beggar boy got a view of the royal sedan chair, and water buffaloes stood idly on the banks, staring at the green-choked lily padded waters filled with lotus flowers. Angkor Wat, that great temple rising like Mount Meru, home of the gods, from a lost city swallowed by the jungle with stone walls gone limey, mossy, and moist, like dew or evaporated rain, an atmosphere that pervades everything and continues like the memory of a monsoon even in the dry season. There’s an odd silence now that I’ve entered the inner chambers. The air is cool, and the people who share the hallways seem to be nothing more than faint echoes as they drift by. I trace a finger around the intricate carvings, the endless symmetry impossible to believe. An empty space, a pond forever rippled. From peace and prosperity, the evil demons battle Krishna on every wall, the walls seeming to never end, every inch of surface carved with countless soldiers, elephants, horses, chariots, demons, slaves, courtesans, drummers, horn-players, flag-wavers, and in the center of it all, at the spearpoint of battle rides Prince Arjuna with Lord Krishna peacefully lounging at his side. Ride into the faceless night and capture as many demons within yourself as you can, enough to battle for the rest of your life. Here in the battleground are not just soldiers, but every man and woman from the lowliest slave to god-king, riding out and meeting danger and evil at the head, engaging all their endless force in battle, because the darkness will destroy you and consume all that has been created out of nothingness and the void unless we meet it with the face of war. “Too far!” cry the archers, who feel their arms breaking. “Too high!” trumpet the elephants, whose stampeding feet have already begun to bleed. But the cries of the front echo all the way to the back, so we move forward with the certainty at this unperceivable distance that someone has sounded the cry; we march closer and closer towards a black hole, forgotten forever as we fly with swords drawn into the wind with bodies as numerous as blades of grass, wispy and curved and altogether shapeless, yet individually as sharp as a glowing knife.
“And that’s when I decided to pledge my life to preserving this place, for as long as I can, in what little capacity I have. When you give your heart and soul to something, it makes it all worth it to know that you’re helping people come and feel what you felt, what I continue to feel each and every day.”
“You been here only three hour,” the woman with the sun hat says with a playful scowl. The other caretakers laugh as we rest beneath the shade of a tree, Angkor Wat standing majestically behind in the distance.
“Isn’t it amazing how we all ended up here?” I sigh blissfully.
“You go see sunset?” Mac the driver asks.
“Is that a thing here?” I yawn and stretch. “Where’s the best place to see it?”
“Sunset Temple,” they all reply in unison.
“That makes sense.”
We fly past the head with four faces at Bayon and take a shortcut past the Terrace of Elephants. We speed through Ta Prohm, where a giant tree sprouts from a doorway and the four elemental pools where people bathed clockwise to cure their infirmities. We find ourselves at the end of a procession so large it seems as if the whole world has come to see the sunset. People must have waited hours ahead of time, some even camped out at the very top of the temple from 4 o’clock onwards in the scorching heat with their smug sunburnt faces, ignoring the jeers by the masses as they cozy in for the sunset of their fucking lives. And why not? It’s not every day you get to see our closest star descend upon one of the very temples built for her, inspired by her, needing her touch, her grace, her beauty to make it real and take shape.
We feel the tuk-tuk being rocked as if we’re in the middle of a riot as the sun threatens to dip down another centigrade closer to the horizon. There is a panic in the mob, and the scene becomes tinged with danger.
“Get out of here, Mac! I’ll go ahead on foot! Go home to your wife and family!”
Mac nods grimly and peels out of there, soon trapped and swallowed by more people. Meanwhile, I have my own problems. I’m currently caught in a massive collective of Chinese tourists in matching t-shirts gathered at least 100 strong. It’s like being trapped in a purple amoeba spreading across the world. There’s an elephant charioting a pair of Japanese newlyweds, the bride barely keeping it together as they lurch to and fro, the groom trying to hold onto his top hat, the elephant driver cursing and kicking his elephant’s ears with a decided vigor. And from every direction, masses of people from across the nations pour in to sit on top of the temple-mountain.
You only realize at the top that the people who had seemed to quit on the stairs were secretly laughing at you inside. They did their tour around the tiers of the wedding cake temple only to find no place to sit. Everywhere you look, people sit happily on steps, on statutes, on peaks and ledges. No one willing to move so much as an ass-cheek to let you think of squeezing in on their slab of stone. But who can blame them? I walk around with my eyes pointed upwards and am mind-blown by the electric awe as I stare beyond and see forest blurring line into night, temple silhouettes in the sunset like fires reaping the darkness, the spires pointed against the paling bluish-gold gradation of the sky. The sun begins to pour down over like a hot, glowing liquid, gently seeping in with a glow, warming the expanse of jungle and distant temples. As I run about, convinced this is my moment, searching for the perfect place to secure its passing, a little raincloud drifts by. Everybody gets all excited and starts firing off their cameras. One guy pre-ejaculates and lets out a moan that quickly dies in the resumed quiet. Now the sun begins to align with the cloud, feeling our respect, sending out rays at an angle that electrifies the strata like a blowing curtain in the window, the sky beginning to glow red. She keeps going and going, and soon glows with the resonance of ecstasy and shame. Everyone takes out their cameras and tries to capture that which is most fleeting, the orgasm of time.
There’s nowhere to sit, nowhere to find this final moment meant to marry me to this journey and its happy ending, when I see my name written among the tree branches as a sign, to know that somehow I was meant to be here. The gift of knowing that the journey was not all meaningless. But was—
“Care to sit down?”
No way! It can’t be. . .
“Your Holiness!”
The Dalai Lama sits on a ledge with a smile, shifting over to make room for me on a lower, less-populated tier of the temple with the sunset in a humbler view.
“Please, don’t bow to me like that. No one knows I’m here,” the Dalai Lama says, looking over his shoulder, waving his hand for me to stop kowtowing.
“What are you doing here?” I gasp.
“I’m here to see the sunset. Are you going to sit or not?”
I move to sit, and then freeze.
“Just don’t shake my hand,” I say, showing him my bandaged hand.
“No problem. Looks like it hasn’t been washed in a while,” the Dalai Lama retorts, and gives me one of his famous chuckles.
“Did you get my letter?” I ask him, sitting beside him now.
“Ah, so you’re Sam?” the Dalai Lama says. “Yes, I remember that letter very well. It was quite recently, as I recall. To answer your question: No, I don’t get death threats every day, which made your particular death threat very memorable.”
The Dalai Lama gives me a Cheshire Cat grin, his eyes glinting with amusement beneath his gold frames.
“So you’re not mad, right?”
“Why should I be angry? You clearly have shown me a kindness which I am only too happy to repay in what little capacity that I have,” he says and winks at me, repeating my own words back to me in their exact phrasing.
Back there, in the courtyard in Angkor Wat, hanging out with the caretakers. Was that him? The woman beneath the sun hat? Was he wearing a wig?
“Wait a second, did you follow me here?” I ask shocked and open-mouthed, staring at him agape now.
“Pretty weird, isn’t it?” the Dalai Lama says and chuckles.
“You were spying on me? How did you find me? Wait a second, that means—”
“Just because I am a monk who walks around in a robe all day,” the Dalai Lama lectures sternly, “does not mean I do not have spies of my own. My secret service was able to intercept this letter just days ago in Dharamshala.”
From his robe, he withdraws a postcard that says “Kunming: City of Eternal Spring.”
“As fate would have it, I was already here, in Cambodia, on my yearly pilgrimage to this very temple where we now sit. Is this a coincidence? Tell me, Sam? What have you learned from your experience?”
“I’m going to become a caretaker for Angkor Wat?”
“No, you dummy!” the Dalai Lama snaps, and resists hitting me on the head with the postcard. He clears his throat and says more gently, “No, Sam. That is not why you were brought here. Tell me why you were brought here.”
I walk in the dying light to the other side with the sunset behind me, and at a distance. The sun disappears over the jungle’s smoldering horizon and glimmers over the temple ruins. A monk sits on the ledge in his robe, brightly colored against the onset of blue night. I want to take a picture of him without knowing why, staring at the sunset, the green mountains all blue and shadowy in the background. But I have no camera.
At night, there’s a blackout. I find myself walking through the streets far away from Old Market, following the river into the night and the darkness, just to see where it takes me. There’s no light from the moon. There are no stars or heavenly bodies as I feel my way blindly through dense, wet darkness, guided by the sounds of laughter and voices, kids shrieking happily, playing hide and seek in the forest. That evening at the chicken-rice spot, two little boys came to my table and asked me if I could buy them something to eat. It was the older one who asked me with that street kid rasp in his voice. It was my last two dollars, but I couldn’t say no. As they sat down, I told the chicken-rice lady to put on two more chicken-rice plates and two more cokes. They couldn’t hide their excitement at the cokes. It was a real treat for them. Another boy came also, but I didn’t have any more money. The two little boys shared with the scrawniest third, who looked like he didn’t even have a home. The plates were cleaned. The food vanished in an instant. The cokes were sipped slowly, cherished in the setting of the sun. Finally, the oldest asked me to buy formula milk in the pharmacy for his baby brother. “We have no money. Please buy milk for our brother. My brother only a baby,” he said with his little dark eyes looking fiercely into mine.
“I’m sorry,” I told him sadly.
Where do we go from here? Walking in the dark, the pitch-black darkness, darker than the darkness was the color of her eyes. I found my way through the forest and found a road. There were flashes from motorbikes speeding past, disappearing into the night just as fast, as crickets reigned supreme over silence, the bewitching of frog-scum, the shadow-boxer nodding at me from the dancing flames of an oil drum, in dreams where you see fire and green.
“There’s so much good in the world. How can we not see it?” I ask, remembering the eyes of the father as he held his little girl in his lap, the two of them just sitting there on the side of the road on a motorbike, smiling and shaking my head no when he offered me a ride.
“And yet, there’s so much corruption. How do we fight it? How do we fight all this darkness?”
“You become light. . . You go where darkness is and watch as it runs away. . . Even one little bit of light can do that,” the Dalai Lama says in his halting, thoughtful manner, nodding his head. “Imagine what can happen when many lights come together. . . and glow at the same time.”
“Tell me where to go, Doc. I’ll meet you there.”
“You must go home, Sam. Go back and tell the others in your village, your city, your hometown. Tell about the wonders and the horrors you have seen.”
“What if no one believes me? What if they say I’m crazy?”
“Whether they do or don’t does not change your mission. You have a responsibility.”
“But I can’t leave,” I tell the Dalai Lama, hanging my head in defeat. “I have this plane ticket that takes off from Beijing tomorrow, but I don’t have any money left.”
“Plane ticket, eh? That must cost about — let’s see, from here to D.C. —” the Dalai Lama does some quick calculations in his head. “$800, by my estimation.”
The Dalai Lama pulls out a huge wad of cash clasped together with a golden money clip.
“Well, it is Christmas,” I say falteringly. “Tickets tend to be more expensive.”
“$1,000 should do it,” the Dalai Lama concludes, deftly licking his fingertips and counting out 10 crisp $100 bills.
“Your Holiness, really. . . I can’t accept this,” I say as he holds the money out for me to take.
“Please, Sam. Consider it my pleasure, and also, my duty. Just as you have your duty, I have mine: to freely share what is freely given,” the Dalai Lama says and winks. “People give me money all the time. I’m . . . loaded!”
He throws his head back and laughs into the shadows of fading pink light.