Angkor What?

I was pretty sure my head was going to explode when I saw the gates to the Angkor complex, but when there were elephants inside, Actual Elephants… well. I walked up to them – there were five – and put out my hand and one of them started snuffling around with her trunk. “Bananas?” asked the girl standing there. “Bananas for elephant?”

I said no and my pachyderm friend was a little disappointed, but she didn’t turn away, she continued to reach for my hand, spreading a little elephant snot on my palm. I patted her on the bridge of her snout and she was warm and prickly. I’m not sure why I thought she would be cool, elephants are warm blooded after all.

You can ride an elephant around the temple complex and their feet are really quiet on the pavement, like they’re wearing big slippers with leather soles. They are quiet and still with ragged ears and skinny brown boys in dark green pyjama-like suits – they sit astride the elephant’s neck. I wanted to ride, but more than that I wanted to drive. J. said I had to go to mahout school first. I’m good with that, though I notice there were no female elephant jockeys.

The temples at Angkor are, oh, how can I describe them? They are exactly as wonderful and better than I’d imagined them to be. They are huge and everywhere, they are giant smiling faces of the Buddha and piles of carved stone discarded in dry fields. They reach for the muggy sky and are sprouting grass and vines and in some cases, entire trees. They are the fantasy temples of Tomb Raider and Indiana Jones covered in Japanese and German tourists. They are lace cutouts of dancers and square doorways etched with flowers. They are steps that are tall and narrow and long walkways supported by collonades. They are spectacular.

Everywhere tiny children try to sell pocket sized souvenirs, kids who are much too young to be touts, and yet, there they are, their hands pushing bootlegged copies of travel guides and strings of wooden beads and little handbags and scarves in your direction. They flock outside each tourist bus pleading, “Please madam you buy one dollar.” It’s not right, they should be swimming in the lake or playing soccer or something, but there are dozens, no, probably hundreds of them, pacing in circles around our whiter foreign selves.

We’re not buying, intentionally. The party line in our group is that we’re to buy only from sources that send the money to good causes, not from the street urchins, because they hand the money over to who knows where, it’s not putting food in their bellies or books in their backpacks. It’s heartbreaking, as so much is in this country. They’re almost always unfailingly polite, not as pushy as you’d expect them to be, and even, sometimes, funny. To say it’s sad doesn’t do it justice, but that’s the best I’ve got.

The heat was brutal today, one of our crew dropped to heat exhaustion around mid-day and I am carryng around a headache, but it’s worth it to be out there seeing the ruins in spite of everything. At the end of the day we climbed to the top of yet another stunning jumble of stones and looked out over coconut palms and mango trees into a darkening sky. We had hopes a storm might break the heat, but it blew off, leaving the same heat and dust that makes everything feel like we’re in a movie. We leaned up against the big stone elephants and prayed for rain.