After eating my cart noodles, I returned to Sweet Dreams and got a beer from Buhn-lao, who wanted me to deliver a letter to someone she knew in Mendocino, California (?!). I lighted a cigarette. I probably opened up my journal and began to write; or I may have cracked the Proust and dived in -- fell back, as Rumi advocated, on my habits. (Despite the noodles, my hunger by now was constant, whetted over weeks.) A white man, probably in his fifties, came through the gate with a young Asian woman in a tight, low-cut and high-hiked vinyl dress. They disappeared into the guesthouse. A few minutes later, a white woman entered and went to the front desk in the lobby. She spoke with Buhn-lao and then I saw her take a key and go down the hall. She left Sweet Dreams again a few minutes later. Shortly afterward, the young Asian woman emerged alone, adjusting the folds of vinyl on her way out. Then I saw the white woman return and go into the guesthouse. I went back to my book.
A few minutes later, she came out to the patio and asked me in a clipped European accent if I knew a good place to eat. I told her I'd eaten cart food, which didn't seem to appeal to her at all. She asked me how she could get to the temples in the morning. I said I had a driver and she could come along with me and share the cost. I invited her to sit down and she did; I offered her a cigarette and she may have taken one or lit up her own. She got a beer from Buhn-lao. Soon we were talking about where we'd been, how we'd arrived here. Her name was Lijsa and she too had been recently to Laos, then through Thailand. She had just finished her medical étage in Amsterdam and was about to become a resident at one of the hospitals. I don't remember what I said about myself; I knew little more than that I was in Cambodia, but that condition was expiring by the minute.
When we went to our rooms, they were adjacent.
Next morning, about five-thirty, I'm waiting for Sawath to pick me up in his taxi. A guy shows up on a motorcycle. It's still dark, I'm still drowsy, and he asks if I'm ready to go. I tell him I have a second tourist with me now who also needs transport. I can get you another moto driver, he says. I try to explain to him that I'm expecting a driver any minute -- this guy Sawath -- and he'll take us both. Then he smiles shyly, embarrassed for both of us, probably, and he says, "I am Sawath." I didn't recognize him. After a moment of spluttered excuses and apologies, I ask where is his cab? (Probably his change of vehicle contributed to my confusion.) No, he says, we go by moto to Angkor; a taxi costs more. So now Sawath and I go all the way back around with the transport negotiations, Lijsa emerges from the guesthouse, and, finally enlightened, Sawath goes off in search of a second moto driver. It takes him about two minutes to find one. A few days in Siem Reap will show why: most of the young men in town seem to spend their days soliciting tourists to drive to the temples on the backs of their motos; the rest are already driving us.
Lijsa and I spent the morning at Angkor Wat, walking among the towers and studying the cacophonous friezes carved into the walls. (Lijsa's English was excellent, but she kept mispronouncing "relief" as "rell-yef." I finally, reluctantly, corrected her.) Angkor Wat attests to the plenipotency of a supreme monarch. It is a self-conscious, colossal fortress, exactingly calibrated and linear -- the model, I thought, for the Pentagon in Washington. The temple is designed and built to overpower you by sheer mathematical gigantism. But Angkor Wat is far more than that. An intricate Hindo-Buddhist cosmography is layered deep into its architecture, all the way down to the number of steps required to walk around the half-mile building. It is by far the grandest and most regal of the many structures at Angkor, the most perfect not only through Western restoration work but also in its original conception. As I promised before, I will not go into further detail. I'm not a Khmer historian or Asian theologian. And although one needs no formal education in order to appreciate Angkor -- just go there and you'll know what I mean in about ten seconds -- you'd glean no more from my exegesis on the place than you would from my takes on Proust or Milton. For any difficult thing, enthusiasm is not enough.
According to the guys hanging around Sweet Dreams -- I hesitate to say they worked there -- most prostitutes in Cambodia are Vietnamese. Whether or not this is true, it's a reminder of the enduring antagonism between the two countries. Ironically, the Khmer Rouge might have ruled longer had they not exhausted their army and matériel and militia attacking Vietnam. I'd already been offered a prostitute by one of the guys at the guesthouse; so I said I had a girlfriend back home, and immediately sunk into not anymore... It took only scant words, the mere outline of loss, to down me. Suryavarman II, to be specific. Angkor Wat, the largest extant religious structure in the world, took decades to build and was probably completed after the king died.