Author: jdewyze

On the Sea of Galilee

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The water that Jesus reportedly walked on is the Sea of Galilee, so we felt pretty excited to see it. Unfortunately, when the weather started to warm up Sunday afternoon, the air got smoggy (though our student guides at the Technion Monday insisted it was only mist, not pollution.) Whatever it is, it almost completely obscured our initial views of the Galilean body of water, as Steve and I drove east from the real sea (the Mediterranean) Monday afternoon. Only when we drove to the top of the mountain where folks think Jesus gave his most influential sermon (“Blessed are the poor in spirit,” etc.) did we get a good view of the famous fishing grounds. It’s not a sea, of course, but a really big fresh-water lake. It reminded us of Tahoe, though surrounded by hills that look Southern Californian, browner and drier than the Sierra Nevada, even in springtime.
The Mount of Beatitudes is a lovely spot, noisy with birdsong and shaded by towering cypress and other trees. We had to pay 10 shekels to park in the lot, but otherwise it doesn’t feel like anyone’s running the site. There’s a pretty little basilica, built by some Italian Catholics,
and a guesthouse and a well-stocked gift shop.
But there was no one, really, for us to ask why anyone thought this was the very spot where Jesus reportedly gave the sermon. Matthew 5:1 says only that he went up into “a mountain” somewhere in Galillee, and there are plenty of those all over the place.
Still, mountains overlooking bodies of water make great religious sites. We’d started the day in Haifa with a reminder of that. Everyone associates Israel with Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, but it’s also the holiest place on earth for the Baha’i faith. That was started by a Persian (known as “the Bab”) in the 1800s who dreamed up sort of a Middle Eastern version of Unitarianism (“All the monotheisms are right!”). Baha’is excel at building religious monuments. They constructed a temple near Northwestern University (where Steve and I met as undergraduates) that’s one of the prettiest landmarks in Evanston. Their world headquarters in Haifa amazed us. The huge property spills down Mt. Carmel, facing Haifa harbor. The Bab is entombed in a gold-domed mausoleum below and above which beautiful terraces have transformed the mountainside. One hundred full-time gardeners tend the formal, immaculate gardens around the property. It was breathtaking.
The terraces climb further up the hill above the dome, though you can't see the in this photo.
The other great theological figure of the Baha’i faith is buried near Akko, the city on the other side of the bay from Haifa. We drove there but didn’t have time to look for the Baha’u’llah’s tomb because there’s so much else to see. Akko is 4000 years old, and among the guys who’ve called it home are Alexander the Great and Richard the Lion-hearted. (Napoleon tried to acquire it too at one point, but lost.) We wandered around the narrow twisty passages of the stony Old City for an hour or so, admiring it. (But what we’ll probably best remember is the delicious lunch of hummus and pita bread and olives and pickles ($3 per person) that we gobbled down in a jam-packed joint in the souq.)
From there we drove to the Mount of Beatitudes and on to our hotel in Tiberius, arriving a bit after 4. Tiberius is one of the biggest tourist bases on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, and when we wandered over to the waterfront later, looking for something to eat, we passed big groups of Israelis and Romanians and other visitors. I wanted to eat tilapia. They call it St. Peter’s Fish in these parts, and apparently it’s native to the lake, which means when Jesus was recruiting his fishers of men, they were recruiting tilapia.
We ordered it filleted and charcoal-grilled, and it was delicious. The heat of the day had faded, so we sat outside, right next to the water and later strolled, taking in the surreal mix of sights. Around us children zoomed by on miniature electric dune buggies. We passed a McDonald’s and a Maze of Terror and a store selling Holyland Jewelry.
We returned to the waterfront for breakfast this morning and it was almost deserted and peaceful. In the morning sunlight, the Sea of Galilee still looked misty, but a few large tourist boats were moving, preparing to take out groups. We wondered if they chug out to the exact spot where Jesus walked, If so, we won’t see it with our own eyes. We’re departing from Tiberius in a few minutes to instead circumnavigate the shore, where plenty of other miraculous spots should await us.

On the (Israeli) road

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Monday morning, we picked up our rental car, an adorable little mauve Fiat 500, from the Eldan car rental agency in Tel Aviv, and I have to say, our interaction with the young manager there was the nicest experience I’ve ever had picking up any rental car anywhere. We sat at his desk, and he not only filled out the paperwork with us but also counseled us on everything from avoiding tolls to the best way to drive from Nazareth to Jerusalem. This took some time, as did getting shuttled to the parking garage where the car was, as did Steve getting checked out on the unconventional controls. By the time we actually hit the road, it was almost 10.

We needed the rental car to get to all the places we want to go in the north of Israel, starting with Caesarea, on the coast about 50 minutes north of Tel Aviv.

The archeological complex contains the ruins of the seaside palaces and associated amenities (chariot racetrack, theater, baths, sewage system etc.) begun by King Herod in 22 BC. Pontius Pilot later lived in it for a while, followed by centuries in which it was grabbed by successive waves of Arabs and Crusaders. Because of our late start, we only had about an hour on the grounds, a shame, and then we had to barrel on to Haifa (Israel’s third largest city and a kind of far distant cousin, in feel, to San Francisco). There we had an appointment to meet with several professors at the Technion (often described as Israel’s MIT), followed by a campus tour guided by two adorable mechanical engineering undergrads.

The driving was a distinctly mixed bag. Every road we’ve been on so far has been in good to excellent shape, and the drivers, while aggressive, don’t seem to be entirely insane. But Google Earth on my phone failed us miserably for guidance, and 90% of the signage uses the Hebrew alphabet, so we had some bad moments, navigationally. (“These are the worst-designed roads I have EVER seen ANYWHERE in the world!” Steve roared, at one point.)

I’m hoping we’ll get accustomed to them. We have a lot more ground to cover.

 

 

We’re not in Babel, Toto

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My main goal in visiting Israel was to better comprehend the people who inhabit this oh-so-influential piece of real estate (with all its ramifications for the rest of the world). And for a few minutes after our arrival Saturday night, things seemed promising. We and the other passengers from our Royal Jordanian flight from Amman breezed through immigration (negating all my worst fears about thorough Israeli screening procedures). The airport ATM efficiently popped out some shekels, and we jumped into a clean looking taxi at the front of the taxi queue. The driver was a fat, jolly guy who promised to be talkative. But the first thing he asked us as he accelerated away from the terminal was to repeat the address that we had given him. He asked again. And again, seeming only with great difficulty to finally grasp that we were saying “Gordon Street” (a major thoroughfare in Tel Aviv’s beach area). It finally seemed to click, and he asked where we were from, but then lapsed into silence, listening to the radio. A few minutes later, thinking of the recent terrible quake in Asia, I asked him if Israel ever got bad earthquakes. And once again, it took some doing for him to understand my question; to simply grasp the words.

He was born in Israel, we learned, and as such is a native Hebrew speaker. But what surprised us most our first full day here (Sunday), is how much of a comprehension gap seems to derive from that language. As a language, it’s unique — the only one in human history that has almost gone extinct and then come back, to be spoke by millions. By the late 1800s it hadn’t been used for everyday activities for thousands of years, instead being employed exclusively for prayer and study. But the early Zionists worked to revive it as part of their quest to reclaim this ancient Jewish home. When Jews flooded into Palestine fleeing the Nazi terrors and then eager to create a modern Jewish state, they spoke dozens of languages. They needed one to unite them. So Hebrew it became, and along with it, its own baffling alphabet.

Of course lots of countries use a non-Roman alphabet, but in our experience, more of them supplement the signage in major cities with romanized versions of the text (if not outright English translations) than they seem to do in Tel Aviv. One exception has been the street signs, which aren’t bad. (They’re in Hebrew, English, and Arabic.)

Another are the warnings not to climb up the (inviting) electric polls. You see them everywhere.

But then you see signs like this one next to city bicycles available for rent:

Would any non-Hebrew speaker have a clue how to access them? (Everything on the screen was in the Hebrew alphabet only.) Some restaurant receipts also are presented only in Hebrew to the bafflement of tourists.

We’ve been told that all Israeli children also study English in primary school (starting in the sixth grade, one person told us.) But clearly, whatever they learn leaves a number of folks (like our taxi driver) pretty uncomfortable with easy conversation.

On the other hand, we had a stimulating and interesting 3-hour meeting and lunch with a group of extremely bright and successful CAD software experts. They all spoke good to excellent English and seemed to understand every word we said. When we walked (for hours and hours) through Tel Aviv’s beach area and a couple of historic districts, at least 2 or 3 friendly passers by asked us if we needed help (as we studied our maps).

So I’m confident we’ll find our way here, over the next 10 days. We may just have to strain a bit at times to make sure we understand

Palm Springs Docs

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Every year San Diego hosts a ton of film festivals. Besides the San Diego Film Festival organized by the San Diego Film Foundation, there also are Latino, Jewish, surf, black, LGBT, and other cinematic events. What’s missing, though, is any documentary film festival. That’s too bad, as far as I’m concerned; it’s the genre I can count on most reliably to wow me. The first time Steve and I went to an event devoted exclusively to docs (the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, held every year in Durham, North Carolina) we were ecstatic. After three days and 17 films, we felt that our brains had exploded (in a good way).

Twice in recent years I also had the chance to attend the superb Rocky Mountain Women’s Film Festival in Colorado Springs, almost entirely non-fiction. But even that’s an awfully long way to travel. So I was pleased and interested to learn that Palm Springs is the venue for the four-year-old American Documentary Film Festival. Its website said MovieMaker Magazine had declared it to be one of the “world’s top 25 film festivals worth the entry fee.” Intrigued, we decided to check it out.

In the months leading up to it, I got several hints that it might not be up to the level of professionalism of the North Carolina and Colorado events. For both of those, we’d had flex passes that made it easy to breeze in and out of the showings. AmDocs (as the Palm Springs event is known), offers one too, but by the time the discounted early fee ended, no schedule had yet appeared on the website.

We decided to gamble on a flex pass anyway. Still, weeks passed before we learned what it would allow us access to. Finally, the list appeared — more than 120 films ranging from 3-minute shorts to full-length features. Instead of being shown in a cluster of theaters that were easy to switch between, however, they appeared to be scattered over three separate cities (Palm Springs, Rancho Mirage, and Palm Desert). That didn’t seem promising.

It wasn’t until just days before the festival that I noticed the website had added a list of what was playing each day in each theater. With three screens, it was clear the Camelot Theater complex would be hosting most of the action. Still, all the programs weren’t offered in a graphic form that would enable any normal person to figure out what he or she could make it to and when. Not until we checked into the festival hotel (the Saguaro) last Thursday night and consulted a physical program left for us by some friends could we actually begin plotting what our schedules for the next three days should be.

Our experience at the other two festivals helped us figure out what to see. (I’ve learned that almost any subject can be interesting.) Even the far flung venues were less of a nightmare than I’d anticipated. We wound up making the 25-minute drive to Palm Desert on Thursday and basically camping out in and around it all day long in order to attend the four screening events (7 films in all, including the shorts). We returned the next morning for the first documentary of the day (a historical look at the events that launched Mark Twain to international stardom), then drove to the Camelot and made it our base for the rest of the festival.

Most importantly, the movies did what we were hoping for — the majority of them were excellent, and a few dazzled us. Of the 16 we saw, here’s my list of the most memorable (more or less in order of wonderfulness):

— Top Spin. Both beautiful and suspenseful, it told the story of three high school students vying to compete in 2012 for Olympic glory — in table tennis.

— Jesus Town, USA. I figured this world premiere would be classic mockumentary, focusing as it did on the production of an annual passion play that’s been presented in the Oklahoma back country for 88 years. Instead, life intervened, and the filmmakers were there to capture it. Both Steve and I were in tears by the astonishing conclusion.

— 88 Days in the Mother Lode — Mark Twain Finds His Voice. A charming look at some California and literary history involving one of our greatest authors.

— No Problem: Six Months with the Barefoot Grannies. How to train some of the world’s poorest ladies to be solar engineers. Amazing.

— Cat Show. I was braced for this look at the world of cat shows to be tedious. But the filmmaker fortunately found a vivid, original, and inspiring protagonist. I felt fortunate to spend an hour in her company.

— Big Voice. Demanding Santa Monica high school choir director pushes his students to become “one big voice.” Watching the process was both moving and educational.

— J Street: The Art of the Possible. Now I know all about this influential new Israel lobby.

— Growing Home. Everything I wanted to know about what it’s like to live in a Syrian refugee camp. In just 23 minutes.

Saturday night we also watched an almost two-hour homage to the great American director John Ford. It was made by the less great Peter Bogdanovich, who was on hand to pontificate after the screening.

If the choice ever comes up for me again, I might skip Bogdanovitch. But AmDocs itself is young and promising. I’d be happy to return.

Weird and wacky Southeast Asia: a photo gallery

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Sometimes you come across things that don’t fit into any proper blog post but still blow your mind. Our journey through SE Asia offered a bumper crop of those, so here I present my personal photo gallery of 10 assorted weird and wacky SE Asian sights:

1) I probably never would have noticed this vehicle, which was UBIQUITOUS in Cambodia. But Steve, who’s astute about such things, immediately identified it as a Camry, a brand that Toyota has never sold outside the United States. Equally weird, the horde of Camrys plying the Cambodian streets and byways are all 10-15 years old, and they’re universally in mint condition. One of our Cambodian guides said they typically cost about $8,000 (and remember that Cambodia is one of the poorest countries on earth). In the US, a comparable one would run half that price or less.

2) The Southeast Asians aren’t the only ones posting bizarre images on toilet stalls. I’ve puzzled over this (lower) Japanese one before and only this trip, while passing through Narita International, did I learn it means the stall is equipped with a fancy toilet that can spray warm water “for cleansing of the buttock.” We had a short connecting time, so there was no way I was going to test it.

But I’ve added some new ones to my collection:

Here it’s the central right icon that disturbs me. No use of hand brooms on your shoes? (The image on the right clearly is intended to prevent actual showering with the hand-held spray hoses that almost all stalls are mysteriously equipped with.)
We found the following affixed to a public toilet outside one of Bangkok’s most visited temple complexes:
But what does it mean??? I can only guess:

Men can use this toilet. Women can too. You can pee standing up. You can pee… squatting? You can wash your hands. Sit on the toilet. Squat on the toilet. (Really?) You can throw up in it? Kick it??? You can change your baby’s diaper or breast feed (…maybe?) You can take your wheelchair in? Throw something in a waste basket. And that huge image — perverts are allowed???

3) Not only bathrooms have that certain je ne sais quoi when it comes to scatological iconography. We captured this one attached to the dashboard of the taxi that picked us up at Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi International Airport:

No doubt about its meaning.

4) The only way I can imagine any death-defying babies besting those in Vietnam is if the babies actually were driving the mopeds themselves. The wee one in this photo is hardly the youngest one we saw, but usually we were too slow to photograph them — because we first had to stifle our gasps and close our jaws, which were gaping open. Not only are these youngsters NOT riding in their National Highway Traffic Safety Administration-approved car seats, restrained by seat belts, but sometimes Mom was only holding on to them with a single hand, while Junior bounced up and down on the seat on his tiny toes. Some infants were too young to hold their heads up, let alone bounce.

5) You might think the only weird or wacky thing about this sign is that the beer is so cheap, but you’d be overlooking the fact that we took this picture in Cambodia. It was on the very touristy Pub Street in Siem Reap, but pretty much every price of everything we saw or were quoted anywhere in that country was in dollars. Sometimes we got riels (the official Cambodian currency) back as change; a 1000-riel note is worth about 25 cents. But ATMs all dispense crisp, clean $100 bills. Sometimes 50s and 20s. Basically, the whole society has acknowledged that their own money is about as important as the penny is in America, thrown up its collective hands, and switched to dollars instead.
 

6) This is Tucker, my Labrador Retriever. We didn’t see him anywhere in SE Asia, but we did see a fellow who looked like his younger brother looking very sad in a very small cage in Hanoi. We also saw heartbreakingly tiny and pathetic puppies for sale on a market street. We had a very, very strong suspicion they weren’t destined to be canine companions; one restaurant not far from that street had a whole section of doggy dishes on the menu. I am aware that some people in China and SE Asia eat dogs, but when I saw that menu, I was too upset to try to photograph it. I felt almost as revolted as if the menu had a selection of delicacies prepared with human meat. I don’t know if this is weird or wacky, but it’s certainly one of those sights that tell you you’re no longer in Kansas (and it’s a good thing your friend Toto isn’t either!)

7) If I were less ignorant about world religions, I would doubtless be blase about this sight of a lingam, which we photographed in one of the Angkor temples. I’d think, ‘Well, duh! Of course it’s normal to have statues of penises inserted into vaginas all over your place of worship.” Actually, most of the phalluses (the linga) have been stolen by vandals over the centuries. But their female counterparts, the yonis

are still everywhere, looking very lonely and reminding you that these folks had a very different view of sex than most of the Christian churches and Muslim mosques I’ve visited recently.

8) A broader awareness of religious practices also might make ancestral shrines seem mundane. They ARE mundane throughout SE Asia. Many are erected outside homes, but some like the one in this photograph (taken in the lobby of one of our Vietnamese guesthouses) are indoor fixtures. The incense stick was burning. The offering on the right was a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. (I guess there’s nothing wrong with smoking if you’re already dead.) And the ice in the glass of Coke on the left was fresh.
 

9) Central Siem Reap has a lot of fish tanks next to benches and adorned with signs offering a pedicure and foot massage all in one. The idea is you put your feet in the tank, and the creatures in it (“pepper fish” was one variety, we were told) instantly swarm around them and begin nibbling on the dead flesh. I paid $3 (“for as long as you want!”) and made something of a spectacle of myself whooping about how much it tickled. (It never hurt, but the feeling ranks very, very high on the weirdness scale.) In defense of the fish, I must say my feet did feel a bit smoother than normal when I got in bed that night.

10) Some fish eat. Many, many get eaten, including this assembly on Steve’s fermented chocolate and rice porridge dish. Breakfast of champions, Filipino style!

Bye-bye Buddha

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[My blogging software wouldn’t allow me to add photos to my last post about Angkor Wat. Now that I’m home again, I’ve corrected that. I wrote the following post and a final one to come on the plane returning home yesterday.]

On this trip, we had a total of less than 15 hours to explore Bangkok. We did our best. We ranged around the city via taxi,

tuk-tuk…
city bus…
water bus…
Skytrain…

and foot. We saw at least 100 things that intrigued us. But the only one I’m certain we’ll both remember is the great reclining Buddha of Wat Pho.

The Wat Pho temple complex is one of the oldest in Bangkok and contains the largest assortment of Buddhas assembled anywhere in Thailand. Some are really impressive…

like him…
and him.

But the unforgettable one is the big, chiller Buddha. I think he was built about 200 years ago. (The informational signs aren’t very clear.) Steve first saw him in 1958, when he traveled around the world with his parents, and he’s been talking about him ever since. He recalls that on his first visit, only a handful of other tourists joined him and his parents in the enormous building the Buddha is crammed into. During our recent visit, there were hundreds, all jostling to try to capture him with their phones and cameras. That’s not so easy to do.

Columns holding up the ceiling obscure a good clear view of him.
This angle from his feet is very popular.
He has enormous toes and extremely fancy feet.
And even fancier pillows!
I’m not sure anything in Las Vegas can compare to him, which feels appropriate, as so many places in Bangkok look like an over-the-top fusion of Vegas and Disneyland. (“Did Walt travel here?” I wondered aloud at one point.)
Of course I say this with the ignorance of someone who’s only been in Bangkok for less than 15 hours. To speak more knowledgeably, I’d have to go back.

 

 

 

The shocking thing I learned in Cambodia

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Say you’re an adult American who went to decent elementary and high schools; maybe even attended a good college. At some point during your life, you become aware there’s an amazing edifice in Egypt called the Great Pyramid of Giza. Although Egypt today is a pretty grubby, unstable place, you like to travel and resolve to see it. Only after arriving do you learn that Egypt once was the center of an advanced civilization, one that shaped a big portion of the ancient world. You might be shocked by the fact that somehow, you never heard of this.

That’s how I feel about Cambodia. Prior to this trip, I associated this little country only with American bombing raids toward the end of the war in Vietnam and the genocide that took place during Pol Pot’s regime. And, oh yeah. The largest religious building in the world was there, legendary for its beauty.

Nat before the moat
The moat of Angkor Wat. You walk across the causeway to get to the wall.

Travelers to Vietnam, like us, often tack on a side trip to this place, Angkor Wat. The closest Cambodian town to it is Siem Reap, which Steve and I reached Saturday via our speedboat up the river from Phnom Penh. With the help of our elegant Golden Butterfly guesthouse ($33 a night including a free half-hour transfer from the boat and two one-hour full massages), we arranged for a tuk-tuk driver and English-speaking guide to take us to the famous temple first thing Sunday morning. My first clue that this structure is more than just an building came when we drove along the man-made moat that surrounds it. As wide as 2 football fields, it forms a perfect rectangle almost a mile long in one direction by more than three/quarters of a mile in the other. Beyond the distant inner side of the moat, we could discern a great wall.

I’d seen plenty of pictures of Angkor Wat over the years, but none of them communicate the vast scale of the complex.After climbing out of the tuk-tuk, we crossed a long elevated causeway that took us over the moat. We passed through beautiful stone gates, then crossed an even longer, more majestic causeway spanning a vast green expanse. Only past a second gate does one truly behold the wat itself, composed of 5 separate towers, the central 100-foot-tall one built on three levels.All the central towersWe explored the first and second levels of the inner compouScary staircasend, then climbed a scarily vertical set of (modern) wooden stairs to get to the top of the central tower. There we surveyed the grand and beautiful composition surrounding us.

Not just the big picture is mind-boggling. The ancient Khmer laborers built most of these structures from big gray sandstone blocks that were quarried more than 30 miles away and floated down the river on rafts. Craftsman carved beautiful images on a staggering percent of their surfaces, images that tell elaborate stories from Hindu mythology.

Carvings detail
One tiny section of the ceiling

At some point, I realized this was the first time in my life I’d been in a country where Hinduism is practiced. The wat was built by Suryavarman VII (between 1113 and 1152) to honor the Hindu god Vishnu. This great Khmer king was renowned for his tolerance, however, and also revered the Buddha (just as many Cambodians today observe practices from both religions). He did this while reigning over the greatest expanse of territory in Khmer history, including big chunks of what today is Vietnam, Thailand, and southern Laos. Like the Romans, Khmer engineers created a far-flung, complex network of roads and irrigation channels that laced together the realm.

Buddha gate
This wonderful gate has four large faces of the Buddha carved into it, one on each side.

They also built temples; more than 1800 of them have been identified in what today is Cambodia, according to our excellent guide, Tep Nat. In the two days we spent with him, we didn’t get close to seeing any of the oldest Khmer temples (some go back to the 600s). But the guide took us to a few built in the mid-900s. He showed us the celebrated Ta Prohm temple, crumbling and literally being consumed by gigantic trees (the movie Tomb Raider was filmed there.) Although some sites were crowded with cocky young Chinese Beautiful People and boisterous Korean groups and a potpourri of other international visitors, Nat several times led us to back entrances and adjoining pathways through the fantastic green cathedral of jungle, where we were the solitary worshippers.

Strangler tree

Fallen column

Like Varik, our guide to the 60s architecture in Phnom Penh, Nat a few times expressed regret at all that the Khmer people have lost over the centuries. Still, things sometimes improve. At one point, Nat mentioned he was keeping a written record of his life to pass on to his three young children. That memoir is already more than an inch thick. Just a baby when the Khmer Rouge took over in 1975, he lost his father, two brothers, and numerous other relatives during that dreadful period. Life as a subsistence farmer (how most Cambodians today survive) didn’t seem promising to him, so he worked for a while as a fisherman and then a waiter (in Phnom Penh). Civil war — between Cambodian government forces and the remnants of the Khmer Rouge — raged during most of his childhood and teenage years. That conflict killed around 5 million Cambodians (dwarfing Pol Pot’s toll of 2 million victims). But the war finally ended in 1998, and Nat moved to Siem Reap the next year, sensing opportunites there. He did odd jobs at first. Then he bought a motorbike to make a living with it, then moved on to tuk-tuk driving (struggling along the way to teach himself English). He finally saved up enough to go to guide school and got his guide license in 2007.

He confessed to us that his dream was to one day save up enough money to visit Singapore. He yearned to see what life in a modern country was like. I could have told him. But sometimes you have to go to a place yourself to get it.

 

An alternative to the killing fields

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“You want go to killing fields?” “Go to killing fields?” We must have heard that question 20 times during our brief stay in Phnom Penh. I found it repugnant — Cambodia’s ghastly genocide turned into the town’s biggest tourist attraction. As Steve points out, I shouldn’t blame the Cambodians. We’ve paid our entrance fees at plenty of other testaments to human barbarism around the globe. And I think visitors to Cambodia should know about what happened here (now almost 40 years ago). Almost everything I know about it comes from reading A Cambodian Odyssey, the memoir written by Haing Ngor — the Cambodian doctor-turned-actor who won an Academy Award for his performance in the famous movie. His book recounted the horrible events so vividly, I’ve never been able to shake the memory of them. It also made me aware that virtually the whole country became a killing field during the four bloody years during which the Khmer Rouge rampaged. So why go to one particular spot?

But what else to do on the single day we had to explore the city? (Although we arrived at mid-day Thursday, the heat was so stunning, we couldn’t drag ourselves away from our hotel’s awesome pool.) Fortunately, I had posed this question to the Goddess Google, and she had whispered back: take one of the Khmer Architecture Tours.

Online, I learned that Phnom Penh has a tiny private organization dedicated to educating visitors about the architectural innovation that flowered in the city during the 1960s. Its members give a couple of private tours; one concentrates on the work of the Vann Molyvann. I’d never heard of the guy, but the website made it sound like he was a major figure in architecture, designing at least 100 significant works between 1960 and 1972 (when the looming catastrophic political events prompted him to leave the country). Steve and I love looking at buildings, so we booked the Molyvann private tour ($30 per person, including the cost of hiring a tuk-tuk for half a day and a professional architect to serve as guide.)

Phnom Penh's central market, designed by French architects and recently refurbished, is a cool and elegant architectural icon.

We were scheduled to do that at 2:30 in the afternoon. In the morning we caught a tuk-tuk and walked around the center of Phnom Penh for 3 hours, following the self-guided map published by the KAT organization. It rained for the first hour, so the heat didn’t feel lethal. Cambodia today is one of the poorest countries in the world, and its capital shows the strain. It has a couple of glitzy high-rises, and some upscale neighborhoods that look almost chic by American standards. It has coffee shops to rival Starbucks and fancy cosmetic stores and at least some gleaming supermarkets. But stinking heaps of garbage collect along plenty of streets, and the power goes out frequently. On our walking tour, we saw structures built at various points in the first half of the 20th century. Though we could see the former beauty of them, most looked sad and unkempt.

While the walking tour was interesting, the highlight of the day was our outing with Varik Roeum, our 23-year-old KAT guide. A charming fellow who just completed his architectural studies a few months ago, he spent almost 4 hours with us, during which we talked about topics ranging from Indochinese alphabets to the Khmer Rouge reign of terror. As we chatted, we drove to see three examples of Molyvann’s work: a low-income housing project built between 1965 and 1967, the Teachers Training College facility (now the Institute of Language) built on the Royal University of Phnom Penh campus and inaugurated in 1972, and the massive National Sport Complex dedicated in 1964.

Some of the campus buildings designed by Molyvann
Part of the Foreign Language complex
Details evocative of Angkor Wat

Seeing these buildings, learning from Varik about the innovations that went into their design, made us think: this guy really WAS a genius. His works have the look of the 60s about them — the use of concrete, the sharp geometries. But more than 50 years later, they’re still functioning well, letting in light and air in ways that make them both livable, beautiful, and economical. Molyvann at times pays subtle homage to classical Khmer detailing, but more than anything, we sensed an intelligence keenly attuned to the ever-important question: how can I create a sustainable building that these particular inhabitants at this particular site will be happy living and working in?

“No one is doing ANYTHING like this in Cambodia today!” Varik lamented. Architectural students don’t learn about Molyvann in school; Varik’s passionate enthusiasm only developed after he heard about the KAT group from a fellow student (the group itself was started by a knowledgeable British architect.) At the National Sports Complex, where we watched a horde of Cambodians using the stadium — jogging, strolling, playing soccer on the field — Varik said there were rumors it was scheduled to be demolished to make way for more gleaming, fast-money developments. “I hope it’s just a rumor,” he said. But other Molyvann masterpieces have already fallen victim to the wrecking ball.

The Sports Palace within the complex, with natural light and air flow

I told him I hoped so too. Some Khmer masterpieces have long withstood the attack of brutes and barbarians. Right now we’re blasting up the Tonle Sap River toward the most famous one of all: Angkor Wat.

 

 

On the (river) road

jdewyze2 Comments

Coming from a place like San Diego, semi-desert, shriveling in the grip of our prolonged drought, the Mekong River and its gargantuan delta feel unreal. Intellectually we know how there could be so much water here; the rainy season is drawing to a close, but the skies still release drenching daily downpours. Still, making our way through this place where rivers function not just as superhighways but also as streets, as alleys, is unlike anything I’ve previously experienced.

So is the way people think about all this water. On Wednesday morning, we hired a boat and guide to take us out at dawn to see some of the impromptu markets that materialize every morning on the Can Tho river (a branch of the Mekong). Boat dwellers ply the backwaters, buying melons, beans, rice, pineapples, and the myriad other foods grown by people who live along the watery byways. The boat merchants then gather, hoisting poles to which they tie examples of what they have to sell that day. Retailers from the town take boats out to buy from the wholesalers. It’s a fascinating scene, and it provided us with several highly diverting hours.

Notice that among other things, these folks have cabbages for sale.

But none of what we saw astounded me as much as our guide’s comments about the rainy season. He mentioned that at this time of year, the town typically floods twice a day — with every high tide. Over and over, folks living near the water see it seep into their homes and rise to a height of one foot, two, sometimes more. My immediate thought was that this was a consequence of global warning, catastrophic. But Ca’s next comment suggested otherwise. “It very nice,” he said, looking serene. The floodwaters increased the supply of fish and brought in deposits of silt that made the rich soil even richer, he pointed out. Getting all their belongings up and away from the water’s reach might be a nuisance, but it only lasted for a few hours each day, part of the year, and folks were used to dealing with it.

Part of our tour included a visit to a rice noodle factory, where Steve had to stare down this resident over breakfast

After our river tour with Ca, we caught a bus to transport us on the three-and-a-half-hour journey from Can Tho to the border town of Chau Doc. The ride was pretty ghastly. Our seats were directly behind the driver, who seemed to have a bad cold. Every few minutes, he made disgusting noises as he sucked mucus from his nasal passages, rolled down his window, and loudly spat a glob into the street. He also texted and talked on his cell phone frequently, while managing to honk several times per minute — warning the bicycles and motorbikers and cars and trucks and other buses jamming the bad roads that he was about to hit them (though he never did, despite coming very, very close). The honking irritated me, but its aggravational power paled compared to the braying nonstop programming on the big TV screen hanging from the ceiling next to us. Maybe Vietnamese sitcoms and propaganda music videos are more lovable if you speak Vietnamese. It’s possible.

Still, our trip to Chau Doc was neither about the journey nor the destination; we didn’t reach our guesthouse until almost 7 p.m., and we checked out barely 12 hours later. We came to catch the Hangchau Speed Boat, which would take us up the river, across the border between Vietnam and Cambodia, and on to the capital city of Phnom Penh. I’m writing this aboard the boat.

This ride is pretty noisy too, but it’s all the rush of water sounds mixed with the bass notes of the boat’s engine. We’re not bouncing and jerking, but rather barreling along as smoothly as if we were on a jet plane rocked by only the mildest of turbulence. The only air conditioning is the natural kind. The breeze magically makes you forget that it’s 90 degrees outside with 90 percent humidity. And how much more detailed and humane the views are than those available from 35,000 feet. Earlier, near Chau Doc, we saw boats of every sort: wooden skiffs and pirogues and junks and ferries and sampans. Not one single sailboat. One expensive looking cruise ship. Now the banks are lined with jungly greenery. Once in a while, a bizarrely exotic temple materializes.

Fast boat cabin interior

Unlike another bus trip, which I would be dreading, I’m happy we’ll have one final ride on the Mekong. We’ll do that Saturday morning, when we travel from Phnom Penh up to Siam Reap, the site of Angkor Wat. But first we’ll get to see something of this capital of the one-time killing fields.

The Phnom Penh skyline, as seen from our fast boat on arrival