360 Degrees Longitude (34 page)

Suddenly my fruit smoothie wasn't so refreshing.

Something I had read in
Lonely Planet Cambodia
suddenly took on a fresh perspective: “If you see anything being done incompetently, remember that all the educated people in the country either fled or were exterminated in the late 1970s.”

I had grown up hearing about the Cambodian genocide. But watching two people break ice on a concrete floor for fruit smoothies where dogs had been lying while the words
anything being done incompetently
echoed in my head gave the events of 30 years ago a gut-wrenching clarity.

• • •

We took a “tuk-tuk” to the ruins of Angkor Wat. In Cambodia and Thailand a taxi is known as a tuk-tuk, which is a trailer pulled by a small motorcycle—a Chinese counterfeit of a Honda Trail 90. I had a Honda Trail 90 as a kid, and put a few thousand miles on it zooming all over the desert and mountains of Southern California before I even got my first zit. Now, as the five of us piled into a trailer behind one tiny motorcycle, I hoped that the brake system had been upgraded since the original 1960's-era original. And off we puttered.

Arriving at the largest temple of Angkor Wat, we hired a young man in his early twenties to be our guide for the day. When we crossed a bridge over a moat that surrounds the largest temple, our guide had an important factoid for us.

“This is the view from the scene in
Lara Croft: Tomb Raider
as they enter the hidden chamber.”

I had no idea what our guide was talking about. “Is that a movie?” I asked.

Our guide was only too happy to fill in the gaps in our knowledge about such an important cinematic touchstone. Clearly smitten with the movie's heroine, Angelina Jolie, he pelted us with every little detail about her and what she did while filming in the area. Such was his fervor that we watched
Lara Croft
months later when given the opportunity. I can honestly say I've seen detergents that leave a better film.

Angkor Wat cannot be absorbed in a few days. It had not been too many months since we had been touring cathedrals and castles in Europe. We had visited many examples of exceptional craftsmanship, from the Vatican to the Charles Bridge in Prague. None of these can compare to the scale and detail of Angkor Wat. Individual temples are spread over several square miles and enormous pagodas top every shrine. While the vastness of the complex is impressive, it is the detail that is most remarkable and the intruding jungle that gives it its character.

Clearly, the entire complex of Angkor Wat was a labor of love for an ancient civilization; every square millimeter of stone is an intricate storyboard toiled over by generations of craftsmen. As the
Tomb Raider
trivia dried up, we were left with an endless stream of data about what all the bas-reliefs and dancing devas etched in stone meant. As the place is immense, there was far more story than we could absorb. Think France's Bayeux Tapestry on an exponential scale.

To make matters worse, my mother-in-law, curse her wretched Mensa cranium, has an infinite capacity for just this kind of mind-numbing detail. By the time I had heard the umpteenth story of how this elephant-headed goddess had a tug of war with a seven-headed serpent and landed in a bath of milk and sealed her power for eternity, I knew it was our turn to make up a story.

The walls of the temples are covered in carvings that tell a story. It has been my life ambition to create my own enduring urban legend and be immortalized on
www.urbanlegends.com
. Whoever came up with the one about the blind date that went bad where the guy wakes up in a tub of ice with one of his kidneys missing is a genius. Now that we were in Angkor Wat, I realized my opportunity was before me.

While Granny was entertaining our tour guide, the rest of us came up with a plan to carve our own legend into stone. We would place it out of sight in some obscure temple to be miraculously “discovered.” But what story to tell?

After much discussion, we settled on a storyboard carving that has a flying saucer with the Microsoft Windows logo on one side and the number 666 on the other. Then we'd show legions of people bowing down to the flying saucer and worshipping it. We would have to somehow pass our stone storyboard through a goat so that it would have that “aged look.”

Too bad our stone-carving skills weren't up to snuff; our carving's discovery would have made a great news story. It may yet. I may not know about stone carving, but I can use Photoshop.

The tour guide was detailing one of the storyboards while Katrina and Jordan took refuge in the shade. Seemingly out of nowhere a monkey approached Katrina and started grooming itself. Katrina sat still and smiled at the monkey. The monkey responded by showing her its many teeth. I didn't know if the monkey was threatening her or simply returning the smile. Then I realized that monkeys probably don't have the social pattern of smiling.

Oops, I thought. One wrong move on Katrina's part and that monkey is going to use those teeth and take a divot out of her arm.

What happened next was either sheer brilliance on Katrina's part or dumb luck, but Katrina responded by simply raising her eyebrows. The monkey responded by raising its eyebrows. Slowly, the monkey came right up to her and started to brush its hand on her thigh; it was grooming Katrina for lice.

The monkey must have thought that Katrina had a terrible case of the mange and had lost all of her fur. It started to inspect the (very fine) hair on her thigh, and proceeded to pinch the little hairs and pluck them out, one at a time, and then eat them.

Katrina tried very hard not to scream out in pain. Always having my children's best interests in mind, I told her to stay still so I could take pictures. After a minute or two, just as suddenly as the monkey started to “groom” Katrina, it turned its back to her and pointed to its back as if to say, “Okay, I did you. Your turn to do me.”

So, Katrina dutifully started to brush through the monkey's fur. Every time she tried to stop and get up and walk away, the monkey would look up at her disdainfully and point to another area it wanted groomed. I don't think Katrina found any lice. And I really doubt she would have eaten any if she had. Katrina quickly decided it was time to start shaving her legs to avoid being mistaken for needing a good lice grooming in the future.

Exiting one of the temples, the sound of playful music beckoned us. As we approached the source, we found several landmine survivors playing music with a donation box prominently displayed. The lesson of seeing a group of amputees was not lost on Jordan, who from this point forward soberly reminded us all to stay on the path every time one of our toes happened to so much as touch a blade of grass.

No sooner were we reminded of the dangers of the landmines than Katrina found an enormous snakeskin that had been recently shed. It was intact in every detail, so that the holes for its eyes and mouth could be clearly seen. Suddenly we all became a little more careful where we placed our hands as we climbed the steep stone steps, or when we stepped into a darkened chamber.

• • •

Our tuk-tuk driver became an honorary member of the family, taking us everywhere we went. On the back of his tuk-tuk was posted an advertisement for a restaurant. Prominently displayed on the ad was the internationally recognized symbol for online addicts who need to get a quick fix: Wi-Fi.

Our driver asked where we wanted to go, and I pointed to the advertisement on the back of his tuk-tuk.

“I would like to go here,” I said.

“No, you don't want to go there,” he said. “I can take you to a nice place. You will like it.”

He didn't understand. I needed an e-mail fix. “I want to use their wireless network,” I said, pointing to the Wi-Fi logo to make my point. He had good English skills, but I've met native English speakers who don't know what a wireless network is.

He said, “Wee Fee? You want Wee Fee?”

Wee Fee sounded close enough to me, so I nodded enthusiastically. We all piled into the tuk-tuk and were on our way to get Wee Fee. The others might be going to get food, but I had one goal.

At the restaurant we were shown in by the maître d'. I was logging into their network before we crossed the threshold of the door.

“I'm in! I'm in! I'm in!” I sang, doing a little dance.

“We are all in,” September said.

“No, no, no,” I said, as the maître d' showed us a seat in the waiting area. “Their network. It's wide open and fast.” I settled into a plush armchair and was downloading e-mail and looking at the news—the world was mine and I could go anywhere I pleased.

“This is an interesting place,” September commented.

I glanced around quickly, not wanting to take my eyes off my two-inch-by-three-inch screen. “Looks nice to me. Kind of fancy for Cambodia, though.” The purpose of the soft light with the reddish glow hadn't sunk in yet.

“Interesting artwork on the walls,” Granny commented. “What kind of place have you taken me to, John?”

I glanced up for a moment at a painting. “Hmmm. It's a neo-expressionist nude. Big deal.”

“I see you learned something about art while at the Louvre,” Granny continued, “but what will your children think?”

I knew she was goading me. Didn't she know I was mainlining a steady stream of 1's and 0's? Without looking up I said, “Not much. You can't swing a dead cat in Europe without hitting a painting of a bare breast. In the Vatican Museum, statues of naked men missing their penises are all the rage.”

The maître d' brought us a menu. Annoyed that I had to stop what I was doing, I quickly looked through the menu and picked something out. I proceeded to go back to reading about important world events, such the scandal in Orlando where a bunch of high school boys on a Disney World field trip were put in the same hotel with a swingers club. Just then Katrina and Jordan started snickering and pointing their fingers at the artwork.

“Pointing isn't polite—what's so funny, anyway?” I then looked at what they were pointing at. The nude was Rock Hudson: his feather boa strategically covered his anatomy. Across the room from Rock Hudson was Chairman Mao with earrings and red lipstick. Another wall sported a painting of a very overweight guy wearing a tutu, a smile, and little else. His hairy chest would have made Bigfoot jealous.

I glanced at September. “Nice restaurant,” she said, giving me a wicked smile.

It isn't as though I wanted to raise Katrina and Jordan in a hermetically sealed mayonnaise jar, but the restaurant's décor was a little over the top. In less time than it takes to explain it, I realized that my own eccentricities entitled me to a lifetime of teasing for my restaurant selection. But while my eccentricities may have been learned, September's are genetic. A couple of weeks traveling with my mother-in-law made me realize that. Regardless, the deck was stacked against Katrina and Jordan, as they were losing out on both sides of the nature-nurture thing.

For a moment I considered leaving, but hey, we had already ordered, and the restaurant had a big serving of Wee Fee. “Yeah,” I said, “I like it, too.”

I
was
careful to sit next to September throughout dinner and to put my arm around her. As the walls were plastered with paintings of men in high heels and corsets, there was no sense in giving anyone the wrong idea. Through dinner I contemplated the bigger picture of Cambodia's recent history and what it meant to be able to display a painting of Chairman Mao in drag in a public place. I think Cambodia will not only survive, it will thrive.

• • •

We had considered taking a boat down the Mekong River to Phnom Penh until we learned that one full of Western tourists recently capsized, Vasa-style. It seems that tickets for seats on the boats are for Western tourists, and the locals are put up on the roof. My best guess is that the captain keeps taking passengers and loads them onto the roof until water is near to lapping over the sides of the boat.

As we had already covered inverted pendulums and Archimedes' Principle after the
Vasa
museum, I resisted the urge to have another science moment on the subject and we simply decided to take the bus to Phnom Penh. We met a nice Australian family that was spending a few months traveling around Southeast Asia. They had come to Siem Reap the day before we had via the same route from Bangkok.

“So,” I asked, “how about those bridges? They must not have been too bad or you wouldn't be here now.”

The father spoke up. “When we came through, one bridge was totally out and had apparently collapsed only minutes before we arrived. We were stuck for hours until it could be repaired, and then all the crew did was lay wood planks across the river. The planks were no wider than the width of a tire.”

“Ah, yes. I think our driver hit that bridge at 40 miles per hour. I nearly wet myself. And yet, here we are doing it again.”

“Well, a fair measure of crazy is doing the same thing twice and expecting a different outcome,” my new friend snorted, “but I suppose you need to be a bit crazy to be on a walkabout for an entire year with your kids.”

I had either been insulted or praised. Perhaps both.

Once in Phnom Penh, all the horrid traffic we had previously witnessed worldwide suddenly seemed sedate and orderly in comparison. In China we observed that the fanciest cars seemed to have the right-of-way at intersections. In Phnom Penh this was no longer subtle, putting the average person at a huge disadvantage, because the average person was on a moped. Rather, the
average family
was on a moped. At the same time. I never knew that a 50cc moped could carry a family of four and their shopping all at once, but I have the pictures to prove that not only can it be done, it's common.

I don't think anyone could ever really be prepared for Phnom Penh. From the insane traffic to the child beggars sans clothes and sans the occasional limb, it is not for the faint of heart. It is also a city full of beautiful people.