2004 °   Just back and the news of the day states that course fees will be upped, yet again. The trip home was smooth, quiet, and almost as if it didn't occur. At the Siem Reap Airport I was already quite certain that I was halfway back in Singapore, all thanks to the surprisingly clean departure hall that looked as international as all airports have been, will be and shall be. And this is third world? Half the time I was lounging in cosy hotel chairs, or being chauffeured around in air-con vans and enjoying slow meals at the old market restaurants, where time is lost to the waiting of food, the ridding of flies and doing mental sums in riels and the depreciating USD. The art of Apsara continues in the dance of hands over dining tables, taking random circular movements mimicking the path of flies, and occasionally breaking into sudden claps, in the directions determined by the local bloodsuckers.

It can therefore be inferred that there's a lot to learn about Cambodia through the pesky aspects of the country. Bugs are everywhere, from the tuk tuk drivers to the landmine-victimised beggars, but yet the cleverest thing that could ever happen in that part of the world is to walk into a bugger trap and not realise it. Soon we were tied by a concept known as a package - something that my parents would gladly submit to - and the circumstances that snowballed from this bad choice. (Or rather, a complete lack of choice. group dynamics state that when everyone is agreeable to everyone else's plan, no one is really planning and they should all get ready for big shit). To liberate oneself from the tangles of the package, one has to sacrifice precious visiting hours and emotional peace for painful debates over the cost of adding one bed or two, and the futile bargaining against late vans and extra charges. But honestly, it doesn't matter, because sooner or later this money will either go to the Cambodians who don't smile, or to the Cambodians who do. (Yes, spare riels will all go to the artisans at the end of the day). this struggle (sounds architectural eh) between the yearn to argue and break free, and a preferred fatalism to live and let live, could not be better portrayed in the bas reliefs of the Angkor Wat, where the Asuras and Gods engage in a celestial tug-of-war with a giant Naga in the story of the churning of ocean of milk.

And how persistent they have been. If the soulful haunting of the beheaded or massacred could not be better felt, there will always be other physical lifeforms that will hauntingly follow you back home. A beautiful little girl tags along like a shadow, trying for the whole evening to sell her food. Long after walking away from Psar Thmey and almost two streets down, the shadow still clings relentlessly. Tuk tuks, in a similar manner, fight to earn meagre commissions by bringing people to select hotels and guesthouses. They follow you down the road as you trek with all your bags in aimless wander looking for a bed and shower, regimentally fighting the temptations of comfort that half a dollar can yield. Sometimes they follow you to your hotel and wait for your answer as to whether you want to use them for the next day's temple visits. Sometimes they just want to go on and on, because they have secrets you might not be interested in, and they want to practise the language.

For as much as the enthusiastic visitors roam around the silent ruins touching and talking to the unresponding stones in amazement, the tuk tuk drivers carry the same optimism in dealing with potential but unresponsive clients. They prey on every opportunity that walks by just for that few successful trips they make in a day. It must be the bugs that they eat. From fried silkworms, to crickets and cicadas, and even tarantulas, the bug lives on.

And this is a trip where tourism is studied, understood, and experienced, both as a first and third party. The swarm of traffic and eateries under umbrellas parked outside the moat of the Angkor Wat says it all. From the causeway bridge, one can either face East and photograph the impressive Wat; or face West to take in the grandeur of the marketplace that blossomed with the tide of tourism. The superficiality of this experience cannot be better described. I really like the idea that you just need to cross the road (known as the small circuit) to step between two different time zones - the Angkorian, and the modern Cambodian - I even better like the idea that the once sacred temple which admits a limited number of visitors in a ritual path is now swarmed with an international crowd, in counts of millions, maybe zillions, like ants that advance in armies over all walkable surfaces. Visitors jump in and out of sanctuaries and stumble upon lingas as if they were bum rests, forgetting or not knowing that these are monumental objects in sacred chambers once inaccessible to the typical folks. The best part of it all would have to be the steep steps leading to the central shrine, which is really now a vertical playground. But how else do I expect things to be. This monument of death is the pride of all their people, a pride which makes their economy grow in ways we do not immediately sense.

Everyday we lunch on the delicate balance between good and bad memories, whipped together in a confusing collage of history. The more I ate the more I felt disinterested. Somehow there seem to be so little, yet there really must be a lot to say. It must be all hidden in secret closets, because it just seemed too peaceful and idyllic, like how a writer puts it - a 'bucolic Buddhaland'. Maybe the tourism boom gave them a new energy to indulge in, and forget about the past. From amok fish to elephant fish to Lok Lak beef and morning glory, everything tastes politically correct. In a sense, the mystique that the French promised when they discovered the 'lost' Angkor city has now found a new place in the reserved voices of the smiley everyday Cambodians.

This morning we were cycling around Siem Reap and hopping all over the town's many tastefully done hotels.

At the old market we were again shopping like in every other old markets in the French Indochina region: the markets are usually dominated by handicraft shops that are no longer visited by the locals, but by the tourists. The food places are also distinctly 'backpacker-styled'. Apart from having half the menu serving Cambodian food, there really isn't anything left that distinguishes these restaurants from those in other backpacker towns, like in Hanoi, or Ho Chi Minh City. Let’s just say that the scarves and craftworks are no longer authentically Khmer, or Vietnamese, or Burmese, but simply homogenised as 'French Indochinese'. The themes recur and recur, coupling the Indianised Buddhist and Hinduistic side with the practices of the Chinese, as if the word Indochina wasn't just a geographical name of convenience. I won't know what I would be shopping then, perhaps just objects of a constructed imagination of no significant authenticity. Yet I am sure I was wrong since there is nothing to justify what I imagined. After all, the things that we bought looks so pretty it doesn't matter if they are mainstream derivatives or not. So what if all the books and VCDs are fakes. The crafts must be real, surely, or at least they must be real copies from somewhere.

Once in a while, a pair of orange or yellow robed monks appear before the houses in Phnom Penh, barefooted, but screened from the sun with umbrellas of matching colours. Their bright robes make them stand out from the landscape of brown, beige and the fiercely white of the sunny day. The homeowner offers them alms, bowing deeply as he reaches before the motionless monks. So ten days it was, trumped by the occasional card games, recurring fruit shakes, and the ice-cool towels - assuming they are very clean ones. I’m tanned.

postscript °   In 1603, then Brother Gabriel de San Antonio, in "A Brief and Truthful Relation of Events in the Kingdom of Cambodia" to King Don Philippe, wrote: "at the entrance to the road, (in the same way as we Christians erect crosses) Cambodian people erect high poles at the top of which is a golden snake. They all worship it; their criminals put themselves under its protection and it constitutes a sacred place. If they have a dispute between themselves and they want to contract a new friendship, they bleed, mix their blood in the same vessel and drink it, each one in his turn; then they dip a knife in it, keep it raised, and through ceremony, promise to be of the same blood, to have only one heart and one will, threatening with the knife anybody who would claim to the contrary. That practice, and the custom of putting snakes on the top of masts along the roads as well as that of the monks chanting the chorus seven times originates from some roman Jews who once lived in that kingdom. There are many Jews in the kingdom of china: they are the ones who built, in Cambodia, the city of Angkor which, as I said, was discovered in 1570. They abandoned it when they emigrated to china, according to what the Jews from the East Indies told me when, passing through there, I conversed with them about that matter."

Footnote provided by the book countered his observations: "Father de San Antonio must have mistaken the pillars for the poles... according to a Siamese tradition, those poles topped by the Hamsa [swan or sacred goose] were imposed on the Siamese at the time of the conquest of the country by the Kingdom of Pegu (1564), as a token of vassalage to that kingdom... it seems difficult to assume that, within such a short time, around 1590, Cambodia could have borrowed the use of similar poles from Siam. Another reason favouring this theory of the pillars or sacred boundary stones is given by the father himself. He notes that the criminals who put themselves under the protection of those poles or pillars enjoyed the right of asylum. that is perfectly correct regarding the Simas: anyone who would take refuge on the territory bounded by these boundary-marks could not be pursued nor arrested - at least temporarily - especially if it concerned political offences. The only way for him to escape the police force was to become a monk as soon as he had entered the place of asylum."

As for the Jews and that incredible assertion that they built the Angkor city, the editor notes: "the Jesuits, according to Purchas, Pilgrimes, assumed the Brahmins existed only since the Israelites' dispersion and that their books betrayed the scriptures' influences. it seems likely that the Jews of the East Indies, by telling Father de San Antonio that legend about the construction of Angkor, intended, at the same time, to glorify their own race and to strengthen a thesis dear to the hearts of the Christian friars."

In another part, the father wrote: "Cambodians are all pagans, although they acknowledge a supreme power that they consider to be more powerful than all their other gods... they have numerous pagodas that look like monasteries, where their monks and their priests, whom they call Chucus, live. These are recognisable by their shaved heads, while the lay people wear their hair long - but not so long as the Chinese - and by their yellow scarf. Those who want to follow the religious status start from childhood. if they want to persevere once they have grown older, they make it their profession and take four vows: not to lie, not to kill, not to steal, not to fornicate with women; that is why they are sodomites, passive ones when they are children and active ones when they are grown up. They chant the chorus seven times and, before starting their prayers, they confess to each other."

Footnote about the sodomies: "sheer calumny, according to all impartial observers."

In yet another part, he wrote about the great re-discovery of the city of Angkor in 1570, which happened while some Cambodian people were hunting rhinoceroses. He wrote that "the houses are made of stone and are very beautiful, very orderly arranged in streets and the works of those houses, the porticos and courtyards, halls and rooms, seem to be Roman."

Roman?!

Again, the French claimed another re-discovery in the 19th century. too bad for the British and the Dutch, the credit can only go to the Spanish, the Portuguese, and the French, and, of course, last and the least, the Khmers themselves, whether or not the colonisers actually believed they built it when they 'discovered' it back then (early Europeans thought the city was the work of Alexander the great or the Romans).

Oh well, everyone (from that part of the world) wants a share of South-East Asian gems. the Dutch had Borobudur (java), the Brits had pagan (Myanmar), the Spaniards Philippines, and the French, Indochina.

A researcher wrote in his thesis while "each Angkorian monarch had a sacred obligation to construct a new temple as a validation that his reign had surpassed the achievements of his predecessor", the colonial project, "in the confidence of the mission civilisatrice, had to leave evidence that it had brought the panacea of western modernity. Current inscriptions on the landscape continue to use the past to exploit its multiple political and economic potential... this embedding is a 'process of construction and reconstruction as the ancestral past is subject to the political map of the present'. This is particularly evident in the multiple maps imposed on the region of Siem Reap."

What have they constructed then? a rebranded Angkor - decadence, mystery, impenetrability, an enigma - recall Bayon? (So enigmatic they found the smile "lacking gravitas", a "face that is faceless".)

Dick Vigers wrote in his dissertation what and where he thought Angkor really was: "Angkor was a city constructed outside Cambodia, not seven kilometres from Siem Reap but in the studies of the EFEO, in the museums of Paris, the Guimet and the Trocadero or in La Monnaie de Paris, the Mint as well as in the international exhibitions and in the minds of the armchair explorers and exotic novel readers, travel bureaux, fridge buyers, etc. Siem Reap, on the other hand, was the creation, or rather, recreation, of the colonial administration, its civil servants and entrepreneurs."

The West had taken Siem Reap as a terra nullius and did what they like.

Reading on, it is said that "the Khmer Rouge had attempted to reconstruct a non-urban landscape as a denial of urban organisation... they 'designed' a 'national' model house that was wooden and thatched and similar to the houses of the rural population."

Sounds like the east also took back their own grounds as a terra nullius and did what they like.

The more significant erasure, it seems, will be due to tourism. But tourism is not new to Angkor or Siem Reap. It has been happening for the past two centuries, no less! Vigers wrote that this phenomenon "grew directly from the archaeological and ethnographic expeditions of the nineteenth century travellers." and that it is no news that people visit Siem Reap out of convenience to visit the Angkor temples. even the airport is named 'Siem Reap - Angkor International Airport', and not just Siem Reap airport alone. In fact there is little trace left of what Siem Reap was before tourism fed it with a distinct urban meaning. It was written that there were even plans to create a 'Nouveau Siemreap', a new tourist city halfway between Angkor Wat and the existing Siem Reap town, which will see new hotels, theatres, cinemas, bars and shopping centres. However, it was also written that "the plan, of which only one hotel was built and bombed before it opened, foundered in the turmoil that erupted after the Lon Nol coup in 1970."

So what are we trying to do, laying butter papers over a beautiful town and trying to organise things like for what? To make a greater non-place out of a non-place? If the conservation office can parcel up the Angkor ruins and allocate each site to a specific aiding nation to take care of, thus selling out shares of their national pride in exchange for long-term foreign interest, then the anastylostic restoration method can be applied in the town of Siem Reap too. Cut the town up into many quartiers. Get a few key nations involved in the act. Each will apply their own medication to the plot. They can take everything apart, lay them on the ground, jazz up the structure and foundations, and then assemble all the pieces back where they belong to, like a giant jigsaw puzzle. Anastylosis is how the Dutch archaeologists restored ruins in java and how the French learnt and restored Angkor in the 20th century. If there really is any non-fictitious ruin in view in Siem Reap, then perhaps the anastylosis method can be quite the local symptomatic relief that fictitious brief setters would like to peruse.

What can go wrong? It’s western medicine alright.

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