Angkor Wat

Angkor Wat was a major religious site for both Buddhists and Hindus in Cambodia for hundreds of years. Today it is a crumbling ruin that serves as an interesting relic of the long dead Khmer empire.

It is eye-poppingly beautiful, and though Amanda and I do not arrive at sunrise as all the guidebooks say to, we are suitably impressed. The crumbling facade and jungle-conquered outer walls stir my poet's soul. "My name is Ozymandius: look on my works and despair."

If I had paid more attention in freshman English, I might have been able to quote the whole poem to you, or tell you who wrote it. I suspect Shelley, though Byron comes to mind as well. Regardless, the sentiment is the same – here lies the madness of a long dead king; a once sacred palace and holy center now a tourist attraction, nearly entirely secular in nature, and interesting only because of its ruinous nature and grand scale.

Nearly totally secular. The highest point of the complex is still considered sacred by someone important, because a ministry of tourism booth blocks the staircase, and men in uniform determine, seemingly entirely arbitrarily, who can get in and who can't.

Men are largely admitted, and in fact I never once saw one turned away. But the leering tourist officials stop women wearing tank tops and dresses that come above the knees, despite the sweltering heat of the day. Amanda and I are stopped because she is wearing her "Chi Phat Wildlife Alliance" tank top; because showing too much skin in the presence of the holy one brings on hurricanes and earthquakes.

I am allowed to continue, but she must remain below in the courtyard. 

The ludicrousness of the situation infuriates me. No one worships here anymore, and they haven't for at least two hundred years. The Buddha statues scattered around the place are defaced by time and vandals, but for some reason allowing a woman to dress for the weather would offend the gods. Amanda is clearly pissed off, but our powers are limited. She shrugs, indicating me to go up by myself. I give the tourist officials an impotent, withering stare and proceed up.

Halfway up I get an idea, and when I return to the bottom, Amanda and I sneak off to a quiet corner and switch shirts. Now armed with my giant, on her frame, button up, she gives the tourist officials a smile and starts up. I sit in the courtyard in a tank top a size too small.

When she returns, we high five, delighted to have overcome this obstacle. Problem solving and critical thinking: 1; Dogmatic religious fear of women having control of their own bodies: 0.

By now Amanda and I are familiar with many Hindu deities and Buddhist doctrines, both of which the complex at Angkor Wat has in spades. A two-hundred-meter-long stretch of hallway features the now familiar scene of the "churning of the sea of milk" which is a Hindu myth. Supposedly all the gods and demons got together to churn this sea of milk, using a mountain resting on the back of a turtle incarnation of another god, with the snake god serving as the rope mechanism.

Yeah. That's a real thing.

Most of the rest of the murals are graphic descriptions of wars. One section has a complete pictorial explanation of the seven hells. I am distantly reminded of Trajan's column in Rome, which is similar to this, but covers the war between Emperor Trajan and tribal leaders in the northeast Mediterranean.

That one had pictures of men and women in shackles on it, too.

It is interesting to me that something so abhorrent as slavery is so ubiquitous. It never occurs to me to think of owning someone, and the thought of me being enslaved ignites such a fire of resistance in me that I find it difficult to imagine someone surviving the attempt, either myself or the enslaver. Only one person would walk away.

So there were murals of wars, of creation, and of hell. There were niches where Buddha’s would be but for vandals and the gnawing inevitability of time. Angkor Wat is a memory; an empty tomb of a long forgotten and longer dead civilization. But what is a tomb?

- Doug