Field Notes: Cambodia
As we snake our way slowly, via tuk-tuk, through the roads of Siem Reap for the first time, a familiar excitement begins to creep over me. It’s the sense of simple surging purpose that accompanies any journey. Journeys are comfortingly simple stories, with clear beginnings and ends. They are made up of moments that seem laden with meaning, if only because they are fleeting. It’s a trick that travel plays on my mind but one that i’m grateful for all the same.
In this way travel is similar to the way I think about photography. Through the lens of my dad’s old Pentax the world becomes a simple place. I can frame out the parts that confuse or contradict, and create some kind of meaning from chaos.
On that first day in Angkor temples emerge from the jungle like shy stone giants, reluctantly making themselves seen. As we begin to explore these endless ruins our imaginations take us to stranger places, and we find ourselves talking about gods and ghosts. Conversations that in any other place would sound childish are now not so easily dismissed.
Even for the most cynical it’s impossible not to feel something verging on spiritual, when surrounded by history that’s too ancient to comprehend and at the same time touchable. Here you can see in the stone wall carvings how Hinduism gradually morphed into Buddhism. Walking the labyrinth of passages you can imagine the city as it was in the 12th Century, a complex civilisation of over 1 million people, at a time when London was still only home to a few thousand.
We visit floating villages in Kampong Phluk, where during the rainy season, the farmers become fisherman, and live on flooded fields that stretch so far into the distance they mimic the ocean. In a small boat, expertly maneuvered by a local guide, we drift silently in dappled sunlight through mangroves, while monkeys gaze down from the treetops.
For me everything is magical and otherworldly, but for my friend Bich, who was born here, the weight of Cambodia’s recent history is more tangible. In Siem Reap evidence of lingering tragedies are visible in the shocking number of landmine victims passed on the streets, and by the casual way Chhay, our tuk-tuk driver, tells us the story of how his parents were killed fighting the Khmer Rouge, like it’s no big deal, because every family here has a similar story.
Days brush by gently, and on the morning of our last day we take one last trip through the Cambodian countryside. This time we are heading nowhere in particular, but Chhay insists on showing us more than just the temples and tourist filled town.
More than once, as the landscape slides past, I instinctively reach for my camera, before remembering that I’ve already used all of my rolls of film. But these final images, (the ones not captured and so probably the most true) are the ones I suspect i’ll remember most. Hundreds of fruit bats circling the treetops. A young woman swinging gently in a hammock with a baby asleep on her. Buffalo ambling across the road, shaking flies from their massive horned heads. And dark skinned stick-limbed children playing in a river, one of them turning with a frown that seems to capture a nation, her eyes for a moment meeting mine.