Mr.Tuk Tuk

A metallic Cambodian loudspeaker spoke, Now here this, The tuk-tuk is leaving in five minutes, Departing for points unknown, A massive short celestial event known as YOUR LIFE will depart in five minutes. 

You are advised to assemble all the necessary documents, certified seals of approval, water, invisible guide books, sunscreen, funny money and so on...you will visit the Mind-At-Large on your short, fast, easy tour.

Bring your life with you, And a glossy greasy Laughing Planet guidebook with heavily creased pages. If you attempt to read while moving at the speed of light or 186,000 miles per second you will discover a new sense of perspective.

You may be surprised or traumatized depending on your perception to realize your experience at Angkor is not about seeing the temples. You will DO Angkor. Get the t-shirt. Check it off your list. Less is more.

Please conclude all private and group discussions, disagreements or arguments with your fellow travelers to ascertain your destination. Talking time is finished. 

The tuk-tuk driver has his helmet and vest. His vest has a green four-digit number. If he tries to bring you into Angkor without the vest he faces massive surprises. For starters he will lose his job and have to return to his small distant isolated village where he will plant rice and provoke white cows with socialist Marxist production tools to pull the plow through mud.

The biggest dream for many young Cambodian men is to become a tuk-tuk driver. If he loses his tuk-tuk job his family will starve to death. This is a common problem here. Death by starvation. If you survive you win. 

If he dies you will be held in escrow. (Old French; a scrap, a roll of parchment)

A tuk-tuk river driver has an easy job. An easy life. He drives you to a temple and crashes out. You feed him. He takes you back where you started. He makes $15-20 for the day. 

The average Cambodian’s daily wage is $2.03.

Not a single woman in Siem Reap is a tuk-tuk driver. There are 3-4 women tuk-tuk drivers in Phnom Penh. They are as rare as clean drinking water, sanitation, hospitals and schools. Women work in massage parlors, restaurants and guest houses. They are the guest and you are the house. 

Your house has many symbolic rooms: the basement is where your unconscious lives breaths-laughs and dances where it reveals inner vision. Clean all your rooms. Take out the garbage. Explore your diverse rooms. 

Don’t sweat the small stuff, it’s all small stuff. You are the housekeeper of perception, sensation, form, symbols and nothing.

A woman doesn't work as a tuk-tuk driver because: 

-it's too dangerous

-it's inappropriate

-it's foolish

-they lack the education, intelligence, drive, initiative

-they haven't broken free of deeply ingrained social and cultural stereotypes: a woman's place is in the home, producing offspring, taking care of kids and the elderly, washing, cleaning, and cooking

-their family will kill them with love and affection

Thirty years ago a Cambodian woman was lucky to finish 9th grade. She married and stayed at home. She produced children in assembly line operations with the highest quality control standards known to modern medicine and umbilical chords.

It will take another generation before women become tuk-tuk drivers. Tisk, tisk, tuk, tuk.

Your mother was appointed to have you.

colorado tourists

Greetings,

Once upon a time five tourists from Colorado came to Cambodia for two weeks. 14 daze.

The leader was a dentist from the Rockies. He had been coming here for ten years offering his services in the capital and rural villages. Doing good work, considering the state of dental health care. He also wanted to see his part-time local girlfriend. She ran a dental clinic in the big city.

She was hot. They practiced oral hygiene whenever they could. It was a mutually satisfying orgasm experience with pliable tissue, lots of saliva and swimming body fluids. Drill me baby.

In the group was a female dental hygentist and three dazed and crazed rich high school kids. The woman was in her 50's, lived in a conservative rural mountain town and was new to Asia.

Someone asked her about life in America. "It's a mess. People on welfare have this sense of entitlement. They get cell phones, food stamps and have no incentive to work. The school systems are falling apart. Immigrants from Mexico keep flooding in. Who would have thought that Hispanics would be the majority in Dodge City, Kansas? Immigrants do all the work that other citizens avoid. Plain and simple."

They went to Angkor for a day. They went to health clinics and helped the local staff. They shopped. They left, filled with monumental anxiety about traveling in reverse.

Metta.

Buy

Greetings,

Hands of Cambodian children.

"Mister, wanta buy a book? Wanta buy some postcards? Cold water mister? No money for school. Book mister?  Good price. You buy..."

Metta.

Feel with camera

Greetings,

How many tourists see only through their camera? Millions. They feel the experience of 8th century artistic splendor with only their cameras, these cold impersonal little tools. Their entire experience is defined by their camera. It's not about knowing, understanding the people, culture, food, art, music, and language. It's about feeling with a camera.

They've learned through hard fast lessons to trust the machine. It is their weapon against mediocrity and boredom and shallow emptiness. They don't comprehend the intricacies of the machine. They believe it can and will save them. The machine controls them. They gratefully accept this reality.

They press optical machines against their faces, piercing retinas, flickering lids. Point and shoot. They lower the device and stare with hard lost eyes at the image, their memory. They judge it. Evaluate. DELETE!

Shoot again. Point. Shoot. Delete. Repeat. A snapshot. Snap a shot. Preserve this moment forever. Quick! They must go. They must move to the next great big thing. They are in a hurry. The tuk-tuk driver is impatient. He wants more money for his time. He waited when they slept. He waited when they stuffed eggs, watermelon and soft bread into tired faces. They ate like animals. They point and shoot. They delete.

Hurry! They have no time to see with their obscurity. This loss, this sense of amnesia envelops them. It is a dark cloud of forgetting. They remember to forget. 

They are on a Homeric quest of infinite proportions and infinite magnitude. 

Their memory card is full. They attach electrodes to a cerebral cortex and press, ever so lightly, the Down Loadswitch. Memories of Apsara dancers, elephants, monkeys, celestial deities flicker and play on a screen behind their eyes.

Avalokiteshvara, the Bodhisattva of compassion smiles.

Metta. 

Interior, Banteay Srei, 9th C. 

Banteay Srei, Kbal Spean & Roluos Group

Banteay Srei

Greetings,

Angkor Wat is huge. It is the largest spiritual building on Earth. It is a peaceful mixture of Hinduism and Buddhism. This makes it unique among other reasons. It dates from the 9th-13th Century.

Most tourists dash in, around and through spending four days of their very short existence. They get to Angkor Wat to see the sunrise along with hoards. It's a zoo. They visit the high points: Angkor Wat, Angkor Thom, the interior of Bayon and, depending on their time and planning, other temples and areas of interest. 

A day pass runs $20, 3-day pass, $40 and a seven-day pass $60. The week long pass allows visitors the luxury of time (a great wealth) to enjoy the diversity of Angkor during a month. Seven visits in 30 days. I selected this option after visiting The National Museum and various galleries around town to learn about Angkor.

I wanted to go far away. For $25 I hired Pat, a tuk-tuk driver with three kids to feed and we left before dawn. A tuk-tuk is a motorized bike pulling a simple carriage. The air was chilly and refreshing. We reached the main entrance. It resembled a well designed airport immigration section with windows and attendants for the 1-3-7 day tickets. I paid for seven, they took my picture and a girl punched my ticket. Buy a ticket and take the ride. The meter began running.

It ran through deep forests, along empty roads, past forgotten shadows and figures of villagers stoking small red fires for cooking and heat beneath or beside their bamboo or wooden stilt homes. It skirted a long deep reflecting pool at Sras Srang. We stopped for coffee. A brilliant orange ball of flaming gas rose over expansive fields. 

We headed for Banteay Srei, 37 km from town. Objective: get there for early light before multiple buses of tourists.

As I'd witnessed earlier at The Silk Worm Farm, according to my guide there, "The Chinese, Japanese and Korean groups are the worst. They totally destroy the ambiance." Obnoxious Japanese camera idiots posed with a woman and her small boy sitting on the floor chopping kindling. Tourists hid behind dyed silks for funny pictures. They were rude and inconsiderate.

In brief: Srei was built in 987 AD and never a royal temple. Small and intimate, rumored to have been built by women with their fine hands. The carvings of pink sandstone cover much of the temple and the reliefs are deep and beautiful, the most incredible at Angkor. Discovered by the French in 1914, covered by forest and earth.

After Seri we continued north to Kbal Spean. We climbed through forests for 1.5km. This is the source of waters for Angkor and the Siem Reap river. Water flows over 100m of carved sacred lingas and Hindu deities; Vishnu, Shiva and Brahma. The Sanskrit name is Sahasralinga, or "river of a thousand lingas."

Kbal Spean

In the afternoon we headed south and then east of Siem Reap to the Roluos Group, a series of three temples, Bakong, Preah Ko and Lolei, dating from the 8-9th century. Roluos is the pre-Angkor original site. 

Bakong was consecrated in 881AD. The layout follows Mount Meru, five ascending levels, moats, and ten surrounding temples. It was reconstructed from 1936-1942 under the direction of Maurice Glaize, the conservator of Angkor.

Preah Ko, or Paramesvara, "The Supreme God," or Shiva was built in 880 AD. It contains a steele in Sanskrit with an inscription about war, fearsome in battle, flashing swords, and invincibility; a eulogy to Indravarman I.

Lolei, 893 AD. Four brick buildings in poor condition sit on an island above a former reservoir. The lintels, door jambs and inscriptions explaining the construction and divisions of tasks are well preserved.

Srei, Spean and Roluos galleries. Visually articulate.

Metta.