A touchdown in gritty Cambodia to visit a daughter interning with a local water project has lodged disparate snapshots in my brain.
I see ancient temples at once held up and torn down by massive trees. Hindu shrines turned Buddhist (or vice versa) with an axe, a chisel or a draped cloth.
Villages that not only float, but move with the seasons. A museum alive with notebook-toting youngsters learning about the genocide that killed so many of their kin.
Disparate though they may be, the scenes all reflect a certain resilience — an ability to flex, to incorporate whatever comes as a way of surviving.
In the Angkor region of northwest Cambodia, we encounter a striking example in 800-year-old Ta Prohm. A Buddhist monastery and university that once housed as many as 12,000 people and employed thousands more, Ta Prohm faded into the jungle for centuries following the fall of the surrounding Khmer empire in 1431.
Brought to light along with dozens of neighbouring temples in the early 1900s, Ta Prohm was left partly embedded in the massive trees that had draped themselves up, over and inside it.
The result is an amazing symbiosis of wood and stone. Each needs the other to remain standing even as it hastens the other’s demise. The effect is atmospheric, photogenic, awe-inspiring.
Perhaps it’s no wonder Ta Prohm appears in the film Tomb Raider, on the cover of Lonely Planet and (as we discover while wandering area shops) in much local art.
Ta Prohm is but one of the thousand or more temples that make up the sprawling Angkor UNESCO World Heritage Site. As we stand in awe at the sheer size of each stone, let alone the intricate carving still evident despite erosion, bombing, looting and (in the last dozen years) escalating tourism, others come to worship.
For here, as belief evolves, icons of faith are not only smashed and beheaded but also used in new ways. It’s not unusual to find a small chamber where people are burning incense and offering lotus flowers before a Hindu god turned Buddhist with an orange drape to cover the nakedness.
While we might cringe and call it desecration, flexing has kept the temples relevant — and not only as Cambodia’s top tourist attraction.
A visit to floating villages not far from the temples, at the edge of the aptly named Tonle Sap or Great Lake, reinforces the sense of Cambodian flex. Not only houses, but pig pens, chicken coops, shops, restaurants and an entire school bob on the water, held up by bunches of bamboo.
Chugging down “Main Street” in a modified fishing boat whose propeller periodically gums up with reeds, we pass villagers poling hither and yon in dugouts carrying everything from teapots to firewood. On the wooden front porches, women mend nets, elders lounge in hammocks and kids stop their play to gaze at the intruders.
Every monsoon season, these villages pull up anchor and move kilometres further into the lake. The reason is simple — and amazing. In dry season, the Tonle Sap drains into the Mekong River at Phnom Penh, 150 km away. As the rains come and as faraway glaciers melt, the flow reverses and the lake balloons in size, bringing a rich supply of fish for the catching.
When dry season returns, the lake shrinks, creating pockets of water amid rich marsh and mangrove, perfect breeding ground for fish. By taking advantage of this annual pulse, the villages have made the Tonle Sap one of the most productive inland fisheries in the world, providing 60 per cent of Cambodia’s protein intake.
Like the water of the Tonle Sap, we enter and exit Cambodia through its capital, Phnom Penh. Compelled to face the country’s bloodbath under Pol Pot, we spend an afternoon at the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum.
“Tuol Sleng” can be translated “Hill of Poisonous Trees” or “Strychnine Hill,” and the name fits. From 1975 to 1979, this former high school became a place of torture and often death for supposed enemies of the Khmer Rouge.
Many of the instruments of torture remain starkly present: shackles, waterboards, electrocution units and an exercise bar turned gallows. Row upon row of photos of doomed prisoners in agony are coupled with paintings by a former inmate, who was kept alive to paint for the Pol Pot regime and now unleashes his memories on canvas. All testify to the horror of a place where even babies were bayonetted and dashed to the ground.
Much of a generation was snuffed out here and in killing fields outside the city, and almost the entire population was driven to out to subsist on a diet of enforced farming, hunger and fear. Phnom Penh left empty, with dark, achingly silent streets, is a place we cannot imagine.
More than three decades later, the aftermath continues. The kingpin of Tuol Sleng, often known as Duch, was sentenced for crimes against humanity just this year, and other trials carry on.
Our daughter’s colleagues, children of the dead, learn to parent without role models, their stories echoing those of residential school survivors in Canada.
Yet the fact that schoolchildren are tromping through the echoing corridors of Tuol Sleng, notebooks in hand, is itself a beacon of hope. As are the again-teeming streets, a feast for the eyes, nostrils and ears with their sidewalk barbers, massage clinics, fix-it shops, roasting pigs, tuk tuks and people on the move.
This country may be bent, I think, but it’s too flexible to break.
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