Day 1 AM: Exploring the River Front

When we teach a class we usually try to set up the computer lab on Sunday. But the students are using their personal computers this week, which caused all kinds of technical difficulties during the week, but left us with a day to explore and get over jet lag.

Our hotel was about a mile from the river front, so we walked. There was a hill with a Wat (temple) at the end of the street. Then we worked our way along the river front that opened up into a river front park. This was nice, but the direct sun was oppressive, so we cut into town and ended up in a bustling market.

 
We eventually made it to the national history museum that was interesting with some pretty extensive exhibits of pre-historic civilization and art from the Ankor period, a very advanced civilization (of almost a million people [1]) that dominated the region from the 12th to the 14th century.

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[1] Much more on this later as I visited the actual site of this civilization over the weekend.

Day 1 PM: Hanging Out with Andy

In the afternoon, I got to meet my friend Andy for lunch. This turned out to be more challenging than it sounded. I caught at tuk tuk (a moped with a trailer). However, in a reprise of an experience I had in Bangkok, the driver only pretended to understand me, drove in the general direction I pointed to, and dropped me off about 20 blocks from where I wanted to go. There were no street labels so it took a while to realize just how lost I was, but a second tuk tuk and a dozen texts with Andy eventually got me there.

Andy was part of the campus ministry we are involved in and graduated a couple years ago. He is the finest young film maker I know.[1] We went to a film festival a couple years ago that included his stuff, and he walked away with around 50% of the distinctions awarded.

He is in Cambodia working with an organization that helps exploited children (using his film and photography skills but also just doing whatever needs to be done). We had noodles and spent a couple hours catching up, and then he took me to see the center he works at. It is a courageous ministry of practical love and seems to be growing and thriving.

One of the unexpected advantages to hanging out with Andy was getting to tool around with him on his moped. The moped-to-car ratio here is much higher than Bangkok (and likely responsible for much more manageable traffic). I had never gotten to experience an Asian city in this way and it was a blast…even when the monsoon rains started.
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[1] I guess this doesn’t say much, because I don’t know a lot of them. But I think he is really good.

Day 2: Monday – Two New Foods

Today I ate two new foods:

A snail

and a shrimp as big as my hand

Day 3: Tuesday – A Word on the Work

Today was the second day of class, so I thought I’d say just a little bit about why I am here. My buddy Cam and I are teaching a hydraulic modeling class with representatives of the 4 downstream countries with riparian stretches of the Mekong River: Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam.
The Mekong is one of the most interesting rivers in the world, hydrologically[1], ecologically and politically. It is either the second or third most biodiverse river in the world[2] with an enormous fishery.[3] Until recently, it was also one of the largest undammed rivers in the world. No longer.

There are approximately 130 dams in various stages of planning, construction or early use in the watershed. This will generate electricity for growing economies (e.g. Thailand) and revenue for poorer countries (e.g. Laos) but will impact the ecology and fisheries which are a resource downstream countries (e.g. Cambodia) are dependent upon. The Lower Mekong countries[4] have formed the Mekong River Commission (MRC) to help plan and negotiate management of this system at a regional level.

These are sovereign nations making difficult trans-boundary choices that will be driven by a range of social and technical considerations that are outside of my expertise. But they invited us here to help build capacity in hydraulic and sediment modeling. And I’m thrilled to be involved. But as most of my friends and family have a threshold of ‘sediment related content’ they are interested in, we’ll move on.
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[1] Even the watershed shape is unique, with a very thin upper watershed following a deep fault out of the Tibetan Plateau. The river basins of South East Asia tend to be idiosyncratic as they are driven by tectonic geology since the peninsula of South East Asia is essentially the part of the Asian content that squirted out when India collided with the shield. In undergrad I saw a film in which pre-collision Asia was modeled with jello and when India hit it, an appendage squirted out that approximated the size and shape of the South East Asian peninsula.

[2]Depending on how you measure (and estimate) biodiversity. This is actually a pretty interesting topic in its own right. “Diversity” is actually a pretty difficult thing to quantify because any metric of diversity embeds a system of values. But the other top three are (unsurprisingly) the Amazon and the Congo.
[3]More fish are caught in the river than the US eats in a year. And river nutrient subsidies also supports a marine fishery that many think is almost as large.
[4]Myanmar and China, the upstream countries, do not come to the table.

Day 4&5 – Four Thoughts on Cambodian Food

These days were the core of the class we are teaching. So life pretty much consisted of working eating and sleeping. The former and latter make bad blog fodder, so I am going to focus on the food. In fact, I think I’ll do four thoughts on Cambodian Food.

1. New Fruit![1] I’m a fan of fruit…but actually discovering new fruit, it is like learning that there were missing episodes of Firefly that had not previously been released.

2. Admirable use of Mushrooms. I had no idea that a) there were so many forms of edible mushrooms or b) that they were invariably delicious. I applauded SE Asia’s commitment to the mushroom.

3. Fish Culture: Between the Mekong and the Tonle Sap (more on that later), Cambodia has a long tradition in fishing and fish consumption…the latter of which being a tradition I observed during my time here.

4. Omnivory[2]: Here is a short list of foods I have eaten in Cambodia that are a little eccentric from western standards: snail, snake, crocodile, and frog.
 
Here’s some pics of a few meals:

Stuffed Calamari

Amok – the quintessential Cambodian dish…in discrete format.

 

 

This might have been my favorite meal.  My first day at Angkor Thom I got caught out in a monsoon.  There was a fun outdoor food tent at the by the tuk tuks.  I got a plate of hot spring rolls and they were awesome.

 

 

 

I got Cambodian BBQ one night and was surprisingly proficient at it…but only because I had seen the grill masterfully negotiated in my trip to Bangkok last month.
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[1] A few weeks after moving to California, Amanda and I watched the film KPAX in which Kevin Spacey plays an ambiguous, quasi-alien character. He eats a bunch of Bananas and says “the produce alone is worth the trip.” We began saying that about our new life as west coasters.
[2]In its strict ecological definition, omnivory isn’t eating plants and animals, it is eating species from multiple trophic levels…and that list includes at least three if not four trophic levels.

Day 6 – Cue the Friday Song

This was the last day of class. I gave a marathon sediment lecture for most of the morning then we offered to stick around after lunch to actually do some modeling if anyone had data. Two modelers took us up on the offer and a couple others stayed to watch. It was fun to cobble together a couple preliminary models of the Mekong in an afternoon.

The multi-national class has been a bit of a challenge. English was a pre-requisite, but an interpreter is always helpful, if only to give the students two shots to bridge the language gap. But because there are four languages represented, this wasn’t possible.[1] But on the whole I think it went pretty well.
After class we went to the ‘night market’ to buy gifts for our families. I think my wife would be good at this given her success at garage sales, where she doesn’t allow the low starting price to keep her from getting to the lower actual price. But I am pretty bad at the market scene.

I got dresses for Aletheia and a skirt and shirt for Charis.

After that we ate and got beers at the elephant bar, a room that presumably has 1000 elephants in the art, tapestries, and nick knacks.  Then Cam and Jeff caught a ride to the midnight flight to Incheaun. But I’m staying just a little longer. You see, northern Cambodia was home to one of the great civilizations of the ancient[2] world, and they left behind a city and temple complex so large, dramatic and tenacious that it is often listed as one of the wonders of the ancient world.[3] So I went to bed to get a little rest before I caught my flight the next morning to Siem Reap, which is the gateway to Angkor.
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[1] I have taught multi-country classes in South America, but the unifying language allows us to use an interpreter there, since even the Brazilians understand Spanish.
[2] Is it ‘ancient’ even if it corresponded with Europe’s medieval period? Not sure. I’m going to go with ancient.
[3] In the updated, non Euro-Centric lists that have more than one representative outside of Greek/Roman/Egyptian civilization and put a premium on…um…still existing.

Day 7 - Angkor Tom

Early Saturday Morning I caught an Air Cambodia flight from Phnom Pehn to the only other city with an airport in Cambodia, Siam Reap, which is only about 15 minutes from the Angkor Archeological Park. We flew over the Tonle Sap which many think is the reason that the Mekong (somewhere between the 8th and 15th largest river by various accountings) is the second or third most biodiverse river. In the rainy season the river connecting this huge inland lake to the Mekong flows backwards and the lake grows dramatically, flooding huge tracts of wetland and woods, providing a totally unique, enormous, annual terrestrial nutrient subsidy to the Mekong. .

I had booked a $19 hotel that got good ratings on Trip Advisor…but still, a $19 hotel in Cambodia when neighboring hotels were going for $200 had me a little nervous. But the Angkor Pearl was great. No frills, but nothing disconcerting. I’d say it was about 80% of the value for 10% of the price.

 One of the best parts was that they sent a tuk tuk to pick me up at the airport, and then the driver offered his services for the weekend. You see, there are iconic images of Angkor Wat that could make it seem like an isolated attraction. But the ‘ruins’ and not-so-ruins are spread over the countryside, with the shortest circuit clocking in around 17 km. So you have to hire a tuk tuk or car and having an airport pick up was kind of like an ‘interview’ where I could get comfortable with Theon’s driving and English to the point that I was satisfied that we would be able communicate and was happy to hire him (which came in at $40 for 2 days).

I got in around noon and we went to Angkor Thom, saving the iconic Angkor Wat for sunrise the next day. Angkor Tom was the capital city during what seems to be the golden age. According to one of my guide books the city had a million people at a time when Paris had 25,000.[1] Angkor Thom featured the basement ruins of a palace (that covered acres and must have been mind blowingly enormous) and a couple impressive temples.

But by far my favorite structure was the Baylon temple, which featured 54 towers with faces of the Buddha projecting in the four cardinal dimensions, creating the unsettling sensation of a matrix of attention. Everywhere you looked, the look was returned…repeatedly. It was simply the most unique ancient structure I have encountered. While I was there the monsoons rolled in and the rain pouring into the temple and rattling the surrounding rain forest created an atmosphere that was a totally original experience.
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[1] One of the temples in Angkor had three times that many people working in it

Interlude 1: So is it Hindu or Buddhist?

One of the things that has confused me about the faiths of South East Asia, both historic and contemporary, is the apparent fusion of Hinduism and Buddhism. My experience with these faiths is in their discrete expressions found on the Indian subcontinent. So one of my objectives of this trip was to understand the history of these faiths in this region and, maybe get a little insight on the contemporary Hindu influences in SE Asian Buddhism. So was the Khumer Kingdom Buddhist or Hindu? Well the answer, unsurprisingly is yes. And actually, it is yes, yes, yes, yes. It turns out that the Kingdom went from Hindu (the early building and Angkor Wat[1]) to Buddhist (Angkor Thom) in its golden age, before making one more cycle in its decline.

So you get syncretic curiosities like 54 towers, each bearing faces of Buddha pointed in the 4 cardinal dimensions, but each with a chimney that allows rain water to fall on a linga[2] dedicated to Shiva inside and gateways to the great city in which the image of Buddha looks out over the 54 Hindu gods and 54 demons inadvertently creating the cosmos in their cooperative game of tug of war with a 9 headed snake.

And everywhere you look, Buddhistrelics are missing, the joint legacy of the Khumar Rouge and the systematic program of defacement during the second Hindu period. So it seems that the legacy of the dynastic alternation between Hinduism and Buddhism led to some dissonance but eventually to a form of Buddhism that features the iconography of the Naga and appropriated the Ramayana and Mahabharata as sacred stories.
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[1] Though Angkor Wat which represents the golden age of this period, is represented
[2]The linga is one of the most distinctive aspects of Hindu iconography. Most interpreters suggest that it represents a phallus penetrating a vulva with all manner of symbolism of the joining of cosmic principles and gender connection as well as the center of devotional practices for fertility and virility. It was ubiquitous in Kathmandu…literally on every street corner. As a mostly ignorant outsider, I’m not really capable of commenting on this meaningfully. But I couldn’t tell if the architectural decision to put in the bowls linga in the belly of each of the 54 Buddhas was ironic, playful, spiteful or a disorienting act of syncretism. Whichever it was, it struck me as yet another of the intriguing dissonance this place seemed to provide at every turn.

Unleash the Ents - Ta Prohm (Day 7 - Part 2)

Let me start by saying that I have never seen Tomb Raider.[1] But apparently part of it was shot here. 

And if not TR, it was only a matter of time before something was shot here. It is so visually unique, providing such sublime contrast and a visual portal to wonder, that it seems like it could carry a thin narrative almost by the sheer weight of its visual novelty and juxtaposition.

When I found out that a work trip to Cambodia was likely, all I knew was that Angkor Wat was the thing people recommended in Cambodia. And ever since I missed out on the waterfall and the golden frog in Guyana, I try not to miss out on ‘the thing to see’ when I cross a lot of time zones for work. But tacking a couple days onto a week long work trip (which is closer to 8 days once you add travel) always seems intractable, despite my wife’s consistent and unbelievably generous openness to it. So I checked out a couple books on the region…and when I flipped to the page on Ta Prohm, I remember thinking “I need to make this happen.” Worth it.

The irony[2] of Ta Prohm is that the restorers essentially gave up on it. It was so overgrown that they decided to leave it in its ‘original state’ as a kind of ‘observational control’ so tourists could see what one of these temples looked like before it was restored (if they ran out of other things to do). But the creeping figs ‘flowing’ over and through the ancient temple rocks became iconic, second only to the profile of Ankor Wat itself.

One interesting note was the consistent friction I felt between two modes of experiencing this remarkable resource. These modes of experience seemed to generally correlate with certain ethnic associations, but I couldn’t seem to write that post without unhelpful ethnic generalization, so for the purposes of this discussion let’s call these two groups the “claimers” and the “discoverers”. One group of individuals (the “discoverers”) seemed consistently frustrated as they tried to snap people-free pictures very short temporal window between the constant stream of people (the “claimers”) taking their turns posing in front of the object of interest. 

The “discoverers” wanted to capture the illusion of remoteness.[3] Other people contaminated their pictures even though high human density was part of the experience as we were getting to experience it. The other mode put the value on personally inhabiting the object…becoming part of literally every image worth capturing. In the first case, a person-less picture was the evidence of the value of the experience as the value of the experience was set by scarcity (“I was there and got to experience something rare and beautiful”). In the second case, the value of the experience is in the personal association (“I was there, see, there I am”).

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[1]I remember when it came out that there was talk about Angelina Jolie’s breasts being animated (er digitally enhance) and my thin inclination to see it based on subject mater evaporated.

[2]Aihctbk (an abbreviation from my main blog for “as it has come to be known”)

[3]If you peruse the pictures in this blog, you will not have to wonder which group I fell into. And it was actually the process of repenting of my frustration as a cultural particularity and recognizing that I was frustrated with the posing tourists for my own sin of inauthenticity that got me thinking about this.

Interlude 2: Some Thoughts on Why we Find Wonder Here

There is something mysteriously iconic about this place. It is almost like it is the prototypical instance of a trope that has captured our imagination for years. Shangri-La, El Dorado, Atlantis, the Lost City of Z all quicken our pulse and they all have something in common with Angkor: the promise of discovery in a world that otherwise seems largely disclosed. The discovery of ‘lost cities’ has a romantic gestalt of pushing back the relentless encroachment of entropy to reveal the story of an expression of humanness that was ahead of its time. But Angkor has one unique quality over all of the other cities listed…existence.[1]

The Angkor Archeological Park doesn’t primarily market history, or even culture. People don’t primarily come here to brush up on their 12^th century Khumer timeline or to track the story of innovation in sand stone architecture or even (for the most part) to investigate the 8 fold path.

This place traffics in a particular brand of wonder.[2] It offers an experience of otherness. It reminds us that reality is bigger than we generally give it credit for. And every time reality surprises us, it can enlarge our realm of the possibilities of existence.

But why? What is it about carved piles of rocks that is not only a source of wonder but an iconic source of wonder? I came up with at least 4 answers.

Wonder of Scale: Angkor recalibrates our scale in three intertwining ways: old, big and many. But scale is the easiest way to generate wonder, and therefore the most common. Because of this, the capacity of scale to invoke recognition of strangeness[3] has dimmed for most of us.[4] So it has to be something else.

Wonder of Human Capacity: We have become accustomed to the resourcefulness of humans. In fact we have become underwhelmed by it. It is almost cliché for us to say stuff like: “We put a man on the moon and we can’t do ____.” and, “It’s 2012, where’s my jet pack.”

But the degree of difficulty for an ancient civilization can shake lose this sense of innovative entitlement. It can remind us of the seemingly supra-biological capacity humans have for ingenuity and beauty. It can generate a sense of species solidarity…a patriotism for humanness…as if these ancient people won a gold medal in the cladistic Olympics and somehow we share it.

Wonder of Impermanence: There is something terrifying and comforting about the ruins of a great civilization. It’s silent, losing battle against the relentless assault of biological and abiotic entropy is a reminder that entropy wins. As the strangler figs’ slow flow through the rock destabilizes the work of centuries it is as if this place whispers to us ““Show me, Yahweh, my life’s end and the number of my days; let me know how fleeting my life is“. These temples improbably endure but also stand as monuments to history’s relentless forgetfulness.[5]

This could be comforting. We are relieved of the pressure of enduring…of the temporal tyranny of mattering. But it is also terrifying…because these great and decaying structures are a trophy to entropy. They are a reminder that entropy wins…

…at least until it doesn’t. And that is why I found these great monuments to an alternately Hindu and Buddhist society made a poignant backdrop reflection on Christian eschatology: that reality ends with a great roll back of brokenness and a great restoration of beauty as Jesus establishes his kingdom on earth. And I suspect if he plans to furnish the eschatological kingdom with the ships of Tarshish[6], there is some way that the makings of the Khumer kingdom will echo there as well…which leads to..,

Wonder in the Space Between Difference and Likeness: There is a strange juxtaposition between the startling recognition of an arbitrary mode of humanness and the recognition of a shared, universal humanity.[7] Seeing someone else live differently (and well) kind of shakes us free of the assumption of inevitability of certain behaviors. 

However, sensing a fundamental kinship with a people so spatially, culturally, and temporally distant, argues that there are parts of being human that are non-negotiable…that are beyond social construct. And this recognition that part of who I am is arbitrary to the point of being silly (and thus I can’t take myself too seriously) but that there is something fundamental to ‘being human’ makes a pretty good tension from which a robust world view can spring.

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[1]***Spoiler Alert (Lost City of Z)*** Yes, I know anthropologists found evidence of an unexpectedly robust civilization in the Amazon about where explorers expected Z to be, but the evidence was so subtle that it is hardly the same as stumbling upon immense rock structures covered in moss and infiltrated by trees.

[2]It promises fundamentally the same experience as the African Safari or Iguazu Falls. The two other epic weekends I have managed to fit around work trips.

[3]I think one of the primary modes of spiritual development is to build pathways of wonder that do not require novelty. But that is a different topic.

[4]I have heard this described as one of the great benefits of parenthood. Things that have ceased to have any meaning, suddenly become magical again through the astonished eyes of a five year old.

[5]When I was a kid there was the shell of an old cheese factory built out of limestone into the face of a hill about a mile from my house. The structure was intact but it showed no signs of recent use. It was a relic of a previous, less technological but somehow more prosperous era of Northern New York agriculture (before my friends dad’s had to scramble for new work after the closing of their family farms). We biked to and explored this little ‘ruin’ countless times. I think Angkor is a quantitatively not qualitatively different experience.

[6]I owe this insight to Andy Crouch’ “Culture Making’ and it has affected my eschatology pretty dramatically. He argues that the description of God’s eschatological kingdom in Isaiah include the very best ‘makings’ of the known cultures including ‘the ships of Tarshish’ (the finest examples of nautical engineering of the day). He argues that this is evidence that the makings of beauty and utility that we construct in this age will somehow (in a mysterious but more than metaphorical way) echo in the next. Or to paraphrase NT Wright’s take on Christian eschatology, nothing beautiful is lost.

[7]I have been reading a lot of Foucault and a primer on deconstruction on this trip. So I can almost hear Derrida label that sentence as phalologo-whatever. I find the whole Sartre-Structuralists-Foucault-Derrida thing (yeah I know, they are like, sooo different – but in my mind they are a single oscillating trajectory – like a dampening sine wave) to be periodically helpful but, on the whole, to be a self referential language game without a lot of explanatory ‘power’ or insight on how to be meaningfully human. Like so many innovations, they were a useful corrective but make a poor center and the liberal arts are poorer for making them ‘the game.’......