Well, I am back from my whirlwind, three week tonsilitis-tour of the States ... I was sick in both Phoenix AND Tuscon, Arizona, and then proceded to be sick in Westchester and downtown New York as well. What I would call a particularly successful and enjoyable trip home. Meanwhile a third bout of tonsilitis has surfaced but who cares because I have my own lovely sheets to roll around in now and no one to let down because I can't be social. Yes, I know I should have those little boogers ripped out of me sooner rather than later but who wants to think about that now that I have my silky fine sheets?

So I have been posting about my trip to Siem Reap and Angkor Wat for awhile now and it looks as though I may have finally exhausted my seemingly inexhaustible supply of overexposed photos. I just want to finish by explaining what it was about Angkor ... and Cambodia ... that moved me so deeply and left me with the feeling that I have to return, at least once more. My trip to Angkor was actually my second trip to Cambodia -- about a month before I had flown to Phnom Penh for a few days with a friend. It wasn't quite what I expected from a national capital: no high rise buildings, just miles of dusty streets, crumbling French colonial buildings and more people on motorcycles than in cars. Although what struck me was how few people there were (although there were plenty of desperately begging street kids!). The streets were wide -- the sort of French-styled boulevards you might expect -- but there were few cars rolling down them and few people on or around them. And that's when I started realizing that the Khmer Rouge's legacy is still very palpable and very real. Up to 3 million Cambodians were exterminated in its camps or from plain starvation between 1975 and 1979, many of them targeted because of their association with the previous government. Artists, monks, commies, the educated, anyone who could speak foreign languages, all of them sent away to these death camps. Most of these people came from Phnom Penh. To put this in perspective, today there are around 11 million people in Cambodia, one million of them in Phnom Penh.

Anyway, I seriously doubt whether I have anything original to say about the Khmer Rouge or Cambodia's very recent, very violent past. However, it is impossible to go there and pretend that it hasn't happened. I mean, my tour of Angkor Wat and all the other temples included rather vivid stories from my guide Chiev about what bullet holes in which stone god's body came from which skirmish between Khmer Rouge and other government factions. Violence literally did not cease in the jungle until 1997, so while 1979 could potentially seem a long time ago (depending on your generation, I mean I was three, sorry) 9 years ago ... well that's still less than a decade. Everyone you meet has lost someone, everyone. It's a big amputated society, emotionally and physically, as literally evidenced by the many "landmine bands" you see during your Angkor tours, groups of armless, legless, eyeless musicians playing for tourist pennies along the sides of pathways leading to what was once the glory of Southeast Asia. A thousand years ago that is.

During my trip to Phnom Penh, I jumped all over my hotel room's cable tv like a monkey to water (whatever I like monkeys) and found a channel playing these slow, lovely Cambodian love ballads accompanied by badly made modern videos. The songs sounded like they came from another era, and indeed, some of them crackled as though recorded right off one of those things, what are they called, RECORDS! So when I was in Siem Reap I asked Chiev about that music and he knew exactly what I was talking about and promptly brought me to an outdoor cd store on the road and plucked a cd from one of the shelves. On the cover were four singers, two men and two women and he pointed out the three who had died in the late 70s in the Khmer Rouge camps. One of them was that beautiful lady pictured above, Ros Sereysothea, a Cambodian pop singer who got her start in the 60s singing with one of the two men, Sinn Sisamouth. They loved the r&b and rock and roll coming out from the states, but the result sounds foreign -- or Cambodian -- to me with an eerie, subtle nod to these other, American influences. In other words, it wasn't globalized, imitative crap, it was Cambodian music in its own right. Anyway, all the movers and shakers of that era were wiped out more than 25 years now, and what you see on Cambodia's OTHER music channel is ... globalized, imitative crap.

I wish I knew how to upload music to this blog, but since I am too dumb for Internet words you will be left to imagine -- or search out for yourself -- the lovely, haunting melodies that really define, for me, my experience in Cambodia. Luckily they exist, none in their original form, because some French people smuggled copies to France before the Khmer Rouge had the chance to burn burn burn the originals away. I hope you decide to at least visit Angkor some day, if not the rest of Cambodia, but I hope one thing I've gotten across is the utter impossibility of separating past from present in this beautiful, sad country. It is a place that refuses to let you be a tourist, remote and safe, and perhaps that is why I like it best!