A Walker in the Suburbs

One advantage of having a tame St. Patty’s Day celebration is waking up and wanting to do the day all over again. It’s something that younger people (and my younger self) would have problems with.

But because my office is having a little happy hour this afternoon, and because I never get my fill of Irish music, I’m treating today as St. Patty’s #2.

I’m wearing green and humming tunes and yes, I’ll try to do a little work today, too.  But the spirit will be with me. The Irish spirit, that is.

The Irish music has been blaring yesterday and today, pipes and jigs and ballads, from my laptop, iPod and CD player. I listen and am back in the little pub in Inishmore in the Aran Islands, or in Dingle Town, where the great Steve Cooney showed up to play at the Courthouse Pub.

I’m remembering the stones, the cliffs, the bare hills all green with lambs grazing, the ancient, ruined forts with rainbows all around them.

I’m tasting the brown bread at breakfast, the scones and the fish and chips and the Cadbury’s chocolate, which somehow tastes better over there.

I’m remembering how I felt in Ireland, which was … like I’d come home.

I’ve yet to write about the food in Cambodia, a topic worthy of several posts. But let me say a quick word about coconuts.

They were everywhere, at roadside stands, alongside Angkor Wat, in the city and in the country. Families served them to quench our thirst after a hot, dusty drive. And as long as the straws weren’t used (and I don’t think they were), they were the most hygienic drink of all.

The ones pictured above were served at the Vietnam border, where we sat for a few minutes to look nonchalant in our pursuit of photos. Maybe that was why their milk tasted all the sweeter.

Coverage of the president’s trip to Vietnam last night has me already nostalgic about my trip to Cambodia. There the newscaster was, standing in a Hanoi street while motorcycles and pedestrians buzzed around him.

When the plane took off from a steamy Phnom Penh runway, it was a few minutes after midnight, February 27. That was almost 35 hours ago — and it’s still February 27.

I have nothing against February 27. It’s a perfectly fine day. Nearing the end of winter, promise of spring to come.

But by the time I turn off the light tonight, I will have had about 40 hours worth of February 27, and that will be more than enough.

Fifty-six hours ago I was interviewing a trafficking survivor as the sun set behind a palm tree.

Now I’m back in Virginia, glad to be home — and waiting for February 27 to end!

We are leaving today, leaving the rice fields and the temples, the motorized rickshaws and the funny little plows, leaving a country that made me feel at home the second I arrived and hasn’t stopped since.

In a great irony of traveling, I feel like I’m just getting the hang of the place — able to pick up a few words from the jumble of foreign sounds, knowing what to order on the menu — when it’s time to leave.

But though my physical body will be whisked from this place at the end of the day, my mind will linger, will puzzle out the sights and sounds, will recall the gurgle of fountains in the Golden Temple Hotel and the generous hospitality of every home we entered, no matter how humble.

Today it is summer heat and warm breezes. Tomorrow will be damp, chill winter. But I’ll keep in mind, as I always do, that the world is large, and there are more worlds within it that we can possibly imagine.

It’s a smile of knowledge and kindness, of wisdom and mercy. It’s the smile of a bodhisattva, and it appears 216 times in the Bayon temple of Angkor Thom, the last stop on yesterday’s temple tour.

The smiles are both inscrutable and accessible, plain and adorned. They were hewn not in solid rock but in huge blocks of sandstone. The smiles were carved in pieces, and in this way they resemble real human smiles, which are often constructed of humor and rue, laughter and longing. 

                                                                                          
The faces of Bayon are a good memory to take home. A smile of compassion for the people I’ve met, for the lost and hopeless, for children playing marbles in a dry and dusty yard, for shop owners sweeping the dirt floor of their new business, for all the blurred scenery on the road, for life itself.

My day off was conveniently timed with our presence near one of Earth’s great World Heritage sites.

We began in the dark, walking across the moat on a floating bridge with only moonlight and phone light to guide us.  We ate a picnic breakfast as Angkor Wat emerged from the night.

A couple of hours exploring it …

then it was off by tuk-tuk to Ta Prohm, the ruined temple pictured at the top of this post.

Bayon with its great carved faces is still to come, but I’m thinking it will be hard to match the evocative world of Ta Prohm with its twisted trees and downed pillars, its roots and its riches.

“Look on me, ye mighty and despair,” Shelley’s lines, come to mind. But in this case there are no “lone and level sands” stretching far away.

Instead, there are piles of rock and lichened carvings and tree trunks still as stone.

An early walk yesterday morning along the Mekokng, my first solo stroll since arriving in Cambodia.

Eventually I found myself at the Bamboo Bridge, a rickety contraption that made me feel as if every step would be my last. It squeaked and it rustled and gave enough with each footfall that I almost turned around immediately.

But in the spirit of travel (which means doing things I don’t usually do), I made it almost a third of the way across before making my way back.

I read later that every year locals disassemble the bridge before the rainy season and rebuild it again in the dry. Which could mean they’ve very, very good at this — or that the bridge has all the stability of a carnival ride.