At first, I thought I had just gotten used to the cooler Hanoi weather and was going to have to acclimate to the heat of Cambodia again. Then, it just became simply unbearable. By now, I’ve realized that it has nothing to do with my few days in cooler Hanoi. I’ve heard from others, and it’s not just me. Everyone’s been saying that this December has so far felt more like April, the hottest month of the year, than the coolest month of the year that December is supposed to be. The news is a mixed blessing of course. On one hand, I’m absolutely miserably hot and end up going to sleep at about 9:00 every night because it’s so uncomfortable to be awake. The night doesn’t even provide any relief, as the temperatures remain about the same. Unfortunately, this is supposed to be the month of most relief from the heat, so I feel a bit like I’m being gypped. On the other hand, at least I know that April won’t be even hotter, because I was beginning to fear that I would wither away from sweating so much if this was supposed to be the relief of the cool season. I’ve resorted to writing envious emails home telling people how jealous I am that they need to wear jackets outside and get to cozy up inside, under blankets.
All I crave is to be cold enough and for it to maybe even be snowy or rainy enough to be able to spend the day inside catching up on indoor things. Even more, I wish that it would be cold enough for a few days to sit by a fire and read a book. Instead, it’s guilt-inducingly sunny outside so that I can’t allow myself to watch a movie on a Saturday afternoon, and inside or outside, it’s so hot that everything you touch essentially sticks to your skin. Showers have become a three times a day activity.
All it took, though, was an email from Steven talking about the 40 degree, drizzly weather in D.C. to make me remember that you don’t get to choose those cold days and then get to go back to tropical weather when you feel like it. But I’d still love some slightly cool weather.
Since we’re all sweating uncontrollably anyway, I decided to join Rabia and some of “the French friends” on an excursion and short hike to Phnom Chisor, an old, Angkor-era temple about an hour and half outside of Phnom Penh. After squeezing in the trip to Vietnam last weekend between weekdays of teaching and after similarly trying to maximize my time in Siem Reap a few weekends before, it was nice to go away for a simple day trip, when I’d leave one morning and be back that same night. I didn’t need to bring an overnight bag, didn’t need to figure out where I’d stay, and didn’t have to worry about going straight into teaching again as soon as I returned.
Although I can’t remember the last time I went Angkor temple scouting in New York for a weekend, there was something about the trip that felt wonderfully familiar and relaxed. Instead of feeling like we were on a big quest to explore some far away place, this trip felt more like we were living in Phnom Penh and were simply doing a regular life, weekend activity, just as you might go for a bike ride on a Saturday at home. It was nice to take advantage of feeling like we simply lived here and were getting together to do something on our day off.
Since Alexei works as an architect for the Red Cross, he gets use of one of their trucks for the weekend, so we split what ended up being a pretty big group of us between the Red Cross pick-up truck and a hired Camry and headed to nearby Takeo Province. After about an hour on the road, we turned off for Phnom Chisor, and the road turned to dirt. Traveling in the countryside really shows the poverty in a more obvious way than is sometimes apparent in Phnom Penh. Additionally, it truly contrasts with the city in its feel, and its look is distinctive. I began to wish that I had had a chance to bring Dad somewhere out of town at one point, where the wooden houses on stilts and small family plots of vegetables and fruit appear so distinctively Cambodian to me.
All of a sudden, about five minutes from the base of the phnom, we ran into a series of dump trucks building up the road. They were dumping piles of dirt about every hundred yards and then bringing in other equipment to spread and flatten it out into a firmer road. Unfortunately, they had just dumped a huge pile right in front of us, and there was no way that the Camry was going to able to make it past.
Already, the roadwork was providing the day’s entertainment for the residents of the nearby houses, and the whole community was simply standing by the edge of the road, captivated by the construction taking place in front of them. So we contributed to the entertainment by all hopping out of the two cars to figure out how we would get by.
We were really pretty far out into the countryside, and the hill/mountain was looming ahead. The fresh dirt and all of the wooden houses along the edge of the road provided good subjects for photos, and we were stopped anyway. Out came everyone’s cameras, as we all started snapping pictures of both our surroundings and of the hilarity of our situation. The roadwork no longer held any interest for those from the town who had gathered to watch, and all focus shifted to the crazy foreigners taking pictures.
It was probably pretty amusing when you think about it. Two cars overloaded with foreigners get stopped on a small dirt road and can’t get by. What do they do? They all hop out, run around frantically from car to car laughing and shouting to each other about the situation they got into and then begin taking pictures of each other next to their truck that’s facing the huge pile of dirt. All of us took the obstacle in good spirit, and it added to the adventure. We must have looked pretty silly, though. I would have never thought about how strange our behavior was, except that we had a mirror of all of the Cambodians around us just staring at us. I felt like we should have part of an anthropological study.
Anyway, the pile got tamped down enough that the truck could get through, so the five of us from the Camry piled into the bed, and we continued up and over the small mountain in front of us.
Phnom Chisor is an old ruin on top of one of the many large hills that juts out unexpectedly from the otherwise completely flat surroundings in Southeastern part of the country. (Phnom means hill in Khmer). Before we left Phnom Penh, we had been advised by some friends who had already been to the temple before that we should go directly into the old temple and not see anything else until after we had seen the inside. They said that doing so would make everything seem more impressive. Not really knowing exactly what they meant, we finished our 30 minute climb to the top of the stairs and proceeded to skip most of the newer temples we passed along the way in our quest to find the old temple ruins. We found it and went inside. By inside, I mean within the walls, because it didn’t have a roof. Instead, there was a large and decorative perimeter wall with freestanding, covered rooms inside. It was impressive, but we couldn’t figure out why going here first would make everything at the site fall into place.
Then, we slowly meandered to the back, and it hit us. The top of the hill was covered with trees, and we had walked into the temple not having any idea where it lay in comparison to the rest of the hilltop. At the back, we all of a sudden looked out through the square window openings in the wall and saw the view that lay in front of us.
We had no conception when we walked into the temple that it sat on the edge of a cliff that dropped down into the palm and rice paddies that stretched out as far as you could see. Where we were looking out from had been the historical entrance to the temple, and we had arrived from the newer staircase on the other side of the hill. We exited the entrance and stood at the edge in front of us. The original stairs and then dirt road that led to the temple lay in front of us, and the worn out earth showed where it had once continued on past where we could see. From our heightened perspective, we could even see the plantings that used to border the road, as well as small ruin directly at the bottom of the stairway below.
We realized that when we had been told us to go directly inside first, it wasn’t that we were supposed to skip the more modern temples but that, when we got to the Angkor-era temple, we were supposed to go inside rather than walk around its perimeter so that the vista at the edge emerged unexpectedly as we worked our way through the temple.
Eventually everyone else caught up (though didn’t get to experience it in the same way that we did, as they walked around rather than through the temple first). We sat down on the steps and began on our picnic lunch, sitting and looking over the dry landscape of rice fields punctuated with coconut trees. It was absolutely quiet, and the panorama of fields spread in front of us in every direction. If we hadn’t known that we had just taken the short trip, we could have been hours and hours away from the nearest city. Phnom Penh is never quite. At the top of the phnom, however, there wasn’t a sound.
After lunch, Benouir and I made the trek down the steep, ancient stairs to the ruin below. As with most of these temples, the stairs were steeper and narrower than should ever be allowed. At the bottom, it was just us, the quite, and the ox-drawn carts that passed by every few minutes and were spooked by our presence. Again, the most striking thing was just how quiet it was.
I don’t think I’ve ever been as hot as I was after the hike back up, and there was nowhere to recuperate. Even shade didn’t provide any relief, and there was somehow no breeze, even though we were high in the air. It took until we made it back to the air-conditioned car a couple hours later for me to finally stop sweating.
Although Phnom Chisor’s certainly not unknown, it felt like we were doing something different and adventurous, yet very local at the same time. Perhaps it felt like all of these seemingly contradictory things because we were the only ones besides the monks and a few Khmer families at the top, and the whole experience provided the sense of adventure that Halong Bay was missing, with its overly pre-planned routes. And after piling back into the cars, we were back in Phnom Penh in time for dinner and a good night’s sleep.