A Jolie time in Cambodia

SIEM REAP, Cambodia – It isn’t hard to fall in love with Cambodia, the way Hollywood star Angelina Jolie did after filming her Lara Croft: Tomb Raider blockbuster in the awesome Ta Prohm temple in this city. Ta Prohm is a few minutes away from Angkor Wat, the splendid 12th century Hindu temple here that is one of the Seven Wonders of the World.

Cambodia is Angelina Jolie country. The places where she stayed – like the posh Sofitel Royal Angkor Hotel and the Red Piano Bar near the city’s old market – display her visit there like a badge. In fact, at the Red Piano Bar, a corner, open-air bistro at a 100-year-old French colonial building in the heart of this city, one of the most popular drinks is called "Tomb Raider," a vodka cocktail which the Silk Air general manager for Cambodia, Prak Mony Virak, warned us was quite potent.

After centuries of war and violence (including the bloody "Killing Fields" period between 1975 and 1979, where almost half of its then seven million population was wiped out in cold blood), Cambodia is running gracefully like a gazelle – not sprinting like a cougar – towards progress. Thus, its Old World charm – most people ride to work on a bike or motorbike under centuries-old trees – and unique culture have remained intact. The people are warm, gentle and are not pushy, with the exception perhaps of English-speaking street urchins hawking souvenirs by the temple grounds. The vendors are refreshingly honest – without batting an eyelash they will tell you right way that the opium jar you just fell in love with is "made to look old," but is not antique. The crime rate, according to our winsome tour guide Srey Roath, is "very low." To walk the streets of Siem Reap is to believe her. Though tourists anywhere on this planet must always remain vigilant, Siem Reap is one place where they can walk around without giving their purse a bear hug. A travel writer who wanted to purchase a lock for his bike in Phnom Penh was given a puzzled look by the storekeeper. Drug and arms smuggling (as Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen admitted) may be taking place in some places in Cambodia, but its streets are safe and peaceful.

Like Angelina, a UN Ambassador of Goodwill who has bought a house in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh, your heart will go out to the orphans (she adopted one, Maddox) and the landmine victims (Cambodia was one of the most heavily-mined countries during the Vietnam War and after).

But most of all, you will be smitten forever by the magnificent ruins of Angkor Wat, Angkor Thom, Ta Prohm and several other temples seemingly in this city. In them, you see the hand of God and the genius of man, traced in sandstone that have defied time and human frailties for the last nine centuries.

My mother-in-law Lutgarda Quintans-Ramirez, quoting St. Augustine, once told me, "To travel is to see God."

Humbled by the beauty of Angkor Wat, with its vertical stairways that seemed to rise up to the heavens in praise, I could not agree more.

Edified, I also felt like Angelina Jolie, and you must excuse the momentary delusion.

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There are only two traffic lights in this quiet city, installed about two years ago. Most of the streets, lined by sidewalks of dusty red earth, are of asphalt, not concrete. The city has no high-rises, malls or supermarkets. So far, it has not been conquered by McDonalds or 7-11. I did not see any taxi cabs, only tuk tuks, which are similar to Philippine tricycles. And yet, Siem Reap has probably more five-star hotels than Metro Manila and Cebu combined, concrete proof that the city with a glorious past is looking at a very bright future indeed. Aside from Sofitel, where our group was billeted, the five-star hotels here include Raffles and Meridien.

After years of resisting the Americans, the Cambodians now welcome their mighty dollar. In Siem Reap, the currency used by both locals and tourists is the US dollar. The riel ($1 is equivalent to 400 riel) is used only for vegetable and fish purchases at the wet market.

According to Virak, the city is expecting to end the year with 1.7 million tourist arrivals. A figure not to be sneezed at, considering that Siem Reap and its suburbs have only a population of about a million!

Most of the 12-million people of Cambodia are female and below 14 years old. According to Roath, though the official death toll of the Khmer Rouge era stands at 2.5 million, many believe about 3.5 million, mostly male, perished.

"Even the mere possession of spectacles earned you the death penalty," she recalled. The dictator Pol Pot, who ruled Cambodia during those bloody years, believed intellectuals, artists and teachers had no place in society. Entire families were separated. Fathers went to one "center," mothers to another. Each of the children was taken away and brought to a center were old female caregivers looked after them.

Roath’s baby brother, then about a year old, did not make it in his center. "We believe," she says with a pained look on her face, "that he died of starvation. He needed our mother’s milk to survive."

Food at the centers for children, recalls Virac, who is from Phnom Penh, consisted of rice porridge. Sometimes, the daily ration was a tablespoon of milk. There were no toilets, and the nearest bathroom "was the first brook you saw."

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I interviewed Roath and Virac separately and talking to them was like our grandparents talking to Holocaust survivors. 

Roath says there were "fireworks in the sky" (gunfire) every night of the Khmer Rouge era.

On the day Cambodia was liberated by the Vietnamese from Pol Pot in 1979, and the people in the centers were told they were free to return home, Virac, then less than 10, raced to the house he remembered in Phnom Penh. To his utter joy, it was still there. But, his heart sank soon after. The house was empty. It had been five years. Was he the only one who survived the Khmer Rouge? Then, his tears turned to smiles when, six hours later, his sister walked in. Followed by his grandmother, and so on. His father was among the last to arrive. But they were complete, the only family in his village that survived the civil war intact.

Though Roath lost her baby brother, she looks back at the past with not much bitterness or hatred.  

"Despite everything, our country has had a happy ending," she says as we end our interview on soft leather chairs in the air-conditioned lobby of the Sofitel, where busloads of tourists disembark almost every hour. "Every problem in our past has made us stronger."

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