Dreaming in Cambodia

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  Siem Reap, Cambodia
Sunday, June 5, 2005

The past few days have been a true highlight of my life, despite the GI issues: Traveling down the river to the Tonle Sap, being on the great lake itself, and now for the past three days, being in Angkor - and all with my son.

Angkor is breathtaking. For 25 years I have wanted to see this and had begun to think, maybe I would not. So, to walk in and around Angkor has been like a dream - I mean it really felt like a dream - especially walking up the long roads leading to the structures and for most, hearing a drum in the distance and as we got closer, the sounds of other traditional Khmer instruments. Outside of most temples there is a group of 3-6 musicians sitting on a mat playing traditional music. All these musicians are disabled in some way, many from landmines - no legs, blind, arm gone - playing this haunting true trance music.

Bantay K'Dai

I watched them at weddings and ceremonies in Dallas over the years. The way it works is they come into the place where they will play, sit on a mat with their instruments, light incense, offer (to the muse?) cigarettes and whiskey, and begin to tune. And as they tune, they begin to come together and in a while, take off all together.

So we're slow-walking through 1000 year old temples, monastaries, funerary structures, and the like, going deeper and deeper until the sounds of the Japanese and Korean tourists are gone and there are only the sounds of the forest and our own occasional conversations. It's hot here, but not bad in the shade and we're slow-walking for sure through series of doorways through the centers of the structures, through narrow dark corridors, across jumbled piles of large sandstone blocks at the edges, and along dirt paths through the forest outside. And coming back, as we near the entrance, again, the sounds of the music.

Oh! I feel so good, so right
in my heart
in my life
in my soul

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Gangstas	Guest house street in SR	Ta Prohm	Tabasco

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