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By Root 789 0

The smell inside was less intense. I took a thick smear of the stuff – it had the consistency of a ripe St. André – and was shocked. It was fantastic. Cheesy, fruity, rich, with a slightly smoky background. Imagine a mix of Camembert cheese, avocado, and smoked Gouda. OK, don’t. That’s not a very good description. But tasting the stuff, one struggles for words. It didn’t taste anything like it smelled; the flavor was much less assertive, and curiously addictive. Durian was one of the first truly ‘new’ flavors I’d encountered – unlike anything else in its uniqueness, its difficulty. Remember the first time you tasted caviar? Or foie gras? Or a soft ripened cheese? There’s that same sense of recognition that you’re in new and exciting territory. You may not love it right away, but you know you’ve tasted something important and intriguing.

Licking the delightful gleet off my blade, I wondered what I could possibly do with this information. What could one make with durian back in New York? How would one store it? Even wrapped in six layers of shrink-wrap, buried in foil, and encased in cement, the odor would escape like an evil spirit. You’d have to treat it like fissionable material, keep it segregated in a special locker in some specially ventilated subcellar constructed just for that purpose. But it’s a tantalizing product. Someone, some New York chef, someday, will harness durian’s strange and terrible powers. And I’ll be there to eat it. Probably alone.

I flew President Air to Siemreap. It was a forty-year-old Antonov cargo plane with passenger seats bolted clumsily into the cabin. The seat belts were broken, hanging uselessly on the sides. When I took my assigned seat, it fell back immediately into the reclining position. The cabin filled up with impenetrable steam as we taxied down the runway. When the flight attendant handed out the in-flight meal, a cardboard box containing plastic-wrapped mystery-meat sandwiches, the entire planeload of passengers burst into nervous laughter and discarded them untouched under their seats without a second thought. Chris and Lydia, the shooters, sat paralyzed, their eyes bugging out of their heads as the plane wobbled and shimmied over Tonle Sap, then slowly descended over the mud flats as we approached Siemreap. Misha, the likable but sinister Bulgarian from Phnom Penh, was on the same flight, on the way to some ‘business.’ From what I’d understood from previous meetings, he was selling exotic snakes to a Russian clientele. But Kry, my translator/fixer, was dubious. ‘He going to see KR,’ he said. ‘You don’t wanta know. Believe me. I don’t wanta know.’

Misha exhaled as the plane touched down. ‘When I was in Bulgarian paratroopers – we like this plane very much,’ he said. ‘Of course, we were all wearing parachutes.’

I stopped taking photographs at Angkor Wat. No camera is adequate to the task. It’s too big, too magnificent to be captured in any frame. There’s no way to convey through simple images the sense of wonder when you encounter the cities of Angkor looming up out of the thick jungle. Mile after mile of mammoth, intricately detailed, multileveled temples, bas-reliefs, jumbo Dean Tavoularis-style heads, crumbling stone structures choked in the root systems of hundred-year-old trees. This was the center of the mighty Cham empire, which once extended as far as Nha Trang and the sea to the east, all of what is now South Vietnam to the south, to occasional sections of Thailand and the Indian subcontinent. The work, the time, the number of artists, craftsmen, and laborers it must have taken to construct even one of the hundreds of structures is unimaginable. Looking at the densely populated reliefs, you are utterly intimidated by the impossibility of ever taking it all in. The KR did its best to ruin Angkor for all time, laying mines all over the grounds, destroying statues and shrines. Looters and unscrupulous antiquities dealers knocked off as many heads as they could, stripped the temples of what they could carry, and sold them on the black market in Thailand and elsewhere.