Naked in Dangerous Places - Cash Peters [58]
And this stuff is going on all the time. It's as if you're living in a Keystone Kops movie, only it's less funny because people could really get hit and killed.
Siem Reap has two distinct sides to it: a detached, elegant side—which is charming to look at, but not quite real somehow, given the rest of the place—and then the rest of the place, a dusty ghetto like the Old West, at once rough, tumultuous, and exciting. One minute you're in the back of your tuk-tuk bouncing past towering pagodas along a wide leaf-speckled avenue of splendid Colonial-style houses bathed in rich golden sunlight; the next, a mere block or two farther along, this brief idyll has evaporated and you descend into pandemonium, swallowed by a shimmering cacophonous typhoon of honking cars, mopeds, tuk-tuks, buses belching smoke, carts overloaded with bales of flopping hay tied into enormous spliffs, and wobbling cyclists of all ages who, if you're a pedestrian, don't necessarily seek to mow you down, but if it's a toss-up between hitting you full-on or braking suddenly, causing two thousand cyclists behind them to jackknife off a bridge, there's every chance you'll be a goner.
Horns parp, bicycle bells ring, shopkeepers unload trucks, calling out to each other as they do so and laughing; feral children—almost babies, it seems—homeless but happy, skitter unsupervised along the roadside, dusting off discarded fruit and licking it, before taking their chances and diving onto the highway into perilous traffic. I tried crossing a street myself and it's not easy. You just hold your breath and run. There are no lights or intersections, no particular code of conduct, beyond a general consensus that killing innocent pedestrians is uncool and might come back to bite you in the ass in some future lifetime. Basically, the only way these motorists will stop for you is if you're on their hood with your body scrunched up against the windshield and they can't see out. Luckily, drivers and cyclists seem to make an exception for children, navigating between the tiny trotting obstacles, graciously allowing them to make it to the other side untrampled.
Careening around corner after corner at speeds of up to twenty miles per hour, we passed terraces of odd-shaped shops piled carelessly one on top of the other like rickety beer crates. Every so often, through the haze and confusion, I'd pick out a cheerful starburst of reddish orange. Monks. A graceful flotilla of them, out for their daily constitutional. Instantly, the grimy roadside became a catwalk spectacle as they pressed on in single file against a rogue wind that threatened to drag their saffron-colored robes up about their shoulders, bald heads shielded from a merciless sun by saffron umbrellas. Nine of them in a bobbing row. Nine dancing orange pontoons. How marvelous. And how wonderfully savvy of them to coordinate their outfits with their accessories. Mind you, they were young. Additionally, in a lot of cases, meditation seems to have put them very much in touch with their feminine side—ahem—so maybe their fashion sense was not too much of a surprise. I'm guessing that the elders, having long since outgrown their obsession with style's dos and don'ts, and too old to make this daily trek into town, allow the novices to go unsupervised, keeping their fingers crossed that, by doing so, they don't fall in with the wrong crowd while they're out. After all, you know what monks are like!
Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. Rrrr. Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.
“ANGKOR WHAT?”
It's a joke. The name of a bar. Someone at the office tracked it down, thought it might make for an extra story beat if I stopped off on my way to the temple.
A lot of streets in Siem Reap don't have a name. Well, why bother, really? But Bar Street does. One of the most popular thoroughfares in town, it's calm and laid-back by day, convulsing with excitement and doused in neon by night, the sweet smell of curries drifting from the kitchens of tandoori restaurants along with the thumping