Excerpts:
UNDER THE SPELL OF ANGKOR WAT by Jeff Wald (www.salon.com)

SIEM REAP, Cambodia — There are certain sounds that must have been ubiquitous and comforting to far-flung travelers of every age. The sound of ice cracking, maybe, or the pealing of bells; a steamship blast, or the whistle of a train. Here in Siem Reap, 125 miles north of Phnom Penh, it’s the prattle of CNN. In every outdoor restaurant and guest house lobby, live Academy Awards nominations coverage…competes with the geckos and frogs, creating a buzz of background noise that satisfies both the cerebral cortex and reptilian brain. The TV shimmers as I write — a long umbilicus to a distant planet.

Siem Reap seems to have changed little since my last visit here, almost exactly five years ago. The same kids leap and splash in the river, the same women squat by their baskets of pineapples, paw-paws and tamarind. I easily relocate my favorite bar, where bottles of Angkor clink beneath a halo of Chinese lanterns. Strange, how a place one visited so briefly and so long ago can seem so instantly familiar.
And it was the same with Angkor Wat. Passing through the western gate, I remembered with absolute clarity the tightly fitted stones of the enormous (and seemingly endless) causeway, the cows grazing by the lotus pond…

The ruins at Angkor cover an area of 77 square miles. Many are being conserved or restored; some are still overgrown by jungle, just as André Malraux found them in 1923. The big cheese of these monuments, of course, is Angkor Wat itself: a single gigantic Vishnu temple, built in the early 12th century by a Hindu king named Suryavarman II.

Even in this day and age, certain monuments have an almost metaphysical power. If you enter Angkor Wat at just the right time — before the tourists arrive, the vendors set up and the land-mine victims arrange themselves along the broad sandstone causeway leading to the central towers — it overwhelms you. It wipes your slate. Something echoes back to you, though you haven’t made a sound. Lotuses bloom in the reflecting pool; a breath of incense trails the air; an ankle bracelet rattles behind you. Along the inner gallery walls, exposed to the rising sun, the bas-relief apsaras gesture with seductive smiles. The air seems perfectly still, and your eyes sting in the climbing light. It’s vivid to the point of transcendence: you and Angkor Wat, alone at last.

An airplane whines by, snapping the moment. And when the spell breaks in Cambodia, it stays broken. The beggars and waifs and water-sellers filter in, tugging you back into these last stumbling years of the millennium. How impossible it is to imagine the place in its heyday: back in the 1100s, when the vast open courtyards were filled with wooden houses, animals, shops and cafes. Of those lives, nothing remains; time has annihilated all but the stone. In the harsh sunlight, there is something unsettling about the naked lawns of the Angkor Wat compound. Like so much of Cambodia, it seems inhabited by ghosts.

But there is, of course, the odd note of redemption amid the decay: the knowledge that renewal, at least on a historical scale, is inevitable. This is especially evident at Ta Prohm: a magical, lushly romantic temple that Malraux (in his avatar as minister of culture) declared should be left in its “natural,” overgrown state.

Entering the ruin — with its pale gum trees emerging from vaulted stone rooftops, root-laced bas-reliefs and mountains of broken stone pillars — is like wandering onto the set of an Indiana Jones film. True chaos has a kind of innate perfection, and nowhere on Earth is it better expressed. Doug Coupland (I think it was he) once observed that colors in nature never clash. A true ruin, I realize, displays the same mysterious, unerring aesthetic. Every element seems in place.

And this is true on several levels. To step into Ta Prohm and explore its narrow passageways is to experience the awed, breathless rush that the first explorers must have felt when they located the famed Angkor ruins in the jungle. The place is a maze, full of dangers and surprises: The place looks static, but a loose stone — or hidden Hanuman snake — could kill you. The temple is also a case study, an illustrated textbook of the fate awaiting unrestored monuments.

Most compelling of all, though, is the view of impermanence the ruin provides. At loose in Ta Prohm, it’s easy to imagine one is walking through the remains of Shea Stadium, or San Francisco’s Financial District. Bulbuls hoot, and monkeys scream in the trees; the fallen buddhas and apsaras seem like natural denizens of the jungle. Only 800 years after its glory days, there is nothing here that did not belong to nature in the first place. At peace in a land of warring camps and mine fields, Ta Prohm provides an uncompromising example of the planet’s ability to restore itself ...

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