Going to Angkor Wat: a story in 24 photos [draft]
It’s 4:30 a.m. Time to leave for Angkor Wat.
In the dimness of the hostel room I collect my camera gear and look around like an Alzheimer’s case as I pat my pockets and try to think what I might be forgetting. Time to go so I hurry down to the hostel entrance and I hop aboard a little tuk-tuk with a lanky Irishman who smells of piss and liquor.
Hasn’t slept a wink, the man tells me. He’s been drinking since I passed him at the hostel bar last night. He’s still working on a pint from the bar that he takes hostage into the tuk-tuk.
We pause outside a hotel that looks expensive and out steps a girl in a yellow dress looking as spry and well-rested as the Irishman and I are not. I’m about 90% sure that she’s Bulgarian but somehow my notes on the day has left that part out — she
“Got to see that fucking tree,” the Irishman says in a voice several octaves lower than mine.
What tree?
I should know the he’s talking about but the truth is I’m just kind of burnt out from the past few months of a job that I dislike at a high school in Shanghai that I find unethical and I booked a ticket here in another state of mind. Vegetative, zombielike, braindead-hopeful.
We climb aboard a bus and I slurp a Red Bull because I am both so low on sleep and also hungry to shoot something good today and I’ll do whatever to psych myself up and not fuck it up like I did that time in South Africa by not having my head in the game.
Mr. Narith, our tour guide, is tough and cheery and more awake than the lot of us put together — the 12 or so who are in the tour group. He tells us where to go and how to see the sunrise and what to do if we get lost, and all of nod and listen.
We stumble our the bus at the entrance to the main temple. Lots of us here, oh I don’t know 200? I can’t count a crowd to save my life.
We’re all just waiting for the sun to rise, ambling here and there shifting in the pre-dawn darkness. I wander into the woods to take a piss and as I’m looking at a dark plant E.M. Forster crosses my mind.
When I step out it’s light enough I start to shoot.
Lovers have come to Angkor Wat.
And solo travelers.
And stodgy greybeards who are DEEPLY unimpressed by everything around them.
There are lovely French ladies traveling in twos and cute old couples and cowboy hats proclaiming their arrival as loud as Columbus and the Royal Standard.
I sneak up all sneakylike behind the cowboy hat and try to capture a photo of him leaning back in that luxurious cowboy way as he drinks up the distant temple as the sunrise transforms into ordinary morning-light.
I have no picture of the ecstatic moment when the suns drips all red over the temple. It was there and gone again and I don’t know where I was to be found.
But the boys notice that I’m shooting them. They turn as a single collective organism and stare at me and BAM—I shoot them again. That’s right boys. GOTCHA
They’re undecided about whether they like it or not, so I sneak off as suave as a slinky before they come to a consensus.
That’s when I find it—the thing I did not know I was looking for. It’s a family photograph. They don’t see that it’s a family photograph (but I do). Everyone has their place. They all look just right. Backpacks, snacks, plans and meeting points. On a tour like the one we’re on everyone becomes a child.
I don’t have anything to say as a landscape photographer and so instead I watch people watching things, take pictures of people taking pictures of Angkor Wat. I am not even sure what it would mean to see or experience these old ruins. At least, I’m not sure that I know how to do so.
How I love this elderly couple way they remind me of now-dead novelists. There’s a short story somewhere inside of their hats and the decision to travel to Angkor Wat.
Inside the ruins it’s cool and dark and one of us notices me noticing them.
The melancholy of the traveler. The delight of new ventures.
The tour guides and their hats wait until we’ve seen enough.
I catch up with my Irishman here and there throughout the tour, watch him watching, watch him muster energy and crash when he can take it no longer.
When finally we reach the famous tree he says aloud to no one: “The light isn’t bad, just take the Chinese out [of the picture].”
Something about him fascinates me. I wonder how he could be so keen on exploration and so disgusting. Irishmen too often play to saint beside the British villain.
Later I drift off to wander on my own through the ruins.
People sometimes ask me about photography and consent, and when they do I think of those instances where it went wrong and where it went right. This park employee is one of those instances where it seemed to go right.
