travelswithalice

January 09, 2007

ANGKOR WAT

Six o’clock in the morning and Stuart and I had been up for an hour and a half. We had found a vacant spot in what seemed like the right place to be and sat in companionable silence with a host of like-minded pilgrims, waiting for the sun to rise over Angkor Wat.

I sat uneasily on a slab of stone; it felt cold and damp. I dreaded to think how it would look in the light. Or what might be crawling underneath. I had no idea where we were exactly. I was in the dark literally and figuratively.

We had squeezed through and climbed over a tightly packed crowd of shadowy figures stationed in a staircase to get to this vacant spot. I could just make out the ground below- not much of a drop but still, I didn’t dare get up to go around the corner of the ledge for a better vantage point. I had seen a big group of people there earlier as we followed the beam of somebody’s flashlight.

I was so excited. Thrilled to be there. Everyone around me seemed just as excited. I imagined a low-level charge of electricity crackling in the cool pre-dawn air. There was a hushed reverence even in the way people picked their way in the dark. We spoke in whispers and flinched when someone used a flash.

Then a voice brashly called out: “Coffee!” An embarrassed round of giggles, then, "How much?" someone ventured.

The spell was broken. It was a tourist thing after all.

Meanwhile, the horizon was lightening and people started to find their voices. Flashbulbs began to pierce holes in the dark. Somebody argued with the coffee vendor. Time to move on.

Stuart and I climbed down from our perch and walked towards a crowd of people standing a short distance away. It wasn't until we got closer that I saw the pond that was half ringed by a crush of expectant photographers armed with a range of equipment in varying levels of sophistication: from the impressive, serious cameras with really useful view finders, all the way to the casually reliable cell phones.

The perfectly still surface of the pond repeated in reverse format the drama playing before us. Morning had etched a silhouette of the spires of Angkor Wat. A virtual paper cutout pinned on a softly colored dawn sky.