Lost in a jungle of humans
There is little left for one to do except sit and think and observe
Farah Zia
The idea of travelling was not invented for people like me -- for whom the stresses associated with the daily grind are all too familiar and who have found ways to either cope with them or live with them. Adventures beyond that are unthinkable. Period. Skies shake and the earth starts trembling the moment I get to know I have to travel. But travel I must and more than half the time do that by air.

What I am looking for when I travel is a place that knows how to mix romance with realism. I think this had something to do with why I chose to visit Cambodia’s Siem Reap, a rainy, faded place that has the advantage of not being obvious in its charms. Phnom Penh, to the south, comes at you with all the energy and brassiness of a Vegas showgirl; Siem Reap, more internal in its interests, and visibly more recessive has the more cultured and often intriguing appeal of a maiden aunt who invites you to a salon for a poetry recital.

Snuggling sweetly between rivers, Siem Reap winks its sky blue and white walls as you approach. The city is a live show of Cambodian temperament at its best -- locals’ tender, convivial hospitality, exquisite crafts and some simple yet indisputably flavoursome regional fare, and stress levels drop below zero.

University kids in motorbike helmets browsing along the street side bookstalls or salesmen at accessory shops specialising in crocodile skin bags greeted me on my arrival. Nearby in Svay Dangkum, The Blue Pumpkin was serving baguettes and brioche in the most exquisite setting with a lounge upstairs shaped like a luxury yacht and dressed in white. Gorgeous restaurants like Le Grand Café were trading in the romance of old France, another recent antagonist that Siem Reap will gladly invoke if it can ensure tourist dollars.

Recommending the best Siem Reap restaurants is like trying to spot the ideal grain of sand on a beach. Siem Reap is young and, for lack of a less annoying word, hip, and the city’s young residents (mostly foreigners) seem keen to outdo each other in the culinary arts. Creative fine dining is commonplace, replete with crocodile, python and ostrich meat. Coffee shops are rife, sushi bars a staple. These days, with inflation soaring, the economy is struggling. But the city has long had a certain languor: restaurants like The Red Piano (where Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt and Mick Jagger dined during the filming of Tomb Raiders) and hotels like Hotel de la Paix with its appealing art deco facade are what will keep financial hopes alive.

Siem Reap’s shopkeepers in the old market area entice you into their little stalls, gleaming with golden or indigo lacquer, with all the charm of their neighbours in Burma and Laos. The market is as animated after sunset as before.

Siem Reap showcases a fully functioning centre. Tuk tuks sashay through the passages; old ladies snore and old men stare; artisans bare their wares prettily inside diminutive ram shackled shops. Artisans d’Angkor is both shop and workshop. Many of the objects churned out within this compound lined with workshops where artisans of exceptional skill are trained and employed, are exquisite: prehistoric jars decorated with hypnotic geometric patterns, replicas of Angkor-period statues of kings and Hindu gods whose smooth torsos and beatific expressions radiate gentleness. Unlike, the British Museum, where devices monitor humidity levels and the artefacts appear infinitely distant, frozen in neo-classical limbo, these statues are still functional objects, the recipients of daily religious devotion.

No visit to Siem Reap is complete without a visit to John McDermott’s galleries -- one in The Passage, and the other on Pokambor Avenue. On the evening I visited the galleries, there had been a shower of rainfall. The place was all but deserted, and I crunched up the wet gravel drive with only a couple of bedraggled birds for company. Inside, the former world of the Khmer rulers comes thrillingly back to life as soon as you step into the enormous entrance salon, with its black and white and sepia-toned photographs. Showcasing work by Mc Dermott -- the Ansel Adams of Angkor -- the gallery also features regular exhibitions and works by such noted modern masters as Kenro Izu.

Next doors, the Foreign Correspondents’ Club (FCC), housed on the grounds of the former French governor’s residence, with a salt-water pool patio and colonial exuberance, minimalist styling and immaculate service overlooking Tonle Sap river, will doubtless soon feature in coffee table guides. Today, it’s full of tourists eating club sandwiches and reading their Lonely Planet guides, but it’s still as good a spot as any to watch street life, the vendors pushing carts, cycle-drivers hustling for customers, beefy white men and waif-like Cambodian women getting in and out of tuk tuks. A dry local joke about the FCC is that it’s the only place where the city’s many NGO workers have to grit their teeth and make conversation with so-called ‘sexpats’. The dinner, I had there, was delicious shrimps cooked with stalks of crunchy Kampot peppercorns, sweet enough to eat whole.

To arrive in Siem Reap today is at once to marvel anew at what the Khmer rulers and their equally resilient, determined, resourceful people achieved in protecting their kingdom’s autonomy from the world, and to see how that same sense of enterprise and patriotism is now devoted to letting the world in. Where protecting the motherland once meant closing the doors to western influences, now it means throwing every door wide open.

It is, in fact, to notice how sleekly the country seems to be moving forwards and backwards at the same time, as if running the latest software on a rusty, long-outdated computer. Foreign NGOs have mushroomed around the city like fungi on trees, and splurge hotels have propped up for luxury travellers. But it’s the remains of Angkor Wat that Siem Reap, like the rest of Cambodia, banks on: from Angkor Wat on the national flag to Angkor Wat resort hotels to Angkor Wat beer and condoms; it’s a silkworm that baits tourists into visiting Cambodia today.

Lord knows how howler monkeys got their name, because they certainly don’t howl. They actually make a spine-chilling, deep-throated, prehistoric roaring noise, which reverberates through the undergrowth. The first time I heard them walking into Angkor Wat, a spectacular Khmer ceremonial site hidden deep in the jungle, I looked skywards in slow-motion horror, quite ready to drop everything and peg it, before realising the noise was coming from a handful of smallish monkeys perched in the treetops.

Time has fostered myths, none more persistent than the belief that Angkor was a mysterious lost city, hidden from the world until stumbled upon in the mid-nineteenth century by Henri Mouhot, the French explorer and naturalist. Angkor’s origins have likewise assumed a semi-mythic status.

802 AD marks the start of the reign of Jayavarman II, the Khmer king who first established a capital close to the river. Towards the end of his reign, he created a new city at present-day Roluos. The next two kings, Jayavarman III and Indravarman I remained at Roluos but the fourth monarch, Yasovarman I moved his capital a few kilometres away.

The layout of Angkor Wat is entirely related to symbols of creation. The Khmers believed mountains were sacred as they were closer to heaven. The sanctuaries at the top of the plinths were seen as portals to the abodes of the gods who lived within. Only the elite could enter these sanctuaries; everyone else would stand in the plaza below.

Some things won’t change in the next Cambodia: temples, rice and Angkor Wat. Swarming with families scrambling up the steep stairs to the sanctuary and taking snapshots, Angkor seems to be Cambodia’s sole source of revenue-generation. Certain figures on the ancient friezes have been burnished to a metallic sheen by thousands of hands. Guides run through their spiel in front of the giant stone heads at the temple of Bayon, and the kapok trees curl their roots charmingly round the ruins of Ta Prohm.

Dedicated to Shiva, the destroyer of the Hindu pantheon, the Angkor complex was built between the ninth and twelfth centuries by seven successive Khmer monarchs, whose masons hewed out stone stairs and gopuras from a breathtaking peak that looks out over the densely forested mountain range marking the border with Thailand.

Places that were hard to visit a year or two ago are now accessible. Elegant French hotels like Le Royal have reopened, offering visitors a flavour of the Indo-hina of Andre Malraux and Marguerite Duras. And as Cambodia gets plugged back into the global economy, speculators are moving in.

The title is taken from a quote by Somerset Maugham about Angkor Wat in 1930. He wrote , "It is an impressive rather than a beautiful building and it needs the glow of sunset or the white brilliance of the moon to give it a loveliness that touches the heart."

The idea of travelling was not invented for people like me -- for whom the stresses associated with the daily grind are all too familiar and who have found ways to either cope with them or live with them. Adventures beyond that are unthinkable. Period. Skies shake and the earth starts trembling the moment I get to know I have to travel. But travel I must and more than half the time do that by air.

Therefore I cannot pretend to be normal at an airport.

I envy those who open their laptops the moment they are settled in the lounge, or their newspapers or books. I have a disdain for those who find friends and acquaintances or readily make ones. For me, airports signify the beginning of a journey that may well have been avoided.

Airports are by design lonely, impersonal spaces. The functionality attached to them makes them all appear strangely similar. Air travel is serious business; it cuts down on the time incurred on travelling. Time -- or the lack of it -- is crucial here. It is not a place that generates stories for literature. Even the film-makers have used airports as the concluding scene or only in intermittent scenes. A take-off or landing of a plane generally suffices.

Unlike say railway stations and the waiting rooms and the trains. A genius like Gulzar could capture a lifetime in a waiting room. Because here, on a train station, time does not fly, it takes slow, measured steps making it easy to count those steps and imagine the life in its backdrop.

Inside the plane is of course a different story -- when you want to engage in a conversation with the fellow sitting beside you, he or she decides to fall asleep and when you want to take a nap, the world’s best chatterboxes sitting on both sides don’t let you. But I have heard some of the world’s telling tales in the plane that somewhat eased the pain of the journey. If you ask me to recall those stories, I can probably remember only one or two.

At the airport, however, there is little left for one to do except sit and think and observe. What I have stored in memory are images, without names or faces.

Travelling within Pakistan leaves me especially angry. I still can’t understand the connection between the post 9/11 world and the body-search conducted with hands at Pakistani airports. Outside the airport, you would not let anyone do this to you ever. But this is a price they say you have to pay for collective security. Whatever, I still can’t get used to it and I may be totally wrong but this hand-body-search, I am convinced, is specific to Pakistan.

Once the anger subsides, and you happen to be early for your flight, it is time to sit and look around.

Again I may be totally wrong, but on Pakistani airports I find that people appear so different from the lot that I am used to seeing. Or is it that airport lounges provide a chance to look at people as prototypes? If anything, they belie the commonly held notion that money brings a certain kind of uniformity. I’m sure it is this diversity that prevents people from dying of boredom in the lounges.

I saw this diversity at the Delhi airport in India recently where I was stuck for a torturous three-and-a-half-hours before I could catch the next flight to Hyderabad. I felt lost in a jungle of humans.

Despite a contrary sexual orientation, I began to notice girls, women. Dressed in saris, chooridars, jeans, wearing finger rings in hennaed hands and feet, the Indian women looked so attractive. As for the men walking beside them, they were dull-looking, plain ignorable, to say the least.

The airport itself was state-of-the-art with brands selling food and gift items. It could have been anywhere in the world. I especially noticed this bare-footed, dhoti-clad old man accompanied by two normal-looking women. Suddenly, I saw him going inside the Swarovsky crystal shop and looking at the windows as keenly as the rest of the people. A perfect photo opportunity was lost. The merger of the ascetic with the consumer of a capitalist society is an image that has remained etched in mind.

Air travel allows you to see more airports than the places actually visited. A visit to Larkana gets you a chance to see the God-forsaken Sukkur airport. A trip to London entails a stopover at Dubai, or worse still, Abu Dhabi. A plane bringing you back to Lahore from Karachi may stop at Quetta for half-an-hour. And you can’t get to Goa without seeing Mumbai airport.

No escaping them as they say. To me airports remain lonely, impersonal spaces that do give me a chance to sit and think and observe but not enough chance to make stories that leave a lasting impression.