When I first traveled to Cambodia, in 1994, small arms fire was not an unusual sound in the Phnom Penh night. An AK-47 report was barely enough to make people look up from their pot-laced pizzas at the Happy Herb Bistro on the Mekong riverfront. It certainly didn't put a dent in the drinking at the Heart of Darkness, the bar of choice for many of the expat relief workers who came to the country after the nightmare Pol Pot years, when more than a million Cambodians were killed for such crimes as knowing how to read and wearing glasses.
Back then, traveling a few hundred kilometers to the north to Siem Reap, home of the famous sublime temples of Angkor, was no easy excursion. Options were limited to an hour-long breath-holding sojourn on a rickety Royal Air Cambodge Fokker-28 prop or the speed (ha, ha) boat up the Tonle Sap, which chanced an encounter with guerrillas or bandits.
But still you went, because there was no other choice. Angkor Wat, built by the Khmer king Suryavarman II sometime between 1112 and 1150, could be the single greatest building in the world. To walk along the grand stone esplanade, with those marvelous, iconic towers etched against the sky, was to reaffirm shaken faith, to restore a sense of loyalty to the innate goodness of our so often brutal species.
Now, with Pol Pot dead, decades of war finally over, and the nation returned to at least a facsimile of normality, Angkor has become a day trip. Travelers fly in from Bangkok in the morning; rush through the temples; snag a box lunch; see the towering banyan trees at the Ta Prohm temple, where the roots surround the building like the tentacles of giant squids; and are back in Bangkok by nine the same night.
But it would be a mistake, this short course, because you haven't really seen Angkor without pausing before the vast bas-relief murals to count the number of demons (92, fat-nosed, eyes bulging) vs. the gods (88, with almond eyes and pointed head gear) as they pull from opposite ends of the giant snake Vasuki in a cosmic tug of war above the Churning of the Sea of Milk. It would also be a mistake not to go to the Phnom Penh markets, where they sell shimmering Khmer textiles and people munch on deep-fried tarantulas. It would be a mistake, too, to skip Toul Sleng, just outside Phnom Penh, the former high school turned into a torture chamber by the Khmer Rouge; 14,000 people were killed in that building alone.
And, of course, there are the skulls, rows of them at the Choeung Ek Killing Fields, just outside of Phnom Penh. It would be a mistake to miss the skulls too. As mad as it sounds, you have to see the skulls as much as you have to go to the Bayon Restaurant in Siem Reap, where they fix the best Khmer noodle soup, or kick back on the verandah of the Foreign Correspondents' Club in Phnom Penh, the most pleasant place in the world to sit in a leather chair under a ceiling fan and sink slowly into the most restful of oblivions.
This is how it is in Cambodia, a land of many contrasts, as they say on the moldy brochures. I understood this best on my first trip, at Angkor, shortly after dawn. Alone, I was strolling the long, 851-year-old stone corridors when I heard the sound of gongs, drums, and woodwinds. The music was coming from the jungle across the moat that encircles the temple. I followed the sound, and, in a clearing, saw a full pinn peat ensemble, the traditional Cambodian orchestra. During the Pol Pot years, almost all the players were murdered or persecuted. But here they were, half a dozen musicians playing Cambodian-style instruments: high-pitched xylophone (roneat ek in Khmer), oboe (sralai), gongs (korng thumm and korng tauch), finger cymbals (chhing), and drum (sampho). Everyone was happy to see me, this strange tourist who came out of the jungle.
"It is good you come here," said Mr. Mak, the roneat player, who was learning English in hopes of opening a hotel one day, "because you should see that even in trouble we have not gone. Like the temples, we remain, to make beauty."
