Road Taken

Back in the refugee camp days, it wasn’t safe to go tromping off on your own to the actual Thai-Cambodian border. The closer you got to the dividing line between the two countries, the higher the chances that you’d meet somebody with a weapon. Lots of land mines got laid there too.

I still recall a lazy Sunday afternoon, sitting around playing music with a few other camp workers in the little border town where many of us lived. A frantic Khmer man drove up and asked for our help in getting his friend admitted to a nearby hospital. Not really thinking what we were getting ourselves into, two of us foreigners hopped in his truck and drove toward Cambodia for a few kilometers along a road we had never traveled before. We stopped in what seemed to be the middle of nowhere, only to see a couple of men emerge from the forest carrying a make-do stretcher.

When they came closer we realized that the guy they were carrying had stepped on a mine. They hung the stretcher, hammock-style, from the inside corners of the shell on the back of the pickup. I sat back there with the guy to keep him steady while we drove to the hospital. He was really suffering and the two of us didn’t have much common language. All I could think to do was to hold his hand and sing to him. Luckily we were able to get him cared for. It wasn’t until the driver dropped us back in town that my friend and I realized we had taken a big risk in going along on that ride.

Two days ago, twenty-plus years after that incident, I got a chance to travel again on that road. Cambodia is no longer off limits; that part of the border is safe. (Tragically, the mines don’t know the war is over, and they continue to claim victims in areas that haven’t been cleared). I journeyed there for a look at a 1,000-year-old Khmer temple I’d read about called Sdok Kok Thom.

The Thai Fine Arts Council’s restoration looks great, as you can see in these before and after pictures. I had the place to myself, except for a school group whose impressive leader taught with questions rather than by lecture: “how are you each going to tell the story of this temple when you get home today?”

Indeed, Sdok Kok Thom’s story is unique. A pillar once stood at the corner of the grounds, inscribed with details about the why’s and the who’s of the temple’s construction. Scholars who have studied the inscription (now in Bangkok for safekeeping) say that it explains more about the context of those times than any similar Angkor-era “cornerstone.”

Perhaps in the future more tourists will also discover the magic of this site. For now, the road remains just as empty as it was the first time I took it. At that time, of course, I hadn’t known where I was going, nor that a temple was hiding in the forest. I hadn’t realized then that just three years earlier, some of my refugee students had stayed in a camp just a stone’s throw from the temple—until that camp was destroyed by shelling from the Cambodian side of the border. I never considered that the area was mined.

A sign at the edge of the site today commemorates the collaborative mine removal effort, which finished in 2004. A total of 76 explosive devices were found buried around the temple.