Return to Cambodia

Exploring Angkorian temples never gets tiresome. Every December for the past seven years, I’ve spent at least four days running around and crawling over Angkor Wat and its hundreds of neighboring ruins. Each time something new hits me about this spectacular complex. It’s endlessly fascinating.

An invitation came my way to return for an eighth trip. Yet I hesitated. We would go in May. It’s damn hot outside in May. As I understood the itinerary, we would spend more time in the nearby town, Siem Reap, than at the temples themselves.

Of course in the end I went. And to my surprise, the highlight this time didn’t date from 1,000 years ago.

We visited a place on the western edge of Siem Reap that goes by many names. It owes its existence and design to a wonderful Australian nun who worked alongside me nearly 25 years ago in Site 2 refugee camp. When the camps closed, Sr. Denise followed the refugees back to Cambodia. She has been there ever since.

One name for this inspiring place is “Mondol Metta Karuna,” which translates as the Center for Mercy and Kindness. Some call it The Reflection Center. Taxi drivers know it as “the landmine place,” because of Sr. Denise’s leadership in Cambodia’s branch of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997.

Whatever you call it, this interfaith center encourages visitors to think about the challenges of Cambodia through the eyes of the poor. When Sr. Denise toured us around, she explained that the center’s founders first sat with nearby villagers to trade thoughts about what makes a successful community. That list wasn’t too hard to generate, and soon they had agreed on seven characteristics.

The discussion got more interesting when they turned to the seven things Cambodian villages find most difficult. In the end they decided the new center ought to focus on these:

• Developing so that everyone is enriched
• Educating so that everyone’s potential is realized
• Caring for the environment
• Promoting peace and reconciliation after Cambodia’s genocide
• Coping with displacement—of the home and the heart
• Disarming
• Governing ethically

Each of these challenges (which of course are also the world’s challenges) have been represented in sculpture and other artworks that are integrated into the center’s landscaping. As residents and visitors pass by, say, the lovely statue of a woman at a well, they may stop to draw water with a traditional bucket and reflect on development for all. Or practice walking meditation around the center’s winding labyrinth. Or working meditation at the wheelchair shop. One can’t avoid contemplation here.

The symbols are all repeated inside a moving multi-faith common room that sits alongside a reflection pond. The center’s layout inspires in countless ways. Mondol Metta Karuna hasn’t made my itinerary during past trips to Siem Reap, but it surely rates a place for future visits.

An interesting side note:

Westerners who leave home for long breaks or retirement often choose Thailand. Plenty of them cross my path as I go around Chiang Mai. When I ask where else they considered, I commonly hear the same places listed: Mexico, Spain, Costa Rica, and several other Spanish-speaking countries. Now and then people mention Croatia. They never say Cambodia.

So I was surprised on this trip to run into a 40-something Dutch couple living in Siem Reap who say it’s their dream town. She volunteers and advises non-profits. He commutes back and forth from Singapore. They settled here after an extensive search for a home base that satisfied their many criteria, including being able to live alongside people in need and to educate their kids in an authentic setting.

So many ways to be inspired in this area!

Walkabout

They say it’s often better not to return to those special places where you did something significant for the first time. You’ll have changed, they say. Or the spot won’t look the way you want to remember it.

Last week, I ignored that advice and retraced Scotland’s West Highland Way, which had been my first several-day solo hike.

Thirty years ago, most everything about the 95-mile journey was new to me: countryside, culture, challenge. The Way became my own little rite of passage.

This time, I had nothing to prove, no goals other than to follow up on a few notes I had scribbled long ago in the margins of a Scottish National Trust guidebook:

If you do it again:

1. Carry less weight (fewer clothes)
2. Go in May, when no bugs
3. Bring an extra days’ food, just in case
4. Climb Ben Lomond, Stob Gobbler, and other nearby peaks
5. Otherwise, don’t change anything – a wonderful walk

Three friends joined me for this repeat trek.  They hadn’t been to Scotland before. We had plenty of company on the walk, which in the meantime has become well-known among hikers from all over Europe. One fellow in particular, a 20-something German on his own, particularly intrigued me.

He told us he chose this long-distance path because “It’s so nice and empty up here compared to back home.” He was allowing several days more than most walkers take to finish the Way: “I might make some side climbs.” The peaks he named were the same ones I had scrawled in my guidebook 30 years before.

We asked where else he had walked. He said that the previous year, he and his brother had completed a long leg of El Camino de Santiago in Spain. They weren’t religious pilgrims, but they were open to the lessons that such pilgrimages can teach. They dubbed these new insights “The Way of the Camino.”

I recalled feeling a growing confidence each day on my previous trip. I would wake up under a tent fly each morning, looking forward to another chance to exhaust myself. Long days—sunset can be 10pm in the Scottish summer—meant that I could go until I was spent, take a break to read if I could find shade, and then go again, fueled mostly by adrenalin.

My provisions back then came from small shops in the handful of tiny villages along the Way. At one of them, I ran into a childhood pal from Chicago. He and I laughed over the chances of a lone hiker crossing paths with a round-the-world bicyclist in the middle of nowhere.

Without the margin notes in the old guidebook, I might not even have remembered the name of that village. When we reached it last week, I thought at first that the grocery had been replaced by a petrol station. Just to be sure, I told my story to a local. He pointed down the only road and told me I’d find “Brodie’s” just around the bend. The sign out front was new but otherwise the shop was instantly recognizable. I posed for a photo to send to my bicyclist pal, who, remarkably, rode past me twenty years later in a Seattle park—the first time I had seen him since Scotland.

The German guy kept cropping up. His enthusiasm was refreshing. During each of the three or four times we encountered him during the week, he had a story. One time he described his previous night’s campsite: “I walked to a place that my guidebook described as very pleasant. But when I reached it, after a very long day, I learned that it wasn’t a campsite anymore. Some local teenagers had been going there and playing rock ’n roll music very loudly. The campsite owners decided a few months ago to close it for everyone. I had to keep walking for an extra two kilometers. Finally I found a beach with large pebbles that made a perfect place to set up my tent. It had a beautiful view and the sound of the waves was very pleasant. I was so grateful to those teenagers and their rock ’n roll!”

Buried memories surfaced of waiting until it was nearly dark to choose a place to string up my fly. On my first time over the Way, at around 10:30 one night, a farmer was surprised to find me still walking. He suggested I hop a fence and camp near a pleasant brook on his neighbor’s land. I knew that Scottish law allows what’s known as “freedom to roam,” but I hesitated about freedom to sleep. “G’on, then,” said the farmer, “Archie’ll never see ya’ there.” The sounds of jumping trout kept me company all night.

The last time we saw our German friend, he was rubbing sore shoulders while standing next to an overweight backpack. We joked that The Way of the Camino hadn’t taught him any lessons about how to lighten his load. He cheerfully explained that he had no choice but to carry several days’ extra food: his mother, who worried, sent him off with dozens of homemade treats.

Was I changed since the first time? Certainly. Yet the view of my former self, mirrored by a young German, looked just about the way I wanted to remember it. A wonderful walk.