One interesting thing in Thailand: there were people wearing yellow T-shirts everywhere. I was told that that signifies support of the king, not just because it was his birthday in December but also because it’s a sharp stick in the eye to recently-ousted Prime Minister Thaksin. The new airport, the building of which was apparently largely handed out to Thaksin’s cronies, recently failed to pass a domestic safety inspection. Runways are already potholed. The director of our Bangkok office, who’s become a valued friend as well as a trusted colleague in an emergency, drily congratulated me on making it through immigration and baggage claim without having structural elements come down on my head. Anyway, in solidarity with the Thai people, I bought a yellow Speedo when we went shopping for beach stuff. (No, you’re not going to see a photograph of how well I filled it out.) Signs in support of the king were up everywhere. Here, they’re on the lampposts, interspersed with Thai flags. I liked all the primary colors:

Our hotel in Cambodia was, rather touchingly, a converted police barracks. The conversion was done charmingly:

The place had an ecological theme–all local textiles for linens, handmade herbal toiletries, signs asking you to reuse towels, that sort of thing–that had a strong presence but didn’t make a hectoring nuisance of itself. Everything was comfortable, and the service was very good. I say this not because my airy-sahib seal of approval is significant but because tourism is a major industry in Cambodia, and its economy needs all the help it can get after it’s tragic recent history. Cambodia faces competition from the already well-established resort areas in countries around it; but no one else has the ruins of Angkor, and there’s evidence that it also recognizes the value of parlaying its remaining colonial-era hotels into a draw.

As impressive as the Angkor structures are, there’s a lot that the Khmers of the twelfth century didn’t know. They frequently stacked bricks rather than staggering them, creating walls that were weak. Also, there are arch-shaped openings all over the place inside the buildings. But when you look closely, you can see that they’re not load-bearing arches; they’re just corbelled like Egyptian arches:

The ruins, including not just Angkor Wat itself but quite a few temples in the same area, are undergoing a lot of restoration and preservation work. I assumed the forlorn-looking ballusters piled out back were waiting to be restored to their places among their neighbors:

But despite their lapses as engineers, the Khmers could carve like gangbusters. Photographs can’t possibly do justice to how overwhelming it is to stand inside one of the collonades and realize that every single surface, everywhere you look above floor level, is covered with etching or relief. And there are plenty of complicated structural elements that are still standing:

To get to the top level of the central pyramid at Angkor Wat (the part that’s shown on the Cambodian flag), you have to climb one of the sets of stairs from the next level down. They are steep stairs, with signs that announce “Climbing at your risk”:

Only one set has a railing (for climbing down), and once you crawl to the top, you wander over outcroppings and door sills that jut up and worn-away floor stones. There are some areas cordoned off, but there are none of the sorts of warning signs litigious Americans are used to. The overall effect was rather fun, though–like a big jungle gym. I felt like a little boy climbing over, around, and through everywhere.

Even though there are other people around, the place can still be memorably eerie. At Angkor Tom, the repetition of faces on the towers is disorienting, like a hall of mirrors:

Also, as in a lot of temples or churches, you notice the play of light and shadow. The little shrine-like spaces are often dark and cool like grottoes, but there tend to be openings nearby through which the sun pours. The temples are actually in use again, so the god statues sometimes have fabric robes over them and offerings in front of them:

For those who want more tourist-poster pictures of Angkor Wat–you may be surprised at how long it is if you’ve only seen the center of the pyramid before–Google Images of course has plenty.