Siem Reap Photos: Batch No. 4

Almost finished processing images from Day 2 at Banteay Srei. All photos end up in my Picasa web album.

Siem Reap Photos: Batch No. 3

A few more today. Still working on Day 2 at Banteay Srei. See all the photos I've finished so far on my Picasa web album.

Siem Reap Photos: Batch No. 2

Slowly but surely I'm working on processing the hundreds of images I shot during four days hiking the Angkor Archaeological Park in Siem Reap, Cambodia. I've managed to upload to my Picasa web album a first few from the second day, which included the longest trek across the countryside, to Banteay Srei, one of the earliest ruins and one with the most intricate carvings. The more than an hour-long ride went through beautiful countryside, mostly rice fields. Difficult to capture in photographs, as the landscape whizzed past the tuk tuk so quickly, but I managed to get a couple usable images using a high shutter speed. Here are the latest:

First Photos from Siem Reap

Now that I’ve landed home from a five-day holiday in Siem Reap, Cambodia, I’ve started working on processing the hundreds of photos I took of the countryside and the Angkor Archaeological Park (AAP). I’ll post to a Picasa album, with notes and links here, whenever I put up a new batch.

To begin, I’ve uploaded about seven from the first evening. One of the must-do events in the AAP is to view a sunset from atop Phnom Bakheng. Admission to the park is free after 5:45pm, so my tuk-tuk driver recommended buying my three-day pass then and hurrying to Phnom Bakheng to get up the hill ahead of the 6:30pm sundown. An overcast of clouds made the viewing that day not as spectacular as it could be (I’m told), but I thought it was an amazing first stop in the AAP.

Thoughts on Mega-Cruising and Fantasy

(Photo: Interior of the Allure of the Seas. By Makele-90 via Wikimedia Commons.)

Toni Schlesinger's conclusion about the hyper-mediated experience of a week-long vacation aboard the world's largest cruise ship seems about right to me. After working a few years on ships, I find cruising to be one of the more artificial ways to travel. Even so, the 3,000-passenger ships I know seem like rustic throwbacks compared to the stage-managed experience aboard the 6,300-capacity Allure of the Seas.

And I thought: Why am I standing on a land mass on a ship? And: When did ships become less about the water on which they sail and more about the land they have left behind?

Not that ships, going back to the first ocean liners with their ballrooms and bowling alleys, haven’t always appropriated the trappings of land. (Never has a ship tried to adopt the rootless, underwater habitat of a shark or even the loft of a mermaid sitting on a piece of coral).

Yet Royal Caribbean International’s Allure of the Seas, the world’s largest cruise ship, launched in December at a cost of about $1.4 billion, has taken the concept of land to a point where, on a seven-day western Caribbean voyage, from Dec. 19 to 26, with stops in Labadee, Haiti, and Costa Maya and Cozumel, Mexico, my Aunt Dorothy and I entirely forgot we were at sea.

Is that a good thing? For romantic sensibilities screaming for the sublime, the metaphysical pondering of the deep — no. For those longing to get lost in a strange, wondrous, digital world of lights and colors that is not unlike the high-pitched energy of Manhattan or any world city — yes.

I'm likewise ambivalent about the cultural implications. I must admit that some years ago I spent hours clicking through the Disneyland website to configure permutations of a five-day holiday in the Magic Kingdom. That was before I had a passport and some experience of exploring foreign cities and cultures. My interests have changed, and these days I'd rather apply $150 toward a visa for China than an entry to Disneyland. But I can still understand the appeal of vacationing in a fantasy world.

A couple of lines from Douglas Coupland's novel Generation X come to mind. First is a quip one of the characters made about how travel has become less interesting since all cities now have the same stores on their mini-malls. With several decks of eateries, entertainment hubs and boutiques, the Allure doesn't just have the same stores as the mini-malls in a landward city. It has the whole friggin' mini-mall -- and a rather large one. I envision something like the Universal CityWalk in Los Angeles bolted into the middle of the ship.

On a deeper level, I think of Coupland's concept of "vaccinated time-travel," which involves adventuring among the past but taking along the benefits of the present, like innoculations against killer diseases. The idea points to two conflicting human impulses. As a species, we seek novel experiences, and we collect them as souvenirs or photos or memories of a heightened sense of living, moments that rise above the mundane. We also seek the familiar so that we feel a sense of control over and understanding of our world. We strive to feel safe, to feel that we have minimized risks.

On the Allure -- and on most large cruise ships, as well as places like Disneyland -- presenting the illusion of travel without risk has been raised to an art form. As Schlesinger reports, the tropical landscaping inside suggests exotic ecosystems, but it's carefully managed to exclude pests. It also excludes flowers. The ship travels to Haiti, stopping at a carefully groomed private beach. But the only local culture allowed to penetrate the security perimeter enters with traditional musicians and trinket hawkers as if they were imports on the shelves of a mini-mall boutique specializing in high-margin tropical wares.

Coupland titled a chapter in Generation X, "Adventure Without Risk Is Disneyland," and the same applies to travel. Without risk, it is only movement, an experience that offers the illusion of a foreign land. No frustrations from language barriers, no gastric distress from unusual local foods and hygenic standards. In short, no culture clash -- ultimately no culture at all.

Even though it is not the kind of amusement I chose for my holidays right now, I don't consider fantasy-world vacations an evil or even a lower form of entertainment. I only think society plays a price when the fantasy is taken as reality. When we become captivated by the illusion, we also lose sight of the collateral costs, such as environmental damage from waste and pollution and the amplification of social inequality from putting our lives further into the hands of profit-maximizing global corporations.

Bush's Hysterics vs. Obama's Cool Calculation

I finally got around to reading the New York Times's account of its dealings with Julian Assange of WiliLeaks. The arcana of the relationship doesn't interest me much, but the story has hidden in the middle an amazing illustration of a glaring difference in style between the administrations of President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama.

The author of the piece, Times Executive Editor Bill Keller, relates the differing character of reaction from the White House to the publication of embarrassing stories detailing the US government's secret affairs. From the Bush White House, hysterical arm-twisting. From the Obama White House, level-headed professionalism and an efficient focus on limiting collateral damage that could affect innocents.

I have vivid memories of sitting in the Oval Office as President George W. Bush tried to persuade me and the paper’s publisher to withhold the eavesdropping story, saying that if we published it, we should share the blame for the next terrorist attack. We were unconvinced by his argument and published the story, and the reaction from the government — and conservative commentators in particular — was vociferous.

This time around, the Obama administration’s reaction was different. It was, for the most part, sober and professional. The Obama White House, while strongly condemning WikiLeaks for making the documents public, did not seek an injunction to halt publication. There was no Oval Office lecture. On the contrary, in our discussions before publication of our articles, White House officials, while challenging some of the conclusions we drew from the material, thanked us for handling the documents with care. The secretaries of state and defense and the attorney general resisted the opportunity for a crowd-pleasing orgy of press bashing. There has been no serious official talk — unless you count an ambiguous hint by Senator Joseph Lieberman — of pursuing news organizations in the courts. Though the release of these documents was certainly embarrassing, the relevant government agencies actually engaged with us in an attempt to prevent the release of material genuinely damaging to innocent individuals or to the national interest.

Challenging Exceptionalism

David Rothkopf of Foreign Policy magazine, makes my point exactly about the idiocy of thinking of the US as "the indispensible nation." He concludes, as I did after reading Rep. Michelle Bachman's rebuttal to President Barack Obama's recent State of the Union address, that the idea of American exceptionalism might prove to be our nation's greatest obstacle in facing the challenges of the future.

Rothkopf buttresses his argument with historic detail, starting with a critique of the President's language framing the US as the innovation nation:

[T]here is one trap associated with this approach that the president and the country need to beware. It is the widely subscribed to notion … often cited by politicians and op-ed writers … that somehow there is something special, some gene in American DNA, that makes us uniquely capable when it comes to innovation....

Now, there is certainly some truth that other societies are less welcoming to the errors which often are part of the innovative process.... But the reality is that the idea that the United States has somehow cornered the market on innovation is an overblown myth.

My view is that such magical thinking about about the US as being the global center of innovation and the indispensible nation flow from the idea of American exceptionalism: the notion that American character or American social norms or American DNA gives our society an intellectual and moral edge over other nations. At its worst, American exceptionalism perverts into the kind of self-righteous, answer-to-no-one thinking evident in foreign policy during the administration of President George Bush.

My thinking about American exceptionalism goes back a few years to reading a sociological and musicological dissection of The Sound of Music, one of my favorite musicals. The author framed the musical as revealing the rise of the idea during the post-World War II era. I never had a clear sense of the fallacy until I started living abroad a few years ago and saw first-hand that America is not exceptional. More recently, Godfrey Hodgson's The Myth of American Exceptionalism gave my thinking some excellent historic context.

The more I think about it and see evidence of the ways exceptionalist thinking distorts American political debate and policy, I become ever more convinced that history will note it as our undoing. That is, if we cannot recognize and adapt a more realistic view of the way the US fits in to the global scheme of things. Rothkopf's conclusion is similar:

Indeed, the greatest threat to the U.S. economy may not be those costly, financially rickety entitlement programs most politicians are afraid of touching. Rather it may be a different kind of entitlement altogether, the sense of entitlement many Americans have to a position of global economic leadership that is vouchsafed to no nation and indeed, is regularly passed on from one era’s great nation(s) to a new set of leaders in the next.