“THEY KILLED THE BUDDHA!” JULIE EXCLAIMED IN AMAZEMENT. Painted on the temple wall above her was the scene of the Enlightened One’s death at the hands of his followers, who’d served him tainted meat for dinner. “But why did they feed him pork in the first place?”

No answer was forthcoming, but really, none was needed. We were ten tourists of a half-dozen nationalities visiting the first of many, many wats—traditional Cambodian Buddhist temples— on a two-week guided trek from the capital, Phnom Penh, to the Khmer spiritual heartland of Siem Reap, and around and back again, with a handful of stops in between.

This was to be a journey into centuries past, into carved sandstone demons and arcane Theravada Buddhist rituals, in which we would confront the historical, religious, and psychological origins of the Khmer people, and perhaps come to, if not understand, then at least begin to grasp the roots of the auto-genocidal fever that swept Cambodia in the mid-1970s, courtesy of the Khmer Rouge.

But, more often than not, we found ourselves at places like Wat Nokor, outside Kampong Cham, whose thick, 12th-century sandstone walls surrounded a still-functioning temple adorned with bright pastel scenes of the Buddha’s life. The Buddha leaving home. The Buddha fasting. The Buddha beneath the shade of a naga, or snake spirit. The Buddha reaching enlightenment. The Buddha being served a meal of bacon, ham hocks, and chitlins, then dying.

Of course, as we would learn over the fortnight, death—and its attendant suddenness and unpredictability— is perhaps the only constant in this country of 13 million, smack between Vietnam and Thailand in Southeast Asia. We would witness traffic accidents, hear Khmer Rouge horror stories, gaze upon skulls and mass graves on display at former killing fields, and examine bas relief frescoes of ancient wars at Angkor Wat. And we—or maybe it was just me—would be left to ponder how any of the famously happy and relaxed Cambodians still manage to wake up at five in the morning and try to grow rice.

WAT WAS I THINKING?
This was not my first trip to Cambodia. In March 1997, when I was living in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, I popped into Phnom Penh to check out the city’s first international film festival. The night I arrived, I spotted a flier at a bar announcing a demonstration in favor of an independent judiciary, planned for the next morning. A good introduction to Cambodian politics, I thought.

The next morning, while I was oversleeping, unidentified men threw grenades into the demonstration, killing 20 people and injuring more than 100. The opposition politician leading the demonstration, Sam Rainsy, accused the prime minister, Hun Sen, of being behind the attack. To this day, Hun Sen remains in power, the two suspects have never been tried, and in February Sam Rainsy was stripped of his parliamentary immunity and forced to flee the country. Cambodian politics, indeed.

This was, unfortunately, nothing new for the country. Almost eight years later, on this trip (courtesy of the generous folks at Intrepid Travel), I visited Toul Sleng, a former high school in Phnom Penh that from 1976 to 1979 the Khmer Rouge turned into a detention, torture, interrogation, and execution site for people they suspected— imagined is the better term, or maybe pretended—were political criminals. The bare metal mattresses remain in the torture chambers, as do the irons used to clamp prisoners’ legs, as do hundreds of photographs of the condemned, from hardened cadres to confused peasants to smiling, gleeful children, unaware of their fates. In all, some 20,000 people were killed here; just 7 survived, and those by sheer luck.

This mass killing perplexed me not so much for its scale—by some estimates, 2 million people died of starvation, disease, overwork, and murder during the Khmer Rouge’s four-year reign—but for another reason: With the exception of a few overeager motorbike-taxi drivers, Cambodians are seriously sweet people, so devoted to Buddhism that they refuse to work in slaughterhouses (local Cham Muslims take those jobs). A tour guide will invite you to dinner at his wooden house, where he lives with something like 43 family members—is he a machete-wielding maniac? Could he kill the Buddha? Could I?

WAT’S FOR DINNER
Cambodians, however, aren’t the only ones who face death daily: The trees here are hungry, and ancient temples are on the menu. Our second wat stop was outside Kampong Thom, at a ninth-century— pre-Angkorian is the official term, I believe— complex of temples that, no longer in use, is sinking into the forest. The ancient pools used for royal baths are nothing more than leaf-lined pits in the earth, and the roofs of the brick temples collapsed centuries ago. Spongtrees wrap themselves around the structures, digging their soft, wormlike roots into the stone and slowly wrenching it apart, year by year, millimeter by millimeter.

This slow-motion demolition is, however, a beautiful sight: Mother Nature locked in battle with the works of Man. As I walked around the temples, trailed by a battalion of children selling kramas, the tartan scarves worn by everyone in countryside Cambodia, I never knew whether to feel heartened or dismayed by the implications. Nature really seems to be winning, and though Man’s putting up a good fight, it’s certain he will lose.

Perhaps that’s just karma at work. Cambodia’s temples were erected over a period of several hundred years by what was essentially slave labor: thousands, if not millions, of peasants ordered by their god-kings to build monuments to the Khmer Empire’s greatness. It was a classic case of the rich riding the poor to glory, and as history has demonstrated again and again, that only leads to eventual ruin. (Or maybe it’s just that all reigns ultimately end.) The spongenshrouded temple I climbed up was once some despot’s triumph, which only begs the question: Whither the White House?

But these buildings remain centuries after they were abandoned to the jungle by their creators, so perhaps it’s not all folly. Angkor Wat, the grandpappy of Cambodian wats, lay buried in trees and creepers for 500 years before Henri Mouhot, a French explorer, “discovered” it in 1863. Now it’s visited by more than a million tourists a year, Japanese and French and Koreans and Chinese and Indians and Americans climbing its steep sandstone steps and snapping pictures of the teetering towers and sweating as they amble across a vast network of wats that once served as the empire’s capital city.

Yet somehow, it all still feels lost, as if, like Mouhot, you’ve just stumbled upon one of the greatest buildings on Earth, and no one else knows. This is partly because the complex is just so alien. At least it was to this Westerner, unschooled in Hinduism and Buddhism, which together form the ideological backbone of Angkor Wat. Luckily, our Intrepid guide, “Three Eyes” Youssa, schooled us:

In the beginning, there was nothing, but Lord Vishnu wanted a world, so he asked 100 gods and 100 devils to engage in a tug-of-war with a serpent from the bottom of the sea of milk. The ensuing battle churned the milk so violently that the level of the liquid began to fall, revealing the land. sort of like a toilet flushing. Or maybe it was that a gigantic turtle rose from the deep, bearing the earth on its back. Or maybe it was that a lotus flower rose from the deep and opened up to contain an aspara, a traditional Khmer dancer. And maybe an elephant, too. In any case, presto! World is born!

This faith came via Indian traders around 86 B.C., but Youssa didn’t have a good explanation for what Khmers believed before that, or why, once they’d adopted Hinduism, it took them another 700 years to start building monumental temples. Still, Youssa’s words definitely made certain aspects of Angkor Wat a little more comprehensible: like the statues of 100 gods and 100 demons churning the sea of milk with a big snake, or the lotus shape of Angkor Wat itself, which appears to rise each morning from the lake in a real-life recreation of the creation myth.

No words, however, were needed when Youssa led us to the Bayon, whose 49 lofty, four-sided spires feature the smiling face of King Jayavarman VII, who commissioned much of the temple complex. Each side of each spire faces a cardinal direction and features a different smile, which Youssa proudly demonstrated for us: the smile of compassion, of kindness, of equality, and of sympathy. The trick, he told us, is in the eyes. Do they look down? Up? Straight across? Are the lids wide open or slightly lowered?

I had a question: Pol Pot, the architect of the Khmer Rouge atrocities, was famous for his smile—which one was it? “Kindness,” Youssa said.

WAT A DAY FOR A DAYDREAM
Men being beheaded. Men being eaten by lions and crocodiles. Men being stabbed, flayed, eaten. Armies having at each other with feral abandon. Welcome to the ground floor of the Bayon, whose bas reliefs record the many wars of the Khmer people in detail that would please any Fangoria subscriber.

Yet for all their horrors, the carvings are hypnotic, rewarding anyone with the slightest historical curiosity with dense sociological detail. The armies of many nations are represented by their facial features and garb: the longeared Khmers, the Chinese with their topknots, the beskirted Vietnamese Chams. The frescoes show people cooking, eating, gambling, smoking, dancing, sleeping, buying, selling, dying, living. You could pore over these images for months, or years, trying to understand the subtle symbolism and piece together the narrative.

Or you could give in, as many of us did, to watfatigue. Three days at Angkor, three days in the 90-degree heat, three days of immersion in a culture that might as well have been Martian—three straight days of Angkor Wat, and we were tired. Exhausted. Confused by the place names and ancient eras and the bizarre mashup of religions. Was Banteay Srei pre-Angkor, or post-? Did we just visit the terrace of the leper king, or the terrace of elephants? We checked the schedule that Intrepid had given us, hoping for clues to emerge from the runic Xerox: Why did the French disassemble Phnom Bakheng back in the twenties? Or was that not Phnom Bakheng but another temple, maybe the Baphuon? Why were there no bas-relief carvings of small children offering to sell the Khmer army “cold drink, cold drink”?

But then, somewhere toward the end of all this, sometime after we visited the Landmine Museum but before we decamped from Angkor Wat and headed south for the beach town of Sihanoukville, we wound up at Banteay Samré. I don’t know when it was built, or by whom, or whether it’s Hindu or purely Buddhist. I do know, however, that it was almost entirely empty of people. No French package tourists, no Aussie sophomores. Only two or three children with nothing to sell.

The temple was big and square, and was once filled with water, turning the rooms and corridors into little stone islands. Now, however, it was simply an island of peace, a place to sit and forget the killings that have wracked this land for millenia. And sit I did, in a far-off corner of Banteay Samré, until the sun began to set, the mosquitoes came out, and I heard our tour leader faintly call out my name, wondering where I’d gone.

---When Matt Gross goes traveling, he writes songs about the places he visits. Click here to read his Cambodia ode, Whole Lotta Wat.

LOWDOWN

• INTREPID TRAVEL's "Heart of Cambodia" trip leaves from Phnom Penh and covers the country in 15 days.
• COSTS run US$870 (plus a local payment of US$200).
• Intrepidtravel.com