TRAVEL MEMOIRS
My First Marriage is Forever Bound to the Angkor Wat Temples
My nostalgia for Cambodia
We weren’t that young, Ken and I.
But we were newlyweds, recently out of university. Late bloomers who worked for years before going to school. I was nearly thirty-five. Ken was thirty-seven. We left the USA in late 1993 to travel. His grad school experience at University of Oregon nearly drove him crazy. He couldn’t wait to get away for a six-month backpacking trip.
As it turns out, we stayed gone for a long, long time.
I came back to the USA to live eight years later; Ken never moved home. He stayed in Phnom Penh for the rest of his life, which ended there in 2016 in an odd drowning accident I never figured out. A fall from a wooden boat. A slip. It’s been eight years since he died.
Thirty years ago? We were very much in love, and landed in this little country in Southeast Asia — a tropical place with water buffalos, weird politics, and the world-famous Angkor Wat Temples to the north, in Siem Reap.
In 1994, young backpackers were arriving to Phnom Penh to work and explore. Tragically, several were abducted and murdered when we first arrived. Khmer Rouge bandits kidnapped them from cars and trains. The young people were…
