Perfect Ruin By John Buckley Special to The Washington Post Sunday, January 24, 1999; Page E01

It was difficult to keep my emotions in check, for this was a sight I'd dreamed of glimpsing ever since, as a small boy, I'd seen slides brought back by an aunt who had visited what was then, and is once again, known as the Kingdom of Cambodia.

In Cambodia, as on the bridge to Angkor Thom, there is a corresponding demon for every god, an evil that matches--and, too often in the past 30 years, overwhelms--the beauty of this small, sad country. Travelers to the ruins of Angkor--as the more than 100 square miles of temples are known--have been few and far between since the Vietnam War spilled across the Cambodian border in the late '60s. While the horrors of the Khmer Rouge period have begun to recede into history, this is still a haunted land. The recent surrender of the last Khmer Rouge holdouts, and strongman Hun Sen's subsequent failure to seek justice against them, has once more left the nation roiling.

That I was standing at the entrance to Angkor Thom was the fulfillment of a lifelong dream, and seemed like no easy feat. For the better part of 20 years (1970-90) Angkor was a virtually impossible sight to behold. Yet since the mid-1990s it has become a tourist destination accessible to more than just adventurers. Today it is a surprisingly accessible destination, for the tourist infrastructure in Cambodia has been dramatically upgraded. In two spectacular instances, hotels that were built when Cambodia was a sleepy, peaceful outpost of the French colonial empire have now been lovingly restored and, even without the lure of Angkor, could qualify as destinations in themselves.

Beginning in 1998, direct flights from Bangkok to nearby Siem Reap--obviating the need to go through Phnom Penh--make Angkor at least as accessible as Peru's Machu Picchu, and almost as easy to get to as the Mayan ruins of Chichen Itza and Uxmal. Because of its continued political problems, Cambodia is still no one's idea of an obvious vacation spot. Yet Angkor Wat is probably a safer destination today than the Great Pyramids of Egypt. But if the lack of visitors last summer is any indication, few Westerners know this.

I arrived at Angkor Thom midway through a bright summer morning, having resisted the impulse to overrule Bros--my guide--who, upon meeting me at Siem Reap's airport, insisted upon our going first to Angkor Thom, and to Angkor Wat only later in the day. After waiting a lifetime to see the perfectly proportioned temple that has beguiled Westerners since the French naturalist Henri Mouhot "discovered" it in 1860, I was dubious about literally passing it by on the way to other nearby ruins. But Bros knew what he was doing.

His plan was for us to go first to Angkor Thom's temple of the Bayon, with its 54 towers on which are carved more than 200 identical faces of Jayavarman VII. We would return to Angkor Wat after lunch, he promised, when the sunlight would be better. I dutifully dropped my bags at the Grand Hotel d'Angkor, whose recent renovation by Singapore's Raffles Group has restored a luster to what, until last year, was referred to derisively as the "formerly Grand Hotel." The Grand sits across a garden from King Sihanouk's palace, seven miles from Cambodia's greatest treasure. After having spent so much of the previous week in dispiriting Phnom Penh and in Battambang, Cambodia's second-largest city, its setting seemed like Eden.

You must pass by Angkor Wat to get to the separate and more recently built Angkor Thom. The tips of Angkor Wat's five towers tantalizingly shone through trees as we came upon the broad green moat that surrounds it. While Angor Wat is one large temple--in fact, the largest religious structure in the world--Angkor Thom was at one time the largest city in Southeast Asia, and home to more than 1 million of J7's subjects. By the time I was walking across the bridge leading to it, the mystery and beauty of those faces calmed me down--fast. I had three entire days to see all of the splendors of Angkor--the Bayon, the intricately carved walls and buildings of Banteay Srei some 15 miles away, the overgrown ruins of Ta Prohm, not to mention Angkor Wat itself.

As it was to turn out, three days is but a half-day shy of the optimal amount of time the visitor might take to see what should be viewed as the Eighth Wonder of the World.

In 1996, when my wife and I visited Bangkok, the task of getting to Angkor was daunting--too daunting, as it turned out. While in Bangkok we spontaneously decided to see if we could get there, but learned we would have to fly first to Phnom Penh and, after spending the night, join an organized tour group for three days or more. We hadn't the time, or, despite the desire, the inclination to see Angkor in this manner.

Just two years later, we discovered, the traveler has many palatable options. In addition to flying to Siem Reap directly on one of Bangkok Airways' twice-daily flights from Bangkok, traveling through Phnom Penh is easier, and more comfortable, than at any time since before Cambodia fell to the Khmer Rouge.

Prior to the war, Phnom Penh was reputed to be one of the most beautiful cities in Southeast Asia, a status lost and not regained. Visitors will wonder what the descriptions of Phnom Penh's former splendor could possibly be referring to. Certainly the Royal Palace and the National Gallery, with its displays of Khmer statuary, many of which were shown at the "Sculpture of Angkor and Ancient Cambodia" show at the National Gallery in Washington in 1997, still beguile. The undeveloped waterfront along the Mekong and Tonle Sap rivers gives the visitor a glimpse of Southeast Asia at a decidedly slower pace than that of Bangkok, Jakarta or Kuala Lumpur. Cambodia's Holocaust Museum, housed in the former torture center of Tuol Sleng, inside of which more than 17,000 party cadres were taken on their way to execution, is as haunting as the realization that this thriving capital city was, within a day or two of the Khmer Rouge takeover, emptied of its population, which was force-marched into a countryside that became the Killing Fields.

But the poverty in Phnom Penh remains stark, and it feels as if you're in an overwhelmed village. The contrast is especially startling between most of Phnom Penh and the city center's newly built or refurbished hotels, even in a region with dramatic contrasts between rich and poor, between the charming and the horrific.

Yet if you go to Phnom Penh on your way to Angkor, you will certainly find good accommodations. In addition to its renovation of the Grand Hotel d'Angkor in Siem Reap, the Raffles Group has restored the Hotel Le Royale, the preferred billet of American journalists from the spring of 1970 when the American and Republic of South Vietnam troops swept into Cambodia to the April 1975 takeover of the city by the Khmer Rouge. There are other decent hotels in Phnom Penh, but the Royale in its refurbished state is one of the most charming hotels I've ever stayed in, superior to its parent company's flagship property in Singapore.

The itinerary worked out with Phnom Penh-based Pich Tourist Co. had me spend the first day at Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom, finally heading to Phnom Bakheng, a nearby hillside from which Angkor Wat can best be viewed at sunset. On the second day, my guide and I drove 15 miles on bad roads across a patchwork of fields devoted to both wet and dry cultivation to Banteay Srei, a small temple predating Angkor Wat. That afternoon, I returned to spend time at the Bayon and at Angkor Wat, less driven to inspect each square inch of the sandstone edifices and more determined simply to absorb their radiant splendors. On my final morning in Siem Reap, we went on what is known as the Grand Circuit, and after lunch returned to follow the Little Circuit, these tours comprising 12 temples on an approximately 20-mile loop around Angkor Wat. I left Siem Reap after three nights with the understanding that I had missed only the Roluos Group, with its famed Bakong temple, on an otherwise relatively exhaustive first view of the great temples that make up Angkor.

The visitor to Angkor must see four sights. First among them, of course, is Angkor Wat.

I was prepared for the precise and perfect proportions of Angkor Wat's architecture; the way two of the five towers remain hidden to the eye if viewed straight on; the sheer scale and formality of a structure as intricate in its way as the Taj Mahal. Yet, rather than being in the midst of an urban environment, as the Taj is, Angkor Wat seems to have been placed magically in the midst of forest, jungle and field.

What I was not prepared for was the quality and extent of the bas-relief on all four exterior walls. The artistic quality of the etched narrative--much of it from the Hindu Ramayana, with its titanic wars fought by men and gods in the guise of animals--is breathtaking. Different narrative threads occur at literally different levels. For example, along the wall of the South Gallery, the "Judgment of Yama" shows depictions of life in Heaven and Hell using the 12th-century equivalent of a split screen, with Heaven above and Hell below. "The Churning of the Ocean of Milk," which depicts scenes from the Baghavad-Pourana and showcases gods and demons pulling on a snake to create a magical elixir, has a degree of delicacy and artistry that would impress a Michelangelo.

The mischief and precision of the carving at Banteay Srei is worth the arduous trip on potholed roads. Built in the mid-10th-century, as the Khmer Empire was gathering momentum, Banteay Srei is a comparatively tiny temple--its entire set of connected buildings could easily fit within an interior courtyard of Angkor Wat. Yet the playfulness of the carved lintels, with their scenes transported from Indian mythology, prefigures the rise of Khmer artistry that was to result in so many accomplishments in statuary, bas-relief and architecture.

The Bayon at Angkor Thom, with its hallucinogenic, hall-of-mirrors repetition of Jayavarman VII's visage among the 54 towers rising to a central point, is as affecting in its own way as Angkor Wat. All along the ground level is bas-relief depicting scenes from the wars the Khmer fought against the Chams (Vietnamese) and the Siamese. In Contrast to this are scenes from daily life: women in childbirth, men in their fishing boats pulling carp from the great Tonle Sap lake. The artistry is less exact than that of Angkor Wat, which predated the Bayon by some 40 years, but the overall impression lasts every bit as long in the visitor's memory.

The unreconstructed temple of Ta Prohm makes the visitor feel like Indiana Jones. For deep in the jungle a short distance beyond Angkor Thom, Ta Prohm lies more or less as the French naturalists found it 130 years ago. Trees, some of them more than 300 years old, grow right over the collapsing structure of the temples themselves. Archways are crested with perfect sculptures of apsaras, the ubiquitous female dancers who entertained the court here 700 years ago. It is spooky, overgrown and crude, especially when compared with the well-preserved sites at Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom. But when you walk along the narrow path that takes you to Ta Prohm, your heart jumps into your mouth just as it must have for those 19th-century Frenchmen who, stumbling through the jungle, came upon it for the very first time.

The visitor who goes to Angkor and is unmoved by its beauties either must suffer from neurasthenia or ideology. (In fact, there is a famous picture of Angkor from the early '70s depicting Khieu Samphan and other Khmer Rouge leaders with Sihanouk, who by then was privately their hostage and publicly their ally. None seems particularly moved by the surroundings. Although, come to think of it, last month, when Khieu Samphan returned from his jungle hideout to be welcomed with open arms by Hun Sen, one of the first places he went to was Angkor.) It is the ancient ruin nonpareil.

Machu Picchu may be in a more spectacular setting, but it is comparatively a pile of stones. The Mayan glyphs are interesting, but are to the bas-relief of Angkor Wat as a cave painting is to van Gogh's "Landscape at Twilight."

Plans were announced three years ago for a dramatic expansion of hotel rooms and tourist facilities in Siem Reap, financed primarily by Malaysians. But this was prior to the 1997 coup, and before the Asian financial crisis. It remains to be seen whether the new hotels will be built; while I was there, more than one construction site was idle, waiting for a resolution of its backers' woes.

Despite the irresolution of Cambodia's problems, this is an ideal time to see Angkor. Getting there has never been easier. Hotels and restaurants in Siem Reap are only partly filled. And nowhere else can you see one of the world's most spectacular monuments with a mere handful of other tourists.

Cambodia has no official U.S. tourism office. For more information on visiting Cambodia, contact a travel agent; www.cambodia-web.net offers an abundance of useful information. Also check out the U.S. State Department's Consular Information Sheet on Cambodia; it's at http//travel.state.gov on the Web, or call 202-647-5225 for recorded information and 202-647-3000 for information by fax .

John Buckley, a novelist who lives in Washington, is senior vice president for communications at Fannie Mae.