Angkor Wat, January 1, 2000

Ten years ago I was in the middle of a transition. Today I am in the middle of a transition. I don't believe there is any necessary rhythm to decades, but this coincidence made me want to recall my personal antidote to fears no one was quite sure were unfounded about technological collapse as 1999 turned to 2000.

Traveling to someplace far away seemed like something I might not have much more time to do. So I decided New Year's Eve 1999 I would be at Angkor Wat. If the world's computer networks were going to stop working for a while, where better to be than someplace where reliable electricity was not a given?

Spending New Year in Southeast Asia was in some ways an odd choice. While every cyclical calendar has a new year's day, not all calendars begin on the same date. The Buddhist calendar used in Cambodia starts in April.

The reversal of the movement of the sun on the horizon that the winter solstice marks, and that the Gregorian New Year is tied to, is universal. So it might seem it would still be celebrated even by people who started their year after the spring equinox, when days start being longer than nights.

But Angkor Wat is tropical; close to the latitude of San Salvador, El Salvador. The closer you get to the equator, the less seasonal variation there is in the length of day and night. The drama that people living in northern latitudes experience when the unrelenting darkness finally is put to flight, and the promise of sunlight is renewed, is not inherent in life in the tropics. One of the things I lost every summer in Honduras was the long evenings I grew up with, as the sun continued to set before 7 PM even at the June solstice, and the sense of time passing that comes with visibly shortening days.

Yet there are scholars who argue that Angkor Wat was built to frame winter solstice sunset, so perhaps it was not so odd to spend the first days after solstice there. And it was beautiful: sprawling, almost every surface ornamented, buildings rising behind pools joined by bridges lined with sculptures of serpents and demons.

Even though 30,000 people reportedly were present at the midnight celebration, travel in Cambodia had only become possible in spring of that year. For most of our visit, we were not in crowds, certainly, not in crowds of Europeans or Americans.

The Buddhist religious stood out, in their orange and white robes. At some points in the site, Buddhist ceremonies were being held in buildings constructed by Hindu rulers who commemorated the mythic Churning of the Sea of Milk. Places like this never have simple stories to tell; their pasts reach like filaments to connect with the present.

For me, one of those filaments is the indelible image of sky lanterns, lit and released one at a time by Buddhist monks, 2000 of them to mark the 2000 years of the western millennium-- or 2000 prayers, or 2000 wishes carried away into the intense black sky over Siem Reap that night.