PLEIN AIR GRAND MARAIS
Painting Competition Sept. 9 - 16 Opening Reception Sept. 16 | 5 - 7pm Johnson Heritage Post Exhibition Sept. 16 - Nov. 13 Johnson Heritage Post & Art Colony
TOUR D’ART Beach Houses
The Art Colony’s annual fundraiser and exculsive home tour. October 1 | Noon | $125
grandmaraisartcolony.org PO Box 626 120 W. 3rd Ave Grand Marais, MN 218.387.2737
Nature’s Beauty Built as a Hindu temple, Beng Mealea is largely unrestored, with many of its stones lying in heaps. | MICAELLA PENNING allow me to do this. I want to be a temple guide. They can make more money. But first you must pay a very big sum to be allowed to do this.” We continued walking down a dirt road. Ivy crawled up skinny tree trunks poking through lush stalks of rice, golden in the early morning light. We saw dozens of bird species that day, but the critically endangered vultures remained elusive. Vulture populations on the Indian sub-continent are plummeting due to the use of the anti-inflammatory drug diclofenac, which is administered to sick livestock but is poisonous to various vulture species. The Sam Veasna Center now leads tours to the Veal Krous Vulture Restaurant in the Preah Vihear Protected Forest, where visitors have the opportunity to witness a frenzied feeding, since Cambodia’s remaining vultures now rely on supplementary food. A dead cow is provided, and up to 80 vultures descend into the macabre, prandial turmoil. Passing fields of banana trees beneath a sky splotched with gray-bottomed cumulous clouds, we continued northeast to Koh Ker, a tenth-century city once serving as the capital of the Khmer Empire, moved by King Jayavarman IV from Angkor Wat in the year 921. One of the site’s temples is designed like a Mayan stepped pyramid,
standing over 100 feet tall, with long, thick grass growing on each terraced edge. To the north lay the lowlands and swamps of Kulen Prum Tep Wildlife Sanctuary, originally created to protect the kouprey, and the Thai border. It is unknown whether any kouprey remain in the world. The sun shone blindingly, the heat all-consuming. I sat on a wood log at the base of the pyramid while Diana climbed up. I was sick with something flu-like, and stayed stationary in the shade, beneath a tree canopy hopping with woodpeckers, nuthatches, and collared falconets. The site was still mostly empty of other people; demining occurred only recently. Cambodia continues to have one of the highest casualty rates due to land mines in the world, though the decades of civil war and genocide ended over 30 years ago. A few walls and columns of ancient temples remained vertical, amidst a jumble of angular pieces of stone, demolished by time. Trees sprouted up through the rubble, remaining branchless for dozens of meters, their bark smooth and white. Unlike Angkor Wat, scaffolding, metal braces and construction workers were absent. Shards of intricately carved, mossy stones lay strewn in the wreckage. Leaving Koh Ker, we pulled down a narrow, orange dirt road, stopping to watch
High-Quality Wild Bird Food
EZ Grab & Pour Bags 1st Ave W & Hwy 61 • Downtown Grand Marais Open 7 Days A Week @ 6 am 218-387-2280 • www.buckshardware.net NORTHERN WILDS
AUGUST 2016
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