Guidebooks are a lot like paper towels. You buy them, keep them until you need them, and get rid of them after they've been used. They're easily the most abused volumes on the planet. Pages are ripped from them for easy reference and they quickly become weatherbeaten. Even used bookstores shy away from guidebooks that linger on past their prime.

Back in the 20th Century, I bought a guidebook that I still treasure today. It breaks all the rules. It’s a size that isn’t irksome to carry (even though it has over 300 pages), it covers a subject that hadn't yet been given its own book, and it’s beautiful. I still have it in my bookcase, thirty years after it was published, and it still looks good. No yellowed paper or soggy binding has spoiled it, even though I carried it all over northeastern Thailand and have used it for reference--and for dreams--ever since.

Michael Freeman is arguably Southeast Asia's best-known photographer. His photographs have accompanied the work of other writers, including Jerry Hopkins' weird and wonderful Strange Foods (Asia by the Book, May 2024), have filled the pages of Smithsonian Magazine, and illustrate his own array of coffee table books. A Guide to Khmer Temples in Thailand and Laos was clearly a labor of love, both for Freeman and his publisher.

Although Freeman may never have met Christopher Pym, the two of them had an obsession in common, the road that extended across Southeast Asia in the days of the Khmer Empire. Pam did his best to trace this route from Vietnam into northern Cambodia and failed, as he described in The Road to Angkor (Asia by the Book, July 2024). Freeman is on the track of this road in the opposite direction, leading from Angkor, with greater success. As empire-builders. the kings of Angkor were hell-bent on extending their architectural marvels into their new territory and these structures still mark their road, even as all other traces of it have vanished.

Freeman visits them all, taking his camera and his photographic skill with him. But before he shows them in all their beauty to his readers, he gives brief and highly comprehensible crash courses in the history that preceded them, the religion that inspired them, and the architecture that makes them irresistible many centuries after their construction. Aware that travelers have limited time, he, no doubt reluctantly, ranks the temples in order of what may be deemed important, yet insists "all the sites are worth visiting...The delight of these monuments lies in discovery."

I know this is true. Over the years, Freeman has led me to thirteen out of the thirty-eight sites he has described and photographed. Discovery is what governs my choices of which I loved best.

Walking down a long dusty road in Surin, passing small households where everyone asked me where I was going, suddenly I was in a clearing surrounded by trees and silence. Before me was one of the smallest and most beautiful temples I've ever seen, Prasat Ban Phluang, chaste and simple, a single tower placed on a high platform, surrounded by a moat and ornamented with exquisite carvings on its pale sandstone. The other place that lives rent-free in my head is Preah Vihear, built on a "great overhanging cliff," reached by climbing a series of staircases that "rise about 125 meters." The divine insanity of this place, its wealth of carvings, the majesty of its long corridors, the sheer drop that lies outside of its doors with all of Cambodia spread before it in a carpet of unbroken green, made Preah Vihear eclipse any of the splendors of Angkor Wat or the Bayon for me. Thanks to Freeman, I now can better understand what made me stand in ignorant, transfixed awe.

Anybody who wants to go beyond the stereotypical Thai visit really needs to find this book. Unfortunately it's now out of print--but as Freeman says, "Delight lies in discovery." Search and be delighted.

(The only complaint I have is the size of the photographs. They are numerous and they are tiny, (keeping the book portable and affordable) but because of Freeman’s expertise all of them are detailed and enticing. The other caveat has to do with the age of this book, which was never updated. Although I found its directions and maps were wonderfully clear, that was a long time ago in a whole other universe so due diligence is essential.)