Dark jungle sounds surround us. A cacophony of cicadas wails like sirens. Macaque monkeys that are aggressive in daylight howl even more aggressively. My headlamp beams through the pitch dark. Glints of iridescence, everywhere, flecks of glitter. Glitter? I pause briefly in my tracks, bending down to look. And then, I notice the glitter is moving…

 

* * *

 

I’ve been living in Cambodia for almost a year, and some friends from the states have finally come to visit. After a few days of sightseeing, it’s time to take them to the grand temple complex, Angkor Wat. At 35 square kilometers, the largest temple complex in the world is not a site anyone can digest in a short visit, let alone in a single evening. But as just a small taste, going for a sunset glimpse seems like a great idea. It is the most beautiful, least crowded time of day to glimpse the temples. Least crowded because the park is actually closed, and in order to get in, we’ll have to trespass.

 

As we leave the apartment, my neighbor, Chamreon, chides me in Khmer, as she always does, for going out so close to dark. She chides me for a lot of things. She warns me that my skin will become “black” when I wear short sleeves in the humid, tropical climate. She pinches my midriff and tells me I’m “fat” — in comparison to her petite, lean-eating family, I do happen to be the tallest and fattest. She points out my acne, tells me I need to water my jasmine plants more frequently. Her frankness is loving kindness, and very typical of the Cambodian culture I’ve had the privilege of getting to know.

 

As usual, I shrug her off and choose to go out close to dark, anyway—besides, it’s only women who are encouraged not to do so. With my American upbringing, I have respect for this cultural norm and its desire to protect women, but I have no desire to adhere to it myself. We file out onto the red dirt road: Brian, Kyle, Suja, me, and Lora. In typical Southeast Asian fashion, we squeeze the five of us onto only two small motorcycles.

 

This sunset trespassing venture is not uncommon for me; I run the well-worn trails of the Southernmost temple at sunset a few times a week with my friend Dana. I usually leave just as the sun’s scorching red light touches the water of the surrounding moat and the nighttime cicadas begin to call. I well know which entrance the fewest guards are expected to be patrolling, and which unpopular, worn-down temples invite no tourists. Getting in is easy, and we ride slickly and confidently across the moat bridge toward Angkor Thom, in one of Angkor Wat’s Westernmost areas. Along the bridge leading through the gateway arch, a long line of stone gods and demons sit with stone gazes. Each time I ride into the complex, I can barely believe that this is my life—that I live a 15-minute motorcycle ride away from the world’s biggest religious structure, a complex so epic that it was the filming location of Tomb Raider, and so grand that much of it hasn’t even been uncovered yet.

 

We park our vehicles, and with the sun dropping low and radiating a luminous melon sheen on the water of the vast moat, my friends and I traverse the trails I’m familiar with surrounding the deserted structure. Dusk creeps in, and then darkness. Group mentality and our collective laughter makes us feel safe. I have a headlamp in my backpack, and I’m not worried.

 

We want to keep walking, but mosquitoes start to make us itch and scratch. Dengue Fever is common in this part of the world, so we decide to skedaddle. By now, the path is barely visible. With the dense jungle overgrowth, no moonlight shines overhead. As we make the trek back to our two parked vehicles, I feel our pace subtly increase.

 

“OUCH!” I hear Lora shout from the back of the group. “Something…something stung me!” We all stop, looking back. “Keep walking!” Lora says, panicked. Brian stays put anyway, squinting in the dark. “That,” he says, “looks like a snake.” We peer back onto the path to see a dark, long shape stretched on the ground. I have no will to inspect it. I’m already walking forward, scrounging feverishly through my pack for my headlamp. I race to the lead, turning on the light switch and feeling a deep sense of relief as the path ahead is flooded with bright white.

 

And then I notice that moving glitter. It’s moving in pairs. No, double that—fours.

 

Eyes. I’m looking at eyes. The eyes of spiders. Spiders with glowing, iridescent eyes. In arachnids that hunt at night, four of the eyes contain an iridescent layer behind the retinas. This is what I’m looking at. All over the ground beneath me. All over the tree trunks surrounding me. In the branches and canopy above me. They. Are. Everywhere.

 

Google Cambodian spiders. You’ll mostly find photos of people selling them as food in marketplaces and on the street. They are stacked on plates in large piles, gristled and brown from being fried in oil. There are reasons people catch and eat spiders here: one, they’re large enough to be legitimately filling. If you’re a Pacific Northwesterner like I am, these aren’t the spiders you’re used to encountering in your yard at home. These are big. Thick-legged. Full-bodied. Monstrous. Two, it’s because spiders are…apparently…everywhere. Having never been in the jungle this late at night, I never realized the full scale of the Cambodian spider population. Instinctively, I somehow know that they’re all out to hunt. Perhaps it’s all the mosquitoes that are now clinging to my skin. I see their eyes, and they see mine, and I start to imagine that I’m the potential prey.

 

I’m standing here in the heavy, humid darkness, beaming my headlamp into hundreds of spider eyes, watching them crawl around, and I’m having flashbacks of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. “We have to keep walking,” is all I can hurriedly squeak out of my constricted voice box.

 

“Why?” one of the crew pipes up. As the only one of us with a headlamp, I make a split-second decision not to share the horrifying sight I’ve just seen. “We just have to!” I say, already far ahead of the group. Thoughts flood my brain. Am I crunching spiders underneath my flipflops? Will the spiders crawl over my toes if I don’t walk quickly enough? With all the spiders overhead, will one land on my head? I can barely handle the possibilities, and my pace is at a jog. I’m laughing incredulously at the preposterous nature of the situation, and my friends behind me are laughing too, amongst the various utterances of “holysh*ts” and “ohmygods.”

 

We finally emerge from the thicket of jungle to the clearing where the road is. Lora is still intact after being stung, I haven’t had my toes eaten off by spiders, and none of us have been strangled by the snake that may or may not have been spotted on the path. I’ve learned why my neighbor didn’t want me going out after dark and why Angkor Wat is closed to visitors at sundown. These are boundaries I’ll not trespass again.