Wondering I: June 2011

Angkor Thom

Back in Bangkok, it’s 96 degrees Fahrenheit and its like swimming threw the air because it’s so humid. Where do I even begin with Cambodia? Lets start with how they use American money. I got American bills out of an ATM. 5000 Real (Cambodian $) is only $1.25 American and they don’t use coins so when you get 100 real it’s like having a bill worth a penny. But the whole time it’s very confusing when you get change back because it’s in American and in Real so you have to be really carful you aren’t being ripped off. Which is very common with tourists there because they know it is confusing for us. Secondly if I never saw anything on the menu for over $5. It’s like I died and went food heaven.

So I started my trip to Cambodia flying there. The flight is only an hour so I was surprised when I had only gone threw 5 songs on my iPod and the announcement came on to turn electronics off I was used to the long flights to get into Asia. Fritz’s friend Pheakday came to pick me up and drop me off at my guest house. There were a ton more motor bikes then in Bangkok but they also drove on the same sides of the road as in the US which was an easy adjustment for me. But the traffic, oh my god. Most of the intersections don’t have stop lights so everyone is just getting threw weather someone is about to run them over or not. And you have to do the same thing to cross the street if you’re walking, wait for a big enough gap to not get hit right away and just go until you get to the other side and pray everyone is watching where they are going as motorbikes swerve around you. Top Banana guest house is where I stayed. Got a room with a shared bathroom for $6 a night...(wont stay there again) Run by a Cambodian couple but it turned out to be quite the local foreigner hang out spot. Met up with a high school friend Sarah Greenwood (now goes as Faine) who is working as a reporter for the Phnom Penh Daily. We had some Cambodian food and tried stir fried frog legs. So GOOD! Literally taste like chicken. No joke.

Woke up the next day around 7am to catch my bus to Siem Reap to visit the ancient Temples of Angkor. The bus ride there is a good adventure in itself. There are still parts of the road that are unpaved and even in the paved parts there were a good amount of pot holes to be avoided. It felt like the bus was going somewhere between 55-70 mph, swerving to avoid potholes or motor bikes or other slower trucks and such and honking each time it was about to pass someone. I got assigned a seat in the very front on the isle and the speakers for the TV were right over my head blasting Cambodian pop music videos playing karaoke style on the TV. The guy next to me had a whole bunch of brief cases with him taking up his leg room so he took up half of mine. All the music videos were either a girl or a guy fighting over a girl or a guy and that girl or guy dying tragically (such as being hit by a car or stabbed accidently trying to break up a fight) or that girl or guy breaking there heart for someone else. So nothing new but it was crazy to not have any idea what they were singing about but gathering all I needed to know from the videos. I managed to keep myself amused in a sarcastic way. Something else I’ve noticed around Thailand and Cambodia is that having porcelain white skin is desired more then the natural tan most of them have, which is a strange comparison to the ever so popular California tan. But I digress. The bus ride was about 6 hours from Phnom Penh to Siem Reap. Besides the uncomfortable bus the country in Cambodia is beautiful. Mostly rice fields and houses along the road, water buffalo, cows and chickens everywhere. We past threw an area with the most adorable bay ponies that were pulling wooden carts. I can’t say if the ponies were happy about it but as you can imagine I was stoked to see little horses.

When I arrived in Siem Reap the tuk tuk drivers descended upon me like the plague. “tuk tuk Lady?” “hey lady tuk tuk!” “Lady motor bike lady!” Oh yeah everyone calls you lady. So I gave into one of them and got tuk tuked into town and I think I might have chosen the slowest tuk tuk driver of the bunch because everyone else was passing us. Haha but it was nice to be going slow enough to take in the surroundings. Lots of hotels and guest houses everywhere. I was there in the off season so the town wasn’t nearly as crowded as I guess it gets but it was still pretty busy at night to me. I went to a few guest houses before deciding and got one next to the bridge over to the Old Market part of town where all the commerce was. It was kind of exhausting to walk around the market because every tuk tuk driver hounds you and every stall in the market (80% of them all sell the same things) was a challenge to walk past because the women running them are constantly “have a look lady” “you want scarf lady” “come buy something lady” (90% of the shops sold scarves they are now the bane of my existence). I just don’t understand how any of them made money when they all sold the same junk its ridiculous. But of course I bought my fare share of everything except scarves. Someone threw one into my bag with the other stuff I bought for free though so they must be sick of scarves also. The next day I woke up at 4:30 to go see the sunrise at Angkor Wat, the most famous of the ancient temples. At every temple there are a group of kid and people all trying to sell you scarves and pictures and magnets. The kids will follow you around for blocks with the most sad puppy dog looks saying “please buy my postcards, just $1, just $1 for some rice” or “ I need money for school just $1 please lady”. There are also women who dress poorly and rent babies to sit on the street to beg for money with. It’s really crazy. I’ll let the pictures do the rest of the explaining here.

at a bus stop on the way to Siem Reap

From my seat in the bus. Race car screen saver. Very cute curtains

sunrise at Angkor Wat

All the other tourist

Pony stallion in front of a road they used back in the day when the temple was built

Angkor Wat form the back

Some cows outside the temple wall

Ahhhhhhh want!

So im walking back to the Wat and am thinking "I wonder if there are monkeys here" then I hear a crash in the tree next to me and look over and this is crawling down.

Could have got a ride for $15 but was happy enough to feed her a bananna

South gate of Angkor Thom

Carving at Angkor Thom

The second night in Siem Reap I found a bar that was completely empty with a pool table thought I’d practice my skills (which I have little of when is comes to pool its mostly luck) and ended up meeting two Australians Joel who owned the bar and Daniel who owned a different bar. Played pool with them and I failed miserably but won a couple times by chance. But then I thought them how to play checkers and took'em to the cleaners. Well I would have if we had bet money but anyway. Daniel as it turns out was a metal worker before he decided to move to Siem Reap and built a steel half pipe on the roof of his bar. Im no pro skater but I was excited and he invited me to skate it. Which I did the next day after a trip out to Banteay Srey (late 10^th century temple) which was beautiful. Much smaller then the other temples I visited but the detail of the carvings were unmatched. After that I went to a waterfall I had to hike to with carvings in the river and butterflies everywhere. AWESOME!

The spider i will have nightmares about. larger then my hand with its legs out

Spider was crawling towards this

Some other tourist getting mobbed by kids

Most awesome tree. Kid who thinks hes awesome for ruining my picture.

My villa. The pool was very much needed.

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Girly bar.

Dr. Fish foot massage! You put your feet in and the fish swarm to you and eat all the dead skin off your feet. It tickles beyond belief at first but after a minute it feels really good. And your feet look beautiful afterwards.

Banteay Srey. Amazing detail work.

A Tuk tuk with more then one person passing mine.

A Cambodian mountain

hike to the waterfall

this is before I took a shower

Cool lizard jumped in fornt of me trying to catch the butterfly below

A motor bike can pull anything. (sacks of charcoal wood)

Water buffalo

Sowan :The slowest tuk tuk driver ever. But a good guy.

Roof top half pipe

The bus ride back to Phnom Penh was a long but not quite as painful as the trip before because even though I was right under the speaker again I at least on a window seat with more leg room so I was able to sleep somehow threw the karaoke. It took 8 hours to get back. They did mix it up a little bit though and played some movies and some water buffalo fights. They put to pissed off water buffalo bulls in a arena together and let them charge at each other and they head butt and flip each other over and finally which ever buffalo gets the other buffalo to run away first wins! But trying to stop the winning buffalo after is hauling ass after the other buffalo is another challenge and people are getting dragged and nearly bulldozed. I was guilty entertained. I also wish I smoked cigarettes because there only around $1.25 a pack. Which is ridiculously cheep isn’t it? But I never buy cigarettes so I really wouldn’t know for sure. But my stomach from the shrimp the night before wouldn’t let me eat anything for a couple days that wasn’t cup noodle. When I got to the Phnom Penh bus station the sim card Pheakdey had lent me expired so I could only take incoming calls so I had to find a phone. But his number didn’t work so I called Sarah and she was at work so I said well I guess I gotta get to the guest house on my own. Took a motorbike taxi to Top Banana and the bar was having a party so I decided to go else where. Found a place around the corner called The Blue Dog for $8 a night. Not as luxurious as the room I had in Siem Reap but I was tired, queasy and didn’t care at that point and the bed was soft. It turned out to be a really cool place though.
Saturday Faine took me to the market where there were many more scarves and interesting smells, we went to get lunch and I got a delicious tasting sandwich but couldn’t eat more then a bite because my stomach still refused to like anything accept noodle in a cup and liquids. Went to Faine’s friend’s party that night and met a lot of interesting journalists. When I got back to the Blue Dog I thought I had been locked out so I went around the corner to Top Banana and they said “well don’t you have two keys? One of them is for the gate” …Duh. So I just decided to say and have a drink there because the vibe was mellow and ended up on a tuk tuk with 8 people to another bar after Top Banana closed. We went to the Candy Bar…and it turned out to be a girly bar…which is a bar where sleazy old foreigner guys go to hook up with the prostitute waitresses more of less. But we were there because it was the only place open late. They knew we weren’t there for their..Um goods and most of the x-pads (foreigners that lived there) were all relaxed about it. But me and an Aussie dude Justin who was also staying at Blue Dog decided we had had enough of the shady atmosphere and high tailed it home. On Sunday one of the local guys, Kok who works at the Blue Dog took me to see the killing fields. Which was depressing and surreal but I will admit they need to update the documentary they play in the museum because the horror flick sound effects made the whole thing seem a little too…not serious. If you aren’t quite up to date with world history (I wasn’t either) the Khmer Rouge were an army of Cambodians who took over the Cambodian government and basically enslaved there own people and killed off everyone who was educated and many many more. The killing fields are mass graves. The one I visited they built a monument full of the bones of the people executed pulled out from the graves. Basically it was the Cambodian version of the holocaust. I felt slightly guilty for taking pictures…but its not often you see a tower of bones. But after Kok took me out on his motor bike to some delicious spicy sour noodle soup and sugar cane juice and then we headed to a boat party that takes a cruse up and down the river. Oh man. It was cool seeing the river but being on a boat with techno music and there were probably 7 guys to every girl. The boat trip lasted for about 4 hours and I was ready to dive off after 2. But the weather out on the river was lovely and I liked the views.

Monday I had lunch with Faine to say goodbye. She and everyone else I met told me that I should just move to Phanom Penh and get a job teaching English and doing murals. Tempting…very tempting. I have to admit I was sad to be leaving so soon. I’ll be on a train up to Chang Mai tonight for my last leg of the trip.