19th
Angkor…What’s Wrong With Your Hands?!!!
OK. So we jumped on a cargo boat from the island to mainland Vietnam, with the interest of crossing the Cambocian border at a recently-opened crossing that is not as busy - not the best idea. 2 Americans crossing the Cambodian border + no other tourists crossing + small-town border police = having to bribe your way into the country. They knew we couldn’t get back into Vietnam, they made up a bogus reason for having to pay $10 extra, they held us for an hour, they won. Could have gone much worst than it did, I guess. We then rode on the back of scooters for an hour and a half through prisitne countryside with waterbuffalo and monkeys to Kampot for the night.
We got on an early bus to Phohn Pehn and another to Siem Reap - 11 hours in total and, as you can imagine, shenanigans - Cambodian public transportation has it’s issues - perpetually late, continously skipping kareoke tracks, etc.
We had arranged for a guide that we had been recommended to by some other travellers who arranged for a guide and tuktuk for a 3-day tour of the Angkor area. 8am departure - sooo excited! Nice and cool in the morning. Angkor Thom is incredible with 54 buddha faces, then an overpriced lunch, then Angkor Wat in the afternoon - HUGE, perfect symmetry, crowded with old white-glove-wearing Koreans. Then back to town to visit a school that teaches the impaired to create wood and stone carvings and silk fabrics.
The second day we had a different guide, who sucked. But we got the 2 best things done - a ride on an elephant and visiting the most impressive temple inside the Angkor complex - Ta Prohm, the jungle temple. Christie had really been looking foward to getting on the back of an elephant and Angkor was a great place to do it. 15 minutes around one of the temples and feeding it a bunch of bananas made one very happy girl. Ta Prohm is the temple where there are huge banyan trees growing in to, out of, and through the temple. A lot of people, but still an incredible experience. The temple as an attraction is a fine balance between the history of the building and its slow destruction by the jungle. Containing the trees’ force while also preservng their effect must be a moral dilemma for all involved.
We also stopped at the Cambodian landmine museum that day - very disturbing. One guy started the whole effort about 20 years ago and built the museum recently. Funny enough, I recognized him in the Siem Reap airport days later and shook his hand and thanked him for all he has done. There are limbless victims begging in the streets all over Siem Reap - you simply can’t say no.
While we were in Siem Reap on of the largest yearly religious festivals was also happening and had an opportunity to partake. Thousands of people make their way to Siem Reap to place small decorated floats in to the river at night - an offering to the river, in return of which they are granted a wish. We made our wish and set a little boat adrift. Then ate ice cream from (all San Franciscan readers will ike this one) Swensens! Yeah - they have stores in Asia that look like McDonalds. A far cry from their one small, dingy, but very well known location in SF.
The 3rd day of our 3-day pass was spent riding around on bikes to the temples we liked the most. Great day. Even got to feed monkeys - there are a bunch of - literally - fat, lazy monkeys that sit by the side of the road and wait for tourists to give them food. Kind of sad, but hilarious. I also took a spill off a 4 foot wall that day while paying adventure photographer - almost destroyed my camera, scrapes and bruises. Note to self - you’re not 23 anymore.
Another to-do checked off: Eating what Filipinos call balut and Cambodians call bong tien con - fertilized duck eggs. Basically, the eggs are left to develop for up to 13 days (these were 5 days old and were sold on the street for $.30). Little feathers, little bones, discernable head and face - all goes down the hatch with a little salt and pepper and, hopefully, doesn’t come back up. Like an egg crossed with a sardine - iiinteresting!
We took a tuktuk ride 2 hrs out of Siem Reap to the final temple of interest - Beng Melea - holy crap! Far enough away that the package tourists don’t go and the jungle has not been tamed nearly as much. Totally Tomb Raider! We spent 2 hrs exploring the place - climbing over boulders, walking through dark passageways with a headlamp on, ya know, your typical badass explorer stuff. We ate some suspicious street food for lunch before heading back to the city…
Golden rule of street food - if it hasn’t been cooked right in front of you - DON’T EAT IT. Flash forward 12 hours and Wang was running a 102 temperature and feeling really ill. By 8am (the day we were to leave with bus tickets already bought and a need to get to the US embassy in Phon Penh so Christie could get more passport pages before flying to Bangkok) she was in bad shape. I knew it was time to the hospital when her hands started cramping into totally creepy claws - CRAB HANDS! 6 hrs later, she was fine - temperature down, crab claws gone, antibiotics coursing into her veins through a clumsily installed IV. The hospital was brand new, gorgeous, staffed with Thai and Hong Kong physicians, and totally empty - I guess that $40/month job most Siem Reap residents have ain’t paying for $1000 hospital visits.
We ened up flying to P. Pehn the following morning (narrowly escaping the confiscation of one of our most prized toys - the electronic mosquito bat), got the embassy thing squared away, flew to Bagkok and on to Phuket, and am now sitting in Khoa Lak where we dove a wreck today, are diving one of the top 10 dive spots in the world tomorrow - Richelieu Rock, and are hearing first-hand Tsunami stories in the 2nd hardest hit town on the Andaman Coast behind Ko Phi Phi - crazy! But that’s all for the next blog entry…
