Commenting

It's come to our attention that some people aren't commenting because they don't have blogger accounts, or don't want to use their blogger accounts. We've opened the blog to anonymous commenting, so feel free.

Leaving Cambodia -- Now It Can Be Told

We're about a week behind on the blog, so I'm skipping ahead to today. I'm writing this on a plane from Phnom Penh to Ho Chi Minh City. We're flying straight to Danang from there and staying the next couple of days in Hoi An, which is on the coast a little south of Danang.

We're hoping it will be a little cooler. It was brutally hot in Phnom Penh this morning -- I think the high today was supposed to be 99.

Okay. So here's the funny story about our arrival in Cambodia. We didn't get visas in advance because you can get then on arrival at the airport. But you need a passport photo, which I had brought with me but foolishly put in my checked luggage. I was sort of hoping that there would be one of those instant photo booths (as there is in the Bangkok airport), but there wasn't.

Anticipating a huge hassle, I asked Corina if I could borrow one of her extras. (A little back story here: aside from being similar heights, and both having dark brown hair -- with gray streaks -- and fair skin, we don't look anything alike. For example, Corina has blue eyes, while mine are brown. I'm also 7 years older. Nevertheless, people keep thinking we're sisters.)

And it worked! I gave my passport, application, $20, and Corina's picture to the exact same guy Corina had just given hers to. It was then passed down a row of 5 or 6 people who processed it. And then the same guy handed our passports back to us. It made for a couple of tense moments, but I think the moral of the story is that we all look the same to them.

Safari - Day 2.2

Except for a couple of brief excursions to buy postcards and a Coke, we spent most of the afternoon reading at our campsite. This one was much more scenic than the one at Koh Ker. It was right at the entrance to the temple, next to a stone pool that was part of the temple grounds and was still being used for bathing. We could look over and see Thailand. (The temple itself is in Cambodia, but the rest of the highlands are Thai territory. There is a nice paved road on the Thai side that leads right to the base of the temple. Although, as we would learn the next day, this approach involves climbing a lot of stairs.)

Late in the afternoon, we walked up and explored the temple. At the very back of the temple, there is a rocky outcropping where you can look down and see Cambodia. The view was a bit hazy as a result of all of the fires. We sat there to watch the sunset.

Shortly before sunset, a woman came with her teenaged son. Although she looked like she could be Cambodian or Thai, she was speaking English to him, and we struck up a conversation. She was originally from Cambodia, but had left 30 years ago, eventually settling in the US. Her husband was working at the US embassy in Bangkok. She said that she had been to Preah Vihear many times, but couldn't bring herself to go any further.

I was pretty choked up. It was clear that she missed her country so much that she would come all that way just to see it and show it to her kids. But she couldn't actually go there. I think what was even more heartbreaking is that she was so matter of fact about it. We told her a little bit about our trip and she said how brave we were. But riding around on bad roads and sleeping in tents did not seem particularly brave at that moment. (Amusingly, she also told us that the locals had told her we were French.)

Back at camp, I was feeling a little sorry for the guides who had to provide for us in the absence of the truck with all the supplies. At one point, I asked about towels and the guide had this panic-stricken look on his face. About an hour later, two brand new towels appeared, apparently freshly purchased from the Thai market. Likewise, dinner was two takeout portions of noodles from the Thai market, which we shared with the white dog who had staked out our tent.

Safari - Day 2.1

[Google has decided that my password really isn't my password so I (Corina) am being forced to post as Lara. This preliminary note is necessary so you don't think Lara has let all the military juntas and other totalitarian regimes we've been exposed to lately go to her head and started talking about herself in the third person.]

One more word about our camp at Koh Ker:  in case you're imagining Lara and I in some verdant jungle idyll - put that right out of your head. I overheard our neighbors in the next tent name the site "Camp Scorched Earth" and it's a perfect description. Not only is Cambodia in the dry season really dry, broad swathes of it are also burnt to a crisp. I couldn't really get a straight answer from our guide on why this was, whether they were burning the jungle to make way for farmland or doing controlled burns of the undergrowth to prevent wildfires. When he boasted later in the trip that Cambodia never had forest fires, but he didn't know why, I just looked at the "view" of smoke filled air and our still smoldering campsite and held my tongue.

Anyway, the big group got up at 4:30 to climb the pyramid again for sunrise. Lara and I had decided to skip this particular treat, but when the support staff started striking camp around us at 4:45, we had to abandon our plans to sleep in.  Because the caravan of the big group was loaded down with all the camping equipment for both groups, we were able to get a head start after breakfast and toured a few more small temples in the Koh Ker complex before hitting the road for the far north of the country and a mountain top temple on the Thai border called Preah Vihear.   Our guide mysteriously insisted we stop for "lunch" at 11 am to wait for the other group to catch up with us. After waiting for an hour, and several calls on his mobile, he told us that the chief of police refused to let the truck with the camping equipment drive up the mountain and the other group had decided  to head back to Siem Reap. This seemed a little odd to us, but when we pressed him on why, he just said something about money, leaving us to believe that the police were looking for a bribe that the tour company was unwilling to pay.  We were told that we could still go to Preah Vihear, which our guidebook called stunning, but instead of camping in our luxury safari tent, we'd be staying at a local guesthouse. Since the area was without both electricity and running water, the guesthouse would be way more adventurous than camping.  Having sort of settled into our filth, we decided to push on.

It was right about here that the roads, which had been pretty smooth dirt, turned to hell and remained godawful for the next two days. Every once in a while we'd hit a pothole so deep that the jolt would turn on the windshield wipers and everyone in the car would giggle.  After a couple of hours of driving by dusty rural poverty we reached the base of the mountain, and Lara and I were finally made to understand that we'd have to go the rest of the way on motorbikes, and we should pack a small bag of essentials because our suitcases weren't coming with us. So with moto drivers peering over our shoulders, begging us to choose them we hastily sorted through our unmentionables trying to figure out what we'd need for a night in a Cambodian guesthouse. I want all of you to take a moment to picture Lara's reaction to this scene.

Moving on. We chose our drivers and started heading up the mountain. At first it wasn't that bad. Then it was frakking terrifying and I couldn't imagine how our little motos were going to make it to the top without toppling us backward. For days after my shoulders ached from gripping the handle behind the seat for dear dear life.  I still can't imagine a truck making that trip. We made it, obviously, and after we got off the bikes we started trudging up an ancient stone road after our guide in the full heat of the afternoon sun. It wasn't very far but it felt like a mile in the heat.  It turned out that there was a tent for us after all, left by some previous expedition.  Lara and I collapsed in the shade of a little pavillion begging for cold water and disappointing our guide terribly by refusing to budge from the cool cool shade to walk to the Thai market on the other side of the border. There was no way in hell we were walking 30 minutes in the frakking sun DOWNHILL (which meant we'd have to walk back uphill eventually) to look at souvenirs we could have purchased two days ago in Phuket.  Instead, we read, waited for the sun to go down a bit, and felt sorry for our poor friends who because of corruption had been left behind. We missed them, they were the first westerners we'd spoken with since Burma and Lara and I were running out of things to talk about.

Safari!

There is a really funny story about our arrival in Cambodia, but I think it would be wise to wait until we leave the country to blog about it. So stay tuned ....

The first leg of our stay in Cambodia was a 4 day/3 night temple safari -- a tour of various outlying temples -- that Corina had found on the internet. Other than our hotel room on our first night in Yangon, this was the only actual plan we had made before we left.

We were picked up at the airport by our guide and driver, whose names we promptly forgot. After a quick stop in Siem Reap, we hit the road to a temple called Beng Mealea. This temple has largely fallen down and been reclaimed by the jungle. So we sccrambled around on the rocks. Unlike those in Burma and Thailand, the old temples here are Hindu, not Buddhist.

After a lunch of noodles, we drove to Koh Ker (rhymes with "croquet"). This was briefly the capital of Cambodia back in the 10th century, and is now pretty much in the middle of nowhere. There are about 25 old temples here, the main one being Prasat Thom, a 50 meter high pyramid. We walked around the grounds for awhile and then headed to our camp, where we were soon joined by another group of 20 people, mostly Americans. I was a little wary at first, but they turned out to be really nice. I was never entirely clear on how they all knew each other, but the organizers seemed to be a woman who had been born in Cambodia and who had recently made a documentary about it and her boyfriend.  They were on a 2-week trip just in Cambodia.

Later that afternoon, we walked over to the pyramid and climbed up to the top to watch the sunset. This was a little dicey as the Khmer temple builders do not seem to have been big on uniform stair sizes. Or hand rails. We then had an excellent dinner back at the camp and decided to climb back up the temple to look at the stars, but the chief of police nixed that plan. Still, even just a few yards out of the camp, it was pitch black and we could see millions of stars.

Then we went to sleep in our tent. A word about the tent:  It was pretty nice, with beds and everything. And there was a separate bathroom tent with a toilet and camp shower. And there was a generator, so we had light on our front porch until 9:30 or so. But at this point we were not yet resigned to our fate of filth, so there was a fair amount of grumbling about heat, dirt, and bugs which I have omitted. Use your imaginations!

Bangkok

We arrived in Bangkok and settled into our hotel, which was awesome. It was called Reflections, and it's basically the hotel that a bunch of girls who grew up on Hello Kitty would design -- bright pink and each room was individually decorated. The entrance hall to my room was covered with sand and you had to walk across a dock to get to the bed. There was also a hammock. The hotel also had the best selection of cast-off books we have seen on our trip.

After lunch, we headed downtown to Wat Phra Krew, the temple of the emerald buddha. But we sort of fell for a con and ended up riding around in a tuk tuk going to different shops (and one temple). This wasn't too bad because it was a nice way to see downtown Bangkok, and our driver was honest and said he was taking us to certain shops because they give him gas coupons. It was quite a little racket. I had heard so much about how hot, dirty, and crowded Bangkok was supposed to be, and was pleasantly surprised. Yes, it was absurdly hot, but no more dirty and crowded than New York or London. (Of course, we studiously avoided the tourist area, Khao San Road.)

We finally ended up back at Wat Phra Krew, and at this point I should dazzle you with my description of its architecture, but pretty much all I remember is that it was just freaking hot. Actually, it was really beautiful, much more colorful and ornately decorated than the temples we saw in Burma, but also more sterile. Whereas the Shwedagon Pagoda seemed more a part of the city, with families eating lunch and locals bathing the buddha statues, this seemed more like a tourist attraction. Also the "emerald" buddha is actually made of jasper! 

We then stumbled to a restaurant and got ice cream, and once we had recovered, headed back to the hotel. We ended up eating dinner (sushi) at the hotel restaurant, which seemed to be quite the neighborhood hangout. It was Valentine's Day, and the restaurant was packed with people celebrating. We also got the answer to the question that had been plaguing us in Phuket -- do the Thais actually like duos singing cheesy American pop songs, or is it just what they think the tourists want to hear?  Apparently the former.

It was an early night because we had to leave at 5:30 the next morning for our flight to Siem Reap. I checked out the dvd of "Beyond Borders" from the hotel's dvd collection. It was truly bad, and did nothing to assuage my concerns about land mines.

The Cancun (or is it the Tijuana?) of SE Asia

Note:  This is actally posted by Corina.

We arrived at the wonderland of the Bangkok airport full of hope and promise and no real plans. For days, as much as we loved Burma, we'd been listing all the things we could have once we reached the airport - namely cadbury dairy milk bars and internet.  Burma's lovely and all, but 10 days without chocolate and email really wear on one.  We were hoping to get a flight to Ko Samui that day, but the internet let us down, with none of the big search engines listing any available flights.  We quickly abandoned our attempt at independent traveling and headed for the nearest travel agent. Somehow our visions of our own teak and thatch bungalows on a white sand beach on little Ko Samui got lost in translation and we ended up sharing a characterless room at a big hotel a few blocks from Patong beach on enormous Phuket island and were made to feel lucky to get it. Something about how the Chinese New Year, still a week away, meant all the hotels were booked. 

The taxi ride through town from the airport, while not leaving me fearing for my life like the dark drive to Mandalay that Lara described (and by the way, I think my position in that pickup was the more terrifying - from the back Lara couldn't appreciate our driver's strategy of using his headlights only to signal byciclists to get out of the way - half the time we were driving in the dark into oncoming traffic) did leave me a little depressed. Tshirt shops, sunglass huts, photomats in seeming endless profusion, pink skinned Russians and Brits in skimpy clothes.  It was about as far from our imaginings of a tropical paradise as it could be whithout being Siberian disneyland.  What was worse was that we'd paid in advance.so we were here for 4 nights whether we liked it or not.

There's not much to say about our time in package tour hell.  In retrospect, we probably could have arranged for a boat to take us to a slightly less crowded island for a day, but the surroundings, the internet on tap, and the stock of chocolate we'd acquired drugged us into complacency and we spent three days reading by the hotel pool. We tried going to the beach one morning, but it was hot and sort of smelly, and the pool was less crowded so we didn't go back.

On Feb 14 we finally left Sodom for Bangkok.

Burmese Days Continued

In light of our jarring arrival in Mandalay, we decided to cut our visit from two nights to one. That just left us time to eat dinner at a Thai restaurant that could have come straight out of an American strip mall and to stop by the Mahamuni Pagoda on the way to the airport. It is the home of a gold Buddha figure that is slowly assuming blob-like proportions because they add gold leaf to it every day.

From Mandalay, we flew to Heho, took a cab to Nyaungshwe, and took a boat to our hotel, which was literally on Inle Lake. (It was a bunch of cabins on stilts.). The next day, we took a boat ride around the lake, mostly stopping -- involuntarily -- at various markets and artisans shops where we were the worst tourists in the world and hardly bought anything. We also saw more blob-shaped buddhas at the Daw U Pagoda and -- best of all -- cats that have trained to jumps through hoops at the Nga Phe Kyaung monastery. Which was pretty much exactly as touristy as it sounds. But mostly we just gawked at the people who seem to lead a very traditional way of life, fishing, growing vegetables in floating gardens, and getting around by canoe.

We spent two more days at Inle:  one just sitting around our hotel reading (ask me about the North African campaign in World War II) and one in Nyaungshwe, where we ate a really excellent Shan meal -- a potato based curry, fried minced peanuts, and fresh tomatoes.

On Friday, we woke up early and flew back to Yangon. We tackled one of the mysterious sidewalk teashops where we were served noodles and about five different kinds of meat wrapped in dough. We were then utterly defeated in our attempt to walk around the gardens surrounding Shwedagon Pagoda by the ungodly heat. In retrospect, setting out to do this at 1 o'clock in the afternoon was not a good idea. In our defense, we did make it most of the way around and it was cold at Inle, so we weren't acclimated to the heat. Also, we are wimps.

We ate dinner at the 50th Street Bar & Grill, which Lonely Planet billed as an "expat hangout," where we were the only people there for about an hour and a half. We ate pizza and read old issues of the International Herald Tribune. Our first news since Bangkok eight days earlier. We flew to Bangkok the next morning.

Burmese Days

Corina's right. I really do think that everyone should go to Burma. It was so lovely and a nice change of pace from India, which had started to fray my nerves toward the end (more on that in another post). Case in point:  on the drive in from the airport, the driver told us that in Yangon, slow-moving vehicles like bikes, rickshaws, and cows are not allowed in the road. And no horns. So we drove in to the city on silent, empty roads.

We spent Friday in Yangon, visiting the Shwedagon Pagado and walking around the city streets. My impression was that Burmese people must eat out a lot because we passed a ton of sidewalk tea shops and street vendors selling fruit, roasted corn, fried snacks, kebabs, and mysterious bubble tea-looking concoctions. We ate an excellent lunch of noodles at a noodle shop. Also striking was the people with cages full of sparrows that you could buy to set free and earn good karma. (Leading me to wonder if the people who caught them in the first place got bad karma.) 

Later that day, we flew to Bagan. Bagan was the capital of Burma in the 10th to 12th centuries and is the home of something like 4000 temples and pagodas in 42 square kilometers. My friend Jim had warned us that we would want to spend a couple of days there, but we didn't listen. It's not so much that we needed more time to see the temples, because you could spend weeks there and not see them all. But more that it was really beautiful and a nice place to spend time. The highlight:  climbing up to the top of one of the temples to wait for the sunset and looking over the pictures in Corina's guide book with two local kids. The lowlight:  being strongarmed into buying souvenirs from two tiny women who had offered to watch our shoes at one temple.

The next day, we got up early for a 13 hour boat ride up the Irawaddy to Mandalay. This was incredibly peaceful. The Irawaddy is Burma's main river, but is crossed by only two bridges in its 1000 plus mile length. We passed mostly fishing and agricultural villages, and as we got closer to Mandalay, two ancient capitals Sagaing and Inwa, each with dozens of pagodas. The boat was pretty empty, only about 10 passengers, including a couple we had met the day before who told us that they were originally from Penzance -- leading Corina to look at each other and ask under our breath where Penzance was. (England, it turns out.)  We later learned that they were headed to a 10-day silent meditation retreat. The journey came to an abrupt end when we arrived in Mandalay, with a dozen kids invading the cabin asking to carry our bags, followed by a walk through a foul-smelling warehouse and a climb up the unlit riverbank. We got into a cab -- a little tiny pickup truck, with bench seats in the back. I rode in the back and Corina sat up front with the driver and it is debatable which perspective was more terrifying.

Everyone Should Go to Burma

At least twice during the past ten days Lara turned to me and asked, "Don't you think everyone should come to Burma?" and of course I said yes. Absolutely. Everyone should go to Burma. As I was getting ready to leave the states, I had a "what's the point" moment, wondering why the hell I was about to spend insane amounts of money considering I'm currently jobless to go half-way around the world when home is so comfortable. The second day in Myanmar I got my answer, as we were jostling in a horse-drawn carriage down a dirt road in Bagan, 12th century temples and pagodas to the horizon in every direction, brilliant pink acacia blooming at the side of the road and not another tourist in sight. Of course, now Lara and I are sitting at the computers in our hotel lobby in Phuket, with some bad karaoke act singing "Cocaine" in the background. The town we're in looks an awful lot like Cancun. It's depressing. Travel is all about the sublime and the ridiculous I guess.

Anyway, after Lara found me in the Bangkok airport we made our way to Yangon and after 32 straight hours of travel we checked into our hotel where there were blessed blessed beds. We spent most of the next day wandering Yangon, which is . . . fine. Thanks to the military junta, which has banned motorcycles and horn honking in Yangon (though not in the rest of the country, more on that later), Yangon is a surprisingly quiet city. We made our way to the main tourist destination, the Schwedagon pagoda which makes the country look really really rich. That's one hell of a lot of gold. A toothless man calculated our horoscopes. Strangely enough, we both happened to be wearing our lucky colors (mine is pink, Lara's is red for the record). In the afternoon we flew to Bagan, what has to be one of the wonders of the world, which Lara's friend Jim had warned us we'd need more than one day to appreciate. He was completely right, but we gave it only one day anyway. Stupid of us. More on Bagan later.

Radio Silence

Corina and I met up in the Bangkok airport and we're now sitting here -- partially comatose -- waiting for our flight to Yangon. (The Kit Kats were delivered, but no Twix.) We probably won't have much internet access in Myanmar. So, check back on the 10th.