Cambodia

What to do with 2,349,000 Riel?

The official currency of Cambodia is the Riel.  But a majority of the country switched to a more stable currency, the US Dollar, during their cultural revolutions because of skyrocketing inflation.  Nowadays the US currency (at least in main tourist destinations) is still the choice currency.  Unbeknownst to us, Riels are primarily used as change.  This was a problem since we each changed 100 Euros worth of Riel at the airport as we got off the plane.  It’s like we just changed $135 into coins.  We realized our mistake the minute we stepped off the plane and every price was confusingly listed in USD.  The goal for the next 3 days was to use up our useless and annoying Riels as quickly as possible.

The Dangers and Rewards of Going Out to Dinner

After finding a hostel, our very enthusiastic and pushy taxi driver found us a place in the middle of the city near the night markets.  He recommended us the hostel because he assured us that’s where we would want to be, near many restaurants and shopping.  He also gave us a long speech about how he would be our private tuk-tuk driver and guide for our tour of Siem Reap and Angkor Wats.  We stepped out of our hostel and ventured towards the street market district to try to find some dinner.  But the minute we turned the corner we noticed a very big difference between Cambodia and every country we’ve been in so far.  The solicitors here were feverish and unyielding.  We thought we’d seen the worse in Bangkok, but the people with flyers, the tuk-tuk drivers and the motorcycle riders here were on another level.  As we walked by a row of restaurants, 3 consecutive people literally jumped out at us on the sidewalk to shove flyers in our faces and ask us to eat in their establishment.   This caught Baptiste off guard and he actually freaked out a little and broke into a run.  I followed him laughing a bit.  After we escaped from the barrage of soliciting, we happened upon a quiet restaurant with a discrete exterior but with what seemed to be a performance happening inside the center of the restaurant.   We decided to give it a try and it turned out to be one of the most interesting restaurants I’ve ever eaten at.  We also decided that we hated the district that we were living in so much we found a nice and “expensive” hostel/hotel in a quieter district that same night and moved out the next morning. 

Dead Fish

The strangely named Dead Fish restaurant that we stumbled into is a very uniquely designed restaurant.  Pictures really don’t do this justice and I’m sure my description won’t either, but I at least want to describe it a little so I can begin to give you an idea of why it was so awesome.  //Warning: here comes boring architecture rambling.//  The restaurant is a giant warehouse-like building but inside is divided by dozens of multi-leveled platforms that are connected by zigzagging staircases and even conveyor belts to move food.   The ingenious part of this building strategy is that it multiplies the square footage of a place and uses the vertical space while keeping everything open and feeling as large as possible.  The best thing about this place was how dynamic the restaurant was.  Every platform had its own space but was also part of the larger all encompassing space.  You could see everywhere but reaching it was an obstacle course climbing up to go down and constantly changing levels to move sideways.  Okay maybe I had more fun with this than the average arthritic, elderly or not yet fully grown child would, but I still think it makes for a very cool place to eat a meal or maybe have a nightclub.  And in the center of the restaurant was a platform where there were performers doing traditional style Cambodian dance.  However this place was empty and even all this awesomeness was not enough to overcome the dry, tough meat and slightly expensive prices to earn this place a steady flow of customers.  And even though it had been open many years, it was obvious (from the inches of dust on some of the platforms that) only a very small portion of this huge restaurant is actually ever used.  But after thorough deliberation, Baptiste and I decided it would be too difficult to bring this nearly flawless design to our own countries because the liability of people getting drunk or just clumsily falling off would probably cost more than any restaurant could afford to pay.  So you’ll just have to go to Siem Reap to experience this place for yourself, sorry.  //Architecture rant over.//

Personally, I felt that the streets of Cambodia are some of the most dangerous streets in all of the places we’d travelled in.  It’s not really all that bad but in our short one week or so stay in Cambodia I saw with my own eyes a car hit a dog (it lived and ran away whimpering), two scooters collide and one woman seemed to be pretty seriously hurt and a tuk-tuk skimmed my arm.  There seems to be very few rules and people often take shortcuts for just a small personal gain.  Not to say people shouldn’t visit, these are risks you take everywhere.  

Spoke Too Soon

We decided to stay at another fancier hostel/hotel in a quiet district that was the most expensive room we stayed in throughout our whole trip.  The price was $30 a night for two people with two beds, which is still cheap by 1^st world country standards (but we were paying less than half at our other hostel).  The room was very well decorated, the service and staff were friendly, helpful and smiled every time they saw us.   

Nice looking room right?
 

 We were happy to pay them a little more upfront so that they wouldn’t bother us with other solicitation like that of cheaper hostels.  As we lay in our beds enjoying our awesome new room, I exclaimed to Baptiste, “This room is great!  I love it.”  Exactly 1 second later (really 1 second), I feel a drop of water on my forehead.  I sit up thinking that Baptiste had thrown water in my face, but he was just laying there.  Then another drop fell on my pillow and I look up to see the air conditioner leaking an increasingly rapid stream of water onto my pillow where my head was laying a second before.  We had to laugh at the irony of the situation.  They gave us a new room for the night and I got a bigger bed away from the air conditioner.  

The Good and The Bad of Angkor

Angkor Wat is one of the man-made wonders of the world and the national symbol of Cambodia.  The temples are said to amount to over one thousand (though some are just random piles of rubble) and is supposedly the world’s single largest religious site.  Angkor Wat is undeniably one of the most impressive sites in the world, at least for me.  As an architectural site, the detail, monolithic scale and unique Khmer design is one of the most awe-inspiring sights I have ever seen.   It is a civil engineering and architectural marvel pretty much unsurpassed in sheer size and square footage.  Every temple had a unique and different organization, construction and design.  

Partial Water/Land Temple

Reclining Buddha Which Doubles as a Temple

  

My Favorite Temple EVER, Prasat Preah Khan 

Water Temple

Living the Dream

I experienced many moments wandering through the temples that felt like I had been transported back to my favorite childhood fantasies.  Imaginary places that only existed in movies like Laputa: Castle in the Sky by Hayao Miyazaki and crazy temple ruins in the Indiana Jones series suddenly were right in front of me.  Trees sprouted out, around and through buildings.  Vines sprawl across temples like spider webs reaching with its own direction and will.  Roots wrap like tentacles around intricately carved pure stone blocks.  Secret passages, endless hallways, a twisty turning labyrinth of ancient stonework, climbing down under doorways and up over collapsed ceilings, I venture ever further.  Fearlessly traversing rooftops of huge temple halls, I went higher and farther into temples to try to get a glimpse of what typical tourists don’t get a chance to see.  The smell and sound of the surrounding jungle completes the atmosphere making it everything my boyish adventurous spirit has always wanted to experience.  I fell in love with Angkor.

The Face of Angkor

The Kids of Angkor

The Monk of Angkor

I had too many favorite pictures, sorry I know this is starting to drag on.

Some scenes straight out of my childhood fantasies

This is the last collage of Angkor, I promise.

Choice Shot: Into the Light 

The Sound of Nature's Voice

 

The Most Embarrassing Video I've Ever Filmed

Why does Baptiste have such a funny accent when he says Beng Melea?

 

At the same time, the experience of the people of Siem Reap definitely brings you right back to reality fast.  Solicitors wait at every entrance, every exit and are on every route to almost every temple.  It’s as if every Cambodian in Siem Reap have been specifically trained and all work together to get every penny out of every foreigner who steps foot in their country.  Every five steps you take, someone will ask you if you want a motorcycle or a tuk-tuk ride.  You think I’m exaggerating, but I’m not.  The motorcycle riders will literally cut you off and jump the curb to get in your way to ask if you want a ride somewhere.  They relentlessly try to sell you something, anything.  Women and small children come running the minute you step out of your tuk-tuk or taxi and shove souvenir t shirts, useless key chains, bottles of water, straw hats and cheap reprinted books on Angkor Wats at you.  It makes enjoying the magical moments in temples or even just getting from your tuk-tuk to the temple very difficult when a 7 year old Cambodian girl is asking you to buy something so that she can go to school.  But as Baptiste reminded me, the more you give in and buy something, the more likely they won’t go to school and will proabably continue to sell things because it works.  In either case, it really does ruin the atmosphere when the people so shamelessly extort its own national treasure for money.  

This is what happens when you show any sign of weakness, they attack in unison.  

*Baptiste’s encounters with a lady solicitor* 

Quote of the day: 

Solicitor: “Want to buy something?  What do you want?

Baptiste: “Nothing, I don’t want anything.”

Solicitor: “Okay, $10.”

Baptiste: “$10 for… NOTHING?!”

Solicitor: “Yes.”

The Amazing Floating Village and The Worst Scam

We went to take a tour of a place they call the floating villages.  Located on Tonle Sap Lake, hundreds, maybe thousands of people live on a literal water world because it is cheaper to buy a floating houseboat than it is to buy a piece of land and build a home on it.  The village consists of about 200-300 floating barges and boats either tied to each other or anchored to the bottom of the lake and has nearly every amenity you can find on land including a floating school, pool hall (not sure how they account for waves), restaurant, visiting clinic, bar/club, basketball court, water treatment plant and store.  Everybody travels everywhere by motor or hand powered boats.  And depending on if the tide, the whole village can pick up their anchors and simply float to a deeper or shallower part of the lake.  Our tour stopped at a general store and restaurant where our boat driver showed us around to see the crocodile farm, fish farm and other strange and crazy sights.  He asked us whether or not we wanted to visit the floating school and we said, “Sure why not”?  He then asked if we wanted to bring them some pencils and paper and we said, “Yeah!  That’s a great idea, but where can we buy it?”  Coincidentally, the floating store we were standing in had just that, pencils and paper workbooks.  When we excitedly picked up a pack of 10 pencils and asked how much, we were shocked at the $5 price tag.  Now that’s not a particularly unaffordable purchase, but in Cambodia, $5 goes a long way and we were certain it didn’t cost anything close to $5 to stock.  When we asked about the notebooks, they told us they only sold them in packs of 20.  Some scams are kind of hard to spot, but luckily for us they gave us such ridiculously inflated prices that gave themselves away, we were almost certain that the boat driver, the store and the school simply kept a steady rotation of pencils and paper around and split the profits.  The worst part is that we were highly skeptical that any of it ever went back to the kids.  So we opted out of buying it and our boat driver looked so disappointed when we told him we didn’t buy anything for the kids, he skipped the school tour without telling us.  

If you think the little girl looks mad now, you should have seen her when the first sentence out of her mouth was "1 DOLLAR!"  after she posed and I refused. 

The Overnight Bus Ride from Hell

After 3 days in Siem Reap, we were pretty satisfied and were honestly in a state of temple overload.  We had predicted that 3 days of the hottest, sweatiest longest days of nonstop temple sightseeing would be enough for us and we booked a night bus to Sihanoukville, a seaside city and resort town recommended both by foreigners and by native Cambodians alike as a great relaxing destination.  Nearing the end of our one month journey, we had been in jungles, mountains, rivers and lakes and now we were definitely ready to hit the beach and decided to sacrifice a few days in the capitol of Cambodia, Phnom Phen to spend a few more days lounging on the beach.  The bus we boarded had the worst designed seats and space of any bus I’d ever seen.  I can admit that I’m not a particularly tall guy, and even I was feeling claustrophobic and cramped by the seats.  There were much larger much taller foreigners who were also on the bus who soon found the situation unbearable.  An argument broke out near the back of the bus where one guy reclined his seat into the legs of the guy behind him without any regard of the other guy’s legs.  At one point, both were yelling at each other on the moving bus and the whole bus was staring and expecting an impending mutiny.  Things later settled down but I found myself without a blanket in the blaring AC.  I stuck my arms inside my t shirt and relied on my natural body heat to keep me warm until we arrived about 10 hours later.  Oh, and the “movie on board” which was written on the flier as onboard entertainment was played off an 8” monitor at the front of the 40 ft. long bus.  It took us about 15 minutes to realize they were playing “2012”.

Scuba

After we found the cheapest hostel we’ve ever stayed in ($3 a person), we hit the town to find lunch and see what the town had to offer.  We took a look at two Scuba Diving Lesson shops and debated whether or not we wanted to invest $300 and the next 3 days taking official lessons and getting professionally licensed to scuba dive.  We decided to do it in spite of the fact that we had to spend the next 5 hours immediately after watching a really boring, cheesy and stereotypically early 90’s instructional video on scuba diving.  It just so turned out that a Japanese lady who was on the exact same overnight bus that we were on was also taking the same lesson.  Reiko is from Nagoya, but is living in Siem Reap for a couple months and travelling alone in Sihanoukville.  What amazes me about Reiko is that she’s doing all of this without really knowing how to speak very much English and still lives and travels alone in Cambodia.  We would get to know each other well and become very good friends by the end of our stay in Sihanoukville.  This was good for both of us though because Baptiste and I got to practice our Japanese a little and Reiko had someone to talk to.  The pricy scuba lesson would include a boat ride to a remote island, an overnight stay at a bungalow, meals included and two days of professionally guided lessons.  The island we went to was truly secluded, a 2 hour boat ride away, the only thing on the whole island was 6 small cottages, a shack for cooking and a legit Cambodian fishing village.   There was barely anybody but a few of us foreigners on the island and it made for some absolutely spectacular picture taking.

 

We spent the next two days practicing breathing and emergency exercises and enjoyed two self determined dives at the end of each day.  Reiko had a little bit of a hard time with descending at times and the real trick is reaching a perfectly balanced buoyancy so that you can float without swimming or kicking so that you can float over and above coral and other underwater life forms.  Reiko had a little problem with this and would fall to the bottom of the sea floor from time to time.  This was not good for two reasons, touching coral can damage the delicate reef and often they were lined with sea urchin which are basically giant spiky booby-trap like sea creatures.  On multiple occasions I saw her put her hands down onto sea urchins and I tried my best to keep an eye on her to make sure she didn’t go around impaling herself.  We made some good friends on the island as well with other scuba divers and snorkelers and enjoyed a very nice dinner on the island.  The escape to Sihanoukville and the island was exactly the thing we needed to relax and recharge from Siem Reap.  Oh yeah, and we both passed our official PADI scuba tests and are now both licensed and certified to scuba dive anywhere in the world!

Nothing Particularly Exciting Happens, Just Scuba-ing

The Bat

We spent one night in a bungalow on the secluded island.  We were happy with our room in spite of the giant gaping holes, uneven planks of wood and didn’t think we’d have any problems since we were just staying one night.  But when Baptiste and I were showered (and by showered, I mean rinsed because this island barely had electricity let alone running water) and ready for bed we entered our room and were horrified to find a huge swooshing bat (the size of a small cat, okay… a very small cat) fly over our heads and under our roof.  We both looked at each other, and immediately bolted into our respective beds.  We both quickly ripped down our mosquito nets as if our life depended on it (which it actually kind of did) and stuffed the edges under every inch of our mattress.  After we’d both finished securing our nets we realized, somebody had to turn out the lights.  After debating each other for about 10 minutes, I eventually went out to turn out the lights (cause I’m the braver one ^_<).  But immediately after turning off the lights, we both wished I hadn’t because now we couldn’t see it coming, whatever it was.  Then Baptiste realized he needed his cell phone so that he could set the alarm for the next morning.  This time he had to go out into the dark and get his phone.  After about 10 more minutes of mustering up his biggest ball of courage, he scrambled out and got his cell phone.  We somehow later fell asleep.

 

Bat not included in this collage.

Clubbing with Quail-man

The night after we got back on the mainland, all the new friends we’d made on the island all had dinner as a group again.  Afterwards, Baptiste, Reiko and I decided to try going to a happening bar coincidentally named Utopia.  That night Baptiste was wearing his fisherman’s pants which we’ve deemed as silly pants because they honestly look a little silly.  They are big, baggy, and there’s a string attached to the back of the paints that wrap around the front and act as a belt.  I really liked these pants though because they are long enough to cover the skin and prevent mosquito bites but are thin enough to let air through and maintain constant ventilation.  The only major downside with the pants that we found out that night was that it’s dangerous to wear them with white underwear in a place that uses black lights because the underwear will shine right through.  Baptiste looked basically like Quail-man from Doug.  

The next day was our final day to relax before heading back to Bangkok.  We spent it drinking “happy” shakes on the beach and swimming with the locals.  Reiko got a pedicure on the beach and people thought I was Khmer.  

The Every Asian Man

What do I look like to you?  I have the complexion of a white boy, the hair of a black boy, the eyes of an Asian boy, what am I?  Apparently I can pass for Japanese in Japan (or outside of Japan), Thai in Thailand, Laotian in Laos and Khmer in Cambodia.  I actually had two Khmer people tell me on the same day I look Khmer.  And on more occasions than I care to remember, people simply spoke to me in their native dialect assuming I was one of them.  Usually people don’t guess that I’m Chinese and almost never does anyone ever guess that I’m from America.  At least I can blend in anywhere.

The worst part of my trip makes for the best story

The last night we spent in Cambodia (and actually the last night we spent in any hostel in Southeast Asia) we were happy and carefree.  We had almost made it to the end of our journey without any real big problems, most of what we feared could happen to us were unrealized and we were feeling pretty good about ourselves.  But of course, good old life can’t let us leave without first  serving us a big dose of irony before we leave:

1^st Incident:

Baptiste and I had just gotten back from a very (almost too) relaxing hookah bar where we all (including Reiko) passed out for about an hour.  The bar was awesome and basically consisted of giant lounging couches.  We were just sitting on the end of our bed in our $6 hostel room spacing out when out of nowhere a huge bang comes from our ceiling.  We know we weren’t making it up because the metal ceiling panel actually caved in a little.  But nothing fell down and nothing came through to eat us so after a few minutes of being kind of freaked out, we just went to brush our teeth.

2^nd Incident (immediately afterwards):

I was sitting outside on the bed brushing my teeth and Baptiste was inside in the bathroom brushing his teeth.  Suddenly, he bounds out of the restroom screaming “MMMmmmmmm!!!” because his mouth was full of toothpaste and a toothbrush.  I mumbled “what”, myself with a mouth full of toothpaste and toothbrush.  I peered inside the restroom and saw the thing I wished the most to avoid in Southeast Asia, a GIANT spider by the sink.  I jump back even farther and scream even louder and continuously only stopping to gasp for air, “MmmmmMMmmmMMm!!Mmm!!”  Baptiste finds my fear and reaction hilarious and just stands there laughing at me.  The whole time, I’m screaming “kill it, kill it, kill it!”  He finally realizes what I’m saying, but he first picks up his camera.  He peeks back inside the bathroom but the spider is no longer by the sink.  Those of you who know me at all know that I’m not all too fond of spiders, and giant Southeast Asian spiders are right on the top of the list of things I hate.   Now to top it off, it was nowhere in sight.  Baptiste slowly sticks his head inside the doorway and notices something moving to his right in his peripheral vision.  This time, it was his turn to jump back against a wall and scream for about 20 seconds straight and my turn to laugh at him.  The whole time we’re both screaming and commuting with muffled nonsensical words because we still have our toothbrushes in our mouths, which make the situation all that much comical in hindsight.  The spider crawls out of the doorway and onto the wall in front of Baptiste and right next to our bed.  It moved closer to the corner and was mere inches from crawling under our bed.  The whole time Baptiste is fiddling around with his camera trying to set the right setting to take a picture of this monstrous arachnid.  I scream over and over, “it’s going to go under the bed” and he finally realizes what I’m saying about 5 seconds later.  I toss him a sandal and he pulverizes it in one swift smack.  I have never in my life seen a spider that large or that terrifying.  I don’t care if it was some giant glorified garden spider that lives on flies and mosquitoes, it had to die, or I was not going to sleep that night.  I still barely got any sleep, stupid spider. 

 

See for yourself!

Getting Home

Let’s start with the bus we booked from Sihanoukville to Bangkok.  On the ticket we bought for $12 each, there was one large bus listed that we assumed would take us the whole way.  After saying bitter goodbye to Reiko we boarded a large bus which quickly reached a stop and we changed to another bus about 20 minutes later.  We were on this bus for about another two hours till we got to a small border city where we changed again.  I was glad to switch because the small air conditioner hole of air (like the ones you get on airplanes) was broken where I was sitting and I was gasping for air every 5 minutes.  At one point I just stuck my neck out as long as I could near the broken and crappy tiny spittle of air and just closed my eyes and tried not to think about how hot it was.  The third bus would take us to the boarder of Cambodia and Thailand where we then moved into a small minivan with about 8 other people.  We would proceed to switch to SIX MORE MINIVANS before arriving in Bangkok!  Each time we would pile out, meet at some random shady designated point and move our backpacks to a new van.  Some drivers would only drive us for 15 minutes before switching us off again.  It was like a terrible game of hot potato where we were the unwanted potato.  I’m assuming all these switches was done to save money so that they don’t end up with a large bus or van in Bangkok without having anybody to transport back.  This was convenient for the drivers, but very inconvenient for us and it was a pretty annoying trip.  We bonded with the other passengers by complaining to each other and then later just laughing at how ridiculous this situation was.  Never believe Cambodian bus companies, they are SHADY.   

Arriving back in Bangkok made me realize how I could actually FEEL the change in me in only one month’s time.  I had a newfound appreciation for simple things like paved roads, not fearing land mines all the time and sidewalks without trash.  It was funny because we had been in the same city only one month before and it seemed so amazingly different to both of us.  To hear music, to see food and venders, even the gas station outside reminded me of a remote gas station in America more than in southeast Asia.  It was good to be back in Bangkok.  With a newfound appreciation for Bangkok, Baptiste and I were ready to hit the town.  The plan was that we would arrive around 10 PM, go find a trustworthy hostel to put down our backpacks, get dinner, and shop at the night market and on Khao San Road until about 2 AM and we’d make our way to the airport to catch our 5 AM flight.  As a last minute precaution we decided to go into an internet café and print out our confirmation number so that we could check in.  We were going to do it either way, but decided to take care of it when we first got back instead of waiting till later which would later turn out to be a decision that would save our butts.  As we checked our flight at 11 PM, we were shocked to see that our flight was actually scheduled for 2 AM instead of 5 AM.  So disappointedly, we had no time to buy souvenirs for friends and ourselves and quickly bought one last Chang beer and Pad Thais to go and ate it in the taxi on the way to the airport.  We were both incredibly thankful that we didn’t miss our flight and saddened by the fact that we’d miscalculated and didn’t get to spend more time in Bangkok.  It’s really too bad, but I consider it just another reason to go back.

There is nothing like the sights in Cambodia.  It is still developing and I understand that’s why the people of Cambodia seemed so determined to make money.  And despite all the money tourism must bring into the country, Cambodians still remain some of the poorest in the world (many can’t afford to get clean drinking water).  I love the Angkor temples but Baptiste and I agreed that we would not want to go back unless it was with friends or family who wanted to go see Angkor Wats. 

The whole trip is something that I will never forget.  I’m sure it will be an experience that I will relive, retell and remember forever.  I didn’t really know or think that I would be capable of such an adventure and even surprised myself at how much I was able to do.  It’s nice to really push my personal limits because I discover things about myself I didn’t know before and the more I try to find my limits, the more I realize I have none.