I missed my 30th Birthday!

Whoops. Those Koreans got me again. So they start counting years at conception, and then something happens when the New Year Comes in. Maybe you need some kind of higher math to calculate your age here, I don't know. I do know that it is somewhere more than a year and less than two years older here.
Age is very important in issues of social interaction and paying respect, so I get asked my age about every time I meet someone new. Today was my first time back to the climbing gym since the New Year came in, and I was surprised this time to find out I'm now 30 here! Really, I was 29 here three weeks ago, I swear. I must have had my 30th in Siem Reap while visiting Angkor Wat. That's okay with me. It was an awesome party New Years, and in a really cool exotic location. I had a destination birthday! Now, not only will it be a let down when I actually turn 30 in American years (I can't imagine I'll have quite the same celebration), it will also not be a big deal. I mean, how bad can 30 be when you hit it for the second time?

Phnom Phen

Well, all you need in Phnom Phen is one good full day and some powerful anti-depressants. I am a firm believer that we are only doomed to repeat history if we forget about it, so I feel it is important to go and witness bits of history when you are close to them, no matter how much they turn your stomach. The capital of Cambodia was the center of Pol Pot's genocidal rule, and as such holds many reminders of the recent past. It was hard to keep in mind that the genocide here lasted until the year of my birth.

So we started the morning with a tour of the Royal Palace and the Silver Pagoda. These were much like the wats of Thailand: highly decorated, elaborate structures housing gold-leaf religious paraphernalia. We thought we had missed the silver pagoda...because it is not in fact silver, nor is it labeled as such on the tourist map they gave us. I feau pax'd here greatly by not taking my hat off in the presence of the king's elephant carriage. It wasn't in any special building, but I guess since it belonged to the king, you couldn't wear your hat in its presence. :)

After the sight-seeing we went to S-21, otherwise known as the Toul Sleng Genocide Museum. It is easy to tell that this poor building started its life as a school, but under Pol Pot, it became one of the most notorious detention facilities in the country. They have several of the torture devices and vivid descriptions of how they were used. The rooms still have blood spatters on the walls and ceilings, and some have images of the corpses that were found in them when the prison was shut down. Those who ran this facility felt that documentation of the victims was very important, so you can also walk through room after room of photographs of the men, women, and children who were processed through this camp. It is heart-wrenching, utterly painful, and unbelievable that such atrocity is possible. It was permissible to take pictures here, but I couldn't bring myself to do it. It was just too awful.

The next step on the path of history is to visit the killing fields. There are literally hundreds of mass graves around Cambodia, and indications that many more exist that haven't been found, but the killing fields just outside of Phnom Phen are home to the more than 10,000 victims that went through Toul Sleng in just 3-4 short years. Sadly it houses the remains of many others as well. To save bullets, the victims were clubbed to death, but the blows were often not fatal, so they were buried alive, or killed by the chemicals spread over their bodies to decrease the stench of decay. There is a monument here that is at least five stories tall with human skulls stacked from floor to ceiling. The grounds are still strewn with bits of clothing, and people pile the little bones they find on the ground in designated areas. It is quiet here now, but that quiet is oppressive and is not extended to those who visit.

Exotic food and wild life

Really, this is the odds-and-ends bit of my adventure that didn't fit well elsewhere, but might actually be more entertaining. :)

Let me start with the food. I get to eat exotic food right here at home as you have witnessed from previous blogs, but it was a treat to have a different set of spices and all the fresh fruit I could eat. We often ate from street vendors in Thailand, but not in Cambodia, where the street food was deemed, "for the hygienically adventurous." Our average lunch cost less than $2 on the street and consisted of fresh fruit/ juice, pad thai, satay, and/or unrecognizable yet delicious items. My hands-down favorite dish was Khao Soi, a Northern Thai recipe. This is a savory curry noodle dish with any variety of meat or tofu you choose. We also liked the pumpkin soup in Cambodia that had coconut and coriander in it. One of the stranger things we tried was miang kham. This fab dish took a leaf and filled it with coconut, lime, chilis, ginger, peanuts, and dried shrimp. You fold this up and dip it in probably a hoisen sauce. mmm. I think the worst thing we ate was labeled juicy king lobster fritters. We ordered this on principle because the name was hilarious, but it turned out to be a large, over-cooked crawdad.

As for the wild life, I make this two separate words because on this trip it refers to both the animals and the people we encountered. Our guide in Chang Mai made the comment that the only wild animals left in the jungle are the tourists. I guess I believe him. We didn't see anything wild in the jungle, but we saw plenty of strange animal life in other places! Every trip has it's classic line that you quote forever, and I think for this trip it will be, "Claire, get closer to the monkeys!" What Melanie couldn't see through her view finder was that I was already close enough to pet the monkey, and when I tried to squeeze in just a bit more, it turned in to a toothy demon monkey. I guess I reacted rather badly to this because our tour guide nearly wet himself he was laughing so hard.

We nearly wet ourselves when we saw a large reptilian head poking out of the water when we were in a paddle boat in Thailand. I thought it was an alligator at first and then a giant snake, but I'm pretty sure Melanie was right in deciding it was the same sort of giant lizard we saw while touring the canals in Bangkok. This would be a water monitor, and the one we saw sunning on the rocks was about 4ft. long. I can only imagine how big the one in the water was since I could only see it's head, but it was a big head. And we were in a little boat.

My favorite animal was the elephant, and mostly because we kept running into them. You can have tours of cities, ruins, or the jungle on an elephant, so they were pretty much everywhere we went. The best elephant spotting was while we were climbing the elephant trail to avoid all the crowds heading up to see the sunset at Angkor Wat. The sign at the bottom said "Careful elephants!" I laughed that I sure hoped the elephants would be careful, and the first time they came running around a corner (I'm not kidding) I realized that this wasn't funny. While cute, they are a bit intimidating when they are coming down a narrow path at high speed.

The strangest animal we met was the Irishman, or men to be more exact. Part of their mating ritual is apparently to toss the female of the species high in the air. One of them would hoist multiple women at the same time. It sort of reminded me of the log tossing competitions you see on weird sports channels sometimes. We celebrated the New Year with a group of them at a massive block party in Siem Reap. It was great fun. I think the fun was enhanced by the bucket drinks though......

Chang Mai

I was warned ahead of time that Chang Mai would be my favorite spot, but I still didn't schedule enough time there. I guess I don't mind the excuse to go back! This is a city in North Western Thailand that is surrounded by wilderness. People go to see the mountain tribes, participate in adventure sports, and hike the territory. We scheduled one full day of adventuring and managed to visit on orchid farm, ride an elephant, trek through the jungle to visit a waterfall, see an indigenous tribe, and go white water rafting. We really lucked out with this particular trip because usually there are upwards of ten people with you, but we were a happy group of four, and believe it or not, the two other guys on the trip were also visiting from Seoul! How crazy is that?

I am easily distracted by pretty things, so starting the trip at the orchid farm was dangerous. I promptly lost the group as I wandered through the rows of orchids, taking pictures and smiling to myself. They were massive, and gorgeous, and truly interesting in the way they grow. I loved them.

After the orchids, we went to visit the Karen. This is a "long neck" tribe that resettled in Northern Thailand from Burma. Apparently most of the indigenous people still living in that area of the country came over from Burma....so we weren't seeing an ancient Thai way of life, but an import I guess. That's okay, most of S.E. Asia spent so much time invading each other in early history that the cultures are pretty mixed anyway. Also, the village we visited was only a "show" village where the tribes people can come and stay to make some money off the tourist trade. The actual villages are too far out to reach on a single day's trek. It was still educational...and sort of heartbreaking. "Long neck" is so called because they use continually growing copper coils to stretch their necks out. Only the women do this as it is considered a part of beauty, but the adult sized copper coils weigh over 10lbs...I can't imagine carrying that on my shoulders all day. It was hard to see the little girls in them too...they all had handkerchiefs under their coils to help with the chafing, and of course the neck deformities can also be health hazards....

Next we headed to an elephant camp for a ride through the jungle. We were told that Asian elephants are smaller than African elephants, but they were plenty big to me. They are also apparently nicer. We named our elephant Baxter, and we soon found out that he only works for bananas. We fed him about a bushel of the darn things, and everytime we stopped feeding him, he stopped walking. Well trained.

After the elephants we had lunch in a little hut in the middle of the jungle where apparently you can stay the night for 20B! That's less than a dollar folks, and they had cold cokes and beers. :) They also let us hone our slingshot skills here before we trekked on to the waterfall. This trek would definitely not have been sanctioned by any American tour company...I'm pretty adventurous, but I was still convinced at least twice that I was going to fall and break myself.

Finally we went white water rafting and got completely soaked. The day was good fun, and actually the whole group enjoyed it so much that we decided to all get dinner together! We went home and cleaned up, and then our tour guide took us to a good local restaurant and ordered all the yummy Thai dishes we had never heard of. It was fabulous.

Angkor Temple Complex

So I fell victim to a common mistake. Angkor Wat is just a temple, but it is a small part of a massive temple complex, all of which is breathe-taking. I had read about a few of the lesser temples, and I figured that two days would be plenty of time to see everything...boy was I wrong. Two days was plenty for temple sight-seeing, but it wasn't near enough to see all of the awe-inspiring structures in that area. For the first day of exploration, we got a guide and more history than we bargained for. We were both praying silently for the man to be struck dumb by about lunch time. The information was all very interesting, but when he started with unpronounceable King the I and progressed through unpronounceable King the VIII with several intervening kings, we were hopelessly lost. I also got confused through all of the changes in religion. They mixed and switched between animism, Hinduism, and Buddhism, and different Kings supported different ones, so the deities in the temples were rubbed out and switched a number of times, and sometimes just eliminated all together. Consequently I bought a book. :)

So while the temples in Thailand were ornate and gorgeous, the temples of Angkor are rugged and imposing. They have truly been hacked back out of the jungle, and in places, the banyon trees are so old and large, that they look to have grown out of the ruins as well as over them. There are areas that still have beautiful carving, but the spine tingling aspect is really how ancient everything looks as it threatens to fall down around you. The idea that people could build such large complex structures with such detail is mind blowing when you consider that these temples were started in the 800's. I'm afraid I'll fail miserably if I try to describe the structures to you, so I'll just give some pictures and some names.

This is the Bayon temple. Every spire is topped with this king's face, pointing toward the four cardinal directions:
Ta Prom was also spectacular in the havoc nature has wreaked with it. This is the one famous for having the massive banyan trees um, invade it I guess. I think it's been in some movies. The picture of the tree is just to give you some perspective on how big these suckers are. I couldn't get most of it in the picture!


Next is Angkor Wat. I don't think it needs introduction, but you should definitely be humming the Indiana Jones theme song as you scroll through. I added one of the murals because both the Bayon temple and Angkor Wat are famous for the stories carved on their walls.

Many of the structures have very similar elements, so I can illustrate most of what I saw with pictures of a few. We actually visited about 13 separate structures, but I'm only adding pics of one more that I found particularly awesome. Bantay Srei is way off the beaten path...it's a good 45 minutes further out from the rest of the temple structures, but it is well worth the ride. In addition to seeing some more rural village life on the way, the structure itself is gorgeously carved and the sandstone is still quite pink.

What Wat?

The word Wat means temple and is used in both Cambodia and Thailand. When I set out for my Christmas adventure this year, I knew one of my stops would be Angkor Wat in Cambodia, but I didn't realize just how wat-full my vacation would be. I spent my first full day in Thailand visiting some of the lesser Wats while waiting for my friend Melanie to arrive. The most impressive (Wat Inthara Wihan) had an enormous standing buddha, and the most peaceful was made of marble (Wat Benchama Bophit) and had gorgeous grounds.
































The next day we did the mandatory Bangkok tourist items: Royal Palace and Wat Phra Kaeo (home of Thailand's emerald buddha), Wat Po (home of an enormous reclining buddha and the origins of Thai massage), and Wat Arun (temple of the dawn). The RP and WPK share grounds and together are visually overwhelming. It was hard to remember to get out from behind my camera and just enjoy the views.

























On average the Thai temples were lacquered and sculpted and gorgeously ornamented with gold-leaf. The grounds of every temple had at least one stuppa (a bell-shaped building built to house and honor the remains of someone important in the temple's history...or at least that's what I understand about them.) Wat Arun was decorated with pottery! It was sort of mosaic-like in that respect, and it also had some really beautiful sculpting on its walls. It probably had the most killer stairs we met in Thailand...definitely not for those afraid of heights.






























While the Wats are incredible, I was a bit watted out after two straight days of them, so we gave up on them until we reached Siem Reap and the Angkor temple complex. I couldn't help myself from pointing them out when we passed them though...."There's a Wat!" "Look, a Wat!" Melanie probably got really tired of this since there are over 300 temples in Chang Mai (almost as many as Bangkok) and we only really explored about eight in Thailand. This didn't stop us from snapping a few pics of the ones we passed though...and Melanie found an especially good one with large donald duck statues dotting the temple grounds.

We did seek out one temple in Chang Mai: Doi Suthep. It sits on a hill high over the city. The legend is that an elephant was sent to find a new home for an important buddhist relic, and it died on that hill so a Wat was built there. The sunshine was amazing in the inner courtyard, magnified by all the gold, and the views of the city were spectacular. I was also incidently blessed by a monk and spattered with holy water.





























We also went to see one temple in Phnom Phen: the Silver Pagoda. It is on the grounds with their royal palace, and we saw some of the prettiest landscaping there. We also saw Cambodia's emerald buddha and the disco buddha here. We named it as such because this sitting buddha had some sort of weird disco laser lights doing some psychedelic moves over his head. It also prompted us to start singing, "Shake your buddha!" I can't quite figure out how anyone thought putting disco lights over the buddha's head could be reverent, but hey.

Hello! Lady, Tuk-tuk!

I have thoughtfully considered changing my name to Lady Tuktuk since this is what everyone called me in Thailand and Cambodia...or at least what they called at me. You can't walk five steps in either country without some one offering you a ride on something. I did accept some offers: I rode some Tuk-tuks (essentially motorized rick-shaws), mini-busses (bench seats in the bed of a pick-up), taxis, water taxis, long-tail boats, paddle boats, and even an elephant! I did however pass on the opportunity to ride on the back of a mo-ped. So many people accept the moped rides, that we almost never saw a person riding alone, and the record we counted was five people (four adults and a toddler). It was more interesting to see the things transported on the scooters. My favorites were a wicker barrel full of live piglets, and a flock of live ducks tied down to some palm leaves. If you can't catch a ride on a scooter, then you can always climb into a truck...or onto one. I saw one so packed that people were riding on the roof of the cab and on the HOOD!

I realize it is a bit odd to open the commentary on one of my most memorable trips to date with a bit about the transportation, but I'm sort of over-saturated with things to talk about. I saw and did so many things in the last two weeks that I'm finding it hard to organize my thoughts, and this is the first one that coalesced itself into something writable. I seem to find the little oddities just as interesting as the big crowd pleasers, so I have quite a bit to write about.
I'll try to organize my trip into categories so I don't bore you with one big blog. :) I'm also going to incorporate a slideshow of the entire trip here with specific pics in the individual blogs.

Thailand-cambodia