Destination Angkor, December 2, 2007
“Rain, ATM’s and countryside”
I decided to make one last trip up to the town of Seam Reap and the massive complex known as Angkor Wat. The Cambodian government through a momentary stroke of genius, long ago limited the number of vehicles allowed to enter the park. Not just anyone can enter with a vehicle, your have to be registered as a guide and or a driver. This has forced the majority of tourists to come in either, big tour groups, with personal guides, rented car and driver (like the rich) or as most of us budget travelers, riding on the back of moto’s or using Tuk-Tuk’s. I had driven a rented motorcycle from Phnom Penh to Seam Reap, taking about 5 hours over mostly submerged roads from the biggest rain storm in the history of my motorcycle adventures. I swear this rain storm had water coming from all directions at once and it was a good thing they provided the motorcycle with a snorkel. I had a really good poncho and after making double sure that my laptop and camera were safe, I did a series of relays, from one rain shelter to the next. I would ride until the rain hurt, then dive into a thatched roadside food stand for a break. I think I actually got bruised on the legs not having any leather pants or boots. Needless to say the rider, the bike and all but the electronics remained wet the entire trip. I dared not even bring out the camera for fear of getting water in the bag. One good testament was the Lowepro Stealth Camera bag, not a drop got inside and it was only under the poncho. After finding a relatively nice hotel on Wat Po Road. I spent rest of the evening drying out. I arranged for a Tuk-Tuk to take me in and out of the park each day as riding in them was easier than riding on those tiny moto seats. OK for short rides around town but not on any extended trips. The cost of a three day pass was 40$ and add to this the Tuk-Tuk with driver at 10$ a day, and you quickly see why most people spend 3 fast and furious days trying to visit as much as they can. The main route for most people is called the Grand Tour. That route takes in the main ruins consisting of Angkor Wat, the biggest and grandest of the three, the Bayon second largest, but this is the one with a hundred towers that have the 4 faces pointed in the cardinal directions. Most people think of the faces as that of the Buddha, but in reality, they are of the Leper King who ruled godlike and were Hindu based. Then there was everybody’s favorite and known to many because of the Angelina Jolle movie, “Tomb Raiders”, Ta Phrom is the temple where the trees were found growing in and among the ruins and left there. The trees are called Banyan’s and considered scared and belonging to the sprites in the afterlife. To cut them down would incur the wrath of the long dead who live in and around them. Anyway, having seen the Grand Tour two times before, I opted for the ruins located on the outer limits of the park and one or two actually outside the park boundaries, most surrounded by jungle and only reached by driving through a few remote villages and hundreds of rice fields. To my surprise I was not alone at these outer ruins, there were a great many thinking the same thing as myself to avoid the masses on the Grand Tour. Out here the picture taking was easier than the Grand Tour would have been. On the Grand Tour the picture taking is about group shots taken in front of other groups standing beside another group. Gone are the days when you could wait 5 minutes and the one group would pass and you could get a shot in between, now the groups are almost continuous. The next day started out with an early morning pick up at the hotel 0500. If I had been staying at a real good hotel, the staff would have made coffee or hot tea before I left, but being budget minded I just stopped off at one of the hundred small Khmer road stands. For 25 cents, I got a black coffee with sweetened condensed milk in the bottom of the plastic cup. This was ok as long as you didn’t stir up the milk. It was way too sweet to drink mixed, if you work it right you can sip out the black stuff in between the bumps and not get too much of the sweet stuff. The ride into the main park was only about 20 minutes too show your pass and then on to the outer ones about 1 to 2 hours with some breaks for food or picture taking enroute. Once at the ruins, picture taking was a hurried affair with the light getting hotter as the morning progressed. Usually by 1000 the light was so hard and hot the picture quality was minimal at best. After taking in the ruins, we would look for some breakfast from the many have food and drink vendors clustered about the entrances. On arrival they will call out and say “Suh, Suh, wan Cold drink, Suh?” and if you don’t buy right away, they say “OK, buy me when come back, remember you I speak you fust!” I always bring my own water, but the food would spoil fast with out ice and the only electricity here abouts consisted of 12 volt car batteries for the lights or TV’s . I try and pick the food vender that the Tuk-Tuk driver use’s as this always gets him a free meal for bringing me by. Being a westerner usually means eating from the menu and costing more. The locals are very surprised when I asked for my food with out a menu. They are surprised because they also know it’s cheaper, but then are also quite pleased that I have taken the time to learn their language. Most people coming here don’t have the time to spend learning the lingo other than “Hello or Thank you”, so they are very used to everyone dumbing down and speaking the pig English most everybody tends to use. It goes something like this, “Me, food eat!” and “Looky Men-nu?”, “U speaky English?” (duh, what country am I in?) or “Beer, Me one!”, and my all time favorite, “Is water Purified?”… I long ago learned, no matter the country, if you eat from the food stands, you always take the chance of food poisoning and or the at least being contaminated by the local bacteria. Even in the best restaurants your chance’s here are tripled at best. As a rule, get to a new country, eat as clean as you can for a week or so before you start venturing out to the street food and you will have a better chance than most at holding off the dreaded backpackers disease, (severe stomach cramps and a guaranteed to lose ten pounds case of diarrhea)… Oh, and when and if you do come here, you gotta try the frogs. It a considered a delicacy here and this might be rough on some of you, but, to keep the frogs as fresh as can be, they skin them alive and then leave them until the costumer is ready to eat and then stir fry them still kicking in the pan from the heat!! (I can hear everyone groaning from here!) Well alrighty then, on the final day of a trekking into these remote sections, I developed a severe case of heat exhaustion and I think it almost turned into heat stress. Forgetting where I was, I tried to do too much, too fast and did not drink enough water. (I always thought beer counted!) All the walking, the climbing, the jungle heat and riding to and from the ruins in the open sun, then add the humidity combined with poor physical conditioning and overweight, well, you get the drift. I came down with all the usual symptoms, cool clammy skin, a massive head ache, feeling slightly nauseous and faint, I was so weak I could barely lift my arms. On the way back to the hotel I had my driver stop off at a Star Mart and buy me 2 gallons of water and something similar to Asian gator aid, he then drove me straight to the hotel, no stopping off for beers today. Pulling up outside the girls working there saw me literally slither out of the Tuk-Tuk, the driver telling them I had fainted or passed out coming back. They rushed over and helped me stagger to my room, which thankfully, was only one floor up. The girls took me straight to the shower and even brought a small plastic chair so I could sit under the cold water, drinking and re-hydrating. The girls kept a constant watch on me the first night, stopping by to check my temperature and bringing as much water and tea as I could drink. I started feeling better almost right away. I had a Thai restaurant just across the street deliver some hot soup and there was an Apsara Mart (Khmer for Nymph Mart) right around the corner with more gator aid, and 2 days later I awoke still feeling a little weak, but most of the symptoms were gone and I felt none the worse for the wear. “Doctors, I don need no stinking Doctors!!!” anyway, here’s to my good fortune and the help of strangers!
The town of Seam Reap that supports Angkor Wat with hotels, restaurants and the most ATM’s in Asia, used to be a sleepy little village supporting the various Archeological Teams sent by the various countries to helping to restore the ruins. When I first got here in just 5 short years ago there were only one or two little Chinese restaurants. The Red Piano Bar (Angelina’s favorite place), a Happy Herb’s Pizza, (home to the famous marijuana laced pizzas) and an oddity of a restaurant called the Dead Fish Guest House. The latter’s logo advertising that “We don’t serve, Dog, Cat, Rat or Worms” and seemed to serve as a testament to the quirkiness’ of Seam Reap. There was only one “Zanzi” Bar that catered to girly needs and the usual Vietnamese courtesans casting about and a scattering of small coffee bars/pubs where the “teams” would often meet after hours. The streets were dirt, and most of the buildings made of wood with some remnants of the old Indochinese Architecture. Now most all the older wooden buildings are gone and replaced with square concrete structures having little or no flare other then artsy names like the Angkor What Bar, or some Japanese style neon lights or the drab looking backlit sign mounted on the roof or to the walls. The only street with any style left is Pub Street, so named years ago when it was lined with those small café’s and pubs reminiscent of Paris or Rome. Now they are even dividing the city into, “the French Quarter” or “China Town” to reflect the new owners. The name Seam Reap it self means Siam Defeated, I guess a time long ago they won a war with Thailand near here and named the spot accordingly. I have mentioned earlier that the old market part of town is starting to resemble one of the pavilions at Epcot Center in Disney World with the Angkor theme redone in concrete and rebar. Here everything has the name Angkor associated with it, Angkor Massage, Angkor Market, Angkor, Angkor, Angkor... Even my hotel was named “Angkor Thom”… About the only thing left that is real anymore are the beggars still wandering around making upwards of 10 to 20$ a day from the misguided tourist thinking they are “just helping out”. You know the teachers here make less than 35$ a month, and the cops even less than that. Hell, why work at all if the tourists will pay you 300$ a month to just hang out and beg!
After the hurried trip through Angkor, I spent the next few days recuperating in a small town along the southern coast called Kampot, and even took a few rides out and into the countryside. Take any road out of town and when you are far enough out that you begin to see the rice fields and cows, take another right or left down any of the small rural dirt roads and the real Cambodia is ready to slap you in the face. Crossing into the countryside is like time travel. Gone are the trappings of modern day accoutrements, here things go back to the basics of survival as fast as flipping a light switch. On the farms and out in the fields, the chores are a constant, water must get to the fields, the pigs must “food eat”, the cows tended and these chores mostly done by the men, leaving the actual harvesting to be done by the women and older people. They work fully covered head to thigh in their sarongs under a conical hat and scarf for protection against the sun. Looking closely sometimes you can only see their eyes and the long black hair knotted in a pony tail. Children not in school usually work right along side the women. Seeing me they all stop and marvel at the passing stranger and wonder why he is taking pictures of something so ordinary. Here a good house cleaning means sweeping the dust back into the surrounding fields. It’s easy to see why the customs of leaving your shoes at the door are prevalent in these settings where everything is dirt, clay, mud or some kind of dung. Most houses are on stilts, taking advantage of the cooling effect the wind has when it blows under and around the house, drawing out the heat and in the rainy season keeping it afloat. The ground floor also serves as the cooking and living area, with hammocks strung betweens the posts and the ever present “dto”, a bamboo/rattan like table where they sit, sleep, eat and read. When you first drive though the rice fields, you can’t help but wonder at the beauty, the hundred differing shades of greens and yellows from rice fields mixed with the reds and browns of the many paths or roads like a pastel painting come to life. The color of the deep blue sky against a horizon of green, dotted with sugar palms or coconut trees, and the workers homes serving to break up the endless pattern of square rice paddies. I think on any given day when you drive through the countryside, you can bank 2 hundred hello’s an hour and over a thousand waves from those to distant to shout. The children would sing out the word “Hello, Hello” until you’ve either past or answered back with a “Hello” in return. It’s probably the only foreign word they know and they just love having the chance to say it.
On one my drives out and about, I happened upon a small elementary school on the same grounds as a working temple near some “Killing Fields” (Google Khmer Rouge). As I was walking around I could hear the kids in a classroom reciting the alphabets. Not wanting to disturb the class I stayed back out of sight and worked my way closer to better hear them. The school was old and dusty, having the same Indochinese bureaucratic yellow colored walls everywhere, now faded by years of neglect and brown up to the waist from the dirt of thousand dusty children leaning against it. No lights in the classroom just what ever natural light spills into the doorway and windows, a chalk board and small wooden tables and benches for the students to sit and write on. As I inched closer to the classroom, I could just see a young boy about 8 or 9 holding a long pointed stick in his hands and as he would tap and recite each letter or vowel on the board, the entire class would then repeat it in unison after him. Altogether, the effect was like that of a song, the boy in the lead and the children behind him acting as the choir. All this time, waiting patiently out in front of the classroom was a little girl of about 4 or 5 years old. I could only guess, but she must have been waiting for her older siblings to finish class and take her home, but here she sat patiently waiting, singing the same words as the class only singing them quietly to herself, still dressed in her school uniform, hiding just out of sight under an open window. I sat close by under a shady tree on a small wooden bench and quietly just let it all just soak in. To hear the kids in the background singing their lessons was as beautiful as any opera or concert I’ve ever been to, with the only other sound anywhere a puff of wind through the trees and maybe a bark or two from a dog down the way. Sitting there, at that moment, I felt almost totally at peace sitting there. Hell, I think I even levitated, a real Zen moment for me and to think, people wonder “Why” I travel…
Off to Vietnam in the morning, got my tickets and have managed to shed another 10 pounds of ballast (clothes and fat!) So, look for more notes in a couple of weeks.
George
