Cambodia & Thailand

Two weekends ago (March 13-18), Nathan and I took a trip to Cambodia and Thailand.

Disclaimer: One of the conditions of my 12-month visa for the Philippines is that I can only be here for 59 consecutive days (but I can leave and re-enter as often as I want for 12 months). If I stay longer than 59 days, I have to pay something crazy like $150. On top of all this, I also can’t re-enter the country without proof that I have a ticket to leave again before the 12 months is over. I’m actually feeling pretty guilty about this situation, because there are a lot of people that helped fund my volunteer work through donations. I don’t want to give off the impression that I have all this excess money and I’m using it to jetset around Southeast Asia, and at the same time I don’t want to miss this opportunity to see other countries while I’m on this side of the world.  Luckily from what I’ve seen so far, you can go a long way with very little money around here! Anyway, I just wanted to put that out there.

Siem Reap, Cambodia

Angkor Wat

We only had one full day in Cambodia- we arrived the previous night and would leave the next morning for Bangkok. I had been pretty disappointed once I realized how little time we’d be spending there, but it ended up being perfect.

Siem Reap is the city outside the Angkor temple area. I think it exists entirely to provide food and accommodation for the huge number of tourists visiting the temples. Nearly every building we passed was a guesthouse, hotel, bar, restaurant or souvenir shop. The dusty roads were packed with tuk tuks and motorcycles, both used to transport tourists around the area. For $15 we hired a tuk tuk driver for a full day to take us around the temples.

Angkor Wat

I was not expecting there to be so many people! Though I guess it makes sense, especially given the recent increase in airlines flying into Siem Reap. The walkway to the first temple we visited, Angkor Wat, was packed with tourists, monks and local guys persistently offering us tours. Normally crowds like that could make it hard to appreciate an ancient temple, but it was still totally engrossing. The scale is unbelievable. There were many buildings within Angkor Wat, and not a single feature was without intricate detail. It was constructed as a Hindu temple in 1125- I cannot fathom how many hours it must have taken to carve the thousands of images of Vishnu into that much stone without any of today’s technologies! Nevermind the massive undertaking of gathering all of the raw materials.

Nathan took over Angkor Wat

The corridors were incredibly narrow and winding, like a labyrinth. It was really disorienting at times, and I wonder if that was intentional. Imagine the original tenants meditatively wandering the zig-zagged halls that are now filled with shutter clicks and voices in 20 different languages.

The fact that it was just under 100 degrees might have contributed to my feeling of disorientation. Having to wear long pants didn’t help either- some temples have a dress code prohibiting shorts or tank tops. Being the good tourist that I am I bought some massively baggy Thai-style pants from a woman outside one of the temples after haggling down to 50% of the asking price (my mom taught me well!).

Ta Prohm

We wearily toured a few other temples after Angkor Wat, including Bayon Temple, which is Khmer for “GIANT FACES EVERYWHERE!” and Ta Prohm which translates to “TREES ARE GROWING INSIDE THIS TEMPLE, WHAT!”. I think.

There were a couple others that we just quickly stopped by, but the heat in the middle of the day was so draining and I was relieved to go back to our guest house to shower and relax. I really enjoyed the place we ended up staying – Advisor Angkor Villa. Everyone there was really friendly, and the highlight of the whole trip for me was meeting other travelers while lounging in the common area. We met a French guy who bartends for 6 months and then travels for 6 months, on and off, forever. A German artist who sold a painting and decided to spend the money on a couple months in Thailand. A German engineer a few weeks into his 18 month globe trek.   Everyone but us was travelling solo, though a common sentiment was that they hadn’t been alone much given the robust community of travelers in that part of the world. We ended up going with a few people to a night market for late-night snacks and beers. Meeting all these interesting, brave, adventurous, and yet also totally normal people was really inspiring. Like, “Hey, I could do that!” Anyone could do that!  It was also timely because I was finishing Vagabonding by Rolf Potts, a book dispelling the myth that only a certain type of person can see the world.

Onward, to Thailand!

Yikes, budget travel: $10 for a bus, 200m walk, and crowded minivan ride from Siem Reap to Bangkok. 8am-6:30pm. But we made it!

The bus dropped us off at Khao San Road, the westernized backpacker/hostel zone, loaded with bars, cheap guesthouses and street vendors selling less-than-authentic Thai food. We compared prices and found the cheapest place- around $11 per night. Having read that some of these places are pretty grimy, I asked to see the room first. We scoped it out, without instructions on how to turn the lights on, and it looked like a totally standard, albeit cheap, hostel room. After paying and learning the secret for the light switch, it was a whole different story: dirty stained sheets, little bugs on the floor, mystery gunk on the bathroom/shower floor. Not cool.

"I'm hard to eat out with" in Thai

 Luckily, one of the people we’d met in Siem Reap had just been to Bangkok and wrote down a couple recommendations. The next we got out of there as quickly as possible and hopped on a boat ($0.50!) down the Chao Phraya River to the part of town he recommended, and I’m so glad we did! This next guest house was only twice the price of the first, and was pristine. Some things it had over the first place: so clean, air conditioning, free filtered water, free wifi, free coffee, the most helpful staff, and a kitchen for guests! What a 180.  That was a pretty awesome turn of events. The host at the front desk even wrote me a little note in Thai that I could hand to food vendors and they would know what I do and don’t eat!  Or it said “This girl is crazy, just nod & smile and then go stir fry some vegetables”.  We will never know.

Monk crossing the street

For Siem Reap, there was really no planning required because there was just one attraction: temples. Bangkok is totally different, but that didn’t stop us from making no plans and doing almost no research. I don’t think it could have worked out any better- without a big list of things we wanted to do, everything was an adventure and we were free to spend as much or little time every step of the way. I was feeling pretty templed-out, so we skipped some of the major tourist attractions. Instead we stumbled upon really beautiful parks, a giant anti-government protest camp, and countless monks doing everyday activities (sleeping, crossing the street, drying their laundry). Monks are just people! In orange! Especially in Thailand where every male is supposed to serve as a monk for at least a week. I loved that!

Sleeping Monk

Oh Thai food. The hard thing about being white and liking really spicy foods is that nobody believes you, and I also get the feeling that people are worried for me when I order things spicy. So usually they ignore my requests. I thought Thailand would be different because I’d heard that everything is made spicy by default, and it was for Nathan. But alas, the blander tastes of my forefathers have betrayed me again. It wasn’t until the last night that I was able to get my fix via green curry at a jazz club. Spending an evening listening to live jazz and drinking cocktails probably wouldn’t have made it into a tightly-packed tourist itinerary, and it was one of the best things we did there. Along with lying in a park watching kids flying kites, standing at attention while the queen drove by in a massive caravan, taking the long way to the Old City by walking through the overcrowded markets of Chinatown, and getting around by bus despite not always knowing where the bus was headed.

I will leave you with a list of things I overheard our fellow American tourists say while travelling:

• “I just came from Bangkok, why the f*ck would I go back? F*ck that!”
• A guy at our guest house in Siem Reap in response to our bus driver politely asking him if he was also taking the bus to Bangkok
• “I already hate this country. You just can’t talk to these people.”
• Annoyed girls trying to check into our overbooked guest house, talking amongst themselves in front of the Cambodian staff, all of whom seemed to have an ok command of the English language.
• “New York and Philadelphia have really different accents, but nowhere else in the US really has an accent. Like, people in California sound the same as people in the north east.”
• A lesson about American accents from a New Yorker to a British girl on the trip to Bangkok.
• “Look, that monk is napping, take his picture!”
• Me.