P.P.S. ("Post-pre-script," obviously) Apologies for stupid font things and formatting things here - the blogging program is being stubborn and I don't know how to fix it.
Hi everyone. My deepest apologies for the severe delay in updates to this blog. As some of you know, I'm currently working on my applications for the Rhodes and Marshall Scholarships, and those essays have taken up every bit of my free work time. But recently I've taken a break from the essays and am trying to catch up on my blog. Here is the Thailand and Cambodia entry, and I'm close to done with the Japan entry as well. After that, all I need is my Bali entry (which will basically consist of "THE ST. REGIS IS THE BEST HOTEL EVAR"), and I'll be all caught up (we're in India now, going to see the Taj Mahal tomorrow). But thank you, dear reader, for your patience, and I hope you enjoy this next entry.
On the flight from Beijing to Bangkok, after Stephen and I listened to Sibelius’ 2nd Symphony, I had a revelatory journal entry. I reached the conclusion that I should pursue a career in philosophy rather than psychology. This is a big shift for me, but I’ve done a lot of thinking about it and think I’m right. I’ve been obsessing and talking about it so much during this tour that it’s become a joke and irritation among my fellow Whiffs, who have been very indulgent of my recent predilection to talk about my internal conflict incessantly. I feel like I’ve resolved a lot of the conflicts now, so hopefully I’ll be able to think and talk about other things over the course of tour. If you’re interested to hear more about my reasoning, shoot me an email.
Upon arriving in Bangkok’s beautiful shiny new airport, we were picked up by a huge bus and immediately set out on a 1-2 hour drive to Pattaya, a Thai beach town. We were hosted in Pattaya for two nights by the Siam Bayshore Resort, a very nice hotel surrounded by sketchy clubs and run-down hotels. They took very good care of us – the staff were incredibly kind and courteous and always smiling at us, telling us they were honored to have us, etc. Josh observed about the Thai that they are very friendly and gracious and greet everyone with a smile, and it was completely true. We only spent a day in Thailand, but it’s high on my list of places to return.
In our rooms that night was a platter of local fruits – big grapes with seeds, lychee, a Jack apple, bananas that are sweeter than you can get in the US, and some tasty thing with a hard pit, the name of which I can’t remember or figure out. Our individual beds were double-sized. This was the first of many very nice hotels on this tour. One weird thing: there was an indoor window between the shower and the main room, such that if you didn’t close the blinds, you could simply watch someone shower. We dedicated some good time to discussing possible reasons for including such a feature in a hotel room.
After crashing late that night, we woke up the next morning and had a fabulous hotel breakfast (once again, one of many I will have this tour). After walking around the trashy streets and laughing at the strange presence of a Russian restaurant in this Thai town, we departed in an open-air taxi (basically benches on the back of a pickup truck) for the Floating Markets. The Floating Markets are a colorful complex of food, clothing, and souvenir shops all on the water, on thatched-roof wooden docks connected by bridges. Many people kept shop on small wooden boats floating by the bridges, selling hard-boiled quail eggs, assorted fruits, fried dough, etc. Stephen, Evan and I bought coconuts from one of these boats and sipped the coconut milk through straws as we walked around. One image that stuck in my head was of a man swimming near a boat, washing a huge pot in the grayish water.
One of the most pleasant things about this market is that people weren’t desperately trying to sell you their wares – they were happy to have you look at them and consider buying them without pushing you to go further. So we had a splendid time walking around and looking at all of the colorful merchandise. At one point, we noticed a person stumbling around inside of a plastic ball on the water. We went over to investigate. For about $5, you could enter this 7 foot diameter clear plastic ball and have it inflated with you inside, and be pushed out into the water (on a leash, so you could return eventually). Of course I was the person to do this. Stephen caught the action on his FlipVid, and we will post it onto YouTube as soon as I remember to tell him to. :-P All who have seen this video have agreed that it is the peak of my career in physical comedy. It was fun for me too. Once you see the video, if you observe carefully, you can see why it’s so difficult to stand up – as soon as I put weight anywhere on the ball, it moves under my weight and topples me over. Apparently the strategy is to run in one direction and reach an equilibrium that way, which is what I attempted. As the video will show, I was not successful in this endeavor.
After we returned from the floating markets, we quickly showered (as a slightly futile fight against the sweaty humidity) and departed to go ride elephants. At some point earlier in the tour Scott had made a joke to Josh about how he wouldn’t be happy with Josh’s tour managing unless he rode an elephant; apparently Josh wouldn’t have it and so found an elephant riding park about half an hour away from our hotel. Tourist season doesn’t really seem to have started yet, so we were the only customers there at that point. As we walked in, we were greeted by a sign advertising a “monkey training cobra show.” We were also greeted by a little elephant (shorter than me), walking around freely and feeling at us with its trunk to see if we had any bananas to give it. Keiji and I rode an elephant together. We rode on a metal bench perched on top of the elephant, while our driver simply straddled the elephant’s neck and mostly steered it with his feet behind the ears.
This was a surreal experience – feeling the elephant lumber beneath you, how long and wide its gaunt is, was truly astounding. Also, the elephant’s skin was rough, hairy, and warm to the touch, unlike anything I’d felt. I spent the latter half of the ride with my flip flops off and my bare feet on the elephant’s back, just feeling the skin shift beneath me as the elephant walked. At one point, the driver took my camera and got off the elephant, telling me to climb on the elephant’s neck myself. So I straddled an elephant neck, and the driver took many pictures of me like that.
The complex we drove through sometimes looked like the most isolated jungle possible, sometimes like the backyard of a theme park, and sometimes it was full of people’s shanty houses with laundry hanging on lines. It was a strange place, to say the least, but beautiful.
After the elephant ride that day we sang a concert at the hotel. The hotel put together a beautiful setup in its central courtyard and we sang a good concert. Before they served us a very nice meal of Thai food – but nothing spicy, which was very disappointing. Luckily, I would get my spicy fix when we returned to Bangkok a few days later.
The next day we spent driving into Cambodia, to Battambang, where we would stay the night before heading on to Siem Reap. Driving in Cambodia was much like driving in Thailand and Vietnam – the landscape through the windows is mostly rural, poorly constructed houses, and when you pass through a city there are many restaurants and businesses being run out of garage door setups. Honestly I sometimes found myself struck by the sheer amount of businesses running, and the amount of inventory they all had in stock. For a poor country, there sure was a lot for sale. But it didn’t seem like too many people were buying, which was strange given that the display of inventory for some stores seemed almost like a show of wealth. I don’t pretend to know what I’m talking about when I make observations about the economy in southeast Asia, though :-P.
One distinctive thing in the landscape was the fact that almost every house had a large, ornate, colorful, beautiful shrine in its yard. These shrines seemed far and away to be the best maintained and most valuable object in any property, and I found myself wondering how much of their personal wealth people invest into these shrines. Apparently Buddhism is the major religion of Cambodia, and all of this has made me understand just how deeply ignorant I am of what Buddhism is. I’d always thought of Buddhism as kind of more a philosophy than a religion, but it turns out that in common practice it has a whole pantheon of deities, just as many absurd prophecies about the future as any religion, and a lot of iconography that I don’t understand. Traveling around the world and realizing how little of what I see I understand makes me want to go back to Yale and major in world history. Alas, it was not to be.
We crossed the border from Thailand to Cambodia on foot, which was quite an experience. There was a strange structure to it, especially the number of people trying to sell us things in the no-man’s land between where we went through Thailand emigration and where we went through Cambodian immigration. A snazzily dressed man who called himself Mr. Lonely escorted us to our bus, managing to share with us on the walk his woes with women and his rendition of an Akon song I don’t know. After a lunch break, we continued to drive to Battambang.
When we arrived in Battambang it immediately began raining, which was good for breaking the heat but bad because all the roads were dirt and so you couldn’t walk around without getting your shoes incredibly muddy. My shoes have taken quite a bit of damage over this tour, and I’m pretty sure I’m going to have to burn them along with all my other possessions at the end of this tour.
Battambang is a small town full of the garage door businesses I was talking about earlier, which makes it fun to walk around. We met a Buddhist monk that night named Mr. Lucky, who guided us to a restaurant named the Asean Beer Restaurant. Mr. Lucky wore an orange robe which is simply an enormous square tube of orange material; he showed us how he folds it around himself in order to wear it as a robe. Mr. Lucky was very smiley and friendly and had good English. He has been a Buddhist monk for seven years, but is young – he is just now finishing high school. He hopes to go to medical school in Scotland and be a doctor. But in the meantime he runs a tourist business in southeast Asia, and told me several times that if I am ever in Cambodia or Vietnam, I should call him up and “you and your friends will be happy.” Mr. Lucky knows the secrets to a fun time in southeast Asia. So, friendly as he was, I couldn’t shake the feeling that he really wanted to be our paid tour guide.
But Mr. Lucky didn’t ask for money, and did lead us to an incredible Cambodian restaurant. The Whiffs bought 13 of us (one was home sleeping) an extravagant meal in which we all ate and drank as much as we could (and some more), and in total it cost 100 dollars with tip. It’s expensive to get to southeast Asia, but once you’re there it’s cheap to live. Our waiting staff did not speak any English, so there was quite a bit of charades trying to order what we wanted. Nearly at the end of our dinner, after we’d stuffed ourselves full (I had the green curry, which was universally agreed to be the best dish there), a couple guys made the (great/terrible) choice of ordering the “fire mountain” out of curiosity. This turned out to be a bump-shaped grill that they lit on the table and provided you with massive amounts of raw meats to cook on the grill or in the boiling broth on its side. I remember there being squid, shrimp, and steak – I’m sure there were some other meats as well. We all tried to eat as much of it as we could, but unfortunately a good amount of food ended up being wasted. But damn, it was quite an experience!
The next day I slept in and then we departed around 11 for Siem Reap. At Siem Reap we stayed at the Victoria Angkor Resort Hotel, a beautiful very high-end hotel with a magnificent pool. The aesthetic of this hotel was focused on wood and empty spaces, something I liked quite a lot. The elevator was an open-air lift made of welded iron – I thought this was particularly striking.
Upon arriving we almost immediately all got into our bathing suits and putzed around in the pool (as per usual, much more luxury than a bunch of college kids should be allowed to have). Later we got changed and were served another extraordinary dinner. After the dinner we sang a concert outside for party guests at the hotel.
One of the most incredible things about this hotel was actually outside it: in the park in front of the hotel were enormous trees full of black splotches. Those black splotches, upon further examination, were bats, big ones – there were hundreds upon hundreds of these bats in this complex of trees. During the day you could hear them squealing outside your front window. But in the evening (in fact, while we were eating dinner) the bats perform a mass exodus from the trees, all going in the same direction (why? I don’t know). A few of us left dinner to watch this for a while, and it was a truly unique sight. There was a continuous stream of bats flapping their wings for as long as the eye could see. Sam Bolen accurately observed that this was a pretty convincing sign of the apocalypse. (The picture may be dim, but all those black specks are bats, and that barely captures the half of it).
The next morning had the real action, though: our tour of Angkor Wat and the surrounding temples. Apparently there are hundreds upon hundreds of these ancient Buddhist and Hindu temples around Siem Reap, and we only saw three of the most famous. First we went to Angkor Thom, which was the capital of Cambodia when it was built around 1200 AD. It was actually a thriving city of over a million people at the time. Now all that remains is the stone – the wooden city is all dust, but the stone temple stands strong in all its detail.
The Angkor Thom temple was the religious center of this thriving city, and it was built after the king decided to switch the national religion from Hinduism to Buddhism (apparently Hinduism wasn’t giving them much success in wars, so they figured they’d appeal to some different Gods who might give them better luck). So the temple is full of and partially composed of twenty-foot tall stone sculptures of the face of Buddha, some with eyes closed, some looking out, all with the same serene half-smile.
The walls of Angkor Thom are littered with detailed murals depicting dancers and gods and stories. The amount of detail remaining in the stonework is truly astounding (check out the picture). You can see the curves of the dancers’ individual fingers and the subtle emotions are clear on each face. These small details combined with the majestic sweep of the thousands of tons of stone piled up into a massive temple complex make for a humbling effect. Angkor Thom may well have been my favorite of the temples we saw, because for some reason I was able to conjure the most vivid image of what it must have been like in its prime. Imagine the 20-foot-tall Buddha faces gilded with gold, painted colors all over the temple, priests and common worshippers flocking the asymmetrical passageways going about their worship, while the commercial bustle of the wooden city surrounds them on all sides. I think especially the asymmetricality and unpredictability of Angkor Thom contributed to how easily I could imagine it as still being an active worship space.
After Angkor Thom we went to Ta Phrom, a temple complex famous for the particular way in which it has been destroyed – it has been strangled by the jungle. While the stone temple walls still stand, some have been crumbled by enormous trees, or merely integrated with the trees, so a tree will grow its roots over a wall or around its base. This is what you imagine when you think of an Indiana Jones or Tomb Raider scene. Thus it’s appropriate that a scene from Tomb Raider was actually filmed at exactly this temple. I spent some time exploring this one on my own, running around, getting lost, ducking between trees, through doorways, over rubble – it was a lot of fun and I wish I could’ve spent longer there.
Finally, after a break in the afternoon, we went to Angkor Wat, which is the crowning jewel of all these temples (though there are hundreds upon hundreds of these temples, which you could spend months seeing). Angkor Wat looks very different. It’s much more formal and symmetrical – its three crowning towers are nearly identical (except the middle is larger), and they clearly bisect the complex. There’s a grand moat surrounding Angkor Wat, a grand wall, and then once you enter, there are three wedding-cake levels you have to climb in order to reach the top. 
The first perimeter is covered with mural work all around, of the same detail but on an epic scale – hundreds upon hundreds of feet all laid with ten-foot tall murals depicting stories about war, about the home, and about the gods. The second perimeter is a grand hallway with stone seats laid all around. I learned that these seats were occupied by worshippers all chanting prayers in unison. I’m sure that resounding prayer shaking this beautiful temple had a pretty strong effect. And then, on the top, there’s a shrine, and you can walk around and see the towers up close and personal.
One feature that I found distinctive was the staircases. The stairs are so narrow and steep that you must climb them with your feet sideways and your head down (to make sure you don’t fall). Apparently this is an intentional feature of the design. The reason is that this forces you to climb the stairs to the shrine with respect and deference towards the gods. Turning your feet sideways is a sign of respect, because pointing your feet directly at someone is considered rude, and bowing your head is a sign of respect, perhaps for obvious reasons. I thought it was really cool that the physical experience of walking up the temple stairs automatically puts you in a respectful and deferential state of mind.
Walking out of Angkor Wat, along the long, grassy “front yard,” I saw a strikingly white horse grazing on the grass. There seemed to be no one nearby who was responsible for the horse. This image stuck in my head. Before boarding the bus back to the hotel, we also saw some monkeys, just hanging out in the trees by the side of the road. There was a pretty cute baby monkey clinging to its Mama.
That night we got to see a traditional Cambodian dance show. The dances were very formal and stylized, but all of them portrayed stories – either epic battles between good and evil gods or a simple courtship between a mischievous young boy and a demure young girl. The music was the best part – there was a young girl singer, simply sitting very relaxed on the side of the stage, who sang beautiful ornamented music of a type I cannot really imitate or describe. She had a throaty but clear tone, and danced up and down scales I barely understand with an incredible agility and versatility. One of the most impressive things, though, was how the dancers managed to keep their headgear on while dancing – some of the crowns they wore were a foot tall, topped with many ornaments and delicate spires. I probably couldn’t have kept one of those balanced even while standing still, but these dancers did it while dancing.
In the meantime, the Victoria was really spoiling us rotten. The General Manager either really liked our performance or was just feeling generous, because he comped us all the food and drinks we could ask for as well as two visits to the spa. I got two different massages – the shiatsu massage was by far the better one. I got my muscles pounded and stretched six ways to Sunday, and felt really awesome afterwards.
Thus it was with great reluctance that we departed the Victoria that Wednesday to fly to Bangkok. We had an overnight layover in Bangkok before our early morning departure for Tokyo the next day, so we got rooms at an airport hotel called the “Convenient Resort” (many jokes ensued about what was and was not convenient about it) and went out in search of dinner. We ended up at a Thai restaurant across the street which was fairly obviously not frequented by a bunch of American college students. Since in all of our time in southeast Asia we’d been asking for spicy food and not getting it, several of us ordered curries or other dishes and asked the waitress to make them very spicy. We got exactly what we asked for. My chicken curry was the spiciest dish I’ve ever had. Each bite felt like taking a shot of tequila. My mouth was burning, I was sweating terribly, tears streaming down my face, but above all I felt an adrenaline rush like no other. I was very proud of myself for maintaining this intensity of spiciness for at least 20 minutes and most of my dish (though I may have ordered two or three extra helpings of white rice). Stephen, Josh, and Sam Bolen were right there with me, especially after they all ate the raw spicy red pepper together. Bolen was fine (I’m convinced he doesn’t have taste buds), but Josh and Steve were right there with me in Pain Town. But it was a lot of fun, and on the way out a table of locals all gave us the thumbs up for braving the spices.
The next morning, after very little sleep but with a surprisingly settled stomach, I boarded our flight to Tokyo.
I CAN'T WAIT to see you running around and falling over in a translucent ball on the water. Seriously I am so excited.
ReplyDeleteAlso, next time you see a cute baby monkey, take a picture please.
I approve of this blog entry: detailed, amusing, thought-stimulating once again.
Miss you!
Also, I am reading diligently. Keep posting, pig.
ReplyDelete