Penultimate, and ultimate

You know you are tired when you find yourself veering toward the sidewalk handicap ramp because you can't lift your feet six inches to mount the curb. You know your mosquito bites itch when you have given up on your organic tea tree oil and are buying the hardcore anti-itch lotion at 7-11. And you know it's your last full night in Thailand when you are shelling out $15 (in Thailand!) per drink to be at the Sky Bar, on the 64th floor roof of the State Tower, just to have breathtaking 360 degree views of the city and full moon. 

This being SE Asia, there is not really any guardrail or much besides 4 feet of glass between you and the ground 64 stories below, so you get lean over the edge with your drink and watch the lights, boats, and traffic. Maybe not the best idea after 14 hours of walking (over the entire city!) when your balance is not the steadiest. But it was a great close to the day. 

This post is short since I need to go collapse in bed, and my last post, since tomorrow I have Massage School all day, May Kaidee's vegetarian party in the evening, and a 1 AM flight home to NYC via Beijing. Thank you again everyone so much, it was great to get to share this as I went and feel you guys near. Lots of love, Jynne.

All hail the king, including tuk-tuk drivers

So in the end, Phnom Penh really redeemed Cambodia for me. I had great fun buzzing around the city on the backs of boy's motorcycles, who would take me anywhere for $1, so I did a grand tour - the riverside, the wats, the markets - my favorite was the medice market, where stalls sell all sorts of herbal and voodoo cures. Buckets of dried frogs, starfish, wood scrapings, leaf sachets - if I knew what they cured, and proper dosaging, I could've picked some up for back home.

I also moto'd to Phnom Wat on a hill overlooking the city, where Cambodians come to have their fortune told. A nice old man gives you a book of fortunes written on palm leaves, which you hold over your head and insert a pointer stick into at random. Then the old man reads you your fortune. (apparently Cambodians will do the stick over and over until they get a good fortune, though this seems to me against the spirit of things). The old man spoke no english so could only tell me in French that my fortune was "tres tres bon," but I got him to write the fortune in my notebook in Khmer script.

I moved on to the genocide museum, housed in the former public school-turned-Khmer Rouge torture facility, was incredibly grim, understated, and extremely moving. It's a fascinating time to be here in Cambodia because the leaders of the Khmer Rouge are only now finally being brought to trial - the trials literally started just last week so they are all over the papers. There is an unease about all this, maybe as in post-war Germany, as so many people here actually were soldiers in the KR and perpetrators of their own people's genocide, now turned everyday civilians. The museum had a great exhibit room dedicated to this population.

After more exploring, I spent my remaining Cambodia time to Le Hotel Raffles, a super luxurious colonial-era hotel with stunning facilities, including one of those eternal swimming pools, a live piano bar, and guests actually dressed in white linen. With the hope that all white people look alike to them, I put on my nicest outfit, pretended I was a guest, and headed on in all the way through to the pool area, where I got handed a fresh towel and a glass of sauvignon blanc. Oh, and I had one of the bilingual staff translate my fortune: "Whatever it is you want to do, you can do." A great epigraph for the trip.

But that happy confidence felt a distant memory by 6 PM today when I had a second extremely traumatic entry into Bangkok. The best comparison I can make is if you landed in America on the 4th of July, and your airport bus dropped you at the National Mall in Washington DC just as the fireworks were beginning, and you needed a taxi to your hotel on the city outskirts. Not happening.

It's the Thai King's birthday on Saturday, Thailand's biggest national holiday, and tonight kicked off the 3 day celebration. They have closed down the entire downtown to traffic, and millions of people have flooded the streets. This would be great if I weren't carrying 20 pounds of luggage: I was left to walk, for nearly an hour a half, to my hotel through dense crowds, fireworks bursting overhead, live music on all sides. This was at points hilarious though at most points totally harrowing. I even almost regretted taking that huge, heavy souvenir elephant mug that my drink came in at Le Hotel Raffles. Almost.

In which a difficult morning gets even more difficult

Just when your morning can't get any worse here - you've been forced into taking a 6:30 AM bus to Phnom Penh when you wanted (needed!) to sleep in, which means no yoga and worse, no breakfast at all; dust has been blowing in the bus windows coating your face and bags; the bus keeps violently swerving around slow-moving vehicles and animals; nausea setting in as you've had no breakfast, the bus smell is foul, the swerving incessant; the bus has stopped (finally!) after four hours at a "rest stop" for food which turns out to be a filthy, fly-ridden pit at some dusty outpost where you don't dare eat anything from those scary pots besides the rice - just then, when you are really hungry, dirty, tired, and cranky, you feel an itch and look down, and see that Cambodian children have put a dozen live tarantulas all over your tank top and are shreiking with the hilarity of it.

Okay, so it was funny. Even I laughed, after I got done screaming. Apparently this roadside village is famous for eating tarantulas as a delicacy, and, both live and fried, the poor things are everywhere. I tried to explain that being vegetarian lets me off the hook for tasting spiders but the kids were still very disappointed that "nice lady" got back on the bus without having a taste. "Taste so goooood!" I bet.

Two hours later, after a few days of the relentless tourist-touting of Siem Reap, it was a huge relief to finally arrive in the much more cosmopolitan (relatively speaking) Phnom Penh, take a shower, and have an enormous overpriced but delicious $7 veggie sandwich on a home-baked baguette. At this point I didn't care if that's most people's weekly salary here: I desperately needed the upscale nourishment, and to spend an hour in a stable, spider-free lounge chair.

The city is more lush (e.g. less dusty) than Siem Reap, energetic and bustling (impossible, actually, to imagine the Khmer Rouge evacuating this entire city in 1975, and what the scene must have been like) and has some truly spectacular pagodas and palaces. I spent the afternoon visiting several, including the famous Silver Pagoda, so named for the over 5,000 solid-silver tiles laid over the pagoda floor, each beautifully engraved. This being Cambodia, though, what have they done to their priceless 5,000 solid silver tiles? Oh, you know, just packaging-taped them at every single seam so they lay flat. It'd be like if the French duct-taped the Bayeux tapestry to the cathedral walls. Crimminy.

I then headed (of course) for the FCC for a mojito and an afternoon reading editions of the Phnom Penh Post, which included reports on everything from the Cambodian elections to Tiger Woods apparently having some late night car accident, and the Saints MNF victory. Glad to be up to speed! The FCC here (for those who have seen The Killing Fields, it is featured prominently) is a shabbier but more characterful version of the Siem Reap location; here the black leather loungers are all cracked, and the white walls are faded yellow from years of cigarette smoke; but you still have the atmospheric balcony, spinning fans, and sunset over the Mekong River (it's down here too!).

I closed the evening with a massage from a blind person: an NGO down here trains those blinded by landmines to be masseuses. It was an incredibly intense (good intense!) experience, as I could feel how present she was the whole time, having to feel her way around my body, and her knowledge of pressure and touch was outstanding, as you might expect.

Tomorrow, a visit to the actual Killing Fields, and the genocide museum; then I am off on a short flight to Bangkok around 5 PM to close out the trip. And I think today was the memorial for Martin's mom Susi; I am so sorry I missed it and was thinking of you guys today.

The doctor is in, but the freizes are out

Just back from Dr. Fish! What, not familiar? For $2 you lower your legs into a tank full of thousands of pirannha-esque minnows, who descend on your feet and eat away all the dead flesh. You even get a free beer while this goes on, I think to take the edge off the panic. I watched one fish work its way down the side of my foot like it was a corn of cob. The whole scene was prototypical Cambodia: the fish tank "spa" out on the street in front of a noisy Khmer bar, and in front of the fish spa, a band of limbless landmine victims playing those atonal single-string violins we often hear in the subway.

Speaking of which, I should quickly mention Cambodia's horrifically violent recent history. The aftermath is omnipresent: military and police linger uneasily everywhere here, and many people - from babies through adults - are blinded or missing limbs from landmine explosions, which continue to explode all over the country. It is estimated that over 3 million landmines remain uncleared from the farms, fields, and countryside - laid in the 1970's first by the US and then by the Khmer Rouge. I visited an incredible landmine museum run by Aki Ra, a former Khmer Rouge turned humanitarian, who is now the country's leading landmine defuser and also runs a boarding school for children maimed or blinded in recent years from explosions. Most say they picking up what they thought was a toy. The most heartbreaking part of reading all the kids' stories is that they all say how sad they feel when they think of their families - not because they miss them - but because, thanks to Aki Ra, they "eat so much better food and wear so much better clothes than their brothers and sisters and parents." Cripes.

Anyhow, I arrived at 5:30 AM at Angkor Wat (waved through by police) to see the legendary sunrise: the enormous temple and distinctive beehive towers are reflected in the moat as the first pink and red light emerges. Beautiful, yes. What stunning photos of this event don't show you is the 100s of tourists all positioned on the front gate, cameras snapping, and the touts running back and forth pushing coffee, eggs, postcards, water, bracelets, puppets, you name it. Always quick to flee my fellow tourists, I made a long hike to the backside of Angkor, and enjoyed the rest of the sunrise alone save the company of an enormous troop of monkeys, which was much more to my liking. Plus their funny monkey poses silhoutted with the beehive towers, as the blinding sun came up, made for better photos anyhow!

I then made it through 9 of the most famous ruins and temples before officially having my temple nervous breakdown, close to 11 AM. The moment came in Preah Kahn. I'm a fan of Vishnu as much as the next guy, but sometime around the 9th temple's 137th restored frieze depicting the puranas, and all Vishnu's arms started to make me dizzy. I began desperately searching for an exit (in the hot sun, clamboring over huge collapsed temple stones) when an Australian man nearby commentedto his wife "gosh, you could spend 2 days just in this temple alone, couldn't you?" Ahhh! No, I could not! Help me Mr. Kuhn!

Safely rushed to the nearest foot massage parlor, I recovered my strength and decided that for all Angkor Wat's majesty, and the dozens of amazing eight-foot faces carved at Angkor Thom, and the rose jewel of Bantay Srei, none of it holds a candle to Ta Prohm, my favorite temple from yesterday. All the restoration work on so many of these temples has a way of making things just slightly too sterile for me - I know others will disagree, but I prefer the crazy, raw, jungle-eaten lost temple of Ta Prohm. Post-massage I headed back to Ta Prohm to enjoy the enormous tree roots and mysterious tunnels and courtyards once more.

Later this afternoon, Mr. Kuhn took me to the Cambodian idea of a "crocodile farm," e.g. a big wooden box filled with two dozen unhappy crocodiles for tourists to look into and scream. We then headed out to Tonle Sap lake for sunset, which is a wild phenomenon - it's nearly the size of our own Great Lakes but is only a meter deep. Basically, it's an enormous bog. There are entire "floating villages" harvesting fish and fauna of people who live out there year round, and watching the sun set while they all began lighting their lanterns and fires on their small houseboats was beautiful. Apparently this was featured on the Amazing Race so perhaps some of you are already familiar.

The end of the day found me back on the FCC poolside lounger for happy hour, again. What can I say, this is my 2nd of 3 chances to hang at the FCC! And you can be sure I'll be there tomorrow too - except tomorrow at the Phnom Penh location. The six hour bus ride from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh begins at 7 AM tomorrow so I'm off with my freshly nibbled feet to bed.

Oh and last night's crocodile did die. The moral of the fable was something to the effect of "know your place" and "don't be ungrateful." Just the sort of message you hope to receive before bed from your hotel owner!

Post eighteen, which is full of mazes and discoveries

I arrived this morning in Cambodia, which appears to be the Iowa of SE Asia, flat, treeless, hot, rural, a lot of cows, and roadside stands selling root beer - or, cane sugar beer in this case. The only thing missing are my relatives! I was en garde, having been warned so much about the poverty here, and even when my hotel was on hand to meet my 15-minute early plane, for a free ride in a luxury tuk-tuk to the hotel, I was still a bit on edge.

I was greeted by three Cambodian hotel youth who were very concerned about my overheating and insisted I sit down in the lobby before checking in, and enjoy a cool washcloth to the forehead and a glass of what looked like alarmingly dirty drinking water. They smiled and stared, I smiled and stared back, enjoying the washcloth but determined not to touch the cloudy glass. They smiled and stared, and pointed at the glass, and stared, and stared, and finally I caved and drank...oh, lemonade. Whew.

So thank you, Hotel 89 - very little money per night here gets you lemonade, unlimited bottled water, 80 cable channels, free internet, the hottest shower I've had the whole trip, the softest pillows of the whole trip, and a tied scroll containing the text of a traditional Cambodian bedtime story, "The Crocodile and the Six Judges." I'm saving it for bedtime of course, and will let you know what happens to the crocodile tomorrow. It doesn't sound good.

Also $13 gets me a luxury tuk-tuk and private driver Mr. Kuhn for the day, from 5:30 AM onward, at my beck and call. I feel a bit like a colonial queen being toted around in my tasseled tuk-tuk with burgundy cushions and fancy claw armrests, naked children waving at me from the roadside. And Mr. Kuhn, hilariously, refuses to leave my side - I tried to tell him I would walk to get lunch today and meet him in an hour but he insisted on driving me the 2 blocks and then sitting in the tuk-tuk outside the restaurant window...in which I was the only diner, and the waiter likewise just stood next to me while I ate. It must've been exhausting to be royalty, actually; tomorrow I think I'll take my noodles to the bathroom and eat them in there.

Anyhow, today was day one of touring the extensive temples of Angkor Wat (there is only one actual Angkor Wat, like how there is only one Random House imprint, but also exists a greater Random House with many imprints, likewise, dozens of temples from 900-1200 A.D. are spread about an hour apart from the main Angkor Wat complex). I started with one of the furthest afield, Banteay Srei, considered a "jewel" and famous for its rose colored stone and incredible intact, intricate engravings. This was all true, but the temple itself is tiny - just one small main building - and I had a bit of a spoiled "oh, is this all there is to these legendary temples?" moment.

It was the perfect setup for Ta Prohm (google image if you don't know it!), the temple made famous by the A. Jolie vehicle Tomb Raider. Ta Prohm is totally overgrown with spectacularly huge white tree roots, which over the centuries have grown so thick they have prised apart the enormous temple stones. If I had paid attention to my Rough Guide, I would have known in advance that Ta Prohm complex once housed 12,000 people with 80,000 more living on its fringes. Instead I had no idea how enormous it would turn out to be, had low expectations after Banteay Srei, and ended up quite lost deep inside the unending, breathtaking, maze-like courtyards and tunnels.

I can't imagine a better place to be lost: the late afternoon sun sent slanting rays through the palms and overgrown temple doorways, the cicadas and birds shreiked overhead, and the enormous white tentacles of tree roots (enormous! two stories hight!), like so many alien claws, gripped the most staggering temple ruins I have yet to see. Most tourists visit Ta Prohm in morning (I am strategically doing the circuit backwards) and happily it was nearly deserted, so for much of my wanderings I was totally alone in the mysterious temple maze. I stayed till sunset and may go back again tomorrow.

I closed the evening with cocktails in the garden of the Foreign Correspondents Club of Siem Reap, one of the most romantic foreign locales I've been in since the Park Hyatt of Tokyo - too bad this one was wasted on me there alone, with my lonesome notebook and pen. I'd been dying to go here (and even more so the legendary FCC of Phnom Penh, where so much action went down in the 70's) and it met dreamy expectations: the all-white club, shutters thrown open and black ceiling fans spinning, palm trees reaching to a nearly-full moon, white loungers around a reflecting pool, with me on one of them, $5 green fizzy cocktail in hand ("Correspondent's Feast"). All it was missing was some Khmer Rouge violence outside the gates! Maybe next time.

Off to find out the fate of the crocodile, and hit the soft pillow for the night. 5:15 AM wake-up tomorrow to make it to Angkor Wat to see the sunrise over the temple.

Farewell, my lovely Luang Prabang

This was my last full day in Laos, and I am saying a sad farewell to Luang Prabang, the most livable city outside the US save Mexico City that I have ever encountered. The combination of cheap luxury, stunning scenic beauty, spicy food, fresh fruits, monks and motorcycling is all any girl could ask for!

I spent the morning motorbiking to the legendary Kouang Xi waterfalls/swimming holes, which I was a bit skeptical about, since I am skeptical about all destinations mentioned in tourist guidebooks, and also not the biggest waterfall person. It's water, and it's falling, folks! But I am SO glad I went, and SO glad I did the slightly uncomfortable clothing combination of motorcycle gear/swimwear. Plus it was my big laundry day ($1 for all your clothes washed in two hours) so I had very limited clean clothes leftover to choose from already. Let's just say I made sure no photos of me in my outfit were taken today.

Much like how no one photo can capture Amsterdam's endless beautiful rows of 1600's townhouses, no one photo can show you the beauty of Kouang Xi's endless crystal blue swimming holes, descending one after the other, waterfall giving way to swimming hole and again a dozen times, with local Lao frolicking nearby on their Sunday picnics. But I was so happy to have my swimwear and readily jumped on in to join the odd mix of monks, local Lao, and tourists enjoying blue pool after blue pool. I'm not clear on where this water comes from, since ever other Lao waterway I have seen is solid brown mud. Perhaps it is communist government-filtered.

My feet still in pain from my four hour jungle hike two days ago, I biked back to town and indulged in an hour long foot massage in the afternoon, which was phenomenal (Eastern-style with a focus on accupressure points, ahhh) and ran me all of $3.50. A sauna, banana milkshake, jumbo BeerLao, and bungalow balcony nap later ($2 total), I returned to "downtown" Luang Prabang for a fancy dinner to celebrate my final night in town.

I had made a reservation at Les 3 Nagas, Lao's most legendary foodie restaurant (it's even been reviewed in the New York Times!). It's quite expensive by Lao standards (by US standards, about equivalent to Olive Garden) - I had 2 generous glasses of wine and a 4 course Lao traditional dinner for $28. The highlight was the starter soup of tofu and Mekong river seaweed, but the overall lesson is that Lao streetfood (which I had been eating all week long) is just as good as Lao gourmet food, and streetfood sets you back a mere $1. But the 3 Nagas service was extremely sweet, and they did write "Mrs. Jynne" in silver paint pen on a banana leaf, bound to tropical flowers, and tied to a candle waiting for me at my table when I arrived, a personal touch I greatly appreciated. Maybe not $27 appreciated. But oh well.

Tomorrow morning I'll enjoy a final morning market and monk's alms, then board my 10:30 AM plane to Cambodia. I can hardy believe that in 24 hours I will be exploring one of the wonders of the ancient world, Angkor Wat. Internet situation in Cambodia is unclear so nobody (mom!) worry if I am MIA for a bit.

Channeling my inner Steve McQueen

Good news everybody! No footworms. But after that excruciating day of barefoot hiking, I thought my feet deserved a day off: so today became my official first full motorcycle day. $10 for a Honda Dream and a hot pink helmet and I was off on I-13 North toward the China border. (sorry mom, this is all dad's fault, he passed on the DNA).

Looking back on it, Motorcycle Safety School prepared me extremely well for SE Asia motorbiking: I ran over obstacles and handled dirt roads like a pro, and even remembered (and successfully executed!) the technique we practiced for dealing with dog attacks. The only material not covered was 1. Water buffalo - a twofold problem. If sprawled in the middle of the road, veer around it; if a herd crossing, stop motorbike and let them pass. 2. Chicken and elephant right-of-way - the opposite of what you might think. Elephants demurely yield, whereas chickens determinedly run headlong in front of you. This results in them being the squirrels of the SE Asia roadways: splattered twitching feather remains are not uncommon. 3. Goat herds! Okay, so I only encountered one goat herd my whole trip, but I was so thrilled and so busy staring at the goats (my favorite animal! so cute!) that I forgot I needed a strategy for driving through the middle of them until near impact. Happily we all panicked at the same moment, and scattered, intact, in our various appropriate directions.

I'd like to say that motorbiking northern Lao is super badass, but the truth is that animal obstacles aside, it is extremely easy, even on the dirtroads. In retrospect we did vastly harder drills on the Bronx obstacle course for hours on end; whereas driving here in Laos at a consistent speed, on lightly curving open roads, with no other vehicular traffic save the occasional slow moving pickup truck lugging a cow, is no problem at all.

I biked for seven hours to get as deep into northern Laos as I could in a day, following some of the trails I read about on the Biking the Golden Triangle message board. It was a mix of paved and dirt roads, through the beautiful Lao mountains, hugging the curves of muddy rivers, and through all kinds of tiny villages. I see why bikers are so crazy about it - you see, feel, and smell so much more - the hibiscus bushes, the coal fires, the buffalo poop, the laundry soap, the fish grilling on a flame.

I stopped at the Nam Ou caves, where broken images of the Buddha are disposed of from wats all over Lao in ghostly riverside caves, and at a village famous for its Lao Lao Whiskey - they float dead scorpions in it, for flavor or dramatic effect I'm not sure, but the flavor and the effect are equally frightening. Low on gas somewhere deep in the mountains I began to panic having, well, NEVER seen a single gas station here, but eventually figured out that the local village stores sell not only water, grilled fish, and cigarettes, but also buckets of gas. I filled up for $2 and was back on my way.

The only part of driving my bike that was a challenge was, embarassingly, getting it started. Unlike the bikes we drove at Motorcycle School, this had a pump-kick start that I couldn't master for the life of me. So each time I stopped (for water buffalo herds, bathroom, vistas, town visits) I had to flag down a local to restart my bike, much to their amusement. Or maybe it was just a farang in a hot pink helmet making them laugh. Each time I studied what they were doing until finally by mid-afternoon I had it down - shift into neutral, pump the kicklever, give it a little throttle at the sweet moment AND a slight push forward, and, vrooom! It was a relief to not have stopping create such a scene anymore.

Tomorrow: biking to find Henri Mouhot's grave. He died in Luang Prabang when he was only 35 years old, and is buried somewhere outside town. Also by the way thank you everyone who is reading and commenting! It is really nice to feel your presence and support over here on the other side of the planet.