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.
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.
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.
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!
