The misadventures of the gapyap boys

Can I just say first; who even reads this blog? the number of reads for each post can't just be explained by our parents. and who were the 7 people who read a post within 20 minutes of me posting it at 3 AM Melbourne time??
If you're reading this now, I ask of you- who are you??

Disbelief over the readership aside, Siem Reap was a blast; every day was packed with stuff so I had little time to write much of it down, and only now as we're leaving the country have I found the time that will hopefully do it justice!

On our second day we decided to take a day off temples- to stretch out the feeling they create, and also to take advantage of something the lonely planet had told us- that a ticket validated after 5pm could be used to see that evening's sunset from any of the picturesque temple views- and stayed valid into the following day! but more on that later.

We had seen and read about a lot of community projects in and around Siem Reap- charity-run orphanages, fairtrade community partnerships, and the phenomenally challenged grassroots demining movement to name a few. One which caught our eye was called, from memory, "artisans angkor", which offered a tour of their wood carving, stonemarsonry, metalwork and silk farm projects designed to preserve khmer culture and provide hundreds of jobs. The silk farm was fascinating (and I know, it doesn't seem like a very typical thing for two 19 year olds in an internationally known tourist and backpacker hub to go to a silk farm; we shared our tour with two old women from Toowoomba who seemed a little surprised we'd taken the time to go) mulberry bushes are surprisingly tiny trees. we walked through the bamboo huts that made up the production line and saw every step extremely close-up.

One of the big mysteries of silk-farming was solved for me: how they manage to pull off the silk in a single strand. They boil the cocoons to make the strands separate and become softer, then they lightly hack at it with a tool that resembles a nail-covered stick. this rough approach gives them the loose end, which they attach to a spinning wheel and just spin it off the cocoon while they boil it further. it's a little more complicated than that but you get the idea.

The looms, and the complicated and varied means through which they create patterns in the material was incredible.
as hugh succinctly said: "it's just, tangle tangle tangle tangle- scarf."

The project was originally started up with funding from various international sources- in particular, France- but now it is completely self-sufficient and employs hundreds of people in Siem Reap and the surrounding provinces. It is one of many developmental success stories in Cambodia as it recovers painfully slowly from the Zero Years- and this country needs every success it can get.

Afterwards, we hit the markets (relatively touristy compared to the other markets in Cambodia, particularly battambang- the markets here are almost entirely domestic-oriented) and wondered around killing time before 5. we hired crappy bicycles for 50 cents each, and quickly worked out why they were 50 cents (for an extra dollar we would have had gears. another 2 dollars might have bought working brakes) before riding the several kilometres out of town to the archeological park checkpoint.

When we reached the checkpoint, problems soon started to surface. We'd bought a 3-day pass and had already validated the day before, and according to the ticket inspector you could only exploit the free sunset rule by buying a fresh ticket. After a bit of discussion, she added that after 5:30 you didn't need a ticket at all.

In retrospect, her comment really meant that at 5:30 the park and all the temples it contained would close, so the tickets would become invalid and no one would need a ticket. But it was all the hope we needed.

We killed some more time wondering around dirt tracks that served as backroads and happened upon another access road to Angkor Wat, primarily for local use (many people live in villages scattered in and around the temples- possibly a few hundred live inside the old city of Angkor Thom itself, where once a million lived) and lacking a checkpoint. We figured we'd ride in a little early and aim to get to Angkor Wat by 5:30, and use our flimsy checkpoint promise as our bargaining power in the unlikely event anyone tried to stop us.

-in our effort to make it in time we pushed our rusty one-speeds as fast as they could go- as fast, and at brief moments even faster than the overtaking tuk-tuks.
-to keep a cool, inauspicious air in front of the many guards along the access road we donned our sunnies in the failing light- the perfect accesories to dispel any suspicions.

so started two of our Angkor Wat biking traditions, in addition to the perennially delapidated bikes themselves.

Sadly, we were just too late- marred by just a little too much cloud cover, we missed the sunset and even the brilliant red skies that sometimes follow it. nevertheless, we walked against the tides of tourists leaving Angkor Wat by the grand stone bridge that crosses the water-filled baray and into the grounds. Disappointingly the front facade is undergoing rebuilding, so the towers were a little obscured by green scaffolding ("should have made the scaffolding grey like the stones!" -Hugh) but with the time we had we just wondered around the grounds and took it all in. we left the Wat itself for later visits.

The trip back was in the near-dark, so in homage to the Blues Brothers t-shirt Hugh was wearing, we donned our shades and lamented about the distance to Chicago and our dwindling cigarette supplies. From that point on the trip became a little hairy. virtually blinded by the glasses, we tailed buses for their slipstream and overtook tuk-tuks to the enjoyment or often complete surprise of their drivers. My response to anything that added to the chaos was invariably, "I don't have any brakes!" which was true.

and then we had dinner and went to sleep the end.

recent activities update: spent a full day in Battambang, Hugh rested, Julian trawled the markets looking for last-minute bargains for things as varied as bootleg shampoo, bootleg wedding rings, giant peanuts, perms, 24-hour tailored suits, live turtles and fly-covered meat effectively laid out on the street out the front.
I discovered the BEST amok curry in all of cambodia (a dish I have eaten at least once a day since we arrived in Phnom Penh) but couldn't share it with Hugh because he couldn't stomach it. For anyone interested, the White Rose in Battambang. It's also impressive for having Lonely Planet's seal of approval without becoming a tourist hell-hole, maintaining a strong local clientel.
Also discovered a "Laboratoire Human" (eep.) and a supposedly "silent" industrial grade diesel engine the size of a car. We couldn't work out if it really was silent, or if it was just off at the time.
and then we had dinner and went to sleep the end.

So I've been writing frantically about angkor wat but I haven't been posting it because I have no complete posts (and I want my posts complete, dammit!) and haven't had the time to write about where we actually are!
[pre-script: right now we're in Battambang, near the border with Thailand]

Phnom Penh

We spent yesterday and the day before in Phnom Penh- after spending 7 hours on a 5 hour bus route (feeling like we're driving in Australia judging from the length of time the bus spends on the lefthand side of the road), we dodged the crowds of tuk tuk drivers, choosing to walk our way to the first cheap hotel we can find. we find a suitably cheap (and suitably dingy) place with an outhouse and a steel padlocked door, and realise our room overlooks a secluded open-topped bar hidden from the road by 6-storey hotels and homes on all sides.

We wondered down to the shopfronts, two doors down the road, walked into the travel agent/hotel that fronted the bar (everything in Cambodia and Vietnam is a slash something. i.e. "Happy hotel! restaurant/hotel/travel agent/bar/backpackers/massage parlour/purveyor of contraband items/gift shop/internet cafe..." of course not all of those are loudly displayed at the front. but I digress, the bar)

We walked in, got ourselves beers, and were walking out to the back of the bar when I said to hugh, "it's funny, this building has the exact layout of that travel agent we were at" (during our previous visit to the city, we spent most of our 5 hour layover sitting in a hybrid shop waiting for a midnight bus) "they sure do build things exactly the same around here."

turns out it was EXACTLY the same layout.

The front of house, even though he was as drunk this time as he was the last time we were there, remembered us and was so keen to see us he offered us a $3 room. on glancing in the open door behind him (straight from the bar to the room), we decided the extra $5 was worth the luxury.

--

The next day we hired a tuk-tuk to take us to Choeung Ek- the Khmer Rouge killing fields. It was an unforgettable experience. but not like Sapa, or the temples, or anything.

The place had a feeling to it, a feeling that stays with me now and makes it difficult for me to describe it, not because I can't, but because I don't want to.

You go to Choeung Ek thinking you know what to expect, you arrive, you think you're grasping what you're seeing, think you're digesting it.
and then you can't talk about it, you can't walk, you can't think

--

Today we left Phnom Penh for the second and last time. in the mid-afternoon we arrived here, in the provincial capital Battambang. It's refreshingly quiet and lacking in tourists- we were the only non-local people on our full bus (but sadly, not one of the legendary so-crowded-there-are-people-on-the-roof buses, just a big bus with no spare seats)

Hugh ate some bad pasta last night (first rule of food south-east asia- just because it's western food, doesn't make the cooking methods any more hygienic) so he's back to baby stage (eating, sleeping and pooing, with priorities not necessarily in that order), but he'll be right by morning.
It's 11 pm and I haven't eaten.
one day I'll post my thoughts on Angkor Wat. one day soon.

I lost my travel diary, with entries from Paris as well as our trip to North Vietnam, somewhere in transit on the central coast, so this post is as much for myself as you guys because I haven't had the chance to immortalise any of my experiences here or the impressions I have taken from them. after all, that's what this blog is about. I apologise in advance if I go on incomprehensible tangents, make a million typos or just stop making sense at some points, I just want to get it out before I forget this trip.

We've been here in Siem Reap for 4 days now. Deciding to focus on taking it slow here was the best choice of the entire trip- not only did the relaxation of time constraints lower my blood pressure (hugh noticed a lasting change in my behaviour within hours of us deciding not to race to Laos), but this city needs time devoted to it.
Siem Reap is actually really nice. It's full of tourists, and tourism infrastructure (the entirety of downtown is tourist-oriented restaurants, bars, markets, stalls, feet-biting fish tanks (I'll get back to that), travel agents and stores), which is understandable considering it is the launching pad to visiting one of the premier tourist destinations in the world.
That said, the town is great, a lot more laid back than the metropolises of Hanoi and Saigon, and we have a ball riding around and down the 10k or so bitumen road to the temples themselves- we delight in sprinting and overtaking motos, tuk-tuks and buses, putting the shoe on the other foot, so to speak, and it always gets a bit of a dumbfounded or amused reaction. we even had a race with a tuk tuk driver today!
but I digress.

The food is brilliant. we've had Amok, the traditional curry here, named after the importantly included leaf, I think, and the basic coconut green curry, and the ginger curry, and the pineapple curry (all brilliant) and several brilliant deserts all based around the concepts of caramelised banana, pure palm sugar and coconut milk. The curries often come inside a coconut or a half-pineapple- the best bowls I have ever seen.
We ate at a vegetarian restaurant so full of unique dishes (as opposed to the rows and rows of similarly-named and catered "traditional khmer" eateries- some of which serve BBQ snake, crocodile, ostrich... and kangaroo... the word authentic gets stretched here a little sometimes)
anyway, so full of unique dishes that I was so upset we could only eat dinner once that night. My entree was this indescribable mush of coconut and tapioca and a few other things I can't remember, and hugh had stuffed tofu for mains- the name "rediscover tofu" was warranted, it seems. after we finished our meal we talked to a canadian family about food, neighbouring countries, racism, islam and the occupy movement for over an hour! they just wouldn't let us leave!
long story short, this is by far the most touristy city I have ever visited, but it still, a credit to the Khmers, has more than it's share of charm and warmth

But the temples themselves.

We decided a one day ticket was absurd- no one comes all the way here to spend a day glancing at angkor wat! this place is huge!
so we bought a three-day pass (and as you can see, we stretched it as far as we could)

We arrived in Siem Reap on a horrible (don't get me started) night bus at 6 AM and decided, once we had a decent enough looking hotel and tuk-tuk driver, to jump straight into it and hit a day at the temples. the tickets are pricey so for us it was no question- a day at the temples is milked for as much eroded stone, ancient symbolism and pristine views as we can muster.
We'd been force-fed a tuk tuk driver (long story) so we decided to avoid virtually all of the main temples and use the extra range that a tuk tuk has over pushbikes by getting him to take us to the more far-flung temples of Bantay Srei and Kbal Spean (also known as the river of a thousand lingas), and the grassroots "cambodian landmine museum"

we blitzed it to Bantay Srei- the only stop being when our driver went for a piss so we pissed off to the temple we stopped outside and, not knowing anything about it, just jumped into our first angkor experience.

the jumbled piles of stones,
walking under dodgy unstable 10-tonne archways,
the sheer scale of it all,
the apparent reference to every possible religion at once,
as well as this eerie sense that even through the centuries, separate cultures, wars and defacements, the true sense of the temple still shines through all the crap and stops you in your tracks-
all these things prove universal, and it was at this temple (tra trom or some name that does not at all resemble tra trom) that we first experienced it.

Having not had much experience with the other temples was probably a drawback for us on our visit to banta srei; as was having no guide book or tourguide whatsoever. we had a sentence in the lonely planet that said "hewn from a unique pinkish rock, the most beautiful carvings in the whole angkor complex", but that was all we had to go on. sure, we thought it was amazing, but it was bloody hot and we were a little underwhelmed- only in retrospect to I truly appreciate how detailed and well-preserved the minute stone carvings were. I can't even write that stuff down, I mean finely detailed, 10cm high figures, sculpted from rock, after 1000 years, still finely detailed! I mean, what!? how is that even possible??

so then we drove another very long distance, and climbed a mountain trail for half an hour (there is a reason these temples receive far less visitors- it takes too much bloody effort), for us a great fun adventure in itself, until we came upon the Kbal Spean. Essentially the thing that sets this temple apart - I mean aside from the fact that it is located under a river - is that instead of carting the blocks from somewhere else to the temple site, sculpting and then playing elephant-powered sandstone lego, as is the case with the construction of the other temples,
in Kbal Spean, the religious carvings are hewn into the riverbed itself. this included the thousand, or at least a lot, lingas (essentially phallic fertility symbols that turned any water they touched into holy water), and following just downstream of the carving was a 5m or so waterfall onto rocks and a very shallow pool. in the heat of the day, the torrent of holy water in this shady oasis made the climb worth it a thousand times over.
there were about 10 other tourists with us at the river when we went for a dip- definitely those of us who stood under the waterfall had a much better time.

The landmine museum was a fascinating and showstopping look at the effects of the civil war (some 6 million antipersonnel mines still litter cambodia and the effects of those bombs can be seen in their survivors every day on the streets of Siem Reap), and also of the brave grassroots movement fighting to destroy them, one bouncing betty at a time. the museum also had a school and housing for child victims and orphans disadvantaged directly by mines- this seems to be a running theme, any charity with any money helps disadvantaged children. all the local museums, monasteries, things like that. out of the horror of the zero years, many people are putting their whole lives into the recovery of this country.

We managed to extort a visit to a temple at sunset out of our driver, and so we sat on one of the upper levels of tra tram or prah khan or broban, I have no idea, surrounded by tourists, eating two mangoes and an entire bunch of bananas ($2), being offered a "beer for sunset" by a local police officer. the sunset was beautiful- the only one we managed to see, in the end, thanks to either our lateness or thick cloud cover.

Speaking of police, we've also had offers to by policemen's badges and hats, and one crazy situation where a bored cop showed us past the "do not cross" line he was supposed to enforce, up a pile of rubble onto the roof of a temple for the best photos! the police here aren't about false arrests for bribes- they're all about trying to entertain themselves and generally being complacent!

So this is a massive wall of text- and I know I've only done one day and there are two I've hardly mentioned (well, two and a half if you count the time we snuck in after 5:30 when you technically don't need a ticket, to see a sunset we ultimately missed)
but that will come, I promise. Can I just say, though- we visited Angkor Wat itself three times, and it just got better and better. I can't wait to get to describing our last visit!

also, I did say I'd get back to it- we payed 2 dollars each to stick our feet in a big tank of fish and watch them eat the dead skin off our toes-
incredibly weird but so awesome! like being poked with toothpicks, and straws, and, well, being lightly nibbled by small fish. I entertained myself by lauching some of the fish out of the water. they landed back in the water, of course.

I don't want to leave this place- in fact becoming an archeologist in order to remain and visit the temples full-time has become a viable career path- but we're on an 8 AM bus to Phnom Penh.

Sadly, we got to Saigon later than we hoped- partly because we lost a couple of days in Hoi An with my gastro,
but mostly because we were overly optimistic of how fast we can move through the region.
being late meant we were forced to concede we couldn' buy bikes and cycle through the Mekong to the border, our ultimate triumph,
which turned into a blessing in disguise, considering how bloody big the Mekong Delta is and how, well, wet and inhospitable it is to bicycles due to this general abundance of water and lack of solid ground.

So, we took a tour and it got us through the Mekong and across the border.
that being said, however, even that wasn't a very efficient method of transport, with us constantly being put on the wrong buses and in the wrong hotels- our hotel in Mytho was still being built. Our hotel in Chao Doc NEEDED rebuilding. all the more reason to be glad we're in Cambodia! Our entry into this country was rather glamourous- we took a boat up the Mekong, through floating villages, up canals and past countless kilometres of irrigated rice farms. the laidback scenery and transport made for a perfect entrance into the relatively laid-back Cambodian countryside.

Phnom Penh is an interesting capital- while still full of all of the trappings- tourist streets, international hotels, embassies and big impressive palaces and pagodas, Phnom Penh manages to have a 'small town' feel about it- like around the next corner the city will just end and give way to a floodplain of rice paddies stretching into the fog.

It's as though this slower, smaller feel had an immediate affect on us- within an hour of arriving in Phnom Penh, after already booking a "time-saving" night bus to Siem Reap, we decided to drop Laos off the travel plan altogether and focus on spending a more relaxed week totally in Cambodia. What was "bustosiemreapquicklookattemples!oooohangkorWHAT?gottagoplaneflightnewcountrybusbusbusTUBETIMEyayyyyyBUSBUSBUSgonnamissourflightGONNAMISSITAHHHH FIN"
is now "bus to Siem Reap in the early morning, stroll through temples for a few days, lie on a beach for a few more, fly home"
which has left Julian feeling much more relaxed. It's a shame we won't make it to Laos, but the brief time we planned on spending there was an insult to the inherently slow nature of the country.

After a 24 hour bus ride from Hoi An, we made it to Saigon (or, if you want to be patriotic, Ho Chi Minh City. But no one calls it that.)
The trip was surprisingly relaxing- you just lay back and watch the view go by. I got on with my head feeling like a rotten rice paddy and came out at the end feeling fine, somehow!
At the bus station we decided to snub the taxi cartels and take a public bus with a Chinese guy we'd talked with on the bus a lot.
This turned out to be a cheap (bus tickets cost around 15 cents here) and entertaining option- due to New Years celebrations, large parts of the city were shut down so it took us two hours to get to the hotel district. At one point the driver simply turned the bus off and we waited for 15 minutes to get across a two-way one-lane bridge.
I've said it time and again that there are bikes everywhere here- but Saigon makes Hanoi look like a lego town with a few bicycles compared to the number of moto's on the road here. some main streets are simply constant walls of bikes.

Yesterday was spent at the cu chi tunnels- an unmissable destination for both of us but unavoidably and frustratingly touristy. everywhere were dioramas, models, etc, of all of the fighters and weapons. the tunnels themselves seemed nothing remotely like what the wartime tunnels would have been like, but it was still interesting to go. A shooting range offered us the chance to fire some of the guns that were used in the war-
each of us fired a few rounds from an AK-47. It was chained down to the fence so you didn't really get the sense of the weight of the gun, or the recoil, which was what I hoped for, but what I took back from the experience was the sound and the smell- real guns are incredibly loud when they are fired, and the smell of gunpowder was everywhere.

What's interesting about Saigon is the tourist area- they have essentially packed all the foreigners up like sardines into this 3-block district packed with tour agencies, hotels, western-oriented restaurants, western bars, convienience stores selling Tim Tams and western institutions like subway. You only need to walk out of the tourist precinct for 50 metres before the city abruptly changes. all of a sudden there are almost no foreign faces on the street, and restaurants speak zero english.
we had one BBQ-and-rice restaurant welcome us in and offer us a table, then promptly serve us a round of fried chicken and rice and 4 glasses of tea (there were only three of us so we got so confused) it took a good few minutes to say we hadn't ordered anything, so they took it back, only to bring us a round of pork ribs almost instantly. When we did order it was misinterpreted twice. What I'm trying to say here is not that they were clueless or that they should have spoken english, but that it was an hilarious situation at the time, and I found it so interesting that even around the corner from the main tourist drag, there were restaurants that did not cater for non-vietnamese speakers at all- that the segregation of tourists from locals is that strong and enforced. A lot of travellers I have met have all made the same observation- that it seems all of the tourists are taken along the same route and to the same destinations, as prescribed by the government.
behind the scenes, tourism is scrictly controlled.

Sadly we're both feeling crook and we're running out of time so one of our most anticipated parts of the trip- escaping the government-supervised tourist trudge to instead cycle unguided through the Mekong Delta to the Cambodian border- won't go ahead. Tomorrow we'll leave on a tour that follows the same path, but via buses and ferries. It's a shame, but it's too time consuming to attempt it on our own. We chose instead to save some time for Cambodia and Laos, and to come back one day and do this trip again.