Well, there seems to be some egg on my face. It’s been over a week (a jam packed one at that) since I’ve blogged. To my credit, I did type up a decent bit of this time, but failed to save it to my computer. Such are the woes of a sometimes blogger.  

I had an early morning leaving Phuket. I got in the taxi around 5am. The flight was pretty tame, I slept through most of it I think. I had a few hours layover in Bangkok that passed without much affair, outside of an overpriced Thai Burger King meal. My seat neighbor was an interesting and classically bubbly Mormon guy who works for an INGO that’s affiliated with LDS. Definitely interesting to talk to, and a good way to pass the hour long flight. However, he did break my streak of sleeping through takeoff. I’d be at 9 in a row now if it weren’t for him. Whatever, I’m not that salty… I don’t think I’d want to join his organization, but haring his experience did make me imagine a career in humanitarian work. Could be cool!

Now to the good stuff. I landed in Siem Reap, Cambodia, and acquired my visa without much ado. It was kind of a fun process, everyone on the flight was filling out all the papers as a little family. I took the shuttle bus to the center and caught a tuk tuk to my hostel. The driver, Zaki, offered to give me a personal, one-on-one tour of Angkor Wat and some other temples, eight hours for only $20! I said I’d let him know, and took his WhatsApp down. I checked into the hostel and found that I could book a sunrise tour through them, including pickup, for like $9 only. So I did that. Pretty hard to turn down. 

My first night in Siem Reap was spent wandering around, eating some great fried rice while sitting in a little plastic chair, and looking around the main market in search for some additions to my funny/knockoff underwwear collection. I was pretty successful! I’ve got quite a few at this point… The town of Siem Reap is very interesitng. My mom visited Angkor Wat in the late 90’s (super brave, they were just exiting a huge war and genocide), and she said that there was a single dirt runway and a few roads around the town, and just a little tourist infrastructure. Now, the whole town seems to be a bit of a playground in which tourists can unwind between their tours of temples. Fair play. The main occupation for men seems to be tuk-tuk drivers, who vigilantly ask each passerby if they need a ride and, upon rejection, if they need marijuana.

The next morning I awoke before dawn and piled into a van with a few more groggy souls. Our tour guide, Mr. Chong called us his family, and throughout the day referred to us as the chong Family. “Okay my family, we have ten minutes here and then we will move on”, “Chong Family, over this way if you please!”It was really sweet. 

The tour itself was mind-boggling. I doubt that I have the proper grasp of any language on earth to do these temples justice. To try and fail would border on insulting, so I’ll share a few tableaus worth mentioning. Watching the dawn break while crossing the bridge spanning the Angkor Wat moat, which symbolzies the pasage from the underworld, to the earthly world, and into heavan. Feeling the sun on my face as it crested the five towers of Angkor Wat. Seeing a monkey steal a fellow tour member’s water bottle, unscrew it, and drink, with the background of Bayon temple’s ancient carved stone faces. Feeling like Laura Croft under the dripping roots of banyan trees in Ta Prohm, where they actually shot scenes in Tomb Raider. Learning so much about Buddhist and Hindu history from Mr. Chong: empathy, sympathy, equanimity, and charity, the tale of churning the sea into the elixir of life, the binding of stone through friction, the use of elephants and bamboo rafts. One structure in Ta Prohm is well known as an echo chamber of a peculiar order. Not by shouting or clapping can one activate the echo, but only by simply taking a deep inhale and pounding one’s chest with strength can one hear the reverberations. So cool. We finished with most of an hour of roaming around Banteay Kdei, which was almost completely devoid of tourists. Most of the temples were over a thousand years old and in remarkably good shape, as well as remarkably open for total exploration. 

We got dropped off back at the hostel, where I napped with vigor. I got a nice little lunch of fried frogs and beer (actually pretty unsatisfying, frogs are like little chicken wings with 1/5 the meat). I still had plenty of day left, so I made plans with Zaki, my tuk-tuk driver for a private tour at sunset. I had the sense we’d seen most of the major sights in the morning and I thought that it could be cool to see some place that’s a little more unknown, I asked if he knew and places like that. He said yes and picked me up a couple hours later. 

We rode for about 30 minutes, well out of the city and into more rural areas. I was really grateful for the chance to see a slice of real, daily life in Cambodia. I don’t think that I’ve ever been anywhere with such a visibly low stnadard of living, with so little wealth. I felt a bit uncomfortable moving through there as a tourist, with mixed feelings of being glad to be able to put money into their economy, as well as a gratitue for being able to have a narrow window into real life in Cambodia. The real treat of the tour was talking with Zaki. He told me about how hard it is to be a tuk-tuk driver, and in general how hard it is to find work in Cambodia. He also told me about his family’s experience escaping the Khmer Rouge. Mr. Chong had told us a good bit about the history, but hearing Zaki’s story was really moving. He was born with only one arm because of the hardships his mother faced. He told me that after the Khmer Rouge killed almost a third of Cambodia’s population, there were only 13 teachers left in the entire country. We spoke about how openly people share their experiences and the need to express these feelings while watching the sunset over long sprawling rice paddies, with a view of the largest lake in South East Asia, and the floating village of fishermen that live on it. 

The next day was relatively mundane, at least at first. I had booked a morning bus from Siem Reap to Phnom Pehn, leaving at 9:30. Unfortunately, after arriving to the bus stop (a stretch of wider than average sidewalk on a bust road at the city outskirts), I learned that my bus would be departing at 11:50 instead. So I got some fried chicken and waited. There’s lots of waitign around in travel. If there wasn’t, this blog may well not exist. The bus ride itself was nothing amazing. I bought some quail eggs and a yummy cake off a woman selling snacks from a big platter atop her head. the driver played traditional music at full blast the entire trip, which ruled out any hopes fo a nap. Other than that, we arrived in Phnom Penh around dusk. I checked into the hostel, dropped my bag, and went out to get a meal. To be honest, my general approach to dining in South East Asia has become to walk around until I see a place meeting the criteria of 1) a good number of locals are eating there already and, 2) there are little plastic chairs. This spot met both criteria, and I was rewarded for the accuracy of my little algorithm with a delicious meal. 

I went back to the hostel and met two of the most memorable characters from my travels so far. Rahoul, a 32 year old welding equipment sales manager from India, living in Dubai, and Liam, a 43 year old self-proclaimed bad school teacher from Ireland, both travelling solo. They were going to find a pool bar and, being a patron of the game myself, asked if I could join in. They said yes, and so we went.

Usually I find solace in the warning at the header of this blog, and I hold back little detail. That night and the next are exceptions to that rule. Suffice it to say, much beer was drinken, many pool balls sunk, and many friends met and made. In sum the first night began with the pool bar, a return to the hostel, another pool bar, a big club with a few mishaps, including a brief departure and gallant return by yours truly, and a brief stop in another club before retiring around 4am. The next night began at a new pool bar, before proceeding to a small club for a while, then a few hours of karaoke in the strangest room I’ve ever been in, again retiring around 4am. Night 2 was joined by Nea and Leak, two lovely Phnom Penh locals we met the night before as our guides, kind enough to drive us around on their bikes! In short, debauchery was responsibly had. It was fun and exciting, and the ensuing sleep-deprived zombie state reminded me why I rarely do this sort of thing. 

In between these two nights I was not idle. I visited S-21, the brutal detention center which Pol Pot and the Khmer Rough used to torture false confessions out of tens of thousands of people before killing them. It was an intense tour, with vivid audio description. Being in the actual places where these atrocities were committed was surreal, and I kept floating off mentally, having to pull back in and remind myself that these terrible crimes really happened to real, loving people, and they really happened right where I was standing. In the evening Liam and I did a sunset cruse along the Mekong River, which flows through Phnom Pehn, and was really nice. For evening, see above.  

The next morning, my last in Cambodia, I went to the Killing Fields, the location of the largest mass graves from the Khmer Rouge regime. Again, I felt the color drain from my emotional landscape seeing this place. It has a haunted feeling. In the middle of the memorial, there’s a large building containing thousands of unidentified skulls and bones found in the area. Words are unable to capture the tragic somber, or at least mine certainly are. I felt in me as if a breath were given to shamefully glowing coals, reginiting into a flickering flame of resistance. People in Palestine, Congo, Sudan, Ethiopia and more places I know not are experiencing the same hell right now, just personalized for their own indiviaul suffering. As I travel now I do not find much I can do, but combined with my visit to Srebrenica, I feel more ready than ever to dive into resistance movements when I arrive back home.