Cambodia, Part I

Capital: Phnom Penh

Currency: Riel ($1 = 4,000 Riel), US Dollar

Language: Khmer

Transportation: Tuk Tuk

1/9-1/13

When we arrived in Phnom Penh, we had been traveling for two days straight, and we finally had a chance to lie down and relax. And we did. We took it easy that night, and most of that weekend, since the most pressing thing on the agenda was a local beer taste-test. Incidentally, in the contest of Anchor vs. Angkor, the latter is without a doubt the superior beer, and it's my understanding that neither is actually pronounced "anchor." Anyway, we found a lot of good restaurants down by the river, which was where all the other white people were going for food. We often ran with the tourist crowd in Cambodia, but since I had only a few hundred Chinese yuan to my name, I had to remind myself that my place was with the backpackers. Luckily, things were pretty cheap by American standards. Five dollars could get you a hostel room or a hot meal.

The first night we went with traditional Khmer food, different from Chinese, but still very Asian in flavor. That was also the night I tried grog. I had no idea what it was, but I really wanted to find out. As I recall, they put in front me a pot of tea, some honey, a few slices of lime, and a shot of rum. I had no idea what to do, so I just poured some tea and dumped in the honey and rum. I don't think they gave me a spoon, so the first sip had a hell of a kick, and the last was a little gooey. After that, we had mostly Western food, a lot of it, since you can't get a real burger in Wuhan.

Most of these restaurants have outdoor seating, which makes a lot of sense with the year-round shorts weather, and as you sit there, you get to take in what little there is of a riverfront. Unfortunately, you don't get much culture, since the only Cambodians around are serving the food or selling books and bootleg DVDs. Several children came up to us as we ate, and we'd say no thanks again and again, trying not to let the white guilt get the better of us. We'd get the bill, which was always in US dollars, and our change would come in both currencies. They don't use coins; instead of a quarter, they'll give you 1,000 riel. It's bizarre, not to mention confusing. And when you get up to leave, there is a chorus of no less than five guys there waiting for you, and they only know one song: "Hello, tuk tuk?" This is an industry of guys sitting around in motorcycle-drawn carriages, calling out to any tourist who might need a ride, apparently not caring that there aren't nearly enough tourists to fill every tuk tuk. We always walked, and thanks to the transportation surplus, we were the only ones.

Our only tuk tuk ride in Phnom Penh was part of a tour offered by the guest house. We got up early to take a trip to the Killing Fields, then a former house of torture (now a genocide museum), and finally a lovely indoor market. Overall, it was a depressing day. If you haven't read up on Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, you probably should. But don't have anything fun planned for afterward. Once all the joy had been sucked from our lives, we said goodbye to the English couple we'd been paired with and went down for a nap. Later, we watched the film version from the early '80s, the one with Malkovich and Sam Waterston, and it really captured the chaos and brutality in Cambodia at the time. After that, we probably had a drink.

I think I'll save the rest of my comments for Part II, but in the meantime, here are some pictures:

http://picasaweb.google.com/kevin.wender/CambodiaPartI

Thailand

Capital: Bangkok

Currency: Baht ($1 = around 35 Baht)

Language: Thai

Side of the Road: Left

1/9

We landed in Thailand at about 1 or 2 in the morning with our hostel already booked. We grabbed a cab from the airport and rode the expressway into Bangkok. We saw maybe one other car the entire time. When we got to the guest house, we had to sort out a small booking mix-up, which was made much easier by the fact that they spoke English. Thai is actually pretty easy on the ears, but not any easier to learn than Chinese. They, too, use a different alphabet. The currency definitely required some mental math on my part, but I was only in the country for about 12 hours, so I wasn't really looking to stretch my Baht.

The room had the bare essentials--two beds and a bathroom down the hall. It turned out to be a good value...I think. We got a few hours of sleep before waking up to check out. It was hot outside that day, and traffic was bad, and nothing looked remotely like winter. I went to the 7-11, which was weird, and then we went back to the airport, which was also weird. This was the same airport that had been besieged by protesters just a few weeks before. It was kind of disappointing to see that operations had returned to normal, that there weren't hordes of people with unintelligible signs hurling unintelligible insults at whatever government happened to be in power that day, but in retrospect, it was probably better that the airport wasn't shut down.

You know what happens from here, more checkpoints, passport stamps, and shoving to get on the plane. (Another flight on Air Asia.) I support my previous statement by saying that this flight had mostly Chinese passengers. I grabbed a sandwich and a fistful of US dollars on the way, which I will explain later, and headed off to Cambodia. I would've liked to stay longer--I hear the country has great beaches--but we had other plans. I promise that I did far more interesting things in Cambodia than I did in Thailand. You'll just have to keep reading.

Southern China

So, I'm back now and busy picking up the various threads of my life--classes, friends, the search for employment--but I'm going to devote the next several blog posts to my recent vacation. Unless something exciting happens here in Wuhan, which I'm guessing it won't.

1/7-1/8

I'll start from the beginning. The Wednesday I left, I still had two final exams to give and all of my grades to record. This is how I motivate myself. I buy a train ticket to Shenzhen and use the departure date and time as my deadline for finishing all of my work. (As with anything schedule-related, the school was pretty fuzzy on when I had to turn grades in.) I gave finals, ran home, and had my travel buddy Cori record my grades while I finished packing. I'd like to think it wasn't all my fault, that my laundry had taken longer to dry than expected, on account of the cold. But who remembers. I might've also been cleaning, not wanting to leave a lot for the rats.

The train ride was fine, aside from the usual Chinese guys sidling up to me, snoring, and hawking up unmentionable fluids. I slept on the narrow bed next to my backpack filled with five weeks' worth of stuff. Cori and I arrived in Shenzhen early the next morning. Already, we noticed a change from the blustery weather in Wuhan. The sun was shining, the air was calm, and it actually felt easier to breathe. We began killing time before our evening flight to Thailand by stopping off at the nearest McDonalds for breakfast. The scene of us trudging into a restaurant with giant backpacks, as if we were grabbing a quick McMuffin before mounting an expedition into the Swiss Alps, was to become a familiar one.

We did a lot of walking, and when that got old, we hopped on the metro line. And when that got old...well...we saw a movie. We had a lot of time to kill. It was a Chinese film, and if that wasn't enough to hamper our interest, it was a sequel. Luckily, action films don't need much translating. After that, we hit the Starbucks. Shenzhen was surprisingly clean and Westernized that way. Later, after dinner, we found a shuttle to the airport and made friends with a Canadian man on the way. He spoke a fair amount of Chinese, said he was also on his way to Thailand, and since our gate was nearly impossible to find, he was a big help. Now let me wrap up the entry with my experience on Air Asia.

Being a low-cost carrier, they don't do jetways. They take all the passengers waiting at the gate and herd them onto a bus, which then drives across the tarmac to the plane. There are no seat assignments. As the doors of the bus opened, I felt the crowd behind me contract, pushing ever harder toward the waiting plane, bursting into a mad dash for the stairs. This is the kind of thing that, as far as I know, happens only in China. I may be wrong, but weren't we all sitting in the same section of the same plane going to the same place? Is the difference between a window seat and an aisle seat really worth throwing elbows over?

I put on my headphones and reminded myself that I'd be in Bangkok by morning.