Day 4: The Monsoon hit SE Asia

Today is time to leave Cambodia, which is sad, but having seen most of the Kingdom of Angkor in no time flat meant that we were ready for our next adventure. We packed and blogged, then had a few hours to kill before heading to the airport.

Drinks on the roof: We had two Cambodia beers left in the fridge so after checking out, we went to the roof. There was a little elevated area where we hike up above the rest of the pool-folk to what seemed like the proper vantage point for our last beer in Cambodia. 

Frequent relaxer's card: We went back to Lemongrass spa--Travis for a Khmer massage and Nicole for a "Laotian fresh multivitamin" facial.  What they meant by that was just rubbing food on her face for an hour would make her more youthful. Nicole likes to rub cheese enchiladas and baguettes all over her face already, but hopefully this will be more beneficial for her skin. 

Last Cambodian meal: About to sprint to the nearest tuk-tuk to avoid heavy rains, we spotted a decent looking restaurant and remembered one of our favorite things to do is to just randomly try restaurants we see passing by.

The illustrious Damnak Khmer - our last meal in Cambodia

Nicole had some yummy steak and veggie kabobs with pepper sauce...so good that she sequestered the waiter to explain the recipe in his best broken English. Apparently the sauce of all ages is...wait for it: pepper, sugar and lime juice...legend...dairy. Travis wanted to have one more Amok, and it was good as usual, but sadly he ate it too fast and we couldn't snap a picture of the beautiful banana leaf-wrapped presentation. 

Onto Laos: Our favorite driver, Mr. Ra, took us to the airport and I snapped another picture in an attempt to show you how beautiful the international terminal is...right before the rain kicked up a notch.

We shopped at the fancy airport yet didn't buy anything other than some Cambodian ice cream (decent but not a must-try), but we really wanted these shoes:

Arrival in Luang Prabang, Laos: Its dark and rainy, but we breeze through visas and immigration and head to our hostel. It's "quaint" in the lobby with very nice Laotian staff, but when we get to the room it's a little bit dirty for our liking. As in, they didn't really clean it in the past few days/weeks/etc. Since the rain subsided, we left our bags and went out to see the town. The night market was ready for the rain with tarps everywhere, and since the Laotians aren't very tall it meant Nicole breezed through while Travis dodged, ducked, dipped, dived and dodged (sic) his way through the market. Cool stuff and a huge market, but we're on a mission in search of food...at least Travis sure is. We forego the visit to the tour agencies our guidebook recommended because Travis assured Nicole they'd be open late, and we proceeded to a little spot for dinner called The Garden Restaurant. Travis went right for the Fish Mok, a Laotian famous dish of spiced/steamed fish in a banana leaf, and Nicole had some Chicken Marsala.  The Fish Mok looked like fish spam, but tasted pretty good with a weird texture. So after all of the excitement about the Laotian food Travis was enamored with the Indian food Nicole ordered and proceeded to eat most of hers. We then went to the tour offices which were closed. Travis is deemed no longer a reliable source of knowledge when it comes to Laotian business practices. 

Laos "Full House" bar: On our way home we walk towards the bar district (aka 4 bars in one block that have an 11:30 curfew), we accidentally crash a family party. Picture this: we follow loud ("lao'd?) music and voices up a ramp, only to freeze when we see a family of about 12 Loas just enjoying what must be a festive Thanksgiving dinner. We try to sly-ly turn around and they spot us and cajole us into coming in for a beer. It's seems to be a functioning restaurant, but it's just the two of us and this family...which is kind of aaah-some. The ring leader introduces us to his adorable 3 year old daughter who is kicking a soccer ball around with two other toddlers (toddlao).   He then proceeds to show us his pile of giant empty bottles of BeerLao, and explains that 'Lao people drink too much'
and he's had 6 of these. In a way, he was calling us out for only having one bottle. Anyway, we've now been accepted to the tribe and were given a key to the city.

Heading home: Given the state of our current place (and inconvenient locale), we fought our fatigue in order to check out a few places, both inside and outside of our budget.  The outside-of-our-budget places sure are fun to see.  We found two we loved in our budget with availability, and one called Apsara said we could check in early. We walk past the bar district and arrive at our lame duck hostel and call it a night. Happily, we will be checking into a our new place first thing in the morning. 

Day 3: Angkor Wat Sunrise

Temple Ticket Booth at 5:00am

The day started at 5am, but the morning at Angkor Wat was amazing... 

The Race to Sunrise: The picture is blurry, but we were at the ticket counter with a few hundred people at 5:10am. From there we joined the tuk-tuk race to Angkor Wat. It felt a little like the Cambodian version of Black Friday with everyone racing to get a good spot with a decent view of the majestic sunrise.

Angkor Wat: Pitch black we were thankful Travis bought a cheap flashlight and brought it this morning as we trounced through the temple ot position ourselves for sunrise. 



Angkor Wat at Sunrise



 Already 3 rows deep, we found a spot where Travis could see over the crowd and Nicole could reach her camera high enough to see over the crowd. The crowd was not without drama as people tried to push their way to the front for a good shot. A few verbal sparrings took place around us, including one with a French man that Travis and an Aussie felt compelled to deny entry. The chinese pushed their way through, the French tried to make up stories to get their way through, and the British politely asked if they could crounch in the mud in front...meanwhile the Aussie man had a nice way of telling people off since he'd been there since 4am. The sun finally came up and we migrated through the temple in Tracole style, while the rest of crowd snapped a million more photos. One cool site was the thousands of pink flowers on lily pads in the lake in front of the temple.

Angkor Thom: Told it would take an average of 2 hours to tour wonders and relics of this area, it was a bit anticlimatic, but still pretty cool. This temple had less restoration and so we trekked through fallen columns to find the entrance. We were greeted with incense, a thread bracelet and few words for good luck. Around Angkor Thom, there are still several places of worship. We were most interested in see the "elephant temple" which turned out to be something of a gazebo with trunk shaped objects shooting out of the roof and a statue of worship below. Enough templing, time to head back and explore the town on foot.

Exploring the Market: We haggled at the local market and found Travis some t-shirts. We looked at some picturesque paintings and passed an usual amount of gem stone shops. After we exhausted all the market had to offer, we found a cool spot on the corner called the Red Lion, where we grabbed a bite to eat for lunch while street performers stopped in front of our table to throw knives and play with fire.

Another Massage: Of course, the day would not be complete in Cambodia without another massage, so we headed back to Lemongrass Spa for round 2 of massages. After all, it is vacation. :)

Poolside Drinks: Thorougly relaxed when we returned to our hotel, we took a short siesta and then made our way up to the pool for some afternoon cocktails. The pool was filled with hotel patrons, and Travis spent hours trying to surmise their home country based on the language they were speaking. It was then we decided that life doesn't get much better than listening to music, sitting by a rooftop pool, having a couple drinks. Even as the sun went down, it stayed warm enough to continue to enjoy the awesome setting.

Travis Enjoying the Soup

Cambodian BBQ

Cambodian BBQ: We had been talking about this for days, and finally we made our way to Cambodian BBQ. Your order family style with a choice of 7 varieties of meat or 15 varieties of meat. While kangaroo and snake seemed interesting, we opted for the limited selection which included ostrich and allegator. After a bit of time, the waitress brought out a ferociously hot stone to heat up the grill above. There is a chunk of pork fat sitting atop the grill and a moat of broth that they add noodles and fresh veggies to make a soup. The assorted meats come in a divided platter with picture labels on toothpicks to identify the meats for grilling. From there it becomes a DIY meal. We were surprised that even usually gamey food like allegator were pretty delicious cooked this way. This was our favorite meal of the trip so far.

The Temple Club: We decided to check out Pub Street...we were drawn to the music playing from the Temple Club so we went in and grabbed a drink. They have this great happy hour special on cocktails that is 2 for 1 but it is only from open to close. We paid a slight premium for name brand alcohol and filtered ice, but we felt it was worth it to save ourselves from gnarly hangovers and giardia.There was  fun energy here with a pool table and dancing - and some combining both.

Day 2: Seeing the temples

We arranged for a Tuk-Tuk driver, Ra, to pick us up at 8am for a full day of temples.  We planned to see the #1 sight, Angkor Wat, on day 2 because we didn't want everything else to be a let-down.  We'd see about 5 today, and Nicole and I have a similar style so we go pretty fast.  We read a bit of the history of King Jayvarasham VII who built many of these (note:  I just called him "JAY" so I'm not sure how the rest of his name was spelled), as well as some of the stories.  Fascinating to me is that there were about 1 million people living in this area and each site was basically a city within the empire.  They are only a 5-minute drive from one another, but in a time with no vehicles it's understandable that the neighboring cities are about 3-4 miles away.



Tuk Tuk Selfie



We had to drive past Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom on our way, so we got a sample of the beauty of these places. First we saw Preah Khan.  We really liked this one and took a lot of pictures.  It had a long history of king Jay that we read.  Not much else to say until you see the pictures, but one interesting fact is that one end was built for Buddhists to enter, and the other for Hindus.  It has a Vishnu statue for the Hindus and some other features, so you could worship in your faith by whichever entrance you took.

Next, we saw Neak Pean.   This was in a way one of my favorites because it was unique and simple.  The Lonely Planet book says "If Vegas ever has an Angkor-themed pool, this would be it."  We walk along a long, wooden path over a lake, past a band playing cool Cambodian music.  More on the band later.  We continue on and Nicole points out the very astute reality that this type of standing water in a 3rd-world country is the type you read about with flesh-eating microorganisms (don't critique my poor biology lingo), so she was a little concerned about falling in. We forge ahead, dodging the Asian tourists stopping for many pictures and observing a couple of their hats in the water.  The walk was very pretty if you can ignore the thought of falling in.  The destination is a tower, which apparently had an "anthropomorphic" fountain in the 12th century.  The tower would shoot water in four directions into four pools, and the ''healing fountains'' were an elephant, a human face, and two others I don't remember.  It may not have been breathtaking, but still cool to look at, and I liked to reflect for a minute on how people used it 900 years ago.  This was basically their doctor:  I believe they would bathe in these pools when they were in need of healing.  Now we've adapted the idea that deathly ill people should stay out of the pool, but to each their own.



Pre Rup

We then went to Ta Som, which we liked...but it started to look similar to the others.  Afterwards, we headed to Pre Rup, which was more of a platform with great views.  We really liked this one because it was more open and we could pose like lions on the stairs.  More of a golden color instead of the grey, and plenty of light, and five upright structures on top of the flat upper area. These places were full of really cute kids and others selling stuff, so we quickly learned how to say "No thank you" (Te Ah Kun)  in Khmer, which is helpful and sometimes enough to get them to stop following you. 

We took a long drive to Bantaey Srei, the red temple.  The coolest part was the drive:  Gorgeous farmland mixed with palm trees, houses on stilts and villages all along the way.  The diverse housing was simple yet clean, the people, although poor, seemed to have their basic needs met and looked very happy. What we really noticed was that there wasn't trash all over like you see in most 3rd-world countries.  We passed several primary and secondary schools and saw many children walking, bicycling, and motor bike-ing to school. We saw women heating up stone Cambodian BBQs, and people with beer posters on their houses, cows, chickens, dogs, naked cambodian babies and an occasional monkey or two were just hanging out.

Bantaey Srei was pretty neat, and the entrance was pretty fancy, but we were getting templed-out.  We dodged the umbrella-armed French tourist bus group and made our way through pretty quickly.  The red stone was cool, as was the fact that this was about 200 years older than Angkor Wat.  Seems they built this village, then made their way the 25 km towards Angkor as the empire grew.  Nicole got some pics of three adorable little girls giggling in an ancient window, while a boy jumped over them and tried to steal the spotlight.  We guys are the same at all ages and nationalities.  We had a quick lunch of pineapple fried rice because the "overpriced tourist trap" food was like $6/plate.  How could they gouge us like that! ;)

On the way back we asked to see Ta Prohm because in 4 1/2 hours we were already done with our expected stops.  He takes us to another temple on the way and we say "no that's okay" as it looked just like Pre Rup to us.  Ta Prohm was different because it was the "tomb raider temple" with a tree growing right out of it.  Roots all over it. Pretty cool spot.  We took a half-mile walk through a pretty tree-lined trail to get there, and listened to the loud screech of Cicadas all the way.  It was a nice temple, but like many of these was being restored so we were able to see it quickly and head out.  On the way back a policeman showed up and the 8 year-old kid trying to sell us postcards took off on a dead-sprint into the woods (barefoot no less). 

Happily we head back, and decide to not be ambitious and go to Angkor Thom today.  It's hot, as Ra advises us.  Ra was a really sweet man (as most Cambodians seem to be) and had cold towels and cold water waiting for us at every stop. We'd always pan the gaggle of tuk-tuks for our guy and then see a giant smile as he came walking out to reveal himself.  So at around 2:30 we get back into town.

THE MASSAGE.  So this is part of the wonderment of SE Asia:  The cheap massage.  Instead of the $8 hour at our hotel, Nicole finds a couple places in our guidebook.  One is right by the restaurant we wanted to visit at 5:30. So we head to the Lemongrass Massage, and are greeted with tea made from lemongrass & ginger...then we hike 2 flights of steep stairs after a foot cleaning.  With relaxing music playing in the air conditioned room we entered, the atmosphere was serene and the traditional Khmer massage was awesome...Travis fell asleep, as often happens. When we return downstairs, Beale tea (used as treatment for loss of appetite and some fatal disease like tuberculosis - not quite as tastey as the lemongrass but a nice way to ease back into civilization) is waiting for us as we complete our comment cards. It was an 'expensive' one at $12 for 60 minutes, but they were pros.

We find a couple of backpacker-type bars and Nicole picks the one playing Adele, and we're happy to be in a familiar setting.  Just a bunch of people with nothing urgent to do, having a local beer or two. 

Siem Reap Bar

We decide it's time for dinner and get lost in the tangled circle of streets and alleys now that it is dark.  We pass a couple places full of lawn chairs facing 8 TVs, and Travis is still wondering why. We pass a restaurant with a poorly-translated subtitle "Satisfactory food" and Nicole captured the moment.

We finally find our restaurant "Sugar Palm" and are happy we did because we saw Andrew Lau's doppleganger.  Cool atmosphere, and some good local fare.  We had a marinated steak salad that was awesome, and a fish Amok.  Amok is the local curry, and it's like a slightly-thicker curry than Thai.  The whitefish was very light and fluffy and just tasted great.  It should be noted that Travis loved fish amok a little more than Nicole did...but we were happy with the meal.

Apsara dance show:  We post up at a bar called The Temple that has a 2-hour Apsara dance show which is basically a band playing while a group of ladies comes out and does 5-7 dances, each in 5-10 minute bursts with different outfits. 



The Coconut Dance

 Travis was excited to see "The Coconut Dance," but disappointed that rather than wearing the coconuts they were oddly caressing them and banging them together for our musical pleasure.  The Peacock dance was kind of cool too, with both male and female peacock, which should be noted is not biologically accurate.  A lot of the women wearing those gold hats that look like little temples, and they do this crazy thing bending their fingers and feet in weird ways. Then they had some more lively dances, but most were pretty slow and more like yoga than the up-beat stuff you'd see in say a latin country.

We had a couple beers on pub street, chatted up a South African chef who works at the Sofitel and just moved to Cambodia 3 weeks ago, then called it a night.  We're waking up at 4:30 am tomorrow to see Angkor Wat at sunrise!

Day 1: The voyage to Cambodia

Day 1: The voyage to Cambodia

Monday, November 25, 2013

The Logistics - we traveled through Vancouver, where we had a 5-hour layover, then a short stop in Hong Kong, then we arrived in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam Monday morning.  Nicole's status was a God-send, as we were able to use the Cathay Pacific lounge at both Vancouver and Hong Kong.  I really took advantage of the free food and drinks, and in Hong Kong we were able to shower and everything...which makes for a world of difference in a 2-day trip.  Because of this, we felt pretty good when we arrived in Vietnam.



Banh Mi



Streets of Saigon

With about 5 hours to connect, we checked in for the flight and just took our carry-ons to the same part of town we stayed in back in 2010.  Had a 333 at the airport and another beer at the familiar bar "GO2" in town, ate a Banh Mi sandwich from the street vendor, looked at some beautiful oil paintings and clothes...then went back to the airport. 

We were both pretty happy to break up the travel with a little visit to a familiar, and fun, part of Vietnam.

The scenery on the flight was pretty amazing (over the lake between Phnom Penh and Siem Reap), and the airport was gorgeous Khmer architecture.  Vietnam immigration had been a little intimidating...but Cambodia was different.  EVERYONE needed a visa, and it was a well-oiled machine:  You give them the form and $20 USD and there are about 15 of them lined up and they just pass your passport down then call your name at the end.  There were about 100 people in line and we were done in 10 minutes tops!  Pretty amazing.

The Alley

Siem Reap is surprisingly clean, safe, and full of gorgeous buildings.  The hotels are all magnificent, even our "mid-range" spot caught my attention before I knew it was our hotel.  The hospitality was great--everyone has a BIG smile.  The downside is their English is limited which makes it hard to say "could you throw in a tour at half-price like we saw online" or that sort of thing.  But hey, lets consider it part of the charm.  It was reasonably late arrival at say 7:30pm so we went to the rooftop pool happy hour and had a local beer and Travis slowly began to fade.  We searched high and low for this place called Chamkar, a vegetarian Cambodian restaurant recommended in Lonely Planet.  We found it on "the Alley" which was in the Pub Street area.  Pub street is lined overhead with upside-down yellow umbrellas and huge neon "Pub Street" signs.   Bars and restaurants everywhere.  We didn't expect this type of nightlife, but it's a blast.  Being pretty tired after a long trip we ate some decent-but-not-amazing food, went and saw the cool night market then went home. Tomorrow we have a long day of temples!

Cambodian jogging and a quick update:

Hi all! We're safely in Siem Reap and have so much to tell you already about the gorgeous airport (not kidding), the nightlife, the rooftop pool and bar...and our trip across the planet to get here.

We're up early to take a jog through town, then at 8 we start a 10-hour temple tour followed by a great Khmer dinner and maybe pack in an apsara dance show and a massage!

Hey everyone,

Yes this is a real blog. We're making the last calls we can make until 12/7, so we'll be living on Internet blogging and emails for a while now. This trip to Indochina is like a journey way back in time: a simpler time...with no iPads or wifi or roads. Although ironically these countries have the wifi and iPads but still don't have a robust network of paved roadways. Off we go! More to come soon I hope.

I believe we're 17 hours ahead so we will arrive in Vietnam at 10am Monday, or about 3pm Pacific time on Sunday. Radio silence till Monday I guess. Wish us luck!  Miss you already (I'm talking mostly to the dog, but that goes for you readers also).