Practically exploding with fun

Cambodia

My school was doing some sort of strange field week thing which no one could adequately explain to me; the gist of it was that everyone wore different colors and no one ever came to class; this seemed as good an excuse as any to leave the country for a few days. So I set off early Wednesday afternoon to take care of some visa stuff; apparently to leave the country, I would need some sort of tax form for my teaching income, and to get back into Thailand, I would need a re-entry permit. However, the offices were all closed before I reached them so I opted to just go to the border and wing it.

The border city of AranyaPrathet is about a 5-hour bus ride from Bangkok; I left on Thursday afternoon and arrived about 10 minutes before the bridge closed at 6. I negotiated a $1 motorbike ride the remaining 6km; fortunately, my driver was twice as fast and reckless as any of the others on hand and I reached the checkpoint several minutes before the rest of the passengers.

As is the case with many border towns, Poipet, on Cambodia’s side, is packed with conmen trying to help you arrange visas, change money and get onward transport. I was shuffled on to the bed of a waiting pickup truck along with 20 Cambodians; it was not at all uncomfortable as it was filled with semi-ripe pomelos that made for excellent seats. I listened to the others talk to each other about how much the driver was ripping me off for about an hour, and then decided to claim my rightful seat in the cab (actually I think I paid for 2 or 3 seats). The Cambodian language sounds like a cross between Thai and Louisiana bayou English, but most can’t understand a word of Thai (much like Floridians can’t understand people from Louisiana); this didn’t stop me from using Thai at every opportunity – I spent 2 months learning the language and was not about to let it go to waste.

Despite its bad reputation, I would have to contend that Cambodia is a much safer place than America; back home, putting 21 people in the back of a small pickup and driving 140km over rugged terrain would be ludicrously dangerous and stupid, but here it’s perfectly normal. Unlike in Thailand, drivers are expected to use the right-hand side, but this didn’t really come into play on the road to Siem Reap. Much nearer a dirt-bike track than a highway, it is covered in huge craters, meter-high piles of dirt, and random boulders; navigating this stretch means seeking out the least difficult path, whether that’s on your side, that of oncoming traffic, or in the adjacent rice paddy. To make the experience even more fun, hordes of every class of vehicle from motorbike to road-train are trying to use the same tiny channels of navigable road in both directions, and at the same time, to pass their slower counterparts. The result is an average trip length of 7 hours to cover a distance which, given the complete lack of geography, could theoretically be finished in one.

Despite his earlier promise, the truck driver didn’t actually continue on to Siem Reap but stopped in the rather nondescript town of Sisophon. There wasn’t a whole lot going on here and the guesthouses all consisted of cardboard boxes that residents had set up in their homes, so I was intent to keep moving. Unfortunately, by this time it was the dead of night and due to banditry and the fear of falling into a hole in the road, no one really wanted to move anywhere. I did a little negotiating with the share taxi drivers but couldn’t break the 600 baht mark, so I sat down and had my first experience in Khmer cuisine; this was similar to Thai food but lacked the spiciness and had an added hint of raw sewage that I didn’t particularly care for.

When I’d finished my meal, one of the drivers announced that he would take me for 200 baht. This seemed a bit of a shaky proposition since a taxi in Cambodia consists of any guy with a car and I didn’t know how to identify the road I was on; given that there wasn’t actually anyone driving on the road that night, there was no way to get help if something went awry, so I was reasonably certain that I would never make it to my destination but be robbed and left sitting naked in the middle of a rice patty.

Oddly enough, my driver did go to Siem Reap, and went faster than I could have ever hoped for. He didn’t seem to have the slightest concern for the future of his car as he vaulted over high mounds and slammed down into the myriad cavernous holes. Sitting in the back seat was a bit like riding a rickety wooden roller coaster for 3 hours straight, and I’m not sure whether I passed out due to the late hour or because of the intense pain.

When I woke up, the driver was pulling into the fanciest guesthouse in town; I was too tired to seek out a cheaper place so I paid the $6 (I had to shell out a buck extra for a double room because the single rooms were supposedly sold out) and crashed there; I didn’t even take advantage of the 60 channels of satellite TV (CNBC was playing Power Lunch when I got in).

Around 5:30 the next morning I sought out a motorcycle driver to explore the ruins; the going rate for someone to drive you around on a 60km track to all the different temples over a 12-hour day is $6. There is no short supply of motos in the city and they’re always sure to make you aware of their presence; they have no uniform (as they are in truth just guys with bikes and a bit of free time) so they feel compelled to shout out ride offers wherever you go, even if you’ve already turned down five motos standing next to them. Additionally, there are tuk-tuks, who believe deep down in their hearts that if you rejected a moto’s offer, you are obviously looking for the next class up.

I found a guy who spoke a bit of English and we sped towards Angkor Wat; on the way, I had to pay the $20/day admission fee, which is easily the highest price you’ll pay for just about anything in Southeast Asia – depending on the number of temples you want to see, it’d probably prove much cheaper just to bribe all the individual police – they all make $20 a month and are universally corruptible.

The first stop was the Bayon; this was a very impressive edifice with 3 stories, 54 stone faces, a few hundred meters of bas reliefs, and dozens of maze-like corridors running throughout. Like every other temple, this one had its share of guides who would spontaneously approach you and start talking and only allow you to get a word in edgewise (such as “I don’t need a guide”) once they’d gone on for half an hour and demanded their fee.

Outside of each temple are hordes of woman and children selling cold drinks and souvenirs, as well as troupes of amputee musicians. Traveling in Cambodia is one big guilt trip; everyone is poor and everyone knows that you have absurd amounts of; constant appeals are made to this fact and provide a silent justification for attempting to rip you off at every opportunity. Little children, barely old enough to walk, who have already mastered about 7 different languages, make heart-wrenching pleas for you to buy their little hand-carved drums and flutes, and the 10 postcards for $1 deal is ubiquitous. Competition is fierce – when you are still 500 meters away, each in a line of 8 drink sellers will begin shouting to you and trying to distinguish herself from her neighbors – each often seeks a contract, asking that if you do in fact buy a drink anywhere in that vicinity, you buy it from her. Charity by indulgence is not really the worst form of sacrifice – you eat and buy as much as you can and thus enhance the lives of dozens of desperate vendors; there is however, always the question of how much to bargain – they’ll all gladly accept their opening offers of $200 for their little trinkets, but they’ll also sell off countless hours of work for a quarter if it’ll get them dinner; it’s impossible to find the right figure. Fortunately, I didn’t really have to think about this dilemma as, not realizing the country’s lack of ATMs, I had only my emergency reserves of cash available to me and had to fight savagely for every riel.

From the Bayon, it was on to the Baphuon (which was undergoing heavy construction and was not accessible) and then to the well-restored terraces of elephants and lepers. Along the way I picked up a Lonely Planet guidebook, which was conveniently being sold by every vendor in sight – in Cambodia you can buy a photocopied version of the latest Lonely Planet to any country for about 3 bucks. Next were a few other large temples - I’ve forgotten the names of these, but they were impressive nonetheless.

Ta Prohm was the highlight of the circuit; unlike the other temples in the area, archeologists never bothered to rescue this one from the awesome power of the jungle. Everywhere, huge trees sprouted through the broken stone and spidery roots branched down along the walls. Just beyond that was the temple of Angkor itself, which contained a massive multi-story complex and extensive open area, surrounded by walls and a moat; bas reliefs explained various stories on every side of the main structure and great views were on offer from the top of the central towers.

A very popular activity was to climb up to a nearby mountain temple and watch the sun set over the region. Since I’d gotten such an early start and moved fairly quickly through all the temples in the region, I was a bit early for this, but still climbed up the hill, snapped a few pictures and descended again before the onslaught of the crowds became overwhelming.

Wandering around the streets of Siem Riep at night, I found there was remarkably little in the way of entertainment. The major evening activity of the locals seemed to be to sit in local restaurants in rows of lawn chairs and watch movies on 20” TV sets. I had my usual fun of wandering the streets and rejecting the hordes of motos, tuk-tuks and beggars who approached me; another game you can play is to try to spot the bike or motorcycle with the biggest possible payload – several carried bundles of 5m bamboo poles and one carried an inverted bicycle, but my personal favorite has to be the man with the full-sized pig strapped to his back.

After these displays lost their novelty, I decided to try to remedy my rapidly escalating haircut crisis; before leaving the US, I had managed to reduce an explanation for my cut to 4 simple hand signals, but I didn’t anticipate the general lack of standard barber tools over here. I went to a place that charged four times the norm (norm being $.50) in hopes that they might have a set of clippers or perhaps even do something to sanitize their equipment between customers; neither of these proved to be true. The barber couldn’t understand a word I said but spent the next 40 minutes taking a random stab; either as a show of finesse or a nervous twitch, the scissors never stopped snipping even if they were several feet from my head, and the cut was followed by a baby wipe rub-down and a rigorous neck and shoulder beat-down. Exhausted from this experience, the rest of the evening consisted of sampling more Khmer food and crashing early at my $3 guesthouse.

I didn’t really have any solid plans for the next day as I didn’t feel like paying another 30 bucks to see the less impressive remote temples, and there didn’t seem to be a whole lot else to do in the region. Early in the morning, I made a visit to a local artist who had constructed very accurate scale models of the more famous temples. He showed me a copy of the original survey of Angkor Wat, which he himself had helped devise and let me climb to the top of a high platform so that I could take a picture from the perspective of a helicopter – I think the giant houseplants may have detracted somewhat from that illusion. Though he had certainly had his share of fame and had enjoyed many audiences with the king and several high-ranking officials, he seemed every bit as desperate as everyone else and urgently tried to sell me small plaster sculptures copied from the temples.

On the way back to town, a moto stopped and explained that he could take me to the floating village via a $5 boat and visit a temple on a nearby mountaintop – I would only need to pay him $3 for transport. This sounded better than anything I’d come up with so I went along with him. Reaching the mountain, I ascended a few hundred stairs, but at the top I was confronted by two guys claiming to be police and asking to see my ticket; as I would later find out, this temple was under the $20 Angkor Wat fee system, but I didn’t know this at the time, so I refused the request for a $2 bribe and raced back down the way I had come. When we reached the pier, it was explained to me that a boat to the village would cost a minimum of $10 – this was a bit more than I wanted to shell out, so this too was abandoned and we instead just made a trip through the countryside and returned to town; the driver was understanding of my reluctance to pay the full fare.

I went to the main market and found a wealth of odd souvenirs which ranged from local handicrafts to “Danger: Landmines” t-shirts to a fascinating array of opium pipes. Unlike the jaded Thais, these people actually seemed interested in making a sale and would go to any length to make sure you went home toting an Angkor Wat gym bag or similarly pointless momento. I gave in and bought a $1 pack of postcards from a girl who remembered my name from when she had tried to sell them to me 6 hours earlier on the other side of town – like anyone else, I have no use for 10 postcards from the same place, but I can’t help admiring that sort of salesmanship.

The official currency of Cambodia is the riel, which is equal to about 1/4000th of a dollar; the standard for most exchanges, however, is the greenback - nickels, dimes and quarters don’t exist here but have been replaced by 500 and 1000 riel notes. Baht are used often (1 baht being roughly equivalent to 100 riel) and pounds, euros, ringits, and any other form of identifiable currency are readily accepted in most circles. Strangely enough, I found myself mentally converting my native currency to baht before deciding on any purchase.

I went to the tourist information office in hopes of finding something free I could do so as not to tap into my precious baht reserves. The info guy explained that there was a mine museum a ways north of town, and since he didn’t make enough at his desk job, he would take me up there with his motorcycle. I declined this offer and began the long walk; I eventually got a ride with a local and was soon headed deep into one of the suburban villages. Here, I encountered many people who rode bicycles with large red coolers and rang bells to advertise their wares; naturally I assumed this to be ice cream and stopped one; these turned out to be full of frogs - I saw one woman pick a frog out, stretch its legs and arms and rub its body back and forth over a smooth surface – this is apparently how you determine whether a frog is ready to eat - much like poking a cantaloupe.

The mine museum was filled to the brim with undetonated explosives as well as gory pictures and statistics. There was also a mock minefield filled with theoretically disarmed ordinance. Apparently the most effective and economical approach to finding mines nowadays is to go through a field and poke at the ground with a sharp stick; this probably has something to do with the extremely low cost of labor.

Now an expert at avoiding explosives, I took a shortcut across an abandoned rice field to get back to town. On the main road, I came across a pediatric hospital with an English sign requesting blood donations; since I had a bit of free time, I enquired as to whether I could help out. The nurse led me back through the patient ward where sick children lay on mats on the floor, to a room lined with bloody instruments and equipment that looked to pre-date the second world war. While I waited for the doctor, the assistant attempted to sell me tickets to a traditional dance performance that evening, since like most other professions in this country, nurses don’t make a whole lot of money. A little skeptical of the conditions, I began searching for a way to fail the interview; this arrived in the form of a “three-month between donations” requirement (so far, America is the least picky country I’ve come across in this regard).

That night I managed to find an English Mass at one of the country’s two Catholic churches. While I waited for the service to begin, I got the chance to watch a group of local children perform their rendition of a traditional dance accompanied by their imitation of the local instruments. In church, everyone sat on mats on the floor and microphones extended into the crowd so that the priest could spontaneously call on unsuspecting parishioners to answer thought-provoking questions.

For dinner, I had the good fortune of finding an English teacher at a nearby food stall who explained to me the correct approach to ordering food. Apparently you just point to what you want, name a monetary value and get whatever amount the seller believes to conform to that value (thus bhram roi, meaning 500 riel, became the one Khmer word I learned on this trip); this allowed me to get twice the amount for half the price of my previous approach (which basically amounted to randomly saying “How much” without referring to any particular dish or amount - this roughly translated to: “Hello, I’m a foreigner and know nothing about your language or customs, please rip me off as much as you can”).

I had signed up for the boat trip down the river to Battambang, and so, at 5:40 the next morning a pickup came by my guesthouse; we drove in a huge circle around town, piling in a few dozen tourists and their luggage (one had to sit on the roof of the cab), before returning to the place where I had been picked up an hour earlier. Whenever we stopped, we were immediately greeted by vendors carrying piles of fresh French bread or pomelos on their heads; at the boat dock, we were swarmed by children with trays of huge bunches of bananas; I got around 20 small bananas for 10 baht – I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with this many bananas until I was rushed by a wave of a few dozen hungry little hands that left with a much more manageable number.

The trip down the river could not have been more picturesque; every few hundred yards, a new floating village would pop up and all the residents would come out to wave and shout hello as we passed. Though the trip time had been quoted as 4 hours when I bought the tickets, it came out much closer to 8 as our boat served as mail truck, food supplier, and local ferry for every village en route. In parts, the channel through the vegetation was so narrow that large branches swept over the deck, nearly knocking tourists overboard, and the captain often had to resort to shutting off the motors and pushing through with a long stick.

We floated into Battambang around 3PM where I was faced with the reality that there was no possible way I could be at the border before it closed; I would have to call in sick. This left me with an opportunity to explore the surrounding countryside. I hired a moto and drove to a cave 20km out of town where the Khmer Rouge dumped people over cliffs. A young guide led me jogging up the mountain and scurrying along the precipitous edges. He showed me how he could use the levers and wheels on the abandoned artillery to aim the barrels at his high school. Next, it was another 10km to Wat Banan where there was something architecturally similar (though on a much smaller scale) to the temples of Angkor on top of a high mountain.

That evening I searched for the circus that was supposedly in town, but with no decent leads, was left to simply return to my guesthouse. In the morning, I hopped on a pickup truck going to Poipet; since it had around 20 people in the bed when I got on, I guessed that it would probably be moving soon, but it’s a well-established fact that a small pickup will hold at least 26 full-size adults and the driver wasn’t going to budge until he had the quota. The next hour and a half was spent trying to drag people off passing motorbikes and away from competing trucks to try to fill the remaining seats; in the interval many of our passengers defected to other rides. When we finally got moving , we made decent time over the rough terrain and were in Poipet before 10.

Thinking that I would need to pay for a new Thai visa, I tried to get a cash advance from a nearby bank. The teller wasn’t particularly thrilled with my first card where the signature panel had long since worn off and didn’t care for my backup where the name “Jeffrey” didn’t match my passport; by the time I had pulled out my secondary backup, reading “Jeff G DePree”, she was convinced I was involved in some sort of fraud and flatly refused to give me any money.

Fortunately 30-day Thai visas are available at the border free (this made me feel pretty silly for paying AU$90 for my original 90-day). I got back into Thailand with only 1000 riel left in my pocket (which I used to buy a snack at the border market). As was appropriate for the situation, I forgot my ATM pin number and, had I not recalled it on my last try, would have gotten to try my hand at hitchhiking the few hundred kilometers back to Samphran.

This sort of silliness had been going on all week - apparently I was blue, but I don't know why