The Wrath of the Travel Gods

PHOTO ALBUM - Siem Reap & Battambang

After our flight back from Yangon to Bangkok on February 28, we spent three days catching up with blogging, emailing and talking with family; buying toiletries, more malaria prevention medicine, and good books; and consuming the excellent Thai food which we missed during our time in Myanmar.  Also, because we had just spent almost a month keeping our US dollars in perfect condition, Elise needed some time to stop having dreams about her grandfather, Max, rejecting the $10 bill she was trying to give him, and the desperate search to find $10 in a combination of bills that are unmarked, not torn, minted post 1996 – with big heads, and with serial numbers that do not start with ‘CB.’

To get to Cambodia, our plan was to take a bus to Aranyaprathet – the town on the Thai side of the border – and spend the night to break up the journey accross the border to Poipet and then on to Siem Reap.  The bus driver, however, told us not to get off at the Aranyaprathet bus station and instead dropped us off near the Cambodian border at a travel agency that was willing to sell us an overprice Cambodian visa (you can walk 250 meters past Thai immigration and buy one for almost half that price).  I had woken up that morning not feeling very well and now we were faced with the fact that we would either need to backtrack or go across the border and all the way through to Siem Reap that day.  It was later in the day that we would have been if we had planned to go the whole way, but we decided to push on.  After a relatively smooth border crossing and finding some travelers to share a taxi, we were on our way.  The gamble to push on paid off because the once horrible road to Siem Reap we had heard about is now a nice brand-new paved highway and the trip from the border now takes less than two hours.   Even better (or worse depending on how we look at it), I got really sick the next day and ended up laid up in bed with a 101 degree fever – so being in a nice comfortable room with A/C and cable TV in Siem Reap a night early worked out for the better.

The travel gods apparently had decided that our year-off was going too smooth and perfect so far, and therefore decided to throw us this curve ball with my sickness which unfortunately had an effect on our tour of the Temples of Angkor – widely considered the 8^th Wonder of the World.  The Temples of Angkor is one big archeological site of many temples built in the jungle by “god-kings” in the 9^th to 13^th century.  During this time, there were societies with over a million people all prospering off of the resources of the Tonle Sap lake – a huge fresh-water lake that fills by overflow from the Mekong river in the wet season. 

I woke the next morning after spending our entire first day in Cambodia in bed and took my temperature.  It was normal.  Of course I still didn’t feel great, but since I was apparently “normal” and someone with a tendency to “man-up” and push through feeling sick, we decided to take a tuk-tuk tour of the temples for the first day.  After half the day seeing some of the amazing sights in the near 100-degree heat, the travel gods decided that I was not yet ready to enjoy myself.  So I spent the afternoon back at the hotel - followed by the entire next day - feeling horrible again.  Finally I started to get an appetite back, feel much better, and we were able to enjoy the remaining 2 days of our 3-day visitors pass to the Angkor temples. 

One of the main tourist attractions is to get up early and watch the sunrise over Angkor Wat.  The problem was that it wasn’t until the very last day I felt good enough to get up for that.  Elise and I got up at 4:30am and took bicycles in the pitch dark and rode the 6.5km to the temple.  About half-way there, we noticed flashes of lighting.  I cursed the travel gods again.  They apparently didn’t appreciate the cursing because at about 6:10am – right at the time the sun was supposed to be rising over the magnificent temple – the winds picked up and the skies opened and unloaded on us.  We spent the early hours of the morning huddled inside the ruins waiting for the heavy rain to stop so we could ride our bikes back and take a nap before touring the temples in the afternoon.   I hear that the sunrise over Angkor Wat is incredible…but it just wasn’t in the cards for us this time.  Though it didn’t work out perfectly, touring the temples was very impressive and incredibly worth it.  The size and artistic details left by a society of centuries ago is very fascinating.  Also, thanks to Elise for taking care of me, bringing me food, and putting up with my grumpiness because I felt like crap.  She did, however, get to enjoy several 1-hour massages during the downtime of my sickness…    

We next headed to Battambang – Cambodia’s second largest city.  We took the boat through rivers, floating villages, and the Tonle Sap lake.  This boat ride turned out to be very cramped, very loud (the motor was right behind us) and took 9-hours because the water was low enough that the boat dragged along the bottom in many instances.  Probably not worth the time and cost in our opinion, but it was nice to see the villages on the way.

In Battambang we took a cooking class from Nary’s Cooking School.  We went to the market to buy food to make Fish Amok, Beef Lok Lak, and fried spring rolls – Cambodian specialties.  Nary and her husband did a wonderful job.  They run their cooking school from the kitchen in the back of their small restaurant.   We ate like kings and queens that day.

The main sights around Battambang are temples and villages around the city.  We hired a tuk-tuk driver to take us around for the day.  We had a great driver, Bannak, who spoke great English, making the tour a lot more meaningful. We saw how rice paper for spring rolls, bamboo sticky rice, and fish paste were made, heard the legend of the history of Battambang (means “lost wooden stick”), visited the Banan temple, and – most importantly –he took us to the bamboo train station. 

The bamboo train is a unique Cambodian experience.  Using old French-colonial railways, locals have created a “train” which is a simple platform made of nothing more than a couple wheels and axles, a platform made of bamboo, and a small lawn-mower size engine.  It is ingeniously simple, questionably safe, and actually used to transport locals and their goods from village to village.  You sit on the bamboo train and the “Engineer” tilts back the engine so that there is tension in the drive belt.   Off you go -  speeding down the old railway tracks that zigzag and squiggle after years of settlement and neglect – while wondering if the bamboo train is going to fall apart and throw you off the tracks.  Even more ingenious is how it is handled with two bamboo trains come head-on to each other and need to pass:  the train is disassembled by simply lifting the platform off the axles.  The axles are put to the side while the other train passes, then the whole thing is reassembled in less than a minute.  Word on the street is that Cambodia will begin to rebuild the train tracks for a new real train in the next couple months so the bamboo train experience will soon be a thing of the past.  We feel fortunate that we were one of the last tourists to experience (and survive) the bamboo train.    

Next we moved on to Cambodia’s capital and largest city Phnom Penh.