Siem Reap to Bangkok

I was a bit delayed getting out of Siem Reap. I'd asked the front desk of the King Boutique Hotel to book me a ticket with Nattakan, the bus company which ran the direct Siem Reap-to-Bangkok route (and for just $30!). 

Well, the price was right. Nobody showed up to get me at eight o'clock, so the hotel manager made a call. Twenty minutes later a tuk-tuk showed up to get me to the bus, and a harried-looking young Cambodian woman in business casual took my name and money and helped me stick my luggage in the cargo compartment. The seat I'd reserved was taken, so I sat in the very back of the bus near the lavatory, which suited me just fine. We pulled out of Siem Reap at 8:20 (twenty minutes late). "Looks like this company couldn't find its ass with two hands and a flashlight," I wrote in my journal. 

Matters improved by 10:45, when we hit Poipet. The Thai-Cambodian border was one of the few things about the trip I'd been dreading. I'd heard that Poipet was about as seedy as Cambodia gets, with scammers and four-flushers and pickpockets on every street and around every corner. Worse yet were the rumored passport scams and false visa sellers. Our faithful bus crew spared us that hassle. They steered us dauntlessly through the milling crowd of Thais, Cambodians, Vietnamese, Laotians, Indians, and Chinese at the border, lined us all up in neat rows in front of the actual, factual visa office, and then led us down a kilometer of dusty road, through a series of impressive gates, and over a bridge (which the Brits had paid for and the Thais had built) and into Thailand proper. I was one of the first of the bus passengers through, so I had to wait around in the hot, breezy, overcast day on the much cleaner Thai side for everyone else to pass through. I remember having to pee very badly as I watched heavy trucks loaded with manufactured goods and timber lumber to and fro along the unpaved road and across the border. 

After a microwave lunch aboard the bus, I began to nod off. We breezed through eastern Thailand, which was far cleaner, better kept, and spacier than Cambodia had been. Landscaped medians lined the highways and there wasn't a single piece of garbage in sight. The skinny Brahman cows had disappeared, as had the hammocks; now we saw neat condominiums and farmhouses with green and well-tended rice fields beside them. The only evidence of the coup was the occasional roadblock, where a uniformed military policeman with a crisp camouflage uniform and a pistol at his hip would clamber aboard, give us all a hard look, and then wave the bus onward. I have no idea what the purpose of these roadblocks was. Security? Searching for fugitive insurgents? Keeping tabs on the movements of people around the countryside? I suppose I'll never know, because I was soon distracted by our arrival in Bangkok. 

The place was huge. It took us 30-40 minutes to get from the city's eastern limits to the northern bus terminal. On a highway. The skyline was quite impressive, too: whereas most cities are just a cluster of skyscrapers surrounded by squatter suburbs, Bangkok seemed to be an unending sea of four- and five-story buildings with the occasional impressive spire of a high-rise thrusting up out of it, some of them so far away from the center of town that they were barely visible in the thin blue haze. 

At the northern terminal I leaped off the bus, grabbed my pack out of the storage compartment, and tried to get ahead of the press for taxicabs. Fortunately there were enough hot pink cabs outside the station gates to ferry a convention downtown. One brown, skinny, middle-aged gent with a baseball cap and a polo shirt, whose license card proclaimed him to be a Mr. Senkham, snatched me up and led me to his car. I could barely understand his friendly questions ("You from Rob Angelit?"). I dumped my stuff in the back seat and climbed into the front. With his crooked teeth showing, Senkham handed me his rate card. Yep, Thailand was definitely a richer country than Vietnam or Cambodia: a simple ride into town would be 1200 baht, or nearly $40 American. My jaw hit the floor. Even the Skyliner from Narita Airport to Ueno Station in Tokyo didn't cost that much. My hand clamped down on the door handle and I was about to bail out when Mr. Senkham said "No better rate, boss. All standard." 

It didn't even occur to me to argue or haggle. Tired and bedraggled and just wanting to get to Bangkok already, I closed the door and nodded my head in defeat. Off we went. Forty minutes and forty dollars later, I was standing outside of my hostel, Boxpackers. Mr. Senkham happily took my money and rocketed off. I didn't have enough Thai baht, so I gave him forty U.S. dollars. I didn't tip him, but since 1200 baht was $38.72 in July of 2014, he got a tip and he knew it. 

I had to fill out some silly questionnaire and a thousand other forms at the front desk, but then I got my key and headed upstairs. 

I climbed into my surprisingly spacious cubicle, closed the curtain, updated my journals, remembered that I was thirsty and hungry and went back downstairs and around the corner to the 7-11 for some water and snacks, and then came back upstairs and went to bed. 

The next day would prove to be a very aggravating day...with an unexpected reward at the end. Stay tuned. 

snake wine in Cambodia

First, you should see what it is.

Second, you should see what it looks like.

Third, you should know that I still wanted to try it, even though I understood both of these things in advance. 

I happened to see a souvenir market set up on the broad, palm-shaded grounds of Angkor Wat, so I stopped over to have a look. I had intended to give snake wine a taste in either southern China or Vietnam, where its consumption, I assumed, was more widespread and commonplace. No opportunity presented itself. You may imagine my delight when I saw bottles of snake wine being sold at this Cambodian market, then. I picked a small bottle, talked the saleswoman down from $8 to $5 (though I probably could have gotten it for $4) and took it back to the King Boutique Hotel with me to sample.

Here's the video.

Now, I know what's going through your head. Two thoughts, roughly along the lines of "Eww gross, I wouldn't touch that stuff with a ten-foot pole," and "Why would anyone in their right mind want to drink that?"

Well, there's two things you should know. Number one, I am not in my right mind. I've been eating strange things on this blog for five years now. Number two, snake wine is a thing in Southeast Asia, because...

...well, like so many other weird foods and exotic animal products in the Orient, snake wine is believed to be a cure-all. The Chinese, Vietnamese, Taiwanese, and other-ese loudly insist that the stuff will fix everything from hair loss to farsightedness. Oh, and it increases male sexual performance as well. Holy schla-moly, if I had a nickel for every nostrum that the Asians claim improves male stamina, I wouldn't be sitting here in a hipster café off Gwangnaru Road writing about it. 

Anyway, I just thought you should see me drinking a bottle of bathtub tequila with a dead cobra in it. Don't you feel special?

Angkor Wat and environs

I won't say much about the bus ride from Phnom Penh to Siem Reap. It was long and dull. I wanted to take the speedboat up the Tonlé Sap Lake, but my timing was bad—the water wasn't high enough. Even during the peak season there's still a good chance of running aground, I was told. So I gave it up, bought a bus ticket and spent a rather dull six hours in transit. 

I stayed at the King Boutique Hotel in Siem Reap. I later found out that "boutique hotel" is a slightly more upscale and discreet version of a love motel in Southeast Asia. That explains the starkness of my room. No decorations, no paintings, no wallpaper, nothing. Just a bed, a bathroom, a nicked, gouged wooden wardrobe painted all in black, and four white walls. 

Anyway, I didn't come here to tell you that. I came here to tell you about Angkor Wat. 

It's laughably easy to get around in Siem Reap, folks: fifteen dollars to hire a tuk-tuk for the day, and they'll take you anywhere. You can tour the great ruins of the ancient Khmer capital of Angkor on either a full-day (large circle) tour or the half-day (small circle) one. I did the small circle, starting with Angkor Wat itself. 

Let me explain something: "wat" means "temple." "Angkor" means "city," so Angkor Wat is literally "city temple." I know what you're thinking: Why did the ancient Cambodians live in a city named "City"? Beats me. Maybe because the names "Dikshit" and "Long Dong" were already taken. 

My tuk-tuk driver was named Yot. He pronounced it "yutz," and I labored hard to avoid stigmatizing him on that basis. His English was barely comprehensible, but fortunately he was a man of few words. He had a sneaky, shifty air about him that I didn't like. Nonetheless he was capable and patient, and drove me around Angkor Wat, the Bayon, and Ta Prohm with a brief stop for lunch in between. We established a routine: he'd drive me to a locale, I'd hop out and arrange a time to meet up with him, and he'd go park in the shade and unstring his hammock for a nap. I'd wander about the jungle-clad temples, gawping like a moron, for 45 minutes or so, and then off we'd go again. In this way I saw the Bayon...

...and Ta Prohm, the so-called "Tomb Raider temple," because it had the grievous misfortune of having an Angelina Jolie movie made there. 

This place was far prettier and more astounding than Angkor Wat. 

I was told that I'd feel like Indiana Jones walking around Ta Prohm, and boy, did I ever. 

I have no idea who this guy is, but his girlfriend was standing right next to me, taking his picture. 

It was after we got back to Siem Reap that Yot lived up to his unfortunate name. I got out of his tuk-tuk and turned to find him standing there, hand held out. I forked over his fifteen smacks, but he remained where he was, palm-up. 

"Tip, please," he said. 

The nerve of this character, I thought. 

"We agreed on a flat rate," I told him. You yutz, I added in my head. 

"Tip," he insisted. "Twenty dollars."

To this day I'm not sure whether Yot was asking me for five U.S. dollars, which would have brought his total fee to twenty, or for a further frickin' twenty bucks, a 133% bonus. Either way, I was incensed. I told him, as politely as I knew how, to go take a flying leap on a rolling doughnut.

I felt an acute need for another human's company (and a chronic need for a beer), so I walked from my hotel to the Old Market and Pub Street. I was bitterly disappointed with both: nothing but crappy souvenirs in the former and overpriced, foreign-themed cocktail bars full of phonies in the latter. I bought the most masculine-looking notebook I could find (my previous journal being filled to capacity) and went home to catch some bad Asian dramas and a little shuteye before I bugged out for Thailand in the morning. 

a day in Phnom Penh

Travel Truth #4: If you skimp on research, you will pay for it later. 

My only day in Phnom Penh began with a major letdown. My first priority was to visit Kingdom Breweries, Cambodia's premier craft brewery, founded by Leopard Capital and headed up by a German brewmaster. The legend printed on every bottle will happily inform drinkers that every Kingdom brew "blends Europe's finest ingredients with purified water from Cambodia's largest lake to create a traditional yet unmatched flavor."

Yeah, whatever. I just wanted to be able to say that I'd toured the brewery, chatted with the brewmaster, and had a couple of Cambodia's premier craft beers direct from the source. 

I was foiled in that ambition. The date was Sunday, July 20. The brewery was closed on Sundays. 

Rats. 

So I went to the National Palace instead. 

The Silver Pagoda, so called because its floor is one solid sheet of the stuff. You can't see it, though. The curators covered it up with a carpet, the bastards. Apparently it's so tarnished these days that you can't tell what kind of metal it is anyway. 

And then I went to the Foreign Correspondent's Club on the banks of the Tonlé Sap River for some chicken and beef satay, prawn shooters with sweet chili aioli and salsa, and some Kingdom pilsener. Even if the brewery was closed, a lot of watering holes along the riverfront still served its products. 

Then I saw the National Museum. I had to buy postcards somewhere, you know. 

Selfies with Siddhartha is going to be the title of my autobiography. 

I rode a tuk-tuk back to Amber House, filled out said postcards, rode another tuk-tuk to the post office, mailed 'em, and then managed to scoot my butt back to FCC for some beef lok-lak and a Hemingway Special for dinner before the evening monsoons broke. 

Phnom Penh accomplished. 

to Phnom Penh by bus

Travel Truth #3: Happy accidents do happen. Especially at dinnertime. 

My Vietnam-Cambodia hop went off without a hitch. I awoke, dressed, went downstairs, and paid $20 for my laundry, a bottle of water and a ticket to Cambodia. Now that's my kind of trip, right there. The receptionist arranged for a shuttle ride to get me to the bus terminal and before I knew it I was in a tiny, rollicking minivan with half a dozen other would-be passengers, including a sweet old Thai gentleman whose name I shall never be able to pronounce, let alone spell. We boarded our bus at the station, handed over $25 apiece and our passports to be stamped with Cambodian visas, and took off for the border. 

We were on Cambodian soil by 11:20. We made three stops at the border: one to get our entry forms, one to get our visas, and the third for lunch—a spacious open-ended warehouse of a building with a corrugated tin roof and orange tile floors, so cool that a couple of lazy dogs were sprawled down and napping upon it, flies buzzing about their noses. I had chicken and green beans over rice, which I was somehow able to pay for with Vietnamese money (only $2 American). I sat with the nice Thai gentleman and his bent, wrinkled, sleepy friend, who didn't speak a word of English and was wearing a Saigon souvenir baseball cap with the price tag still on it. 

While we chatted, there came a noise like an oncoming freight train. A mild hiss became a rattle, and the rattle an earth-shaking roar. The monsoon rains were pounding down on the tin roof, each drop as big as a .50-caliber bullet, and you could hardly hear yourself think. The Thai gent and I finished our conversation at a yell and then boarded the bus to continue our journey. 

My impressions of Cambodia weren't that different from Vietnam—the two countries looked pretty similar. But the countryside here was dustier, flatter, trashier, poorer, and the people were decidedly more Indian-looking. I saw hump-backed, cud-chewing Brahman cattle, houses on stilts, wells with tin-roofed cupolas, ponds covered with lily pads and filled with garbage, and locals napping in hammocks—hammocks strung between stanchions, between stilts, between fence posts and walls, even between trees at the side of the road. Hammocks everywhere. 

About a half hour before we made Phnom Penh, the bus nosed its ponderous way onto a car ferry and we crossed the broad, rambunctious, muddy Mekong. 

We reached the city at about 3:30 in the afternoon. The outskirts of the town were dirty and dingy, with more of the hollow, crumbling buildings and skewed thoroughfares as Hanoi had possessed—but the Cambodian roads were mostly unpaved and the rotting buildings even dustier and more decrepit-looking. Even the highway from Saigon had been gravel for miles at a stretch. 

I jumped off the bus and nabbed the first tuk-tuk driver I could find. I forked over $5 for a ride across the north-central part of town to my hotel. Five bucks was a bit steep—I overheard other foreigners getting rides for $3—but I acquiesced, as it was the same price I'd have paid for a cab in HCMC. 

My room at the Amber House near Wat Langka wasn't ready for me when I arrived, so I was bowed into a gigantic room with two double beds across the hall. 

The funniest thing was that they had Korean comedy/variety shows on TV. With English subtitles. And as one of my coworkers from Sejong pointed out, they still weren't funny. 

I showered to get the sweat and travel grime off me, rested up for a couple of hours, and then walked to the Independence Monument and the king's memorial and snapped some shots of each. 

I had dinner at the Herb Cafe, a tourist trap of a restaurant and bar just a couple of doors down from my hotel, right across the T-intersection from Wat Langka. I hated myself for even setting foot in it. There was nobody else there but for a young, bespectacled, alarmingly skinny French hipster (perusing a tiny notebook and sipping a cocktail); a tubby, neck-bearded tourist in a black T-shirt and cargo shorts; and an elderly business traveler with a pressed blue cotton shirt and black slacks. I glanced over the menu and picked the first dish that looked good—Khmer amok—plus a whiskey sour. A full meal and an aperitif all for the low-low price of seven U.S. dollars. Zounds. I began to take a (brief) shine to Cambodia. 

I found out later that, quite by accident, I had ordered the country's national dish. Amok is a curry steam-cooked in banana leaves, with thick coconut cream and galangal being integral ingredients. Khmer amok with fish is one of Cambodia's core culinary traditions, though amok can be made with everything from chicken eggs to bamboo shoots to algae. All I can tell you is that the Khmer amok I had at the Herb Cafe near Wat Langka was spellbinding in its spicy savoriness, though (true to my code), I did not take any pictures of it. You'll just have to imagine it. Or better yet, make it yourself and try it. 

Because I had nothing to do when I'd finished my meal (but not my second whiskey sour), I struck up a conversation with the French hipster. As I'd suspected, the tiny notebook in his hands was a handmade Khmer primer. The fellow was trying to teach himself the alphabet while he sat and waited for his Buddhist friends to stop meditating in the nearby Wat Langka. His name was Erwin and he'd been working in financial administration at a local French school for the past eight months. We chatted for a few minutes until I drove him away with my questions, and he packed up and went in search of his friends. I stepped across the road into Samaky, another trendy open-air saloon with liquor bottles arranged on illuminated glass shelves along the back wall. I had a few glasses of Angkor Draft (75 cents each) and stared at the laughing clump of Cambodian ladies in the corner booth and the brooding old white dude with the natty, gnarled dreadlocks hanging down his sunburned, tank-topped back. Then I felt lonely and bored and went back to my deliciously cool room to plan tomorrow's escapades. 

Next up: the first and only full day in Phnom Penh. Prawn shooters are involved. 

Ho Chi Minh City, day three

By prior agreement, nobody in our little clique stirred before noon. We recuperated separately at our respective rooms and convened at 12:30 to revisit the Hungry Pig for some more of their cracking bacon sandwiches. They weren't chintzy with the HP Sauce this time around, either. I went the whole hog, so to speak, and got a fried egg on mine this time. 

Then we split up for the day. Jeff went off with Adam for a foodie crawl across Saigon's underbelly while Jenn and I caught a cab to Notre Dame. 

I also managed to sneak into the big colonial post office and send off some postcards to friends and family. 

I was in a bad way. My cheap Airwalk flip-flops were already three months old by the time I took them on this trip, and all the tread had been worn off the soles. This left me with zero traction on the rain-slicked Saigon sidewalks. I was slipping and sliding all over the place. I came damn near to breaking a leg (or a neck) half a dozen times. It was as if every inch of the ubiquitous square-cut cement tiles with which sidewalks in Southeast Asia are paved was covered with black ice. I prayed to Our Lady of Surface Tension to save my hide as Jenn and I marched to the national history museum, shabby but informative. 

We had a nice nap and then met with Jeff and Adam at 5:30. Jeff clung to the back of Adam's sleek black scooter like a terrified limpet. We caught a cab to the Bitexco Financial Tower, rode an express elevator to the 52nd floor, and drank Manhattans and Long Island iced teas for 290,000 VND apiece (fifteen U.S. dollars!).

The invisible sun sank down behind the murky overcast and Uncle Ho's damp, water-stained namesake city grew dark. The high-rises and spiderweb streets lit up and Saigon was suddenly indistinguishable from any other 21st-century metropolis. Jeff, Jenn, and Adam schmoozed about how fun the place was, but as I sat there with them and stared out the rain-streaked window, I felt nothing but disgust. I was fed up with the garbage piles in the streets, the homicidal scooter drivers, the persistent hawkers, the mawkish artificiality of modernized Asian culture, the pervading sense of cultural smugness about the outcome of an old war, and a thousand other things. I wasn't ready to part company with my pals just yet, but I was eager to get on with my trip and get out of this benighted country. 

I did get a consolation prize that evening, though. Stacey showed up with a friend, Danielle, and we all got a cab to May, a very upscale restaurant in Ward Dakao, District 1. We walked through a dark alley for a few dozen meters until the imposing facade of a restored colonial villa emerged seductively from behind a veil of arica palms like a forgotten but welcoming mistress. Smiling, skinny waiters in light cotton shirts ushered us inside, past the steamy kitchen with its enormous glass windows and up a narrow mahogany staircase to a parlor-like dining room decorated in the vintage French style. Billing itself as one of the healthiest and tastiest restaurants in Ho Chi Minh City ("NO MSG!" screamed the mission statement on the menu's first page), May employs top-shelf ingredients and French-trained chefs to craft a staggering array of delectable fusion dishes. I had the chicken soup, the stuffed squid, the prawns in tamarind sauce, and even a dollop of choco-coffee ice cream. The portion sizes were generous and yet my end of the bill came to just 260,000 dong, not quite $15—the price of a single cocktail on the 52nd floor of the Bitexco Financial Tower. 

After that scrumptious meal (in fine company) there was nothing to do but go back to Green Suites and pack up my things. I'd be leaving on the bus for Phnom Penh the next day at eight o'clock sharp. During our Skype chat that evening, Miss H and I came to a rather momentous decision—one whose repercussions I feel even as I sit here typing this post. We agreed that she would quit her job at Gangnam SLP and return home to the Mojave, while I would stay in Korea only as long as it would take to finish up the fall semester at Sejong University. My thoughts that night were full of the task ahead. As I noted in my journal, "I need to find a place to live..."

Ha-ha. Wait until I tell you about how all that fell out. But it'll have to wait until this travel tale is done. Next up: the first Cambodia post.