Winter Holidays

This winter I did something a little crazy and left Japan! I know what you're thinking... What? YOU LEFT JAPAN?! you flew all the way across the ocean and then you did what?! you flew some more?! you little lucky bum!

yup. little lucky bum is right. Josh and I went to Cambodia and South Vietnam, with an uncessary 5 day "layover" (long story) in Bangkok. It was my third time going to Bangkok and I honestly hope there isn't a fourth. It seems ridiculous to go to one city so many times when there's a whole world full of cities I haven't been to, yeah? yeah! no more Bangkok! Right, so the trip. I fell in love with Cambodia. It was one day that really did it for me, one particular event in that day...

So we rented bicycles one night with the idea of waking up really early the next morning to bike from Siem Reap to Angkor Wat to watch the sunrise. It’s a really short ride and the weather’s perfect at that time of night, the air’s cool and not filled with pollution from the otherwise hectic roads. So we woke up at an ungodly hour, filled our backpacks with water, snacks, sunscreen and grappling hooks (prepared for anything and everything dad, just like you say) and headed off. We had no lights on our bikes (okay so not as prepared as could be, I suppose) and as soon as we left Siem Reap it was pitch black. We had only the faint light of the stars (oh but there were so many!) not illuminating the road before us, and the brief passing headlights and sounds of the occasional tuktuk whizzing by us on the road to guide us. It’s a pretty easy road after you get out of the city; it’s perfectly straight for the most part. You might think it’d be easy to ride in a straight line no matter what the lighting, well, I beg to differ. I felt like I’d lost almost all of my sense of direction in that almost inky black pre-dawn darkness. So I hunkered down on my bicycle and concentrated intensely on the concept of straight, and now I know my concept of straight has a slight inclination to the right. Perhaps that might be due to my very occasional (the term occasional being used very loosely here) starring up at the night sky, but I’m going to blame it on the bumpy road. A few brushes with the sandy shoulder, near misses from tuktuks in a hurry to beat the light and some early morning grumbly conversation later, we arrived at Angkor Wat. There, now in the pale grey light of dawn, we joined the large crowd of people milling about, patiently waiting for the most spectacular sunrise of their lives.

We spent the rest of the day biking around Angkor, exploring nooks and crannies of the many ruins and climbing up as high as we could for amazing views of the surrounding jungle and ruins scattered throughout. Oh, perhaps you want to know about the sunrise? It was a beautiful and extremely intimate experience that all of us few hundred visitors shared together that morning. Okay, honestly, it was gorgeous but not something that pictures could ever capture, nor could I come anywhere close to describing. I have to say I think it was more the sunrise than the location. Don’t get me wrong, the familiar silhouette of exotic Angkor Wat against an orange fading to pink fading to blue sky added a timeless and surreal element, but when’s the last time you saw the sun rise? Anywhere? I need to do that more.

I haven’t even gotten to the part where I fell in love with Cambodia. Let’s speed forward to near the end of the day. Tired, hot and heads full of visions of ancient Khmer civilization, we headed out in hunt of a landmine museum we’d heard about. It’s run out of the house of a man with an amazing story. His name is Aki and we never met him because he was away de-mining near the Thai Cambodia border. His museum has all kinds of landmines and UXOs that he has found and disarmed himself. I was hell-bent intent on going to this landmine museum and this was our last day in Siem Reap; we were going to find that museum no matter what. With our trusty map in hand, rough directions from a helpful local and absolutely no knowledge of the Khmer language, we were sure to have no problems at all finding the place. Of course, we got lost. We were supposed to turn somewhere, (after the sign for the zoo, down a dirt road heading towards the river?) and I guess we turned down the wrong road, which turned out to be the best wrong turn I’ve taken in a long time.

Before I go on, you must know something about our experience so far in Cambodia. The obvious: we were tourists, traveling like tourists, with tourists, to tourist areas and staying in tourist ghettos. We stayed in the “mini” khao san road like area in the city and were surrounded by tourists during most of our time there. It was horrible and I did not like traveling like that. Everyone we met was trying to sell us something (understandably so). Everyone, including the many children that approached us with books and postcards for sale, spoke English. I am not sure I can express how frustrated and upset I felt with the situation without sounding condescending, ignorant and insensitive, but Cambodia is a very poor country and I found it difficult to travel there. I feel incredibly fortunate to have the luxury of travel available to me. I don’t think I could travel there again, if I go back, and I want to, I will volunteer. I’ll leave it at that.

Back to our hunt for the landmine museum… our wrong turn took us to the opposite side of the river we were supposed to be on and had us biking down a village road. This felt like “real” Cambodia. There were no other tourists, no tourist hawkers, and no charming children persistently asking us to buy their postcards. Instead, there were curious stares (“I think you took a wrong turn somewhere” is probably what they were thinking), surprised smiles and excited children yelling “Hello! Hello!” We must have ridden to the end of the road in only a couple of minutes or so but it was the sweetest few minutes of my entire stay in Cambodia. Away from all the tourism was this honest friendly curiosity and down-to-earth, no-strings-attached “Hello”s. It was amazing to experience this simple greeting in a place where all I knew was what tourism brought to the country. I don’t know what happened on that road but right there, grinning like an idiot and saying hi back to the beaming faces of the kids, I fell in love with Cambodia.

We found the landmine museum in the end, a nice fellow biked us there after we managed to communicate where we were trying to go. The sun was setting by now, and when we arrived it was past it’s closing time, but thankfully we were allowed in anyway. We met some interesting volunteers there, including one guy from Japan who had collected clothing to give out. Some (all?) of the landmine survivor children that live there have language lessons, and I overheard someone getting a Japanese lesson. I couldn’t help but grin as the teacher drilled “Ohiyo gozaimas!” and the student echoed “Ohiyo gozaimas!” (good morning). This world is so small.