The last blog entry

This morning we visited a school run by an organization that some friends of ours support. Unfortunately the kids weren't there because it was a national holiday, but we enjoyed the visit anyway.  "Caring for Cambodia" works to supplement and improve the public schools by providing teacher salary supplements, teacher training. and improved facilities.  The school we saw was quite impressive,  and looked almost like a school at home.  

 We brought some school supplies, and Karl brought two deflated soccer balls that he reinflated just before our visit.

The school system in Cambodia has some serious challenges. They are still recovering from the Khmer Rouge period when all the intellectuals and educated people, which included teachers, were killed, so they need to create an entirely new generation of teachers.

After a farewell lunch with our gang, we headed to the airport.  We are now in Bangkok, having completed the first of three flights .... a very long journey home.  I've traveled to a lot of places over many years, but this was the first time I've gone to the airport in a tuk tuk!

Overall, we had a fabulous trip and would definitely recommend Vietnam and Cambodia as fascinating places to visit.  Thanks for reading along!

Donna

Yesterday afternoon we went into Siem Reap to check out the town.  It's basically the tourist town of Angkor, full of souvenir shops and cafes.  It has a bit of a hippie feel - reminds me of Katmandu many years ago. 

We started at the artisan collective.  This was an impressive organization that takes people from the villages and teaches them traditional crafts during a one year internship.  Then they can stay and be a producing artist there, or they can return to their village where the organization will set them up in a small shop.  They employ 1300 people in all and are very successful.  We saw how they make lacquer, ceramics, carved pieces, etc.  The silk and weaving is beautiful, but is based in a different location.

 

Then in town we checked out an unusual feet cleaning treatment. There is a big pool of fish. You take off your shoes and socks, stick in your feet, and the fish eat the dead skin off your feet!  Adam, Lenny and our guide Alessio signed right up.  As soon as a new person would put in their feet, there was a swarm of fish congregating for the goodies.  Lenny said it felt like you were putting your feet into a living brillo pad.

We had a lovely final B&R dinner last night at a very fancy hotel (now the Park Hyatt) that had been started by a wealthy Cambodian.  It was quite elaborately decorated, and we had a delicious meal.

Donna 

The early morning elephant ride

Just for fun, we all boarded elephants this morning for a mile-long journey on the way to Bayron temple, along a path also occupied by monkeys that are supposed to be occasionally aggressive.

But our trip was uneventful, except that the rocking motion made Donna a little queasy, and afterwards she declared "That was my last elephant ride".

Today we visited the Temple of Bayon.  This is our guide Lim's favorite temple, and we quickly saw why.  From a distance, it just looks like mounds of rocks.  But when you look more closely, you see that there are many towers -- 37, I believe -- each of which has four giant smiling faces  carved on the sides.  The faces are Buddhas, but in the likeness of the king.  You see the faces everywhere you look, either in profile or full forward, and they are serenely smiling at you.  There was something comforting about having them there, looking after you.  

It was quite crowded.  I find it fascinating to see how all-consuming photography has become as a part of touring.  There were probably a million photos being taken of those faces, and of our faces looked at them.  For the closer, larger faces, there would be lines of people waiting to get there with their cameras. We even ran into two of our new friends from the B&R Vietnam trip, sisters Susan and Jaclyn!

After Bayon we walked along the terrace area, where there was a very large public square.  Elephants were the theme, and there were many carved into the walls.  It was a kind of coliseum area where they held spectacles, such as forcing prisoners of war to fight with elephants, which apparently rarely worked out well for the prisoner.

We walked next to an operating Buddhist temple where we were offered the opportunity to be blessed.  We gratefully accepted and all were sprinkled with holy water by a rather frail looking monk. He also tied red thread on our wrists, which is supposed to continue to give us good luck. 

Not being satisfied with such a lightweight blessing, Amy and Joan, and our guide Alessio, opted for the really serious "full water" blessing. They had to change into a shoulderless wrap that was like a sari and sit on the steps in front of our monk.  They then received the major water blessing, which involved the chanting monk slinging paddles of water on them until they were drenched.  It was reported to be quite refreshing given the heat, and of course we are happy that now Amy and Joan are now very blessed.

We did a very lovely walk along the back of the elephant terrace, which was a peaceful, wooded area that included other ruins of temples.  Honestly, you just cannot believe how many ruins there are.

On the way back to the hotel we stopped at a memorial for the people killed by the Khmer Rouge.  This was a very ugly five-year period in Cambodian history when a horrible guy named Pol Pot decided to kill all the intellectuals, educated people, middle class, etc., and return the country to a simple agrarian economy.  Between two and three million people were murdered.  The memorial had some of the skulls and bones amid explanations of that terrible time.

Donna

Angkor Wat

Today was like two separate days.  We did the various temples as described in the morning.  Then we had a midday break to have lunch, shower, and rest.  This place is a 3-shower-a-day place!  The heat is quite intense in the mid part of the day, but is fine in the morning and evening.

In the afternoon we went to the actual Angkor Wat, which is a temple surrounded by an enormous man-made moat.  (It's hard to imagine how one could make such a huge moat in the days before bulldozers.)  This is the most famous of the temples, with the five-tower view of the inside temple being particularly well known, and in stylized form is the symbol of Cambodia. 

There is a very wide causeway that leads into the entrance.  We walked around the temple to approach from the side, which was a bit less crowded.  There are fantastic friezes all around the temple that tell the story of the exploits of the king who built the temple.  The style reminded us a bit of Egyptian friezes. 

We climbed up to the highest tower to explore it at close hand.  You used to have to go up on the original steps, which looked treacherous, and our guide told us afterwards that several tourists died in falls! Now there is a wooden staircase, which still is pretty darn steep, but manageable.  At the top there are many remaining sculptures and courtyards.

After descending, we met up with a friend of B&R who does conservation at the site.  He explained some of the conservation methods and took us up a scaffold to see their work area.  We were able to see the sunset from this vantage point before leaving the temple area.

Seeing Angkor Wat is definitely a must, but I must say that I enjoyed the other temples every bit as much, because they are less restored, more wild looking, and less overrun by tourists.

Donna 

Life can be hard in Cambodia, by Joan

We are in Seam Reap Cambodia with a wonderful Cambodian guide named Lim, who is married, without children yet. But he is only alive because the Khmer Rouge needed soldiers during the 'Killing Field' times.

His mother and father lived in the same village, but did not know each other. His mother was middle class, and his father was working-class Chinese. The Khmer Rouge wanted to wipe out the wealthy and end class distinctions, and they also needed soldiers for their revolution. So they lined up 50 couples in Lim's town and randomly assigned a woman to each man, married them on the spot, and commanded that they go off and produce children. That is how Lim's parents met and how they produced two sons.

Another Butterfield guide in Cambodia is alive because his father survived being tied hand-and-feet with 24 other people and put in a lake to drown. His father managed to lie on top of the other drowning bodies to survive. The Khmer Rouge wanted to save bullets, so they managed to kill their enemies in many creative ways.

Lim lives with his wife, daughter, father-in-law, sister, and brother-in-law. It is very expensive and difficult to live in your own family home, so  the extended family all lives together.

Lim is articulate and smart, but never finished high school because he went to work in the fields at age 15. At age 17 he went to live with monks who taught him English. He now makes a good living as a tour guide.

Joan Y. McCabe

The Temples at Angkor, by Donna

We awoke early today for breakfast at 6am and a 6:30am departure to the temples, to avoid both the heat of the sun and the crowds.  This turned out to be a great strategy, and our guides were very adept at finding places where there were very few other tourists.

I would list the names of the temples we saw, but I’m not sure I could do that, and it wouldn't mean anything to you anyway.  Let me simply say that this temple complex is one of the amazing wonders of the world.  Built roughly between 800 and 1300, it covers an enormous area -- hundreds of square miles -- that was the capital of the giant Khmer empire.  Each subsequent sovereign seemed to want to outdo the previous ones in building the most elaborate and magnificent temple. 

There is no way to convey the scale of this site.  You see temple complex after temple complex, and pass dozens of others on the road that you don't stop to see.  You travel by "tuk tuk" for kilometers between each one.  In each, nearly every square inch of the buildings is covered with carving, much of it quite delicate and beautiful.  There are figures, animals and ornamentation on every surface.  There are piles of rocks evereywhere that have tumbled from the temples.  Some temples have been partially reconstructed, others not.  There was once a million people living in this area, and one can imagine most of them being put to work building these sites, whether schlepping the stone from the quarries, building, or decorating. 

It's amazing that you are given pretty nearly total access to the site and can climb to wherever you dare.  You can see and touch the sculptures up close.

One of the really dramatic parts of the scene is how the trees overtook the temples.  Since they were abandoned to the jungle for about 400 years, it took many years of clearing starting in about 1900 to be able to expose the temples.  They left the most dramatic trees and their roots to see how the temples looked in their overgrown state. 

This site ranks high up with the other amazing creations by human beings that we have seen through the years, including the Taj Mahal, the Moai of Easter Island, and the pyramids of Giza.

-- Donna

PS: Remember, you can click on the photos to get larger versions.

Today Marina and Missy headed home. We will miss having them with us!  Marina just called to say that she had successfully boarded her SFO flight in Taipei, so now she's an accomplished solo international traveler!

Eight of us have gone on to Cambodia (me, Lenny, Cathy, Sandy, Amy, Adam, Joan and Karl).  As much as I enjoyed the other people on the B&R trip, I must say that it is nice to be in a smaller group.  It makes everything happen more quickly, and it's easier to change plans.  Our Italian guide Alessio stayed with us, and we have been joined by a Cambodian guide, Lim.

We had to fill out an Ebola form on the plane!  It basically was a health form that asked where you had traveled from recently, and whether you had a variety of symptoms such as fever, diarrhea, sore throat, etc.  Even though we all have been battling a variety of colds and minor digestive ailments, we decidedly answered "NO" to all of the above.  They ask for your flight number, seat number and cell phone number.  I took some comfort knowing that if the hacking German next to me turned out to have some terrible disease, they would be able to find me and let me know.  When we landed there was a check station with a sign saying that they could take your temperature.  I guess if you answered any of those questions "YES", you were headed to the thermometer.  Thankfully we all strolled through without a problem.

Siem Reap is the town near the celebrated Angkor Wat temple complexes.  Lim told us that the name of the town means "victory over the Thai people".  We have all been alternatively confused and enlightened about the long history of Indochina wars ... who was invading who, when ..... who was the nationalist vs the invader ... who was the liberator vs the oppressor ... it's basically been an area of constant conflict for many millennia.  Sadly, the US plays a not-so-pretty role whenever we turn up on the scene, such as putting in puppet governments, supporting brutal dictators, and generally thinking we know what we're doing when we do not.

Cambodia seems very different from Vietnam.  There is a lot of influence from Thailand and from India, which gives it more of an Indo feel than the East Asian/China feel of Vietnam.  The writing script looks like Sanskrit. Although most people are Buddhist, they still worship all the Hindu gods as well, so you see lots of Hindu iconography.  Many of the people look a bit darker and less East Asian as well.  It seems much less crowded than Saigon or Hanoi, but we haven't seen much yet, so perhaps I'm jumping the gun.

There are millions of tourists here.  Literally, millions.  In fact, over 3 million come to this little city every year.  I saw a parking lot of buses ... it looked like several hundred of them.

A major form of transportation in Siem Reap is the tuk tuk.  I remember the tuk tuks in Bangkok as three wheel bicycles, but these are motorcycles pulling an open carriage that can seat 2 to 4 people.  We went from the airport to the hotel in the tuk tuk.  We were picked up from the hike in the tuk tuk.  We went to dinner and back in them.  And the tuk tuks apparently stay with us during our whole stay here, at our beck and call for whatever we want to do.  We were supposed to figure out which was our tuk tuk and go to the same one each time, but we didn't realize that right away, so were a bit promiscuous at first with our tuk tuk drivers.

After a nice lunch at our hotel (Raffels - very imperial British feeling), we took our afternoon walk through town, along the river. One of the more interesting moments  was when Lim stopped to show us a food stall that sells fertilized duck eggs.  He checked out a few before he came up with one that he wanted and proceeded to open it onto a plate.  Inside was a partially formed duck fetus! Apparently this is a real delicacy.  To prove it, Lim calmly salted it and ate it.  You could even see the beak.  We talked about why this seems gross and it's not clear.  After all, we eat unfertilized eggs, and we eat adult ducks and chickens.  So why does this variety seem so yucky?

We walked to one of the older temples that was the prototype for Angkor Wat.  It looks much like it, but is smaller.  We made it in time to see sunset there, which was our goal.  It is a less known and important temple, so it was fabulous that we had it to ourselves, in spite of all those tourists in town.  It was quite magical to sit there, just our group, learning about Cambodian history from Lim, and watching the sunset.

Donna

This morning we took a speed boat up the Saigon River to about 70 kilometers outside the city.  Here we started with a walk through a rubber plantation. Yes, rubber comes from trees!  It's a process similar to tapping maple trees for syrup.  They make a cut in the tree and the stuff oozes out into a bowl.  The stuff in the bowl feels, amazingly enough, just like rubber. Rubber production is a growing fraction of agriculture in Vietnam, and they are planning to plant many millions of acres.  My only problem with this bit of the trip was getting that damn rubber tree plant song in my head!

We continued on a walk from there through the countryside. This area looked different than the others we had visited.  The houses all were fenced in - I think perhaps because of the chickens and dogs.  The streets were wider and straighter.  Unfortunately there was not a lot of shade and this was our first really hot day.  I bagged the hike early, catching a ride with the motorcycle guy to get to the end faster!

From there we went to the Cu Chi tunnel complex, which is quite amazing.  Just north of Saigon the Viet Cong built an elaborate set of tunnels during the Vietnam War.  They lived in these tunnels and used them as a base to attack the American positions.  They reminded us of those ant farms that we bought as kids.  There were multiple levels of tunnels opening into rooms that were highly specialized -- storage rooms, kitchens, meeting rooms, etc.  Above ground it was entirely camouflaged because the openings and air vents were disguised.  You could see how difficult it would be to know that anybody was there.

The Americans had some "tunnel rat" soldiers charged with entering the tunnels and trying to rout out the Viet Cong.  The elaborate and nasty booby traps, which were on display here, made this quite dangerous work.

 We had a chance to get in and out of the tunnels.  The openings and passages were quite tiny when in use, but they have been somewhat widened in order to accommodate the western tourist!  This was a fascinating visit, although a bit odd as a tourist destination given that it is recent history, and still very fresh in many of our minds.

After the boat road back - with a picnic lunch on board - we collapsed for a few hours.  The heat really makes it difficult to keep up your energy.  It's not even that hot compared to summer, so I can't imagine living here ... or being a soldier here, carrying heavy gear.

We went to a lovely final celebration dinner at the Ly restaurant, which as very modern.  There was a great little local dance show first, with young men and boys doing acrobatic movements in dragon costumes.  Then we had quite a nice gourmet dinner. 

The group then went on to check out the Karaoke scene that seems to be prevalent throughout Asia.  It wasn't really what I expected.  It is a multi-floor building with each floor having a bunch of private rooms with gaudy decor. Very bordello-looking.  There is a big screen and a music system, and you select songs and take turns singing, or all sing together.  I thought it would be kind of fun, but our sound system was creating terrible feedback and really annoying me. Between the screeching, the incense smell, and the close quarters, a few of us made a break for it and left pretty quickly. But Joan and Karl seemed to get into it.

Now we're getting ready to leave Vietnam for Cambodia, after saying goodbye to Marina and Missy (who are flying home to get back to work)  and to the rest of our very nice B&R group.

Donna

Ho Chi Minh City, aka Saigon

Today was mainly about transferring from our beach resort to Ho Chi Minh City - formerly known as Saigon.  Actually, it seems a lot of people still call it Saigon.  Since HCMC is quite a mouthful, I can see why.

HCMC is much bigger and more modern than Hanoi.  It is hard to imagine, but the scooter density also seems higher.  We saw several modern buildings - including one with a helipad sticking out of the 50th floor like a balcony.  Our guide showed us where the famous photo was taken when the US evacuated its staff at the end of the Vietnam War. 

We visited the Rex Hotel, which was the hangout place for journalists during the war, and then our group headed out to dinner at a French restaurant on our own.  We enjoyed the light show on the building across from us, which was constantly showing different patterns of light - much like our Bay Bridge light sculpture, except in color.

Donna