hello there... sorry for the lag in getting info to you. our travels, as luxurious as they seem in a blog, are in actuality, well luxurious and amazing but also exhausting and honestly, at the end of a long day of traveling Lonely Planet style, the last place i want to be is in front of a computer... : ) so forgive me as it has been "my turn" to write the blog for the past week or so.
From beautiful but tourist overrun Vang Vien, we hopped a bus to the Lao capital of Vientiane...French name, French baguettes, a few French restaurants, even a Lao "Arc du Triumph" (forgive my French spelling). The days we were there also happened to be the End of the Rainy Season Festivities---someone should get their facts straight because it rained the entire time. : ) Streets were crazy with vendors, a carnival, concert stages, and the banks of the Mekong were packed with locals watching the boat races--gigantic canoe-type thingies with 30 or so people paddling them---reminded me of races on the lake near my house in MN. We went to a sculpture garden, wandered thru the crazy riverside, saw the national museum--depressing history of Laos, and for once, watched a little HBO in our smelly hotel room! Yay! We both agreed that visiting during a national festival was great, and also a little intense--Overall, it was a muddy, smelly, intense few days in Vientiane and we left sooner then planned--fled actually--opted for a flight to Cambodia instead of further exploring southern Laos--rains have swelled most rivers over their banks and travel is a bit hindered...and the pink dolphins we were hoping to spot in The Four thousand Islands of Laos are least seen in high water. Cambodia and an air-conditioned airplane sounded like the best option. We loved Laos, the people here and the amazing food...but it felt like time to move on.
An airport--wow--it seemed like we were seeing flying cars and robotic humans--an airport! A decently designed modern looking building with lights that worked, airconditioning and toilets we could SIT on! It was amazing, we loved the Vientiane Airport. : ) Flight was short and sweet and we touched down on to a runway surrounded by water---flying over the areas surrounding Phnom Penh was like flying over the world after the polar ice shelf melts...water everywhere and a mere few spots of land and a few palm trees on the surface---a vast, shiny surface--only as our landing gear was unfolded did we see anything remotely resembling an area dry enough and large enough to land on. Out of nowhere, a seemingly island city appeared and we felt certain we would in fact not have to put on our inflatable life jackets and befriend a volleyball.
Landing in Phnom Penh was a breeze and the taxi to the center of town was calming. Acazia found Salt & Vinegar Kettle chips (my favorite) at the duty free store and surprised me with them. It was like christmas. We stayed near the river in the Okay Guesthouse. You do the math. We spent a lot of time walking by the river because finally, it seemed like a city had recognized the beauty of a river and based a park and socializing area around the river...vendors everywhere. You could buy anything from a live bird in a cage made of sticks to a dried sea creature on a stick--both to eat b.t.w. We opted for caramel popcorn.
We set out for the Toul Sleng Genocide Museum and well, we didn't think it would be a HAPPY genocide museum but we didn't think it would be as horrifying as it was. Toul sleng WAS a high school in the 1960's until the Khmer Rouge took over Phnom Penh. From 1974-1979 or so, the high school was a prison and interrogation center. 20,000 men, women and children were "interrogated" and ultimately killed at Toul Sleng, or S21 as it was also called. The school was left much as it was found after all the bodies were removed. It felt and looked much like I imagine a concentration camp must feel as one visits it today. The yellow and white checkered floors scrubbed mostly clean were a disturbing reminder that this place once was for CHILDREN to LEARN in....and then it was turned into this awful awful place. The rows and rows of photos of the people admitted to S21 is sobering...Mug shot after mug shot, these faces stare out at you and you can't do much but to stare back and hope they are in a better place now, a better life being rewarded 1,000,000-fold for the atrocities that were committed against them at this place, in these rooms, in these very rooms that we wander slowly through. I had to remind myself to breathe several times. It is absolutely inconceivable that human beings can believe and be forced into believing that THIS is how other humans being deserve to be treated... I couldn't help but think in the back of my mind about G.W. and how he can't even sign a piece of paper that says most simply, that we won't be cruel to people WE interrogate in times of war. . . He needs to visit S21, if his little brain and even littler heart could comprehend it at all.... pardon me, ahem. Moving on.
After a sad place like S21, we decided we needed some comfort food, so we ate at 2 restaurants that were both organizations that helped children and young people get off the streets, get a job and get on with their lives---we had lunch at the Bodhhi Tree and dinner at Friends Mith Samlanh (and organization that my friend Marq has done some photography for)--both places gave us our most amazing meals in all of Cambodia and were warm and comforting places in a city with so much terrible history and poverty. You think the distribution of wealth seems unfair in the U.S.? Come to S.E. Asia where you either live in a bamboo hut or the 4 story, gaudy balconied cement monolithic "house" next door. Speaking of really big houses, on to Angkor Wat.
We have spent the last 2 days exploring Angkor Wat---said by some to be the largest religious architecture in the world--Built over 7 centuries by the god-Kings of Cambodia, Angkor Wat is the remains of giant stone temples spread over a few miles north of the town of Siam Reap. It is straight out of Indiana Jones and it is truly amazing. Instead of taking a tuktuk, we have opted to ride bicycles to get a little exercise---hot and sweaty exercise. After two days of +/-20k of biking each, I think we AND our sore asses are over the $1.50 a day bicycles we have been renting. Photos do not do this place justice...it is giNORmous and like nothing you have ever seen before. If someone wanted to claim he was a god and build a kingdom of temples to prove it, this was obviously the place. The surrounding towns that built these giants are now long gone as they were built out of wood. Houses of stone were reserved for Gods only...At one time, the population of the area was over a million--at that same time, London had 50,000. Angkor Wat is huge and exquisite. Each stone, howEVER it was moved to its towering position in any of these temples, is carved with more detail than you can imagine---it is exhausting to imagine the amount of work that went into this place...anyway...we have one more day left on our 3 day pass and we plan on revisiting our favorite temples at sunset and then we will hop a plane to Vietnam the next day. BTW our 3 day pass cost us $40 bucks which is the most we have spent at one time on this trip--$100 bucks will easily last you a week in SE asia--Thousands of people visit these temples each day and are all paying ridiculous amounts of money, especially by Cambodian standards, and somehow, this province is still the poorest in the entire country. A hotel company's name is stamped all over our passes and we have a feeling that VERY LITTLE, if ANY of our $40.00 went to the people of Siam Reap. More later from Vietnam.... xoxo Liza
