itinerant dayze

sigh... it's so fucking hard to leave this place. i've been saying "yeah i'm going to phnom penh tomorrow" for four days in a row now... life is hard.

so, after recovering from the party the american girls left and i adopted some french girls, julie and aurelia. beaches, beaches, and more beaches. we'd befriended the family that runs one of the guesthouses here and on sunday the three of us went to one of the more secluded beaches with three of the kids and had a lovely day playing in the water and learning cambodian card games (they all cheat. four-year olds... trying to cheat with the first card they're dealt... but oh so cute!) a couple of beautiful sunsets later and we rented motorbikes and headed to an even more secluded beach. kilometer after kilometer of white sand and turquoise water and NO development anywhere in sight. a herd of cows wandered by around noon, but that was about it as far as other tourists go... pretty incredible that beaches like this still exist only a few hours away from the madness of thailand. this country is about as close to truly 'unspoiled' as any i've ever come across, but i've heard laos is even more so.

anyway, the frenchies inevitably left, but then i met some germans (sarah 22, sasha 32) and a dane (laura) who were planning to go to Ream nat'l park for a night of camping. we went to the market together and bought what we thought would be enough food (six baguettes and some bannanas) and headed to the park. the taxi let us out and said '"here's where you take the boat to the islands" and we said "islands?" i had no idea. turns out the park consists of a number of uninhabited islands just off the coast. ok, sounds great. we took a boat to a little island, maybe 5km across (completely uninhabited), and spent the afternoon frolicking in the water and playing with crabs and seashells. we did discover some strange fresh large-cat footprints on the beach whose origin and destination had been washed away by the surf... when the sun started going down, we found a nice spot that was a safe distance from the surf (we thought) and built a fire and layed down some mats to sleep on. another narcotizing sunset (i'm almost getting desensitized...) and then we sat around trading stories and talking and just generally being really hungry. the bananas were gone by 16:00 and stale bread and water is barely a satisfying meal, even if you roast it over the fire. finally went to sleep, only to awake to laura saying "wake up! we have to move, the tide is coming in!" in my hypnogogic haze i replied "stop being paranoid, we're perfectly safe" and then my feet started getting wet and the fire began to hiss so we got up and moved back to a safe distance... for breakfast we had warm beer and breadcrumbs. not a soul in sight. thankfully, the boat-guy was good on his word and returned around 11 to pick up us emaciated survivors. spent the rest of the day lolling around in hammocks on the mainland beach. saw a school of flying fish flash across the water like a school of skipping stones and dissapear into the suns reflection... then finally made it back to sihanook for a much needed shower.

tomorrow i am really heading to phnom pehn. really. maybe meeting up with aurelia and heading for kratie. my vietnam visa starts today, so every day i spend in cambodia now is one that i must miss in vietnam. i'm feeling more inclined to stay here for a few more days at least, though, both because of stories i'm hearing about vietnam and also because the amount of khmer i've picked up has really made traveling here much more enjoyable. i think vietnamese is quite a bit more difficult. my english is getting terrible. a few days of french, then some german, a little dutch here and there and everything peppered with khmer. happy happy. food delicious very. me go now internet family.

much love.

happy new year everybody!

i haven't written in a while. recap: after battambang, i pick-upped to phenom penh which is quite interesting compared to most asian capital cities. no sky-scrapers or anything... just one very big (around a million people) small town. spent three or four nice relaxing days there (the guesthouses are just one step away from opium dens...) which included a visit to the Tuol Sleng (aka S-21) museum which used to be a khmer-rouge interrogation/tourture/exocution camp. i don't want to describe it. it was extremely upsetting and i left without seeing half of the place. bottom line: there is simply no limit to the cruelty of human beings. very cheerful. moving on... i went to kompot (which is cool because part of the book i just read -'the north china lover' margurite duras, fantastic - takes place there. but really it's just a somnambulent little cambodian town with not much to do. except on new-years-eve, that is. actually the party took place at the Bokor nat'l park which is about 40km from Kampot. it was the coolest new year's eve of my life. here's the setup: on top of a mountain in Bokor nat'l park, there is an old French-colonial-era leisure park which is completely abandoned, very spooky, and surrounded by dense jungle. there is a hotel (straight out of 'The Shining') and a casino and a few other ruins that used to be buildings of some sort. on new-years eve, some french ex-pats flew in a bunch of european DJ's and threw a full-blown rave in the casino. people set up tents, slept in empty rooms in the casino or hotel, or just stayed up all night...

on the morning of the 31st, i was still undecided about the party but i met a nice german guy (stephan, mid-20's, living in cambodia studying social anthropology of some sort) who had just hired a dirt-bike (250cc's, good shocks) to take him to the party at Bokor. we talked for a while and then agreed to go together and he kindly took me on the back of his bike. the ride up to the top of the mountain was intense. the road gets washed away every year by the monsoons, and what's left of it is little more than a dry river bed, only with more rocks. it took us about 3 hours to make it 41km. quite fun, though. when we neared the top, we took a detour to some spectacular rock formations (waterfalls, in the wet season... no more than a trickle now) and recovered from the trip and then headed out to the casino. the location is spectacular. the whole leisure-park-thing is on the ridge of the mountain and the Casino is on the edge of a cliff facing the water. we arrived just in time for sunset and sat above the clouds (literally) watching the spectacular cambodian sunset from the roof of the casino. quite a crowd had gathered already (in my estimate there were between 3 and 400 people, about half-khmer) and the music jumped on as soon as it got dark. there were camp-fires and tale-gate-partys all over the place and i saw many people there that i had seen elsewhere in SEA. watched a truly spectacular sunrise (aren't they all?) from a rock under flying saucer and then sleeplessly and carefully made our way down the mountain on the dirtbike.

met quite a few very interesting people and stayed up all night dancing and talking and generally having a happy and fantastic timE. stephan and i made friends with two nice american girls who are really awesome. tami and jamie, identical twins who go to berkley; pre-med and 'peace and conflict studies' respectively. their personalities are so distinct and they don't look all that identical and i didn't even realize they were twins until we had been hanging out for a few hours. their mother is a psychologist and not only are they an incredibly fascinating twin-study, but they never seem to get bored answering questions and talking about nature-vs-nurture. they have also both taken the controversial (it was in the papers for a while) male-sexuality class at berkeley and taught the female sexuality class as well. brilliantly fascinating people. after the party i've met up with them here in Sihanoukville and we're still hanging out, altho they're heading to thailand tomorrow. it was interesting (and a little upsetting for me) because after suddenly meeting people from exactly the same social strata that i come from (jewish, middle-class, liberal-progressive) i realized that until then i hadn't had a satisfying conversation since i left america. we've basically been talking non-stop since i met them and it makes me feel a real sense of the ineluctable nature of class and background... although the flipside of that coin is identification with my country and my heritage... very very interesting and pleasant.

so now i'm about caught up. spent the day on the beach with Tami and Jamie and have no plans for the immediate future... my vietnamese visa starts next week. Jamie's just spent 4 months in Vietnam and is getting me excited about it, although it's quite cold in the north now...

i hope everyone else had a wonderful new-year and that this will be the best year of your lives so far and the worst to come. nothing but love to all. it's two-thousand-and-fucking-four!?!?!?! (tmesis)

one parting anecdote from the party: it was around 4 am and a bunch of cracked-out party-goers are sitting around a campfire. there's a half-asleep cambodian guy next to me and this drunken english guy comes up and starts bothering him asking how to say "happy new year" in Khmer. the cambodian looks up and tells him to say "berang ch'kooyt chrang" which i understood translates to "white people are very crazy" and i poked him in the ribs and we sat laughing for about 15 minutes while the englishman went around shaking hands and telling every cambodian he met that white people are crazy... it pays to learn a little of the language of the country you're in. heheh, i don't think i'll ever stop laughing about that one...

happy new year!

before leaving siem reap, fabien (27, swiss) and i went to visit a floating village about 10km from S.R.  when you approach the village, you stop at a government office where officials insist that you must buy a ticket (for US$15!!) to take a boat tour around the village.  not only was that too much money, but it was clear that that money would go directly into their pockets and the people from the village would never see a cent of it.  so we refusted and said that we'd simply walk as far as we could and left them on foot.  after a ~3km walk to the end of the land (where the village really started)  we managed to hire two little boys (maybe 7 or 8 y/o) to take us around in a rowboat for $1.50 each... not only was this a much better price, but it benefitted the locals and the best part was that they weren't aloud to go in the areas where the main tour boats went, so they took us to all the parts of the village that tourists never go to.  it was wonderful.  everywhere we went, the children would run out of their houses to wave and shout 'HELLO! HELLO!'.  it was a very memorable experience and i got some fantastic photos!

so... on thursday, i decided to go from bangkok to cambodia.  up at 4 am to catch a a nice, cheap train to the border... third class:  open doors and windows, no seats, no problems.  the cambodian border is notoriously corrupt and difficult, and sure enough, the border guards there cheated me out of about $5 because my passport was sort of full (in addition to the $5 they cheat everyone out of by charging 1000 baht ($25) instead of the official US$20).  it was just a scam.  i still had three blank pages at the end, but they were labled "amendments and modifications" rather than "visas" so they refused me entry until i bribed the guard.  business as usual with the cambodian government.  anyway, that's when the real fun started.

after fighting off the touts at the border, i flagged down a pickup-truck heading from Poipet (border town) to Sisiphon (on the way to Siem Reap).  it was me, some chickens, a few crates of vegetables, and about a dozen cambodian peasants in the back of the truck.  the road was semi-paved;  full of craters and rusty bridges.  i thought it was uncomfortable.  i didn't know what was coming next.  after about an hour, i got out in Sisiphon and found another pickup-truck heading for Siem Reap.  after driving around in circles for nearly 2 hours to pick up more passengers and waste petrol (these trucks leave when they're full, not before...)  we finally hit the "road" with me and 11 cambodian peasants and a few other westerners sitting on a huge pile of jackfruit (about the size of watermellons, and covered with spikes).  between Sisiphon and S.R., the road is completely unpaved, which makes it all but impassible during the wet season.  luckily, the dry season just started, so instead of mud there was dust.  lots and lots of red, gritty, dust.  you would think with conditions like these, the drivers would be slow and cautious...  heheh...  of course not.  they drive as fast as the can, until they hit a crater or a mound and then slam on the brakes.  or they drive straight into a tangle of traffic with the horn blaring making it clear the the other cars, bikes, motorcycles must get out of the way or die.  very entertaining.  the whole trip lasted about three hours... by the end, i was covered from head to toe in red dust (except for faint eye-holes where my sunglasses had saved my vision).  needless to say, one of the first things i invested in when i got to S.R. was a "krama", which is a silk scarf that all the locals wear on their faces and heads when they're on the road to protect them from the dust, wind, and bugs (not funny to get hit in the eye with a three-inch flying cricket when you're going 60).  anyway, it was actually lots of fun... welcome to cambodia!  along the way, we went past some of the most stunning scenery i've ever seen.  just impossible to describe (so i'll try):  electric-green rice-paddies on either side of the deep red dusty sunset-bathed road.  the fields were spotted with peasants and herds of water-buffalo and the odd flock of great-white herrons.  between Sisiphon and S.R., i did not see more than 5 electric lights and there not a single foreigner in sight (besides the few on the truck).  we stopped for breaks a few times in little tiny villiages (clusters of thatch huts on stilts) wherein i was immediately surrounded by a small crowd of the most beautiful children i've ever seen.  and, amazingly, they all speak excellent english (compared to thailand, at least).  they all came up and (after trying to sell me anything they could find) said "What is your name?  Where are you from?  I am 9 years old.  My name is..." with barely a trace of an accent.  they were just adorable...  (N.B. - 105km (60miles) in 4 hours...)

so anyway, on to Siam Reap.  nice enough town.  quite small. it's the gateway to Angkor Wat and, as such, is having new luxury hotels springing up like mushrooms, every day.  (built with foreign money and all profits go abroad, of course).  a few markets and cafes, but really not much to do besides Angkor.  [lots of amputees around (everywhere in cambodia) due to all the landmines.  ~50 are still maiming people every month.  needless to say, don't walk off the side of the road to take a leak...]  yesterday i walked around all day and then went to one of the temples for sunset.  too cloudy for a nice one, though.  so i did angkor wat this morning:

kind of impossible to desribe properly.  i've just put some new pictures up.  look at them.  angkor wat is actually just one temple (the biggest) in the region, wherein there are litteraly hundreds of others.  the whole temple region (the former seat of the khmer empire) spans probably 50km from side to side, so one needs a moto to take you around for the day.  i got there at 5AM for the sunrise (which was also too cloudy to see).  and then, instead of heading for angkor wat, like everyone else, i went to some of the less-popular temples.  my favorite being Ta Phrom at which, unlike almost all of the others, they did not clear the trees and vegetation from the site, so it still looks almost as they found it.  the whole thing is crubling, but ever-so beautifully.  many-century-old tree roots are slowly splitting the rocks to pieces and it is just spectacularly romantic.  as i went there first very early in the morning, i was completely alone.  it was quite moving.  during the rest of the day i went from temple to temple, and managed to go to the less popular ones early, and the more popular ones during lunch time (all the big package tour-buses go back into town for lunch) and somehow managed to avoid the crowds almost everywhere.  as i could only afford one day at the park (it's $20/day, almost none of which goes to the park, rather it goes to the oil company which just bought it from the wonderful cambodian government) this made me quite happy.  i finally went to angkor wat itself around noon and it really is quite a sight to behold.  the overwhelming symmetry reminded me of the taj mahal.  just look at the pictures...  one of my favorite parts of this temple is that all around the base (around 1 km) the walls are carved with beautiful bas-reliefs depicting epic tales of cambodian history (including the ramayan, among others) which are in excellent condition. 

amazing day. 

that's more than enough writing...  more pictures: click here  [the terrorist-looking picture is me trying my new krama on for size].

another short one.

just arrived in bangkok to pick up my passport. i'm now the proud owner of visas for viet-nam and lao. so what am i doing? going to cambodia. tomorrow. it's going to be crazy... check out http://www.talesofasia.com for some insight into the thailand-cambodia overlanding process.

also, more pictures: click here.

a few more from the Ao Nang area; Bangkok, Phi Mai, and then Phenom Rung.

if i make it to Cambodia in one piece and find some decent computers, I'll make an Angkor Wat report in a few days.

love to all. miss you.

[also note: added a quick-links section (on the left) for easy access to all the photos i've uploaded so far.]

PS - two nights ago i ate a fried grasshopper. it was my first bug. crunchy... there's a picture in the latest set.

ooooh what a lovely couple of days...

yesterday, mary jane (40, aussie), suzanne (32, dutch), and i rented 2 motorbikes and headed east towards the Phenom Rung historical park.  stayed the night in Nang Rong, at a very friendly little guesthouse and then set out for the ruins in the early AM.  the trip to Nang Rong was around 120km and took around 4-5 hrs but was jsut beautiful, winding through the countryside and past tiny little villiage after villiage.  they don't get many tourists out there... often when we passed slowly through a villiage, a group of children would run after us shouting "HELLO!  HELLO!  BYE-BYE!  HELLO!"... adorable.  the fields are dotted with massive grazing oxen with prodtruding shoulder-blades, long lop-ears, and formidable horns with a bird or two atop;  peasants toiling away under the sun everywhere...  the ruins themselves, in Phenom Rung were similar to the ones in Phi Mai, but more impressive.  took heaps of picture, which i will upload as soon as i can.  it's surprisingly dry out here.  the archetypal image of palm trees and green jungle everywhere does not fit this region.  it's yellow and brown with fields of wheat and vegetables (and/or other things?) and dry, dusty red earth showing through in spots...  quite beautiful though...

would write more but hotmail is not responding, so i'll save it for another time.

ok, high-tailed it out of bangkok as soon as i could. there's a lot to see in that city, but as i will be back a few times out of necessity, i left it for later. it is huge... probably the biggest city i've ever seen, weighing in at just over 13 million people!! my bus arrived at 4am and after dropping off my bags at a hostel, i spent the early morning wandering around. if you get around before 7 AM there are no other tourists about and it's quite lovely (and cool). the big tourist ghetto is on Kao San Rd. and it is really quite a spectacle. you can get everything there from roasted beetles (for eating) to ladyboys (for loving?). but it's a bit overwhelming and overpriced. the next morning i took four busses (all of them wrong) and spent ~5 hours just trying to find the north-eastern bus-terminal where i could catch a bus to Khorat... but i saved a dollar in taxi-fare!!! sigh...

[the only reason i stopped in bangkok was to drop off my passport to get visas for viet-nam and laos]

Khorat (aka Nakonratchasima) is another biggish city and really not very interesting. spent two nights there due to a promise to trade some books with an expat last night (i got 'jane eyre' for 'persuasion' among others). there are a lot of viet-nam vets living there... left this morning and arrived in Phi Mai, which is a beautiful tiny little town centered around some very ancient Khmer ruins that apparently pre-date Angkor Wat. did some preliminary explorations this afternoon, but think i will try to go back tomorrow around 6AM to take some pics when there aren't any other tourists about. Phi Mai is quite a nice place though and I may stick around for another day or two.

here's an item for all you "elderly" folk out there who are afraid to travel: this afternoon i sat and talked with an 85 year old (that's eighty-five!) welsh woman who has spent the last few months bumming around thailand and cambodia. and she travels ROUGH. she's about 4 feet tall, wrinkled from head to toe, has had two hip-operations in recent years and is blind in one eye. amazing. she recently fended off a pack of wild baboons (single handedly, with a brolley) in the malaysian jungles and was later flung ("like a discus") from a tuk-tuk over some argument with the driver in cambodia... among dozens of other stories... so for all of you who think you can't travel in places like this because you'd be too uncomfortable in your old age... you've got no excuse! live a little! (and she does it all on her welsh pension of around 75 quid per week!)

(bangkok)


developing....


g

sorry to write this one, while you guys are all shivering away back home... but i think i may've found a new contender for the most beautiful beach i've ever seen.    i apologize in advance for all the superlatives -  they're hard to avoid here. 

ok, so i guess the monastic life just isn't for me.  it was interesting, however... first a brief description:  first of all, after registration on the first day, they gave us a little talk and then rang a little bell and commenced the silence.  no talking.  at all.  for the rest of the retreat.  men and women are kept separate for the entire session as well.  dorms are comprised of a concrete slab with a rice-paper mat (for sleeping on) with a wooden pillow.  that's right:  a pillow, made out of wood.  soft wood?  no... just plain old hard-as-rock wood.  for sleeping on.  actually not as uncomfortable as you might think.  the bell rings at 4am.  it's not hard to get up that early when you're sleeping on a concrete slab.  take a quick "shower" (there are big concrete troughs of rain-water with little buckets for you to pour water over yourself) and then head for the main hall for meditation... breakfast is at 8am.  lunch is at 12:30 and that's the last meal of the day.  the food was actually pretty good... all vegan, of course... but quite yummy.  maybe the hunger had something to do with it.  oh yeah, we also got a cup of corn-husk-tea at 6pm to hold us over until breakfast.  bedtime at 9pm.  bottom line:  very very spartan.  interesting experience in learning just how little one needs.

anyway, basically the whole day (every day) consisted of meditation interspersed with little talks and lectures by bhuddist monks living at the monastery.  they would explain meditation techniques and drill you with bhuddist philosophies regarding peace of mind, tranquility, loving kindness, etc.