1. The food in Bangkok is simply fantastic, collectively up there with my top five culinary experiences. Khun Tawee and Khun Kalaya (and their daughter Awika) took us to a restaurant (translated as "Dining Car," with a train motif) close to their condo (and the railway station), and I had the best meal I had in Bangkok, which is saying a whole lot. (The food in Cambodia was more of the same, except a little less spicy -- because they were tourist restaurants, maybe?)
2. There's so much already written about Angkor that I feel obligated to bring out the weary clichés about ancient grandeur and so on, but I think I'll let some pictures -- haven't scanned them yet, but I will when I get back -- speak for themselves. Suffice it to say that the argument a group of scholars have been proposing - that Asia was very much the civilized center of the world for an awfully long time (sorry, I don't have my student-of-history hat on, just my blogger hat) is irrefutable in the face of something like Angkor. When one considers that much of what we were seeing was over a thousand years old, one realizes how misplaced (or rather, displaced) Eurocentrism is. (My little tourist recommendation: see Ayutthaya in Thailand before Angkor, otherwise it becomes anticlimactic -- Ayutthaya is certainly amazing as well, but the whole Angkor complex is simply out of this world. Unforgettable.)
3. There are hotels and guesthouses all over Siem Reap. There are also literally 2-3 internet cafes per block -- mostly 56kbps dialup, but for the relatively cheap price of $1 per half hour (as compared to 150 baht at our hotel in Bangkok). Yes, that's right: one U.S. dollar, which seems to be the principal currency among tourists here. Remarque-moto (not sure if I spelled that right) rides are about a buck -- they're like the Bangkok tuk-tuks, which only the farang seem to ride) -- and so are bottles of water. Our hotel, the Angkor Saphir Hotel, is a great deal for $20 or so a night (this includes breakfast too). (The moaning toilet, the big gecko over our door, and the hilarious sight of a cockroach fly up some American tourist's shorts were all free of charge.)
4. Unwittingly (much to our welcome surprise) our already affordable package tour also included a full two days with an extremely knowledgeable tour guide named Borin, who took us all over the temples, the use of an air-conditioned car, lunch and dinner. (I don't like guided tours -- I keep thinking of coach buses full of Korean tourists, of which there were a lot here -- but this was literally just me and Madeline and Borin with a very flexible schedule. We would start at 7:30, stop for a lunch break, go back to the hotel for a respite from the noonday heat, visit more temples, have dinner, and be home before the regular monsoon rains began in the early evening.) Borin could rattle off lengths and heights and numbers of Buddha statues without straining to remember them.
5. Everytime you come out one of the temples a flock of girls walk over to you as well. "Two for one dollar!" "Cold drinks, madam!" "When you come back buy from me, ok?" "Postcards, sir, one dollar!" they cry. It's all a little unnerving, especially the children singing and dancing for money in the parking lot.
6. A couple of the T-shirts they're selling, in addition to all the Angkor Wat / Bayon / Banteay Srei / Tiger Beer T-shirts, are reproductions of the landmine warning signs, with illustrations of different kinds of military ordnance and what to do if you step on one. (I actually did not see a single sign, because most of Siem Reap has already been de-mined. You are still instructed, however, not to venture off marked trails to pee.) This I find quite tasteless, as there are limbless and blind people wherever you look -- a product of both the Khmer Rouge's twisted logic regarding winning the hearts and minds of the people, and the United States's merciless carpet-bombing of a country with whom they were not at war. (More tonnage was dropped on Cambodia, I believe -- I don't have my books with me -- than the amount dropped on Hiroshima during World War II.)
7. Thai massage (I've never had it before, and I'm not a big massage fan), at the Wat Po School of Massage, is excellent.
Posted by the wily filipino at July 3, 2003 02:40 AM