Hong Kong

September 13-15

Michael and I got into Hong Kong a few hours before Ken and Janine, so we had a chance to check into the airbnb and go explore a bit before they arrived.

Here’s the view from our airbnb… not too shabby, eh?

We checked out a beer shop and then grabbed dinner in SOHO.

Finally J9 and Ken made it around 9pm after an 18 hour flight. We grabbed a quick dinner near our apartment, had a few beers and then went to bed.

The next morning we popped out into the heat to check out a few sights. First up was the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception on our way to Victoria Peak.

Next it was a very steep, slightly terrifying tram ride up to the Peak.

Definitely worth it for a great view of the city.

Then some of the best noodles and dumplings we’ve had at this tiny shop.

We never got a full picture of all four of us together from this day, but note that Michael and Ken are both in Navy shirts and blue/gray shorts while Janine and I are both in pink shirts and navy shorts. It’s hard work coordinating that much. You can kind of tell here:

And you can at least see what the guys are working with here:

That night we got dressed up and had a fancy dinner at an incredible rooftop restaurant – Tin Lun Henn – with a great view of the city.

Somehow, I only have this one picture of Michael. I think he’s pretending to be fancy here:

And of course I got a picture of the Peking duck.

And Janine got this picture of the fancy chop sticks. The white are to eat with and the black are to use for plating when taking food from a communal dish.

And then Michael got this cool picture of the hallway at dinner.

But could we get any pictures of us all together while we were dressed up? No. Janine and I even wore heels!

The next morning we grabbed some great dim sum before heading to the airport.

The below were like tiny pineapple upside down cakes.

Initially we were supposed to meet up with Ken and Janine and spend four days in Hong Kong, a city that all four of us were pumped to visit. But with a huge typhoon headed our way, we decided to enjoy the city for less than two days and then duck out early before the typhoon hit to avoid messing with the rest of our travel plans. We have places to go and people to see!

Mangkhut ended up being the strongest of 16 typhoons since WW2 with winds over 124 miles per hour. There was flooding in Hong Kong and major clean up on Monday, the day we were suppose to fly out. Our Monday flight to Phuket was actually canceled by Saturday morning, so it made the decision to change our plans pretty easy. We hopped on a flight to Chiang Mai and gave Ken and Janine an extra city on their tour of Thailand.

Hanoi

September 10-12

We took a very cold but otherwise uneventful overnight train from Hoi An to Hanoi. We had booked this train before our less than ideal train ride in China, otherwise we would have just flown. But it was mostly fine. We watched the new season of Ozark on Netflix and tried to stay warm. We did have two cabin mates, but they came in, went to bed immediately and said almost nothing.

An hour or two before arriving into Hanoi, we realized we didn’t have a hotel booked. Whoops. We haven’t had this problem too often – the spreadsheet keeps us fairly organized, but the overnight train confused things on the schedule. But we nabbed a place and dropped our bags off before heading out to see the city.

Our first stop was Cha Ca Thang – a restaurant that Michael had found that serves a famous catfish dish. It was delicious, but half of the experience came from the dish cooking right on our table.

After lunch, we went to Hoa Lo Prison, a prison used by the French for political prisoners during their occupation of Vietnam and then used by the North Vietnamese for US prisoners of war during the Vietnam War. During this time, American POWs sarcastically named it the Hanoi Hilton.

John McCain was one of the most famous prisoners of the Hanoi Hilton, spending part of his five and a half years as a POW there. Here are some pictures of McCain.

The entire place had a bizarre feel to it. It was really just one big propaganda museum. A lot of effort was exerted to outline the abuses inflicted on Vietnamese by the French while painting a picture of how incredibly comfortable US POWs were while staying there.

Here’s a POW flight suit:

Although North Vietnam claimed that prisoners were treated in accordance with the Geneva Convention, prisoners suffered severe torture methods and abuses. Despite the reports, the memorial shows pictures of US POWs decorating Christmas trees and celebrating Thanksgiving dinner together.

After our visit to the propaganda machine, we took a trip to a nearby brewery to cleanse our palate.

We also had this amazing pizza for dinner. That’s spicy ham with a huge ball of burratta on top. Mmmmmm

Then we stopped to see St. Joseph’s Cathedral.

The next day we had some solo time. I got a massage, read, and worked on blog posts while Michael went to a cook class.

And for your reading pleasure, here is some information about the cooking class from Michael:

We’ve taken cooking classes in Valparaiso, Marrakech and Tuscany on this trip. The cooking class in Hanoi would be ranked #2 behind Tuscany. Unfortunately Jane did not come along, so it was just me and a recently engaged couple from Israel.

As a side note, when I was waiting to be picked up for the cooking class the hotel receptions was giggling at me. At first I thought she was just being friendly. However, Jane talked with her later and she was laughing because a male was taking a cooking class. She was surprised that a man who she called “so masculine” would do something so feminine. She also couldn’t grasp the idea that we were spending our day apart. When Jane told her that sometimes we just “need it”, she was very confused.

I don’t subscribe to gender stereotypes and am comfortable in my masculinity. However, Jane is required to attend any and all future cooking classes so locals wont question my manhood again.

Back to the class – we started by making chicken broth for the Vietnamese national breakfast soup called Pho (pronounced “fuh”). It consisted of a chicken carcass, water, onions, shallots and random spices. The process requires several hours of simmering so during this time we left the kitchen and went to the market to pick up a few street food snacks and ingredients for the other dishes.

Some of the highlights of the market included fresh seafoods from the local river, bullfrogs, and snapping turtles. We also ate something that included worms. My new Israeli friends tried it even though they doubted worms were kosher.

After collecting our ingredients we went back and made pork spring rolls (for me) and chicken spring rolls for the Israelites. Keeping kosher doesn’t mean that you cant used giant cleavers to mince pork.

Here are the spring rolls:

The final dish is called Cha Ca which is a northern Vietnamese dish consisting of catfish with dill and fish sauce. We had gone to the best Cha Ca restaurant in Vietnam the day before so this version we made was not quite as good. But the pho and spring rolls were amazing.

Upon leaving the class I received a certificate of achievement, chopsticks and a metal tool used to make fancy vegetable art to improve my food presentations when we get back.

Ok, I’m back. Although I missed my incredibly masculine husband on our day apart, it is nice to have some alone time. Ten months is a really long time to be spending every minute of every day together. Also it’s good to know that he’s constantly upping his cooking game.

The next day we wandered through the old French town where we saw the Opera house and the other Hanoi Hilton.

I had heard a lot of great things about the Opera house and wanted to see a show, but nothing was playing while we were in town.

Then we walked to Bun Cha Huong Lien.

This is the restaurant that Anthony Bourdain and President Obama ate at in Hanoi. That episode of Parts Unknown is really special and communicates great messages about food along with the importance of travel and experiencing other cultures. I encourage everyone to go hunt down that episode on CNN.com and watch it.

Obviously we ordered the “combo Obama”.

Here is the table that they ate at:

Afterwards we wandered around town, enjoying the beautiful lake and markets in Old Town.

No way of knowing who this guy is:

We also checked out Den Ngoc Son temple which sits in the middle of the lake.

That night, we tackled public transportation to get up north to an expat community. As a general rule, I like taking trains in foreign countries. Things are usually well marked and it is usually clear how to get tickets and such. Or at least we can figure it out. But this time we were going to be riding buses. It’s just always a gamble while standing on a random road waiting indefinitely for a bus to arrive. Then you have to worry about how to pay for the ticket. Do you need a ticket in advance? Do you pay the driver? Is there a third party on the bus that you pay? Do you need exact change? Is google maps telling us the accurate price for the ticket?

Despite all this anxiety, the bus arrived after 20 or so minutes and we had a slow but successful stroll through traffic up to visit a brewery.

Michael chose it for its 20 beers on tap, but when we arrived they told us the draught beers weren’t available, so we had a few bottles and a pizza before tackling the bus back to our hotel.

Good news! Hello Kitty World is coming to Hanoi soon!

That was the end of our time in Vietnam. The next morning we had some breakfast Pho before boarding a flight and heading to Hong Kong to meet up with Ken and Janine.

See the play on words there? Better Pho You?

Vietnam is a beautiful country with great food that was really easy to travel through. We loved the country and will definitely be back.

Hoi An

September 6-9

Our next three days in Vietnam were spent in Hoi An, a picturesque beach town in the central part of the country. Still battling colds, we spent this time enjoying delicious food, drinking Vietnamese coffees, biking to the beach, and relaxing in this cool town.

Plus we had some more clothes made and some leather shoes from Song Leather Shop! Here’s my final shoe fitting:

That’s right. I love them. We’ll let you know how the shoes hold up, but the process for custom made shoes is cool. They tape measured our feet and drew outlines to perfectly fit our feet. Even if they don’t hold up, they were cheap enough that it was worth the cost for the process. But I think they’re going to pull through!

A shot of a fitting of one of the dresses I had made:

I know the lemons are a bit much, but my grandma had a lemon and lime bag that I use to be obsessed with, so this fabric reminds me of her.

We did have one custom clothing mishap. The clothing shop, Ty Ha Na, makes pants jumpsuits. The pictures looked great, so I picked one out for them to make for me. I also chose this really great dark blue silky fabric. The next day I went back to try it on and realized that I had a custom made garbage man outfit.

These are the garbage people who were standing outside the shop while I was doing my fitting.

I cannot make this up. So, I tried to fix it by having them turn it into shorts instead of pants. It’s better, but still makes me think of an electrician or something. Hopefully with some heels and a necklace it will be ok. Haha.

The beaches were empty and gorgeous:

The street food was excellent:

This was Mike’s guy:

Suns out, guns out.

Plus the bars had live music that was really decent – Weezer, U2, Beatles, etc.

We also had great recommendations from Mike’s tour guide Muay for food in town.

The banh mi place ended up rocking our world. We went there two mornings in a row for breakfast banh mi.

Plus we grabbed some “other” banh mi on the beach one day. Can you have too much banh mi? I don’t think so.

We also found a great coffee shop that we hung out at a few times. You know I love having a coffee place that we can rely on.

One thing I want to mention is about the people and the heat in Vietnam and other Asian countries. I cannot understand how they survive. It is hot. Really hot. Michael and I are sweating nonstop, and yet somehow, everyone is dressed in long sleeves and pants.

Here is a picture of Michael at the post office.

It was so hot in there that at one point, he asked me to stand in line for him because he needed to sit down for a minute. It was nearly impossible to function in that room. And yet everyone else is in pants and sweats. They are layered up. What the heck! I have no idea how they don’t end up with heat stroke. I know that they cover up to avoid the sun, but take off the hoodie when you’re inside!

Wish our two small packages luck on their trip to the US. Michael filled out 3 different forms for each package with all of the same information. Not sure why the repetition, but hopefully that makes it more likely to arrive.

We loved Hoi An and would definitely recommend it to anyone. It was a beautiful, easy city to visit. Plus their lantern game is strong. I would imagine that our next trip to Southeast Asia definitely would include a few days in this city.

HCM

September 3-5

The ship dropped us and the rest of the passengers off at the Sofitel in Ho Chi Minh City. We gathered our bags and checked in. Just kidding. Haha Sofitel is a bit more expensive than what we’re interested in paying in Southeast Asia. So Michael walked to an ATM in a torrential downpour to grab cash and then we took a cab to a different part of town to check into our 20 buck a night hotel room. For the record – although it is definitely not as fancy as the Sofitel, the place was great. It was clean, decent sized room, nice bathroom, free breakfast, and great location. You just can’t beat value like that.

We left the hotel and wandered around the market before heading to Pasteur Street Brewing. Who does this surprise?

We grabbed some beers and the first of many bahn mi sandwiches.

Then it was off to eat more food. We had heard about Vietnamese Cajun fusion cuisine on the show Ugly Delicious on Netflix. Check out the episode on shrimp and crawfish. David Chang visits this restaurant which is owned by a woman who learned about Cajun cuisine while living in Houston:

The restaurant is called Kau Ba or Cau Ba Quan, depending on what source you’re looking at, and the food was delicious with some great Cajun flavors. Plus look at the size of those prawns! They basically just do an adaptation on a crawfish boil.

The next day we continued eating our way through the city with a food tour provided by XO tours. Two women, Vy and Muay, came to pick us up on their motor bikes to take us around the city. The tour was a lot of fun and we had massive amounts of food.

We started with soup – a bit different than pho because of the noodle size and… slightly different broth? I definitely can’t remember what it’s called.

Then off to barbecue: okra, goat, beef, and lettuce wraps with fried mushrooms inside.

Plus frog! Both with the skin and without.

But beyond the great barbecue, there was an incredible battle of chopstick skills with Michael and Muay beating me and Vy in a battle to the death. This was the precise moment of victory for Michael.

I think the picture says it all.

On to the seafood district.

Next stop had us enjoying some clams, crab claws, quail, and this gem:

Balut! That is a fertilized duck egg. So they cook the egg after the baby duck has started growing. Completely grossed out? I would not be surprised. We had heard about this several times, but this was our first time trying it.

It tasted fine. Like hard boiled egg or soft chicken. It was really just working on our mental game and getting the courage to take a few bites. Michael needed a bit extra help getting that bite down.

Thankfully there was some dessert to finish on with these delicious cream puffs and a flan like dish.

Besides the great food, one of the benefits of the food tour was the chance to get on a motor bike – the first time for both of us – and we got to explore districts in the city that we otherwise wouldn’t have seen.

Totally staged photo. We definitely didn’t drive. That would have been insane.

Many tourists only see district 1 (old town area where we were staying). But the tour let us explore districts 5,8,6,7,4 by bike. So we were able to see the Chinatown market, the trendy neighborhood with expensive high rises and million dollar cars, in addition to being able to eat in and explore a few working class neighborhoods. And, yes, you heard that right: million dollar cars. The tax on foreign cars is over 300% and the uber rich in Vietnam are diving the fanciest of expensive cars and paying a pretty penny to own them.

Riding on the crazy busy streets like a local was a great way to get a feel for the vibe of the city.

On our way out of town the next morning we grabbed some breakfast pho before heading to the airport.

We really enjoyed our short time in Ho Chi Minh City, which a ton of people still call Saigon. We’d love to come back and spend some more time, but with colds looming large, we were pumped to head up to Hoi An and relax on their beaches.

Vietnam along the Mekong

September 1-2

We visited three villages along the Mekong before arriving in Ho Chi Minh City.

The first was Tan Chau where we visited Evergreen Island. We had the chance to walk around a local village and see how the people live.

It was a strange visit. I think part of the reason why it was strange is that the flood pushed us to a location that the ship normally doesn’t visit. So we were invading space that isn’t use to tourists popping in. We wandered around for a bit and the guides found us a local’s home to visit. Now this is where things get weird. I think the tour typically does a home visit, but didn’t have anything lined up with this new village. So the guide just wandered up to a home, popped his head in and asked if we could enter. They said yes, I’m assuming, because we entered.

So this was the home. It was strange. They let us come in, and showed us their hawk and their eagle. Note the mouse in the claw.

But then the guide was asking questions of the family – trying to get us a little local flavor. It turns out that the patriarch had died and all of his daughters were home for the funeral. The woman sitting on the bench staring at us the entire time – her husband had just died. Omg. Now… I immediately start backing away slowly. How awful! But the guide doesn’t get a clue. Note – Fin is gone. We have a new guide who is Vietnamese. His name is “D”. So we hang around another 5 or so minutes invading their space. It was awful.

As usual, even if a situation is awkward, the kids are awesome. This might be a good time to talk about local kids.

If there is one thing that I’ve learned after 10 months on the road, it is that kids all over the world are the same. They really are – up to a certain age at least. They like attention. They like silly games and goofy faces. They like it when you smile at them. There is a great quote from the movie the Blind Side and I cannot find it online anywhere. But the kid, SJ, sees Michael near some little girls and they run away from him. SJ says to Micheal, “Smile at them. That’s how they know you’re their friend.” Or something like that. I think about that phrase all the time. Smiling at someone that doesn’t speak your language and doesn’t come from a similar background is sometimes all you need to bridge a gap. Especially with kids. Especially if you aren’t shoving a camera in their face.

It doesn’t matter if the kid comes from nothing. They like to shake your hand or give you a high five. If they don’t know how to high five, it takes about 5 seconds to demonstrate and then they love it. The old “pull your hand away so they miss it” trick is a fan favorite as well. This is pretty exclusively the only trick Michael does with kids and they flock around him. It’s the exact same thing he does with kids in the US. The poor kids we’ve met forget that they were asking you for money. They are often able to shake off any hardship they’re carrying and just act like kids for a few minutes. We saw it in Madagascar with the “money” kids. We saw it in the bus station at the Paraguay/Argentina border with the kids we taught rummy. We see it with these kids – especially this little girl who followed Michael around for the thirty or so minutes we spent in the village.

She could say her name and age in English and Michael found the word for “friend” in Vietnamese. It was very sweet.

And look at this girl – how darling is she?

The director from the ship happened to be with us when Michael was high fiving this girl. The director said, “I can’t believe the way kids react to him. Most kids in Vietnam villages are so shy!” I can see how someone would think that, but all you have to do is treat them like normal kids and they’ll act like normal kids.

One of the women that we met on the ship asked what we do for a living after seeing us interact with the kids at the school in Cambodia. She was pretty upset when I told her accountant and engineer. Upset and surprisingly vocal about her dissatisfaction with my answer. She wanted us to be teachers.

It is good for us that we get to interact with kids sometimes. We miss our nieces and nephews a lot. Ten months is too long to be away from them and these moments make it a little easier.

Older people in the villages also fall into the “smile at them” category. Two random women were hanging out in the area that we were visiting. Both agreed to let me take their pictures and both got a kick out of seeing their photo afterwards.

After the village we popped into a mat workshop. With the heat and humidity, people in these villages sleep on mats instead of mattresses. The process was, once again, incredible. But the entire place had the feel of an old fashion sweat shop. The women get paid very little for the work they do.

https://www.thatsonourlist.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/img_5067.mov

The next morning we went to the village of Sa Dec where we toured the market and visited Thuy Le.

HUGE beef hearts!

Check out the size of the squids below! And the eels above – eek!!

If you’re going to be safe on your motor bike, better do it in style with Hello Kitty!

Each bag is a different type of white rice. It would be impossible for me to choose.

Thuy Le is the house from the book “The Lovers”, written by French Vietnamese author Marguerite Duras. Here is her picture:

Duras was a poor French daughter of school teachers. Her father died and she was facing a life of poverty, Duras began a love affair at the age of 15 with a 27 year old son of a wealthy Chinese family.

Sa Dec is the hometown of Huynh Thuy Le, the 27 year old. I read the book last year. It’s on a list of “must reads” and is printed in a ton of different languages. I found the book really difficult to read. It was a mix of an over sexualized 15 year girl wooing an awkward adult man with a mean family in an attempt to improve her status in life. Spoiler alert – they don’t end up together. His family refuses and her mother ships her to France where she becomes a famous writer. Apparently the man loved her his entire life but she mostly forgot about him. They met up again much later in life. Now I was feeling pretty meh about this. However, anyone who watched the movie just LOVED IT. From the sounds of it, the movie made it sound much more like a love story – Romeo and Juliet or something. So I’m sure that was more enjoyable than the book I read. So here’s the house:

I think they actually filmed in and around this house for the movie and used that table supposedly.

Besides the market and the house, we also a Cao Dai temple? Church?

Caodaism is a monotheistic religion established in southern Vietnam in 1926. Cao Dai is the supreme diety, believed by Caodaists to have created the universe. There are an estimated 4.4-6 million Caodaists. It is suppose to be a mix of Confucianism, Taoism, and Chinese Buddhism. It says that Jesus, Buddha, Confucius, and others received the will of the Highest Power and founded their respective religions to serve and educate humanity. But the frailty of the messengers and common men corrupted the religions.

Some other random people affiliated? Joan of Arc is worshipped. They believe that Joan guided Caodaists at the inception of the religion and promotes full equality of women. They know this because they have performed seances with Joan. They also consider Muhammad, Moses, Louis Pasteur, Shakespeare, and Lenin to be saints. Also Victor Hugo is a saint because, I think, he was a Caodaist and wrote many of the teachings and texts. He predicted he would become a prophet…. so he is considered one? It was a strange scene.

So that’s it for the Vietnamese villages along the Mekong. We ended our time on the river cruise and disembarked in Ho Chi Minh City. Our time on the ship was great. We enjoyed great food and met quite a few interesting people. Originally we were going to play it cool and not divulge the fact that we’ve been traveling so long. Most people who meet us want to spend a lot of time talking about it and sometimes it’s nice just to not talk about us so much. But after a few days the cat was out of the bag, which was fine.

One of the standard questions we get is if we’ve been sick much in the past 10 months. That answer is mostly no. Mike had some stomach problems in Spain and I had a cold a few months ago, but that’s really it. Answering that question too many times on the ship jinxed us. We both landed ourselves with stomach issues on the last day or two of the ship and then colds in the days following. Ignoring that, we had a great time on the river and would recommend the trip to anyone. It was a great way to see the countryside and this beautiful river.

How about this sunset?

And one with a flash so you can see our faces:

Now it’s back to solo travel for another 10ish days in Vietnam. We’re ready to check out the rest of the country!

Phnom Penh

August 29-31

We arrived to Phnom Penh on the 28th in time to go out into the city for dinner. Michael and I jumped at this opportunity and headed out to see what we could see.

First stop? Night market:

After that, we headed to Bistro Langka, a French Cambodian fusion restaurant.

The food was delicious and it was nice to eat a meal off of the boat. Don’t get me wrong, the food on board was really good and there was a ton of it! But it was nice to have a bit of autonomy again, even if it was just in small doses.

The next morning we headed back out of the city with Fin and our group to see Oudong which was Cambodia’s capital from the 17th century until 1866. Now Oudong is a pilgrimage spot for Cambodians. The Khmer Rouge was based here before gaining power in the 1970s, so many of the temples and stupas were destroyed in air strikes ordered by the former President against them. But we were able to visit one monastery where we received a blessing from two monks.

I was expecting this to be hokey or touristy, but it was actually really touching. The blessing covered success, prosperity, longevity, and happiness. So we’re basically all set now.

The blessing was about ten minutes of the monks chanting before throwing wet jasmine flowers at us. It reminded me of being front row with a priest who likes to aggressively douse with holy water. Sitting right up front, the entire thing felt oddly personal despite being in a room of forty(ish) other people.

Tell me that with the strange lighting of this picture and our very serious looks (I promise – it was appropriate for the post blessing mood) that we don’t look like we’re about to reach enlightenment at this exact moment.

See? Super blessed. It was a really cool experience.

Our next stop was in the town of Kampong Tralach. I could have done without this stop. We rode ox carts for about a mile or so through town as children walked along side trying to sell flowers and drawings. The ride felt silly, like we were forcing an “authentic” experience.

But have no fear, Michael was still able to make friends:

Later that afternoon, we had a tuk tuk tour of Phnom Penh with our group.

We grabbed a ride into town, heard a bit about the center square and then ditched the group to go check out a brewery nearby.

Maybe enjoying the beer?

Definitely enjoying the beer.

After leaving the brewery, we saw a rooftop bar down the block and headed over to grab a drink and a bite to eat.

Crazy view, right? Phnom Penh is the most populous city in Cambodia and is also its capital. It has been called the “Pearl of Asia” and has several French colonial buildings in the city. It is obvious that the city is growing at a crazy rate and is just jam packed with construction and cranes. Someone mentioned that it is the “next Bangkok” and they might be right. But I have a feeling that we were visiting at just the right time. There was a lot to do in the city and plenty of great restaurants, bars, and clubs, but the city still felt reasonably small in size.

That night, on our walk back to the ship, we stopped at a street vendor to pick up second dinner.

Random fact about Phnom Penh: it sits at the crossroad of two rivers – the Mekong and the Tonle Sap rivers. The Tonle Sap heads north into the Tonle Sap Lake which then hits Siem Reap. The river is 120 kilometers long before it hits the Lake. But the interesting thing is that during dry season, the river flows south into the Mekong and during the rainy season the Mekong expands so much that it changes the direction of the river and causes it to flow north.

The next day we had another round of tours with Fin. This time, we started with a visit to the Killing Fields of Choeung Ek. This is just one of thousands of mass grave sites throughout Cambodia. It is located just 9.3 miles outside of the city center. As many as 20,000 Cambodians are believed to have been executed and buried here in 129 communal graves. We had the ability to walk among the graves and enter the Memorial Stupa where 8000 skulls, arranged by age and sex, are kept.

As we walked through, Fin talked to us about the atrocities that took place here. After the civil war ended, the Khmer Rouge was granted immunity against war crimes, so people were not afraid to come forward and talk in great detail about what happened at these Killing Fields.

The above was a grave site where hundreds of women and children were buried.

Michael struggled with the Killing Fields, commenting that he thought it was harder visiting here than Dachau. I didn’t agree. Although the stories were awful, I felt like Dachau was really good at giving names and personalizing the stories. This was just an overload of death.

Here, there were so many people that were killed, but no names. Just this one photo that someone had left inside the Stupa.

However, I changed my opinion after visiting S-21, the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. Back in Phnom Penh, in a old high school building, is a former security prison of the Khmer Rouge. It was the most notorious prison, S-21, and was given the name Tuol Sleng. The fruit of the Sleng tree is poisonous. Between 17,000 and 20,000 prisoners were detained here in classrooms that were turned into cells. Only 12 people survived. The stories of torture and living conditions in the prison is not anything I will relate to you here. Here is a picture of the survivors when the prison was shut down.

What made the experience that much more difficult was that three of the survivors were there telling their stories. Also, one of the survivors was an artist who drew, in great detail, pictures depicting the atrocities that happened at the prison. That art was displayed.

This, for me, was worse than Dachau. I physically couldn’t get through it and had to walk away. It was just too awful.

One picture I do want to point out is the above – Pol Pot on top and Kaing Guek Eav, “Duch”, on the bottom. These are two of the names that are important from the Khmer Rouge. Pol Pot was the leader of the regime and held the title of Prime Minister. Duch ran S-21 prison.

The immunity to members of the Khmer Rouge did not extend to these two individuals, along with three other high ranking officials of the regime. However, Pol Pot died the day before he was to be handed over to an international tribunal in 1998. They claimed heart failure, but it is believed that he committed suicide by overdosing.

Duch was sentenced to live in prison along with two other men. Here is an article about the proceedings if you want more info:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/10/world/asia/cambodia-khmer-rouge-united-nations-tribunal.html

The bottom line is that the trials took way too long and probably didn’t accomplish enough. Part of the problem is that members of the Khmer Rouge are still in power today and so the government was holding up the trials. The government wanted justice, but not too much justice. For example, Hun Sen, the current Prime Minister, was a high ranking official in the Khmer Rouge for several years. During some of the paranoia of the regime, Hun Sen along with others were accused of working against the regime. So they fled to Vietnam where he became the Cambodian leader of the army backed by the Vietnamese that invaded Cambodia and took power back from the Khmer Rouge. Hun Sen was appointed Prime Minister during the 80s. When the Vietnamese left Cambodia and the UN oversaw elections in 1992, Hun Sen refused to relinquish power and established himself as co-Prime Minister.

In 1997, Hun Sen launched a coup and replaced the co-Prime Minister with a new guy but in 1998, he got rid of the new guy and took over as the only Prime Minister. After the 2013 election results, which were believed to be rigged, months of protests resulted in 6 people killed and many injured. In 2017, the National Assembly voted unanimously to abolish the minority and majority positions to lessen the opposition party’s influence and then a constitutional amendment was passed to dissolve the opposition party.

Hun Sen appointed his son into higher military positions in a bid to prepare him to take his place when he retires or dies. He claims his son was born from a ‘supernatural’ being and therefore, divine or godly. Political experts believe this is heading in the direction of a North Korea scenario.

So… Cambodia isn’t as free or democratic as we were led to believe. After a long day of really sad stuff, we popped into another brewery and spoke with an expat who is about to leave Cambodia with his family for Thailand. He said that it was time to leave because there was about to be a “regime change” and called Hun Sen a dictator. The most extreme language Fin had used was calling it a “monopoly” on the Prime Minister position. I guess in a dictatorship you are a careful with the language you use when speaking to tourists.

We visited the Royal Palace on our last day in Phnom Penh.

And were able to even smile again after all of this heavy, heavy stuff.

Then, we said our last goodbye to Fin and went to the market.

That last picture is king prawns and they are HUGE!

And as previously mentioned, we popped into a brewery and even grabbed some pizza before heading back to the ship.

So that’s it for Cambodia. The next day was a day on the river where we relaxed, got in some runs on the treadmill, and crossed into Vietnam. I loved Cambodia, and was super interested in the history of the country as you can tell by my obsessive informational overload in these posts. I’m sorry that the info was so heavy. I absolutely promise that Vietnam will be much lighter. It was hard being in Cambodia for some of the historical stuff, but the people, the food and the beers made it really enjoyable. I’m really glad that we visited. We’ll have to see what happens in the next couple of years. I hope the country is able to get their act together politically and that their prosperity can grow. The people deserve it.

Cambodian Country Side

August 27-28

Ok, let’s get a few things out of the way before I talk about our time spent on the Mekong River in Cambodia.

I already talked about the fact that Cambodia use to be called the Khmer Empire and that it use to be a lot larger than the country is now. I also mentioned that Khmer is the name of the language, the people, and the country. Another fact – Cambodia is the size of Missouri but with 16 million people (today) verses Missouri’s 6 million.

Timeline: After the height of the Khmer Empire (when it was bigger than Missouri), the country had a bit of a decline before being colonized by France in the 1860s. It gained its independence from France in 1953 and became a constitutional monarchy. In 1970 there was a coup against the king which installed the right-wing pro-US Khmer Republic. The ousted king put his support behind the Khmer Rouge which joined forces with the North Vietnamese and Viet Congress forces to start a civil war. During this time the US bombed Cambodia to disrupt the Viet Cong and the Khmer Rouge.

The Khmer Rouge took control of the country in 1975 just five days after Congress refused additional aid for Cambodia and US troops evacuated the country. The Khmer Rouge carried out genocide from 1975 until 1979. In 1979 they were ousted by Vietnam and the Vietnamese and Soviet-backed People’s Republic of Kampuchea.

Following the 1991 Paris Peace Accords, Vietnam left the country and Cambodia was briefly governed by the UN (1992-1993) which oversaw elections. Since that time, there has been a one party parliament with a constitutional monarchy. The one party is the Cambodian People’s Party.

So that’s the bare minimum here. I had seen the movie First They Killed My Father recently which was a really well done movie on Netflix about one woman’s story under the Khmer Rouge, so I felt fairly prepared for this portion of our trip. I was not prepared. Cambodia ended up being a surprising and wonderful country that I just loved but also a country that at times is overwhelmingly sad.

One of the things that stuck with me from Young, our Siem Reap tour guide, was a comment he made about diet. “We are flexible. We grow rice. We eat crickets. We survive.” There were many times in these few days in Cambodia that people would tell us horribly sad things and in the same breath note something optimistic. The Cambodian people are survivors and they have worked very hard over the past couple of decades to rebuild their country.

We gathered for the river cruise with the rest of the passengers at the Sofitel hotel. Apparently the rest of passengers were staying a bit fancier in Siem Reap. We were put on a bus with 20ish other people and our Cambodian tour guide: Fin. This is Fin explaining something:

The majority of the stories that I’m about to tell come from Fin. So this experience is by no means all encompassing. Quick anecdote to drive this point home: someone asked Fin if he had seen the movie First They Killed My Father (he had) and wanted to know if it was a truthful depiction of the time under the Khmer Rouge regime. He told us that “was one story. There were millions of stories”. So some of this post is Fin’s story.

There are two major portions of Cambodia’s recent history that seemed to have a major effect on Fin and his family. The first, obviously, is the reign of the Khmer Rouge. Fin was adamant that we realize that people are not embarrassed by the phrase Khmer. That is who they are. Rouge, French for “red”, is used to represent communism. So Khmer Rouge is the group that executed the Cambodian holocaust – a phrase that Fin used frequently.

The Khmer Rouge modeled itself after China during Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” campaign. Its intention was to transform Cambodia into a socialist society through agricultural collectivization. The regime evacuated the cities and sent the entire population on forced marches to rural work projects or coops. The Khmer Rouge wanted to discard anything considered Western including Western medicine, temples, libraries, and schools. It then replaced it with 11th century agriculture.

What could possibly go wrong? So many things. Similar to China’s outcome of the “Great Leap Forward”, taking land from farmers and giving it to communes of city dwellers and then forcing them into hard labor doesn’t work. Starvation was rampant and the cause of much death during this time. The regime was also responsible for massive genocide, much of which was done in the “Killing Fields”. The victims:

– Anyone associated with the former government

– Professionals – teachers, doctors, lawyers, engineers, or anyone wearing eyeglasses as they were seen as a sign of intellectualism

– Ethnic minorities

– Buddhist monks

Somewhere between one and three million people were killed during this time by torture, murder, or starvation. The most common figure is two million which was a quarter of the population at the time.

So let’s recap. The Vietnamese and Soviet Union helped put the Khmer Rouge in place against the Pro-US Republic government in 1975. By 1978, the Khmer Rouge had begun trying to expand its border back into Vietnam, where the great Khmer Empire once existed. So Vietnam stopped backing the Khmer Rouge and joined forces with the ousted King and fought back. Vietnam forces entered Cambodia in 1979, took over leadership of the country, and sent the Khmer Rouge north to the mountains. The internet calls the next ten years Vietnamese occupation. Fin knows this is seen by other countries as foreign occupation, but the Vietnamese stopped the Khmer Rouge, so he and others in Cambodia call it their liberation day.

The 80s – that ten year period until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 – was the second period of time that was important in recent history to Cambodia. During this time, with the Vietnamese and Soviet backed government in place, Cambodia began to rebuild. Remember that the Khmer Rouge killed off professionals and teachers, and those who were not killed off fled to refuge camps in Thailand. Although the killing field activity had come to an end in the 80’s, there was a new danger for young people as they were conscripted into the army to fight a guerrilla war in the Northern mountains against the remains of the Khmer Rouge.

Being sent North to fight was basically a death sentence as the armies were fighting the Khmer Rouge and planting thousands of mines in the mountains. Note: no record was kept of where the mines were being planted. As of 2010, it was estimated that 4-6 million mines were believed to be unexploded in the country. Obviously not near Siem Reap or any area that we were going to be visit. Also, I believe that there is a constant effort to remove these land mines, but there is nothing more current than 2010 that I could find online.

Two of Fin’s brothers were conscripted to the army in the 1980s and both fled the country. Hearing of his one brother’s journey to Thailand was incredible with stories of being captures by royalist soldiers, one of those soldiers eating human livers, riding lumber trucks to the border, lodging with monks, and elderly women helping to hide the boys. The final leg of the journey consisted of crossing the border during the Thai guards’ “lunch hour” when the entire border patrol would leave their post to eat. Both brothers reached the refuge camp in Thailand and lived there until 1991 when they returned to Cambodia. Both brothers were hoping to go to Europe or the United States during these years as some refugees did, but neither made it out of the refugee camp. The one brother was in the camp for seven years.

Fin is the youngest of five children, all boys, raised by his mother. His father was killed during the Khmer Rouge regime. After boarding the bus in Siem Reap on that first day heading to the ship, we drove through the town he grew up in.

A few anecdotes from that trip:

Fin use to be responsible for walking their cows down the road to graze. This hike included a bridge crossing. During the 80s, the army had bombs on the bridge with trip wire at night to ensure no crossings. In the morning, soldiers would remove the trip wire and normal passings would happen throughout the day. Often, the soldiers would forget to remove the trip wire, or would get too drunk the night before to remember, so the local kids would be responsible for doing it.

Less horrifying, during rainy season, as the area is filled with water and rice is planted, fish swim through the rice fields and locals can fish right behind their homes.

Fin also told about his village during the Khmer Rouge. Apparently, each family had a trench dug outside their home. At night, there would be explosions near his home and they would run outside and hide in their trench. Then the Khmer Rouge would ransack the homes. Fin noted with a laugh that, “we were lucky because we didn’t have anything so they never came to our house”.

One reason why Fin was such a great tour guide was because he was able to communicate the message with a bit of humor but without taking the severity of the situation away.

This good humor came out again later in the day when we visited Kampong Cham to explore the Twin Mountains: Phnom Pros and Phnom Srei which translates to male and female mountains.

Legend says that women use to have to pay the dowry when they got married. But they didn’t like this set up, so they had a challenge with the men in town to see who could build a higher mountain in just one day. The rule was that both groups could pile rocks until the North Star was visible in the sky. So they all piled rocks all day long. The women were determined to win, so they lit a lantern and let it fly into the sky. When the men saw this, they thought it was the North Star, so they stopped building and went to bed. The next morning, they awoke to see the women’s mountain much higher and ever since men have had to pay the dowry to women for marriage.

We explored the temple at the top of the male mountain.

Fin explained some history of the temple and also gave us the basics on Buddhism. His info on Buddhism was nothing new, but he added a little flavor to it that I appreciated.

“You are born in your rich country which is much better than being born in Cambodia. But even kings have suffering. So you do good to have less suffering in the next life.”

That’s right. He called attention to the fact that it is better being us – the Americans. He later joked that he must have done something wrong in his prior life to have been born in Cambodia.

This temple was a detention facility during the Khmer Rouge. There is almost nothing left to denote this except for this lion statue.

Apparently the executioner would sharpen his machete on the lion’s back side.

Another thing we learned at this stop was that temples are the place to bring unwanted pets or deformed animals. There are two thoughts here. Regarding the unwanted pets, a new law was put in place to outlaw the ownership of a lot of animals, including monkeys. So people brought their monkeys and other wild illegal animals to the temples where they knew they’d be fed by monks and strangers.

And the deformed animals? Well Cambodians believe they are lucky. So you cannot kill a pig that was born with two tails or a monkey that’s missing an arm. We got a look at this pig wandering around the temple grounds. You can’t tell from this picture, but his front left leg is white while the rest of his body is that grayish color.

Our second day on board had us stopping in Wat Hanchey for a beautiful view from a hill top pagoda.

We had a chance to chat with these (very) young monks who are studying here.

This sweet boy answered questions about where he grew up and what his life is like when he is at the monastery.

After schooling at a monastery, a monk can decide to leave the monastic life and get married or rejoin his family. Fin asked him about this and this 13 year old told us that he believed he’d stay a monk his entire life, because it was, “on his fate”.

This is an empty bomb shell that they use as a school bell now.

And this is a statue of a woman’s hand holding a skewer of sausages.

Most of the statues made a lot of sense. This… not so much.

J.K. Rowling’s inspiration for Fawkes:

Look at the colors on this bug! It’s a bit zoomed in so it’s fuzzy (no way I was getting too close to that crazy thing), but it was a good 2/2.5 inches long – 3 with antennas.

A few words on the Mekong: The Mekong River has the second richest aquatic biodiversity in the world after the Amazon. The river starts in the Tibetan Plateau and runs through China, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam. The word Mekong is a Khmer word that means “mother of water”.

This past July, a Laos dam collapsed on the Mekong which killed at least 36 people, with 98 more missing, and displaced at least 6600 people in that area. The broken dam released 5 billion cubic meters of water. I don’t have a relative understanding for how much that is, but it seems like a lot of water. Anything I’ve read online speaks exclusively to the effects in Laos, but even a month later, villages downstream were feeling the effects of this dam collapse. We were told that the river was much higher than usual for rainy season and a visit later in the trip to a village had to be changed because it was flooded out.

That afternoon we visited Oknhatey which is also called silk island because of its traditional silk weaving. The villagers farm silk worms, placing them in bunches of sticks to assist them with their cocoon making.

They feed the worms mulberry leaves while they mature for about 47 days.

Then the cocoons are boiled and the threads are pulled strand by strand into silk threads.

One cocoon can unravel to a string of silk 100 meters long. The threads are then colored by natural dyes before being woven into silk fabric. Everything here is done by hand.

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Now I know this is one of those stops where you watch the locals create a product that you can buy anywhere in the area, but you pay more because you watch the women doing it and it is incredible what they can do with their hands. I know that only suckers get conned into buying stuff that they do not need at a place like this. That is why Michael and I bought nothing.

Just kidding. We’re suckers. Anyone who thinks they deserve a present after us being gone for a year is probably getting something made from these incredible women, so I hope you like silk.

After the silk farm, we stopped at a local school on our way back to the ship. We hung out with third grade kids and they were awesome. I don’t love the idea of parading a group of tourists through a school of kids so we can ooh and ahh over them and take pictures. However, they encouraged us to try to talk to the kids and to let them practice their English on us, so I’m trying to be optimistic that they get something good out of it. There was also an opportunity to donate to the school, which does make me feel better about the entire situation. I’m also hopeful that the ship makes some sort of payment to the school.

The little girl I was chatting up was really cool. She wanted to know how old I was and where I come from. She had a handle on some very basic conversational skills, but also she had some things lined up to respond to what I was suppose to say. So if I responded wrong, then her response didn’t make sense. For example, she asked, “how are you?”. I responded with, “really good. I’m so happy to be talking with you.” To which she responded, “I am very good.” She was obviously expecting me to ask how she is doing in return and I messed up by being rude.

That story is not dissimilar from one we heard about Cambodia’s Prime Minister when he met President Obama. Apparently he wanted to be able to address Obama in English, which he didn’t know. So his English teachers told him just to say hello and ask how he is. No matter what Obama’s response, the Prime Minister was to respond with, “me too”, and then the translators would take over from there. Well, when the time came, the Prime Minister got a tiny bit confused and asked Obama, “who are you” instead of how. Obama responded with, “I am Michelle’s husband”, and the Prime Minister responded with, “me too”.

One of my favorite things about Cambodia is how hard they are working to rebuild their country. Fin often used the phrase “year zero”. When I googled this, it is a political concept applied to the takeover of Cambodia in April 1975 with the idea of completely destroying society and starting from scratch. Now society wasn’t completely destroyed despite the best efforts of the Khmer Rouge. But a lot of damage was done. When all of the teachers are killed off, who educates the next generation? Who builds and repairs new buildings when the architects and engineers are gone? Who fills the hospitals when there are no doctors? Well, a lot of people left in the 1980s to be educated. They went to other communist countries, so when they came back from Cuba, they knew Spanish. When they came back from China and Russia, they knew their new skills and those languages as well. But it wasn’t until after the fall of the Soviet Union that anyone learned English. When the refugees returned, a lot of them knew English from their time in Thailand and other countries, so they returned to their homes and taught English to anyone who could pay them even small amounts.

When we were at the school, we met the headmaster. He was a student in his 9th year when the Khmer Rouge forced them out of their homes. When he came back to the island, he was the most educated person. So he became the teacher. The slogan Fin told us was, “Those who know more teach those who know less. Those who know less teach those that know nothing.”

Getting an education in the villages was, and still is, much more difficult than getting an education in Phnom Penh, simply because there are not enough qualified teachers.

So – how did Fin get his education? In 1983, Fin and his family moved into the city (Siem Reap). By the 10th grade, at 15 years old, Fin was no longer in school and was working in a restaurant to help his mother. He was and still is gregarious and one day was chatting with two men who were visiting from Brooklyn. The one man, named Michael, wanted to meet up with him after work to talk more. They had another conversation and the next day, Michael wanted to meet Fin’s mother. He went to their home to meet her and to find out what the family would need for Fin to go back to school. It not only costs money to go to school, but it also takes income away from the family. They came up with a dollar amount and Michael put enough money into a bank account that Fin could go to school for the rest of the year. He then tells Fin that he should write him a letter whenever he needs more money. So Fin finished school through grade 12, writing every so often for more funds. Then he sent Michael a note to ask if he’d help him go to college in Phnom Penh. The story is better told by Fin who can attest to the stress and anxiety about waiting for weeks to get a letter from the US with an answer. Ultimately, Michael pulled through and Fin was able to go to school in Phnom Penh where he got his education and met his wife. They now have a son, named Michael.

So all this hardship and death and sadness… and yet I loved Cambodia. The land was beautiful, and covered with crazy things like this banana flower:

And the idea that rest stops should have hammocks so you can really relax while you have a coffee:

Plus the people were incredible. They didn’t gloss over their hardships. Fin wanted us to understand exactly what happened and how they’re trying to fix their country.

That night the ship arrived to Phnom Penh. We were were really excited to spend a few days in the capital.

Siem Reap

August 26

We arrived late on the 25th into Siem Reap, Cambodia. With only one full day in the city, we booked a tour with Siem Reap Cycling Tour to see the sights. We had a 4:50am pick up by our tour guide, Young, and we were off to see the iconic view of Angkor Wat at sunrise.

We arrived in time to see – nothing. It was too cloudy to see a sunrise. But that didn’t stop a ton of tourists from pushing and shoving.

Angkor Wat is a temple complex and is the largest religious monument in the world measuring about 402 acres. It was originally a Hindu temple dedicated to the god Vishnu but when the Khmer Empire became Buddhist in the 12th century, so did the temple. Cambodia is still 95% Buddhist.

In this carving, apparently an artist tried to change the depiction from Hindu to Buddhist by adding facial hair and a scarf over the left shoulder.

Quick note: Khmer is the language spoken in Cambodia. Khmer is also another name for the country of Cambodia – it is what locals call their country. Kampuchea is also another name for Cambodia – I think it’s the French name. Khmer is the name of the people as well. Khmer is actually pronounced Kh-my. The Khmer Empire, from about 800-1450, extended well into Thailand, Laos, parts of China, and Myanmar. Here’s a map of the empire:

Finding out about the Khmer Empire and Champa (definitely had never heard of that before) was not the only time I felt really uneducated in Cambodia. I apparently know very little about Asian history. I was about to get a history lesson over the next couple of days.

This complex was the capital of the Khmer Empire and translates to “City of Temples”. Although much of the area was deserted by the 17th century, the temple remained active throughout the ages by Buddhist monks while the rivers and lakes nearby helped to keep the jungle at bay (for the most part). There were renovations in the 20th century to remove vegetation from the temples. This work was interrupted by the Cambodian Civil War and the Khmer Rouge control of the country during the 1970s and 1980s. Much more on that to come. Not much damage was done by the Khmer Rouge besides a few bullet holes.

However, a lot of damage was done by art thieves in the 1980s and 1990s from Thailand who cut off nearly every head from every statue and took it back to Thailand to sell. Any statues with heads that you see in our pictures are reconstructions.

Here you can see two statues missing their heads:

And here you can see the outline where a Buddha statue use to be connected to the wall:

Recently a lot of cooperation has been happening between the Cambodian and Thailand governments to get some of the artwork back. However, anything that is returned goes directly into a museum in Phnom Penh to keep it safe.

Here is the main Angkor Wat temple behind us. The building is made mostly of sandstone and is considered “Khmer architecture” which basically just means its architecture is original and anything that looks like it is based off this temple. The towers are shaped like lotus buds and there are a lot of hallways and galleries that housed Buddha statues.

The inner walls of the main building have a series of scenes depicting episodes from Hindu epics. When we walked past them, Young noted that these were myths, but that some of the stone work told actual history of the area.

One interesting fact is that all of the people carved into the walls could be categorized as Thai, Khmer, Chinese, or Champa by their features. Chinese had beards and top knots. Khmer had very long ear lobes.

After getting our fill of the main temple, we grabbed breakfast and then headed off on our adventure.

I was excited to see that we were going to be riding through paths in the jungle. It was definitely a more beautiful ride than driving on the roads.

One of our first stops was this market.

Dragonfruit!

Cambodian diet consists of mainly rice and fish.

Our next stop was the Bayon Temple.

It’s the one with all the heads. It was also starting to get a bit later in the morning, so it became quite overrun with other tourists. Lots of selfies. Lots of posing. Lots of ridiculous outfits so people can become instafamous. Now, I know they were just intimidated because I was looking so good with my helmet hair and super sweaty shirt… it’s hard to compete with the Bronsons when it comes to picture posing.

Here’s Young doing his best impression of the other tourists:

Next some more country side biking:

Young told us: “If you want to see heaven, come to Cambodia”.

Water buffalos! Apparently Cambodians keep buffalo and cattle as savings accounts. They take care of them and raise them until there is a medical emergency and then one is sold off to cover the expenses.

We stopped into this tiny village to learn a bit about their life. Since Angkor Wat became a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the locals have actually had a lot of issues. Because of the size of the site, it includes a lot of local farming areas and homes. But rules associated with being recognized as a WHS make it hard or impossible to build new homes, even replacements. It also has made it difficult for them to get electricity and other services, even though utilities are finally able to reach the area because of construction restrictions.

We rode through some rice fields.

And then we stopped into Ta Prohm. Ta Prohm is a temple that has not had many renovations. The jungle has invaded and it makes for completely incredible ruins.

Oh – does this seem a little familiar? It was used as the location for the film Tomb Raider, the original one with Angelina Jolie.

The way that nature has reclaimed this temple is incredible.

Biking was a great way to see the temples. It was about 25 kilometers which was just enough to feel like legit exercise, but since it was so flat, it was fairly easy to do. It was also wonderful to be out in nature again. Plus our guide was great. Young spent a lot of time explaining Cambodian history, but also wanted to make sure he was on top of Western slang. He would often say, “word”, so Michael helped him expand with “word to your mother” and “extra”. I know that “word to your mother” hasn’t been cool in years, but if anyone has doubts, we can all assume “extra” is no longer cool either now that Michael and I have used it.

That night we took it pretty easy. We checked out the night market and grabbed a Khmer meal.

The main Cambodian dish, amok, is curry steam cooked in banana leaves.

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Siem Reap was a neat little city, and although we only had one full day here it seemed to get the job done. Tomorrow we’re off down the Mekong River. There is still a lot to come from us on Cambodia.

Bangkok

August 19-25

I was very excited for our week in Bangkok. Not pure excitement about the city, but more excited about the fact that we had a full week with almost no plans. We had reservations with a bed and breakfast that was right on the Chao Phraya River and overlooked Wat Arun. So we had beautiful views at breakfast and on the roof at night.

Our hotel was right next to the Royal Palace, so Michael made it a part of his running loop.

Our hotel was also close to Wat Pho.

Wat Pho is the Temple of the Reclining Buddha. This Buddha is 46 meters long and 15 meters high and illustrates the passing of the Buddha into nirvana. The feet and the eyes are engraved with mother-of-pearl detail.

It’s really big.

And the bottoms of the Buddha’s feet are intricately decorated.

Wat Pho is also famous as Thailand’s first university and is the birthplace and training center of traditional Thai massage. We didn’t get massages at Wat Pho, but we did get a few massages (each) throughout the week. Thai massages hurt. But for only 10 or 12 bucks, you deal with the pain and enjoy the benefits of someone just destroying your back.

Tuk tuks!

One of the reasons that we spent an entire week in Bangkok was so Michael could have some custom suits made. He had them made at a place called Raja’s. We’re going to have to go back to work eventually – we might as well look good doing it.

Someone should tell them that the jacket is missing arms…

We loved this experience. Raja’s is run by three generations of a Sikh family and has become pretty well known. They have made suits for a lot of politicians and generals from around the world including Bill Clinton and John Kerry. After fitting Bill Clinton, Bobby (2nd gen) was invited to his inauguration. So that’s cool.

I also had some work dresses made – that experience was less cool. The dresses ended up meh – I’ll just stick with buying off the shelf going forward.

Another treat, since we had so much free time was going to see a movie. We saw the new Mission Impossible movie. It was fun to catch a movie, but the most interesting thing happened right at the beginning of the movie. After the previews, before the film started, everyone in the theater had to stand while a song was played to honor the king.

One of the items “to see” in Bangkok is Wat Sutat or the Giant/Great Swing. I have mixed reviews online of what its nickname is. The thing to view is this large Chinese frame. An annual ceremony took place where guys would try to swing high enough to get a sack of gold tied to a pole about 75 feet in the air. I’m having a hard time envisioning this, but I think the men swung from the red thing and there was a different pole that they were trying to loop the sack of gold on. Who knows. The point is that a ton of men died doing this, so the ceremony was banned in the 1930s. The swing was built in 1782, so I guess there was 150ish years of dudes dying before they realized it was a stupid idea.

We took a ferry across the river to check out Wat Arun – the temple that we can see from our B&B. Wat Arun, which translates to Temple of Dawn, is a Buddhist temple named after the Hindu god Aruna, who is often personified as the radiations of the rising sun.

The problem with Wat Arun? The main building had a strict dress code… and I didn’t pass the test. So this was my view:

After the temple we popped over to see the famous Catholic Church, Santa Cruz Church. Apparently there was a large Portuguese community in Bangkok. In 1516, Portugal signed a treaty with Thailand to supply ammunitions. The treaty gave them the rights to reside, trade and practice their religion in Thailand. This church was built in the 1700s on land gifted by King Taksin in appreciation for the loyalty of the Portuguese.

Unsurprisingly, we had some great food while in Bangkok.

P,aor – where we ate tom yum goong:

Krua Apsorn – we ate crab Thai curry and a super spicy pork dish, among other things Michael ordered for us. My spice training has definitely paid off! I won’t say that this dish was my favorite, but I could definitely handle the heat.

But the best food we had, in my opinion, was some noodles that we found at a food stall next to this random bar. I could eat this every day. Crispy pork on top. Mmmmmmmmmm

Also we had some great Thailand craft beer and Jenga!

We loved Bangkok and were pumped to have lots of time to scout it out and relax. We’ll be back in a few weeks for another three days with Ken and J9!

Kathmandu

August 17-18

We didn’t get back to our hotel from our late night festivities until about 5 in the morning. Definitely not our style, but who am I to argue with good company and great hospitality? We slept late and got up just in time to meet back up with Bianca, Victor and the Aussie Steve for noon lunch at a wood fired pizza joint. Yes!!

This is my four cheese pizza – one of those cheeses is yak cheese! It was delicious! Bianca mentioned this pizza place days earlier and all of us had been counting the days until we could get our hands on this pizza.

Afterwards, Bianca walked us through Thamel to check out a Tibetan bookstore. They sell all of the books that are banned in Tibet by the Chinese government. Perfect opportunity to pick up a few new books!

Michael even found this book that clearly describes me lately:

Afterwards I would love to say that Michael and I went out to see all that we could see in this city. We only had about 36 hours in town. But we were exhausted. The late night and the tough drive completely wiped us out. So instead we went back to our hotel room, watched movies and slept. We didn’t even leave for a second meal of the day.

The next morning, fully rested, we made it to breakfast in the hotel and went out for a few hours before heading to the airport. We walked to Durbar Square – about a mile from our hotel – which is another UNESCO World Heritage Sites.

This square is in front of the old royal palace. Several buildings in the square collapsed due to the April 2015 earthquake. The damage is still being repaired… apparently by the Chinese.

We were going to check out the museum in the square as well, but things got a bit strange. While walking towards it, a soldier wanted to see our tickets, which we had. While I was getting them out of my purse, he pulled his gun out of the holster and pointed it at us. It was only for a few seconds, but it freaked Michael out big time. He let us enter but we were then told by a group of Spaniards that it was opening in ten minutes. We waited for a few minutes but then just left. Not the right vibe for us.

Off to the market instead.

Our feelings about Kathmandu? The city of Kathmandu has infrastructure issues that are pretty similar to the problems outside of the city.

In general, we just didn’t enjoy the city that much. That said, we also didn’t give it much of a chance. It was muddy and hard to get around and hot.

Things didn’t get much better when we got to the airport. We arrived nearly 3 hours before our flight at the suggestion of our hotel. Thank goodness for that. The line to check our luggage took an hour or so even though there were only a few people ahead of us and when we got in line for customs their computers went out right as we were two away from the front. So we just stood there for another 40-60 minutes. We were losing our cool both literally and figuratively.

When they finally got the computers running again, the group in front of us stepped up to be processed. Then a porter pushed a person in a wheelchair up to the front of the line. In front of us. Michael nearly lost it. Then a second person in a wheelchair started coming up to the front of the line. Time to take action. I just put myself in customs’ no man land to ensure that they didn’t cut us off. You know – that area that you get yelled at for standing in? Past the red line on the ground that says please wait here? Yeah – I know, I’m a huge rebel. But it had to be done.

So that was it for Nepal. Not our finest couple of days. For all of the patience that we had on the crazy long drive and standing in long lines during Buddhist festivals with Tibets pushing us, we had zero patience for the following 36 hours in Nepal. Time to get to Bangkok and relax for a few days.