Bangkok: Round II

I would have to say that as a general rule, I don’t really like visiting the same place twice. There is too much to see and do, and never enough time to do it, especially on this trip. I feel like going somewhere twice means you have less time for somewhere new. Having said that, returning to a place that you’ve already been to can be a pleasant experience. You already have a handle on ins and outs like where to stay and eat, as well as what to avoid, so there is less aggravation and you spend less of your time trying to figure things out. Also, you typically see all the major attractions during the first visit, so you don’t have to rush around taking in all the sights. In short, a second visit is typically more relaxed and enjoyable than the first. We’ve actually returned to a handful of cities on this trip (Dar es Salaam, Delhi, Kathmandu), and have enjoyed it when we did. Our second visit to Bangkok was no exception. We ended up returning to Bangkok because overland transport from Siem Reap (Cambodia) to our next destination in Southern Thailand would have taken too long to do all at once, and it made sense to break up the journey in Bangkok. Since we had such a good time our last time there, we decided to give ourselves a few days this time. 


Bangkok at night

Bangkok is unique in the world’s megacities in that hotels, even the high end ones, can be had for very reasonable rates. So, after months of backpacker dives, we decided to splash out on a nice hotel for a few days of comfortable beds, air conditioning, hot showers and flat screen TVs with HBO. We ended up in a suite at the Amari, a brand new boutique hotel with a pool on the roof and a uniformed doorman. The kind of place we could never afford in New York or Los Angeles, but that while significantly more expensive than the places we have been staying, a steal by normal standards. We spent hours reading by the pool or sleeping in and watching movies. After 6 months on the road, we had almost forgotten what it was like to sleep in a king sized bed with real sheets and a duvet, or to take a steaming hot bath. It was so comfortable and nice, we actually didn’t leave all that often. As reasonable as it was though, we couldn’t justify the expense for more than a few days. So, after our hotel holiday, we came back to reality and moved across the street to The Atlanta, a venerable old hotel with peeling paint, art deco furniture, and loads of character. It had a pool (Thailand’s first hotel pool apparently), comfortable beds and was right downtown, so it wasn’t like we were hard done by, but it definitely wasn’t the Amari. 



Hanging out at the pool

What did we do for our second visit? Not much really. Because we had been to most of the “must see” attractions on our last visit, there was no pressure to try to pack things in. We took advantage of the Amari to sleep in and stock up on creature comforts, and we took some time to take care of a few mundane things that we had been meaning to get to for a while. Things like haircuts, postcards and letters, planning our onward travel to Australia and New Zealand, and catching up with friends and family via skype. We even got some wine and food and had a date night by the pool on the roof which was quite nice.

As for activities, we just sort of wandered around a few areas of town we missed last time. We took in the new office buildings in the Silom road business district, the nightclubs in the red light districts of Patpong and Soi Cowboy, people out for a walk in Lumpini Park, and food stalls on the Sois off Sukhamvit. We even got a chance to meet up with a Belgian expat we had met in northern Laos. He works and lives in Bangkok and took us to a really cool restaurant we never would have found on our own, a super trendy place with amazing food and beanbag seating on the lawn full of expats and Thai yuppies. 



Superbowl in Bangkok

I think the highlight though was watching the Superbowl. It wasn’t the game itself, because to be honest, I’ve more or less stopped following sports. Sure I’ll watch the odd game, and can still get into it now and then, but it’s been a while since I’ve really followed any sport. Add to that the fact that we’ve been on the road during the entire season, and haven’t seen a single game or heard a single bit of news (the rest of the world does not care about American football), and you can see why we weren’t really that invested in the game. Frankly we didn’t even know who was playing until we looked it up. However, watching the Superbowl is a tradition, and I can't remember the last one I missed. So we decided to try to see it. Colleen went on line and found an expat bar called The Pickled Liver (best bar name ever ) near our hotel that was showing the game live. With the 12 hour time difference, kickoff was at 7 am. Beer and chicken wings surrounded by Americans screaming at TVs as the sun comes up in Bangkok, one more interesting experience for the books. Actually a lot of my friends in Philadelphia were European and I would often join them for soccer games that were shown live in bars in the early morning, so it was kind of fun to do the same thing on the other side of the world.

So that was our second visit to Bangkok in a nutshell, a fancy hotel, a and the Superbowl, not a bad few days. I’m still a little behind on postings, I guess I’m too busy with all this bloody travelling…

Michael
East Melbourne
Australia

Cambodia: Not Enough Time... Again

When Colleen and I first started seriously talking about this trip, one of our first considerations was deciding how to approach it. Would it be a trip with fewer destinations that we would visit extensively, or would we try to pack in as many destinations as possible, spending less time at each. Ultimately we chose the latter. We both liked the idea of seeing as much of the world as possible, but in the end, I think it had more to do with an inability to cut anything out. We are definitely happy with our decision; we’ve seen and done loads of amazing things in the time we’ve been travelling, and we’ve been able to cross several items off our respective bucket lists. However, there are drawbacks to trying to pack in as much as you can. You end up spending a large portion of your time travelling from one place to the next which can be aggravating, uncomfortable and tiresome, but more importantly, time spent at any destination tends to be short as there is always the next destination to get to. This makes it difficult to really get to know a place as that takes time. A perfect illustration of these drawbacks would be our time in Cambodia.



Our Cambodian visit starts in Laos where we had just spent 4 days relaxing in a small thatch roof bungalow on an island in The Mekong river, maybe the most idyllic place on earth. I could have stayed for a month, but as usual there was the next place to get to, in this case Cambodia, first Phnom Penh, then Siem Reap (Angkor). We didn’t have much time to give to Cambodia, but decided that we just weren’t willing to give up a chance to see Phnom Pennh and the ancient temples at Angkor, so we gave ourselves a week at most to see as much as we could. The next few days went something like this.


Pnom Penh street



We left our riverside paradise in Laos in the early hours for a longboat ride up river to the village where we were meant to catch the bus to Phnom Penh. The bus was late of course, so a few hours were spent waiting on the side of a dusty road, wilting in the midmorning heat. I spent as much of my remaining Kip (Laotian currency) as I could on snacks for the ride, and exchanged the rest for Riels (Cambodian currency) at a ridiculously unfair rate (rates get worse the closer you are to a border). The bus finally came and we took a short ride to the border where we got off, collected all our gear, qued up at the Lao border post to be stamped out of Laos, then walked up the road to the Cambodian border post where we paid three separate bribes for the privilege of being stamped into Cambodia (they were only a couple of dollars each, but still...). By the time all of the border formalities were done, it was lunchtime, so we had some awful fried noodles and a lukewarm beer at a roadside stand in no man’s land between the Lao and Cambodian border posts, and waited for the bus that would take us from the border to Phnom Penh. When the bus finally arrived, it was overbooked, so small folding chairs were placed in the aisle for those unlucky enough not to have grabbed seats early. The 10 hour bus ride to Phnom Penh was crowded, hot, uncomfortable and loud, but we finally arrived in Phnom Penh around 11 pm. I say Phnom Penh, but it was really somewhere on the outskirts of town. Turns out the bus driver was in cahoots with the taxis. He let us off in the middle of nowhere, where the taxi drivers are waiting to charge an outrageous price for a 5 minute ride into town. We were too tired to argue, and it was late so we grabbed a taxi with a guy we had met on the bus and headed for the backpacker ghetto where we found a moderately clean room with in a moderately dingy hotel in a moderately seedy neighbourhood.

Cheong Ek Killing Field Memorial

We only had only given ourselves one day to spend in Phnom Penh, so early the next morning, we hired a tuk tuk driver to drive us around town for the day so we could catch the sights. First, we drove out to the Cheong Ek Killing fields, probably the best known of the sites where the Khmer Rouge regime perpetrated their genocide. We spent about an hour there, then rushed back into town to another genocide memorial, the Tuol Sleng prison, where the Khmer Rouge held and tortured people it deemed a threat. Our driver let us off in the centre of town after that, and we rounded out the day with a walk around town, some book shopping, a close encounter with an elephant, lunch on the main drag overlooking the Tonle Sap river, several close encounters with local traffic, and sunset drinks at a rooftop bar while watching the movie “The Killing Fields”.

Siem Reap

The next morning, we were up early for a tuk tuk ride to the bus station and another bus ride to Siem Reap. Only 6 hours this time, but every bit as uncomfortable. We were surprised to find someone waiting for us in Siem Reap with a sign with my name on it. Turns out our hotel in Phnom Penh had sold our name to a tuk tuk driver in Siem Reap so he could try to make some money off us, an enterprising if somewhat devious scheme. We spent an hour or so checking out several hotels before deciding on a nondescript hotel a little ways off the main strip. Siem Reap itself wasn’t that interesting. Like so many other towns we’ve been to in Southeast Asia, it was set up to cater to tourists; hotels and bad food, shops selling curios and souvenirs on every corner, and drunken tourists outnumbering Cambodians 3 to 1. The only reason to go there is that it is the gateway to the temples of Angkor. There are over 1000 temples in the Angkor region spread over 400 square kilometers, so it was impossible for us to see all of them, but we did our best. We rented ancient bicycles from our hotel (mine had a basket and a bell) and spent the next three days exploring as many of the ruins as we could fit in. I lost count, but I think we saw something like 15 or 20 temples, and we must have covered at least 75 kilometers on our bikes. Highlights included sunrise at the Bayon temple, and the jungle growing out of the ruins at the Ta Promh temple (think Indiana Jones). Lowlights included explosive diarrhea from a bottle of dodgy water we got from a roadside stand, and sore bums from all the bike rides.



Sunrise at Bayon

Our temple visits out of the way, it was time to move on, this time Bangkok. So, on the morning of our sixth day in Cambodia, we got up early for yet another long bus ride. There was a little excitement when a half our into the ride I realized we had forgotten our shoes at the hotel. The bus driver didn’t want to go back, but he did have to stop to wait for more passengers. So I got off the bus, hailed a motorcycle taxi, jumped on the back, sped back to the hotel, collected our shoes and made it back to the bus before it left again. Colleen didn’t even realize I was gone. Other than that, the bus ride was every bit as unpleasant as the two preceding it, possibly more so. It started with a regular bus ride to the Thai border, followed by all the requisite border nonsense (no bribes this time). There was a new twist after we crossed the border in that instead of a regular bus, 12 of us were crammed, along with our luggage into a minivan with inadequate air conditioning and a driver who seemed to be intent on making someone vomit if he didn’t kill us all with his crazy driving.

Jungle at Ta Promh

So that was our Cambodia experience, lots of unpleasant travel, followed by rushed, albeit amazing, sightseeing. I can put up with the unpleasant travel, but rushing through a place is difficult. I would have liked to have learned more about Cambodia’s genocide, the history of Angkor, and the culture and history of Cambodia itself, time just did not permit. Unfortunately this has been true of many places we’ve visited, while we’ve seen and done amazing things, we have almost always wished we had more time to get a better understanding of what we were seeing. No regrets though, we’ll just have to come back some day with more time to spend.

We are in Australia now and having a blast, but more on that in future posts (if I ever get to them).


Michael
East Melbourne

Australia