Chaos in Tejas

Yee haw Texas. Armed with warnings of how red neck/superficial/conservative (choose your judgment) Texans are, I rolled into the Lone Star state excited to meet a "real-live Texan". The woman who checked me into my hotel was Indian and the guy who took my order at dinner was Thai. So much for my preconceived notions of Texans.

I spent a few nights on a "big cat farm" in North Texas and got a kick out of teenage boys calling me "ma'am" and then headed to Austin - which I found very friendly and very non-Texan. Friendly as in a woman I almost plowed over at a cross walk threw me a peace sign instead of the other well known and expected hand gesture, and non-Texan as in almost everyone has relocated here from another state.On my last night, I met a team of roller derby girls! They were from a hill billy out skirts town but were in Austin practicing with the local team who had trained Drew Barrymore and Ellen Page for "Whip It". Those were some gritty broads...before I knew who they were I was listening to them share stories about bruises from "falling down" and I thought they were part of a battered woman's conference.

There's some good raw food going on here - I found an amazing local juice bar, two raw restaurants, and the ORIGINAL Whole Foods. Of course, I made a pilgrimage to see this holy flagship and it was beautiful. The non-raw food that I sampled wasn't really exciting enough to mention. Lots of meat (barbeque) and mexican - which is usually cheap and satisfying but nothing to rave about.

Next stop Fredericksburg - a Texas/German settlement! In the 1840's the Republic of Texas was having problems populating West Texas because it was so well... unpopulated! and vast and wild. So they made a deal with Germany - for a cheap price you get a ticket over to the US, 10 acres of wild Texas pasture, and 1 acre in town for your "Sunday house" so you could go to church and trade over the weekend. In the middle of Texas you can tour the Vereins Kirche, eat schnitzel and drink hefe-weissen.


This area of Texas is known as "hill-country" and while the name suggest what type of terrain to expect, you'd have no inkling of how green TX can be. It was just beautiful hills with winding roads and wildflowers, butterflies and cows. Definitely not the desert and tumbleweed landscape that I had pictured. Heading further west it got more ancient flat seabed and mountainous instead of hills and I swear I've never sweat so much in my life. Every rest stop I get out of my car and my shorts are drenched through the butt and thighs. How do these highway maintenance guys do it? Wearing jeans, long sleeved tees, vests, hats and gloves, standing on the blacktop all day in the sun. Those are some hardy Texans. Yee haw.

The Travelling Continues...

It's very odd to be travelling in your own country. Travelling not just in transit and not on a vacation, but being a traveler. Staying in hostels, talking to other travelers (mostly all European) and seeing your country through their eyes. A French girl says America gives her a feeling of insecurity that she didn't feel even travelling alone in Columbia. I've never thought of the US this way. So now it's time for me to take my learned travel skills and turn the gaze inward to my own country - to observe the people and landscape as I would in a foreign country. My very first thought is IT'S EXPENSIVE HERE! How can people afford to travel for 4 months in the states? Cheap hostels are $25 a night ( as opposed to $8 in Thailand for a personal room) and I can't even begin to think about getting around without a car. My $1000 a month budget in Thailand will last me 10 days here. But this nuisance aside, I think it is important to know one's homeland. And that is what I am going to try to do for the next month or so - get to know my country! Finally!

Some pictures from St. Louis Missouri, Arkansas, North Texas (Redneck central!!) and Austin will be up shortly.

The Conclusion

With no public finale or fanfare my trip (but not my adventure) has come to an end. Since I've been pretty lax on keeping this blog updated, I'll just give you a quick rundown of the last six weeks - the highlights.

a 10 day silent meditation retreat

a 5 day live aboard in the Similan Islands - a National Marine Park that is reputed to be the best diving in Thailand. There were a couple magical moments - swimming with 3 manta rays for 50 minutes, playing with bioluminescence at night underwater, and being within arms reach of a leopard shark

a 7 day fast on Ko Phangan (the island famous for its Full Moon parties) where I drank clay shakes and experienced my first colonic

The two biggest gifts I received from this trip were this: traveling alone is a phenomenal, beautiful thing and I love it - the freedom to pursue exactly what you want and the lack of pressure that provides the ease to listen to your heart at all times is a powerful realization. The second gift is that travel breeds more travel. There are exponentially more places I want to visit and things to see and do. I'm already planning my next trip and this time it's a one way ticket...

Thai Political Unrest

Thailand is in a political turnover. The red shirts (United Front for Democracy Against Dictatorship or UDD) are camping out in Bangkok demanding that Parliament be dissolved. The army chief has given in to this demand, saying that is will be dissolved by the end of the year. The red shirts claim the current Prime Minister, Abhisit Vejjajiva, was not elected by a popular vote (he was put in power after the current government, the yellow shirts or the People's Alliance for Democracy (PAD) staged a coup in 2006 and instilled him as PM in 2008). The protesting reached a head this Saturday when the yellows tried to retake a certain area of Bangkok where the reds were camped out. The yellows used tear gas and either live or rubber bullets (conflicting accounts) and the reds retaliated with petrol bombs. 21 died - 17 civilans including a Japanese reporter from Reuters. Up until this point the protesting has been peaceful. In late March the red shirts gathered 10 cc of blood from each participant and threw it on the steps of the Government house as another protest. They have been camped out in Bangkok for almost a month.

Most red supporters are poor, rural farmers from the North and Northeast. They support the return to power of former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra- who is seen as a sympathizer of the poor. He was deposed in a coup by the yellows in 2006 and has been exiled from Thailand since. He now calls himself a citizen of the world and he resides in London and Dubai, although he holds passports in Nicaragua and Montenegro.

The current PM, Abhisit, is English born and educated (Eton and Oxford) and was one of the youngest ever members of Parliament. He is very handsome but is criticized for his lack of charisma, often giving bland addresses to the people.

Doesn't Thailand have a king? Yes, Rama IX (Bhumipol) has not issued any comments regarding the unrest - but he usually stays out of situations like this, excepting a few very tense moments over his 60 year reign where he had to diffuse political tension.

As a reaction to the violence that took place on Saturday, yesterday a parade of coffins took place through the streets of Bangkok - mourning those killed. All of this on the eve of the biggest holiday in Thailand: Songkhran. Where for three days no one works and everyone participates in a huge water fight in the streets.

This information I've collected through various online media sources - I haven't seen anything firsthand other than an obvious display of force with more policemen patrolling the streets of Bangkok when I was there March 28-30th. I'm currently in the south and the only time this movement is mentioned is when running into travellers who have just come from Bangkok and couldn't get through the streets where the reds were protesting. You'd never even know anything was going on down here. I always assumed coups and protests were huge events where the whole country is in chaos and confusion, but you wouldn't even know a single thing is going on from the way things are down here. Thais are going to work and foreigners are planning dive trips just like any old day. I just hope they don't close the airport when I want to fly out.

I don't have any pictures of this but BBC has some good ones here if you want to see them.

A Short Venture Into Lao

Holy smoke! Smoke smoke smoke! I can't even see across the Mekong which is 100 m wide! Agricultural slash and burn is smogging this city! It's muggier and more humid and I need another shower already. The longtails on the Mekong are using lights! It's 5:15 in the afternoon, sunset isn't for another hour and a half! It's so hazy I feel like I'm stumbling through a drug trip. I write this after 10 short days in Lao, and I want to tell you guys what my experience was with the three different cities I was in.

The current one, (smokey Luang Phabang) is a UNESCO World Heritage city, with small brick lanes and alley ways of families - kids playing, women grilling chicken and men riding up on motorbikes. Hazy market stalls in every glance selling mahjong sets, opium pipes, ancient coins, Hmong silver, handwoven silks, of Lao sandwiches, stir-frys, and shakes. Coffee and pastry shops lining main street with wooden chairs and tables on the terraces. Lao used to be a French colony and that is still represented in the food. Lattes and baguettes everywhere. The most beautiful waterfall I've ever seen in my life. Wine bars! Old wrinkled women selling birds in cages and families (women with three children) setting up their stalls. Two dark skinned Lao girls selling Hello Kitty helium balloons to overjoyed pigtailed kids. Since it's a World Heritage Site, everything must close down at 2300 - bars included - which means there are a lot less drunk people - or people drinking to get drunk, and the town is quiet at night instead of thumping loud disco music. Twice I've returned to my guesthouse around midnight and the front gate and doors were locked, with the front desk boy asleep on a mattress behind the desk on the floor and huge pink mosquito net strung across the room. How charming - I love it here!

The capital city, Vientianne, has the same coffee and pastry shops but without the charm. Dirty guesthouses but a wide variety of cuisine. Nothing to sight-see but bulldozers running along the dried up bank of the Mekong. What do they do in the wet season? Mostly I was here for a visa (the Thai embassy is here). There is a 3 storied mall with a crowd of goldsmiths pounding, burning and cooling small trinkets into toothpicks of gold outside. So much French food around! Who would have thought I'd be eating ratatouille and salmon rillette, all after a sweaty cramped 12 hour bus ride where I was cuddled by the drunk guy next to me? I thought Asia was all about tea, but here it's coffee - Lao coffee, latte, and the ever popular NesCafe - with sugar and Carnation goodstart. This city is the site of the most amazing sauna I have ever been in. I now regard the herbal sauna as almost a holy experience, bringing me to the depths of my consciousness and leaving me dazed and peaceful. When I open the door to step inside, I push aside a heavy, drenched curtain keeping the steam in, and immediately I start to cough because the steam is so thick. Not only thick, but fragrant. Like walking into a pot of chai. After 15 minutes my breathing becomes very labored. In between showers and sauna sessions, I am served a hot, bitter red tea. Men and women are separated, and while I only saw local women, I did see two Western men visiting the sauna. The women were all rubbing their skin with a lightening solution - some were even homemade from tamarind, milk, and honey. I have never sweat so much in my life I kid you not. The YMCA sauna has absolutely nothing on this place.

Babylon, Sin City, Gomorrah, or Vang Vieng. I felt like Ulysses with the Lotus Eaters, you can't leave once you arrive, you are gravitationally held in an apathetic emotionally dulled limbo of no ambition and a desire to get more fucked up. There really are a few things to do here besides party, but the town sapped my enthusiasm by surrounding me with pretentious zombies high on the power of their money, behaving badly because no one is frowning upon them here (Lao people expect Westerners to be assholes). The scenery was beautiful, huge mountains straining up in pillars of rock hovering over the town, but I couldn't separate myself from the debauchery and it made me sick. I really didn't like Vang Vieng and I wouldn't want to go back there.

All in all, the beer is cheap and good in Lao, they have delicious local coffee, the people are friendly and speak Thai (whew!), the landscape is probably the most beautiful I've ever seen. It's just a tiny bit more expensive than Thailand, and they accept US dollars, Thai baht, or Lao kip. When I returned to my guesthouse today around 5 pm, the front desk boy was letting his friends play FIFA on his Xbox or Playstation in the lobby. How endearing is that? A bunch of teenage boys greeting me at my guesthouse by jumping up to help me open the fridge. How sweet. I'm sad I didn't get to spend more time in Lao but I made my choice of what I want to do next and I'm very excited for it. I'm going to the south of Thailand (think beaches) to do a 10 day Anapanasati meditation retreat at Wat Suanmokkh. I hope I learn how to clear this mind and find some inner peace, wish me luck... woo hoo!!!!!

A Day In The Life

Wow. My last week has been amazing. It's almost impossible not to be healthy and mindful where I am. I'm staying on an organic farm just outside of a really hippie/tourist town called Pai. I want to describe it but it's just better to tell you about a typical day.


0630 - wake up - watch the sun rise over the mountains sitting on the porch with kitty in lap
0730 - breakfast of bananas from farm, green tea and homemade soy chai
0900 - hitch a ride into tow on top of a water tank truck
0930 - return books to library, run into Canadian friend on his way to get a tattoo from a famous French rock star (whom I've never heard of)
1000 - yoga and meditation overlooking the river
1230 - wheatgrass shot and fresh coconut
1300 - internet and skype
1400 - internet connections shuts down
1430 - buy and eat fresh ripe papaya for 10 baht
1445 - browse, return and buy used books
1530 - eat coconut sesame scone
1545 - resume interneting
1800 - hitch a ride back to farm
1830 - go for short swim in pond
1930 - eat fantastic dinner of greens, veggies, bananas and rice
2015 - dishes, clean kitchen
2030 - hang around fire talking about The Life Of Pi and hot springs
2100 - retire to bungalow to read my new used book

Man... and that doesn't include the waterfall hikes, bamboo classes, or homebrewed kombuchas! How will I ever leave Pai?

Defying Gravity

"She flies through the air with the greatest of ease..." and then she slams into the guide, who is waiting to catch her on the platform. "Kaw toot! Kaw toot!" Excuse me sorry! The dude weighs 110 pounds and all my weight comes flying at him down a zip cord. I hope he gets paid well.

Jungle flight is an experience not to be missed if traveling in Northern Thailand. The guides are entertaining, the adrenaline rush is unbeatable and the scenery... I can't find a word that's not a cliche, but since it's true I can sincerely say it's beautiful.

I'm on a day trip with Jungle Flight - 7 hours of ziplining, abseiling and sky walks through the Thai canopy. I chose the longer course (the obvious choice) with 30 some platforms but there is a shorter 5 hour course with 23 platforms for $7 less.

The four guides - Jack Sparrow, Tom Cruise, Boston and Ting Tong (Thai for "crazy") are a mischievous riotous bunch. On the first abseil, Boston whips out a book with a handwritten cover titled "Jungle Flight Training Manual" and nervously flits his eyes back and forth between the book and the equipment. "Wait Wait WAIT!" he screams as he drops a Swedish girl straight down, while she squeals with glee and adrenaline the entire way.

The joking attitudes of the guides created a kind of summer camp feel - making us feel less like individual customers and more like a big group of friends on a camping trip (Swiss family Robinson style!) Even with all the joking, it was obvious these guys really knew what they were doing and that we were in good hands. I was always attached to some line or thick cable wrapped around a tree.

There had to be huge trust in these guys too. They clip you on and say 'go' and sometimes the only confirmation of your attachment is the whispered 'click' the carabiner make (you can't see them clip you when the line is attached to your back) and you are expected to jump off the platform faceforward...WAH!! The rush when you just let go, fall, and speed over the trees is intoxicating. Most people screamed with laughter the whole way and dazedly stared back down the line trying to catch their breath once they reached the next platform.

I can honestly say that the view is breath taking because I really did let out a sob while flying down the line, being so moved by the shapely mountains blanketed by green and tinged with a hazy cloud. Going through the lush forest could have been a multi-day adventure - there was so much beautiful climbing green, intertwining limbs, gray trunks with pale lichen patches. It took an hour long drive up a windy (thankfully paved) road to reach this place, but just an hour away there were no signs of being that close to a city while we were up in the treetops.

The only disappointment I suffered was the lack of wildlife. No exotic birds, gibbons or snakes. A lot of sparrows mainly. We were there for the hottest hours of the day when most animals would be smart to lay low, and probably the amount of human traffic through their habitat kept them at a distance from the track we were on. Other than this, the experience was phenomenal.

I would have guessed the whole group to be staring out our windows on the way back, looking up to the canopy marveling at how two hours earlier we were up there swinging through the branches. Instead, the whole group passed out in the air-con bus ride back to town, where we were delivered to the Chiang Mai Sunday Walking market. All that adrenaline really wears a person out! If you are ever in the Chiang Mai province of Thailand, make sure that you don't miss this chance to fly through the air :)

I feel like an asshole

In response to my last post, "The Old One". I feel like an asshole for going on that trek and riding an elephant. Obviously I had a blast and I really enjoyed being so close to such a great animal, but in retrospect I am just a jerk tourist who dishes out dollars without asking where did this animal come from (did they capture it from the wild to use for tours?) or how much does this animal work each day? A lot of the elephants used in these package tours are attained using illegal methods, are over worked, and are given amphetamines so that they can work longer. Yuck. I'm disgusted that I was part of that. A part of me knew it was wrong to partake in this tour but I ignored that small voice because the idea of sitting astride a huge elephant was so exciting. I hope that in the future I can be more objective and be the eco-tourist I'd like to call myself. By participating in this trek I was just one of thousands of foreigners that have no regard for the impact their vacation is taking on an animal, a country, or the environment. Shame on me.

The Old One

The elephant blew a hot gust of air up my face as he unmistakenly told me that he wanted the banana in my hand. I placed it in the tip of his trunk and he swung it down into his mouth. We repeated this routine until I ran out of bananas. He lumbered on up the path while I was swaying at precarious angles with every deliberate step.

Suddenly the elephant leaned his behind into the wall he was standing next to and started to sit down. The mahout sitting on his head right in front of me shouted in Thai and dug his long curvy metal spike into the animals trunk. It hit with a dull hard thud and the elephant slowly reversed the motion of his body and started to walk again. We turned a corner and started a plodding march up a semi-steep incline. I had to lean forward further to feel balanced.

He slapped his mottled elephant ears against his body, trying to fan himself. I was straddling his neck so my legs were in the middle of his ears and bulky body, enjoying his efforts at airconditioning. My double knotted tennis shoes became untied by the end of the walk after all that slapping.

Without warning the mahout sitting right in front of me slid straight down the elephants face and trunk like a child on the metallic slide at recess. He turned back to look up at me, chuckled to himself and turned back to light a cigarette.

I turned my eyes to inspect the animal. His gray skin was blanketed in brown chalky dust and black wiry hairs that would undoubtedly have itched my calves raw if the mahout hadn't the foresight to place a piece of burlap between me and the elephant. The skin itself was a cool heavy leather that had deep cracks running along with the wrinkles. I placed both my hands on the base of his head to steady myself. The act of balancing became much easier with the mahout on the ground, but the mahout's attention was often distracted and the elephant seemed to sense the exact moment when he would be able to turn off the path so he started towards a tree. He broke off an entire branch from the trunk and commenced to munch it. Finding too much twig and not enough leaf, he proceeded to pluck smaller segments from the end of the branches with the most leaves. It looked like he was holding a bouquet of leaves. A fly must have irritated his shoulder because all of a sudden this bouquet was flying at me, still in his grip. He slapped at his shoulder with the leaves and satisfied, promptly shoved them into his mouth, beginning to masticate. By this time the mahout had noticed his wandering charge and called us back to the path.

We continued on behind the caravan of three other elephants. We lumbered up to a dusty broken hut where a man sold us bags of bananas for 20 baht. Everyone immediately had to surrender all their bananas one by one to their transports until their bags were empty.

Snack break complete, we headed back to the tall huts (they're the same height as an elephants back) where we had loaded. While I was standing there earlier waiting to load, I saw my elephant approaching from a ways away. As he mozied on over to pick me up, the man on the platform waiting to help me jump on laughed and pointed underneath the elephant. The animals mottled gray and white fifth leg was hanging almost to the ground - missing the dust by mere inches as he swung on over to meet me.

Now, as we were making our way back to these huts, the three elephants leading us walked right up to the unloading zone no problem. Our old man decided that instead of waiting in line to be deboarded, he wanted a drink. He stepped over to a huge clay container of water, stuck his trunk in, and inhaled. The sound of a huge balloon inflating expanded around me, followed by a huge splashy exhale as he filled his mouth with the water from his trunk. He did this a few more times, and then the next time he sucked water in, I watched his trunk go up and around instead of down and under into his mouth. Oh boy. The water erupted from his trunk and soaked me and my two German companions riding on his back. Not cooled down enough yet, he sprayed each side two more times, extracting squeals and belly laughs from us each time. With the mahout gone, I was able to lay my chest down around his brow and wrap my arms around the sides of his head to give him, what felt like to me, a hug.

With his passengers very pleased and giddy, the old dude stuck his head against the unloading platform and allowed me to jump off. I watched the mahout jump back on and lead him away. I turned away down the platform steps feeling very grateful and absolutely tickled pink to just have ridden such a huge, old, mischevious elephant.

Food and Fun - the Thai language

I've had 7 days of language class and I love it. Learning a new language is so revealing of the culture and people. My teacher repeatedly says Thai people only care about food and fun, so the language doesn't have much complicated like tenses, conjugations, or masculine/feminine! Actually, when we ask questions about saying something in the future, does the object have to come after the noun, do you need to repeat the pronoun, she shakes her head at us and in a comical voice says "Think about Thai brain, me so simple". So it sounds easy huh? For the most part it is. The tricky thing is the tones. Thai has 5 tones and they are pretty damn important. If you pronounce the tone for "beautiful" wrong, you are telling someone they have bad luck. Even worse, if you pronounce "experience/done already" wrong, you are saying "the mans body part that women no have" as my teacher would say. The mix-up has happened to me already! I went into a restaurant right after class full of confidence built up by my teacher telling me I am a genius student and ordered kaaw soy, a local egg noodle specialty with slow simmered chicken legs. Instead, I was served white rice because I pronounced "soy" with a falling tone. Bummer.

These tones make spoken Thai quite obnoxious. Listening to women talk is like having squawking parrots trying to out-caw eachother. To get the tones right, I just pitch my voice as harshly irritating as possible. It's actually fun to learn - putting a sentence together is like trying to compose a song. I almost think I should get out sheet music and write notes on the score to follow with words below.

There are personal pronouns, but women don't use them when talking about themselves because it's too formal. Instead they use their name because it's cute to refer to yourself in the third person, or they don't use a pronoun at all. The he/she pronoun (kao) doesn't differentiate between male/female/ladyboy. Sex is not as important in this culture as age is. It's more important to know if someone is older or younger than to know gender. A common greeting is to ask "How old are you" to determine if you show respect or expect it.

The language is very playful and cute. Words are repeated not for emphasis (I like it very very much) but to make a phrase cute and fun. Instead of saying "I'm joking" when using the words, they'll say literally "speak play" - play talking! They really do love their food and fun! The teacher loves to ask us funny questions. "Did you watch beautiful girls dance last night?" "Did you drink whisky with ladyboys?" Just this morning, she asked my friend Robbie literally "When have you experienced to be a man?" which we could only guess meant "How long have you been a man". For us westerners who would usually consider some of these questions a bit invasive, especially in a classroom setting where not everyone knows eachother or anyone else's views and beliefs, it feels a bit awkward. But the teacher, a teeny 30-something beautiful Thai woman, finds these questions hilarious and she laughs so hard she bends over.

As in many languages English has been incorporated and there is a set of words that are a jumble of both languages, referred to as Tinglish. These are mostly English words with Thai accents such as - airport, whisky, chocolate, shopping - even the word for foreigner (farang) came from French foreigners calling themselves "francais" and the Thais pronounced it "fa rang set". So now it's used for any foreigner. Some of the Tinglish is pretty incomprehensible unless you've heard it pronounced that way before. The 7-11 is just called the "seven" but it's pronounced "say-when", and a tissue is called "teet-choo" so you've got to wrap your ears around different pronounciations.

It's really fun learning all these new words and sounds. My teacher says if you don't smile you won't get the pronounciation right and people won't understand you. Most of them don't understand me anyways, but the smile goes a long ways in getting people to help me out. I just didn't realize that the famous Thai smile was part of the language.

I Gave My Passport To a Stranger

I gave a stranger my passport. And then I gave him $20 to ensure it would come back to me. I guess this is a common practice here. Instead of going to the embassy yourself to get a visa, you can give your passport to a travel agency and they will take it there for you for a few extra dollars. The anxiety I suffered when it didn't come back at the time promised was interesting. I worried, panicked, fretted, imagined the worse, and cursed travel agents, deceitful people and Cambodia in general, but I also trusted that the company did everything in their power. This is how things can work here, and I need to be assured that I'm not being taken advantage of, I'm just another squirrel in the process. And if the man who took my passport says, Oh I'm sorry it will definately be here tomorrow morning, well, then I'll just have to wait till tomorrow and see it then. It was quite a lesson in accepting the system as it is and not how I want it to be. In the end, I have my passport in time to catch my bus, and a beautiful hologrammed Thai visa is shining up at me from page 19.

Cambodia

So I'm in Siem Reap, Cambodia right now, visiting the temples at Angkor Wat. I've vaguely heard of these famous temples before (a UNESCO World Heritage Site) but had no idea how sprawling and ancient they were. It's basically a whole county of walled cities and temples and each one can take 2 hours to walk through. Angkor Wat is the most well known one - right at the entrance. The "Rainbow Bridge" crosses a huge man-made moat and connects the underworld (our world outside of the temples) to the human world (inside the temples). My first day I had a guide and a tuk-tuk driver ( a cart on the back of a motorcycle - very exciting!) who took me on the mini-tour. ...The mini-tour was 7 hours... Each temple is at least 1 km away from the next so I really did need a driver. The second day I did the grand tour without a guide and it still took me ... 6 hours.. I didn't repeat any of the temples on the second day and there was still more to see when I was done! Pictured here is my favorite, Preah Khan. 800 years ago it was a city built for the King while he was rebuilding his regular temple that had been sacked by the Siamese. Preah Khan is like a fairy tale in a forest. The temple still has all its mystical splendor while being slowly consumed by jungle. I was expecting to run into Mowgli from the jungle book at every doorway. This temple was calmer, being on the grand tour and further away from the more easily accessible Angkor Wat. Robbie and I had a picnic of pineapple, dragonfruit, and milkfruit in the shade of a doorway at the entrance to this temple and it was all the serenity and connection to the past I was hoping for.

Evidence of the Khmer Rouge is everywhere. On my first night I attended a concert at a hospital in Siem Reap and watched a short film about the building of the hospital. They showed footage from when the Khmer Rouge were in control and inside the hospital you could hear rockets shooting off while the doctors tried to attend to emaciated children. The doctor giving the concert said that before Khmer Rouge there were 950 Cambodia doctors in the country, and after wards only 50. They killed anyone with an education so it has been hard for the country to move ahead without intellectuals.

The food in Cambodia hasn't been too impressive so far. It's not as spicy as the Thais and I miss that. Lok lak is a chicken dish with onions in a sweet red sauce that I was hoping had heat but alas, had none. Of course, it was served with rice. I also had a chicken porridge last night that was good but mono-flavored and not spicy... I miss Thailand!

Pub Street in Siem Reap is where all the tourists go for dinner and drinks. Beers are $.50 draft and there is a variety of western food such as burgers, pizzas and french fries available. I went there on my first night and had Cambodian barbeque which included chicken, beef, squid, snake, and crocodile. Everything was good even though the crocodile was quite tough, but I enjoyed it all.

My guesthouse is this wonderfully huge place right in town and I have my own bathroom (shared with Robbie of course) and shower (by shower, I mean shower head with cold water right above the toilet, so that if you want to shower, the toilet will be completely soaked. I guess you could go to the bathroom and take a shower at the same time if you wanted... hmm hadn't thought of that before). No air-con in the room, but frequent cold showers seem to have almost the same effect.

The next step is getting up to Chiang Mai in Thailand to start language classes on Feb 8th. I'm taking a beginners Thai 3-week language class and I'm really excited to get into a routine and am hoping that I'll walk away feeling more comfortable travelling by myself around the country.

You are welcome to check out my photos from the trip thus far on Picasa Web Albums. You can see them if you click here.

Thanks for reading, would love to hear from you all, and hope you are well!

First Impressions

Wow so here I am, being amusedly overwhelmed by the whirlwind that I've jumped into. Every sight, smell, taste and interaction is a new sensation and I am happily bewildered. I can't yet absorb everything and turn it back to tell you in a conclusive or comprehensive fashion so I'll just describe what my sensory organs are experiencing and hope that you get a feeling of what this place is like for the first few days.

Bangkok is like a rainforest that crashed into an urban downtown: it's sprawling, modern, delicious, diverse, stinky, muggy, fresh, touristy and tropical. Walk down the street and you'll see individual slices of sushi rolls for sale for 6 baht (15 cents) each, bags of fresh ingredients for homemade soup including everything you need - sauce, garlic, onions, basil, lemon grass and shrimp powder, a monk in a saffron robe getting out of a cab, children buying cups of icecream from a street vendor, mystically beautiful, elaborate spirit houses outside of every business, wreaths of flowers hanging from the buildings, male expats in their 50's hanging out with young Thai girls, bright green and pink neon taxis, sizzling oil frying fish across from a flip flop vendor, tiny trendy Thai girls sending text messages waiting for the bus, exhausted fat dogs lying prostrate on the sidewalk, scrawny cats running into shops, a pidgeon landing in a bowl of peanuts for sale, and Dutch, French, Japanese, British, German, Spanish and American tourists everywhere. You'll hear the sound of a motorcycle constantly revving, and Beyonce and Shakira screaming at you advertising their bootlegged cds from Khao San road. Some of the foods to experience; drinking out of young coconuts, eating dumplings on a stick, sampling bitter fresh olives served with chili sauce, bags of fresh mango, pineapple, papaya, watermelon, apple, guava, and a mysterious fruit I described as "pear and honey" before being informed it was a fresh date! (Which I've never seen before) . Smoothies with coconut, dragonfruit, lychee, persimmon, beet and strawberry. At night you'll see a truck full of dead pigs being delivered for the market the next day, obnoxious drunk guidos being rude on Khao San, Thais sitting outside at the many street stands for dinner, little boys playing what is some derivative of World Of Warcraft in internet cafes....

Just a glimpse of my exceedingly stimulated brain on sensory overload. There will be a more selective account once I can digest some of this experience, thanks for reading!

The night before departure

Well here I am practically ready to leave. That doesn't mean the bag is packed yet, but everything that I think I'll need is ready to go in. The plans for this endeavor are pretty loose so far. I will be travelling throughout Thailand (with likely excursions into Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam) for 3 and a half months. I have a pretty good idea of what I'd like to do while I'm there but who knows how much that will change. My goal here is to accurately report my observations, experiences and crazy adventures back to you. I hope you are pumped to experience Thailand through me! Here we go.........