Awestruck and overwhelmed!

Words are utterly insufficient to convey the overwhelming scope, magnificence and mystery of the Angkor temples.  At a time when there were maybe 50,000-100,000 people living in Paris, the largest city in Europe, the Khmer empire had built a city 20 miles square, with as many as 1,000,000 inhabitants. It is truly overwhelming to try to take in.

The temples are stupendous.  Bigger by far than anything I've seen in Mexico or Europe. Some structures have been reclaimed from the jungles, but others are still wrapped in giant tree roots.  The temple at Ta Prohm was used as a location for the Tomb Raider movie to take advantage of the great images of elephant trunk-like roots enveloping the buildings.

The decorations, including statues, carvings, and bas-reliefs, are every bit as impressive as the buildings themselves.  Some of the ornamentation has been badly treated by erosion, the collapse of many of the buildings, and the fighting that took place here when the VC and Khmer Rouge controlled the are in the '70s' (there's even some VC graffiti from 1972 in one building), but other stone carvings look like they were completed last month.

We had another great guide, but trying to absorb the enormity of the Khmer's achievement in a couple of days, is like trying to learn trigonometry in a week.  The first order of business when we get back to Lawrence will be to get a good book on the Khmers and try to reflect on what we experienced.

Siem Reap, the provincial city which serves as a gateway to Angkor, is a lively town, full of resorts, restaurants and bars and a busy night tourist market.  We had dinner downtown last night and it was like being in Cancun or Cabo San Lucas - lots of young people from all over the world having lots of fun.

Hotel rooms are inexpensive as is food and drink.  That, coupled with the incomparable ruins, makes for a pretty great  vacation spot.  Unfortunately, it is now so popular, that up to 3,000,000 tourists a year are visiting and putting a huge strain on the monuments and the environment.

We'll spend tomorrow visiting the National Museum branch in Siem Reap and then chill until our 11:30 PM flight to Seoul. Home on Sunday.  It will be good to be back!

I'll try to post some final reflections tomorrow before we leave.

An emotional roller coaster in Phnom Penh

Up Wednesday at 5:30 to clean up, talk to Rebecca on FaceTime, have breakfast and meet our guide at 7:50.  Our first stop was at S-21, the former school the Khmer Rouge used as one of their prison, torture, and interrogation centers. 

The museum is chilling. The setting is so ordinary. Apart from the barbed wire covering the porticos, the buildings look like any other school set down in an urban neighborhood. 

The jailers, like the Nazis, photographed each of their victims (20,000 at this center), which included intellectuals, merchants, monks, soldiers from the Lon Nol regime, foreigners, and towards the end, even senior Khmer Rouge cadres who had fallen out with the leadership. 

A few individuals survived the prison and later wrote about and painted vivid scenes of the torture and cruelty they observed. 

Kathy and I had our photo taken with one of the survivors and purchased a copy of his book.

The killing fields themselves are disturbing in a different way.  The setting, in an abandoned Chinese graveyard close to a lake, is almost peaceful.  The mass graves where the murdered victims from S-21 were buried are shallow overgrown depressions in the grass. The remains of the victims, however, are a constant reminder of the not so long ago horrors that occurred there. In the rainy season (which is just ending now) bones, clothing fragments and teeth work their way to the surface.  I haven't travelled to Auschwitz, but I suspect the feeling surrounding the places is similar.  The scale of the savagery seems comparable - of a wartime Cambodian population of 8 million, around 2 million died in the purges, forced labor and combat that occurred in the late '70's.

The afternoon tour served as a partial antidote to the grim morning stops.  After shopping for 45 minutes at the "Russian Market," we had a great lunch in a small boutique hotel/restaurant before touring the city's founding namesake's temple 

and  the National Palace and adjacent Silver Pagoda.  The buildings, especially the pagoda, are fabulously decorated and beautiful set off against the afternoon skies.

Our flight to Siem Reap left at 6:00 PM, so we had to wrap up the sightseeing early and get to the airport.  After a short and uneventful flight we landed in Siem Reap, the final stop on our tour.  Our new guide met us at the airport and drove us to another beautiful hotel.  Thursday, we start our tour through the Angkor sites early, so we'll turn in now and write more tomorrow.

Upriver to Cambodia

We got up early to catch the speedboat from Chau Doc to Phnom Penh. A couple of pedicabs were at the hotel at 6:30 to shuttle us to the dock.

The trip to the river took us past an school complex where parents were having breakfast in street corner restaurants with their kids before sending them off to join their classes.

I shot a ton of pictures of activity on the river in the early morning while we waited for the boat.

Once we got under way, we cruised up the Mekong for about an hour before stopping first at Vietnamese border control and then, a mile or so upriver, at the Cambodian border post to obtain visas.  After about an hour and a too early in the morning Cambodia beer, we resumed our trek to Phnom Penh.  We passed under a huge new suspension bridge under construction about 20 miles south of the city.

Once we landed, a new guide met us to escort us to another in a string of memorable hotels - the White Mansion. Our room on the top floor featured a terrace with a fabulous view of the thunderheads building over the city.

We decided to walk to the National Museum to catch the exhibitions before it closed.  The walk was a constant barrage of propositions from tuk-tuk drivers offering tours.  The museum's collections of statuary from Angkor and other Cambodian historical sites is wonderful.  Kathy and I both wish we knew more about Buddhism and Brahmanism, the religions melded by the Khmers and celebrated in the Ankorian temples.

We walked by the National Palace and Silver Pagoda, which we will tour tomorrow.  The buildings are stunning from the outside.  

After we left the Palace environs, we ran another gauntlet of aggressive tour guides and tuk-tuk entrepreneurs on the way back to the hotel, getting semi-soaked by the rain in the process.  We stopped in a wine shop to buy a couple of bottles of French wine.  As we left the store, we noticed another well stocked wine shop across the street.  That was two more well stocked shops that we saw in three weeks in Vietnam.  From the large number of French and Italian restaurants in the city, there seems to be a lot more European cultural influence in Phnom Penh than in Vietnam - at least in the cuisine. After a beer on our rooftop terrace, we headed out to dinner in our own tuk-tuk.  The driver took us to an Italian place recommended by the proprietor of our hotel's restaurant.  Our driver insisted he would come back to pick us up when we were done.  I don't know why I was surprised when he actually did.  We had trouble settling our bill at the restaurant - first, because while the US dollar is the de facto Cambodian currency, they wouldn't take an old $100 bill (apparently because Phnom Penh is a center for passing North Korean counterfeit US Currency) and second, because one of my credit cards wouldn't work and they didn't take Amex.  Kathy had to treat me.

I have mixed impressions of Phnom Penh.  The hotel and wait staff are charming, the children lovely and friendly and many of the public buildings are impressive.  The aggressive hucksters are a turn off and the city has a reputation for street crime by thieves on motorbikes like Saigon did in the '70's.  In fact it reminded me of Saigon in 1972 in other ways, too including the location of some high end homes, hotels and businesses in otherwise shabby neighborhoods.

We're steeling ourselves for a tough day tomorrow, including a trip to the genocide museum and the killing fields. Got to turn in early.  More tomorrow.

Last day in Vietnam

Our last day in Vietnam was a long one.  Tran, our guide, met us at the hotel at 7:30.  We left our luggage in the van and caught a boat to visit the Cai Rang floating vegetable market.  Evidently, the Delta has a pretty sophisticated marketing system, involving ever higher layers of brokers and middlemen.  Buyers visit local farms and buy produce and take it by boat to sell in floating wholesale markets like the one outside Can Tho.  The sellers "advertise" their wares by flying examples of the produce they have on offer from a pole on their boat.  They typically live in the back of the boat and operate their shop out of the front.

The sales boats are serviced by floating cantinas selling refreshments as well as food items.

We saw a creative wedding photagarapher taking pictures on location in the middle of the market.

The Vietnamese government is attempting to resettle slum-dwellers throughout the country into newly built communities, but there still are lots of tin shacks on the water like those I remember from the 70's

After leaving the floating market, we made our way to a workshop where the workers make rice paper and dried rice noodles.  

They also sold snacks, including grilled paddy rats.

We made our way back through the floating market to the wharf by way of a landside retail market on the river bank.  The fish was so fresh it was still jumping in the display tubs.  Tran told us the market opens early and the best produce goes for higher prices in the early morning,  The poor wait to shop later in the day, when the prices have fallen.  The meat on offer typically has been slaughtered around  A.M., so it, too, is very fresh.

After catching the van, we started the 4 hour drive to Chau Doc, a small provincial town close to the Cambodian border.  On the way, we stopped first at a crocodile farm,

and then at a bird sanctuary located in a mangrove swamp.  We toured the  swamp by motorboat and pirogue, seeing hundreds of storks, herons, cormorants and other waterfowl,

and then climbed  lookout tower for a view over the whole preserve.  

The trip through the forest was magical, with clouds of large birds flapping away as our boat motored by.

When our visit to the refuge was complete, we headed into Chau Doc and said farewell to Tran and our driver before checking-in to another nice hotel.  Neither of us has had much experience using guides on past travels, but the extraordinary professionalism displayed by each of the guides that Travel Vietnam assigned us on this trip has made me reconsider the value of having a knowledgeable companion along when traveling in an unfamiliar place.  All of our guides were university trained, friendly, fluent and cheerful.  Tran, our last, was the best of a very good bunch.

We decided to walk into town before nightfall to see the Mekong and walk through the market.  Chau Doc reminds me of Ben Tre in the 1970's - smaller, shabbier and a lot more rough around the edges.  Kathy observed that if this were the first town we'd visited, she'd likely be home by now.

We stopped at a restaurant next to our hotel and had another great meal of seafood and banana flower salad, stir fried beef and onions and basa (Vietnamese catfish) braised in a clay pot.

We leave the hotel at 6:00 tomorrow to catch a speedboat up the Mekong to Phnom Penh.  Vietnam has been wonderful and I'll be sorry to leave.