pampering ourselves in phnom penh

Cambodia is a really crazy country, a "shit storm"as David cleverly and accurately termed it our first night in Siem Reap. It's a mess, totally underwhelming. For one thing, everybody wants a piece of the Westerner's money. And they do not take "No" "No way" "Not a chance" Absolutely not" "Not on your life" or "No way in hell" for an answer. I told David they needed rape prevention classes here, because the Cambodians need to realize "no means no." He didn't laugh.

Also, the driving. Tom will nod his head and agree, because it's a total fucking mess. When we arrived in Siem Reap, there was this mob of bikes, motos (like passenger motorcycles), tuk-tuks (motorcycle pulling a bench for 2-3 people) and few cars, all swarming in teh street. I couldn't figure out was was so off-putting about it, other than the road was dirt and they were all going so fast. then it dawned on me: there were no stoplights. No street signs, no stop signs, no stop lights. Nothing regulating the flow of traffic. The people just...drove. And prayed they didn't hit anything.

The flip side of this, of course, is that we're really in the third world. The country is filled with abject poverty and child malnutirtion and victims of land mines and people desperately trying to stay alive on a daily basis. It's incredibly harsh. It's very upsetting. And so, like most Americans, I pretend it doesn't exist and focus on the food and the temples and counting the days until I'm back in the west (from today: 7 to Israel; 9 to California).

Siem Reap, the springboard town into the Temples of Angkor, is fun. It's a little crazy, as the people here have made tourism into a true industry. There is a whole stretch of Vegas-style hotels of brobdignagian proportions, and then streets and streets of more "modest" guesthouses and hostels (like the place David and I stayed). The town itself is very cute and touristy; by our third night I was bored with the options. It was fine, for a night or two, but I couldn't imagine staying here for more than a few days. If you love bars and clubs, then, yes, of course, but otherwise, eh. They had very, very good iced cream though.

Angkor Wat is truly spectacular. I'd learned about it in my archeology of cities course my 4th year at UCLA, but not really in great depth. But it's amazing! Angkor Wat is really a misnomer, it's really the temples and cities, spread out over many kilometers, of Angkor - Angkor Wat is the biggest and most central Temple; it's the biggest religious building in the world. How about that, huh? They are these huge, immense, grand, monumental limestone buildings, with huge staircases and stepped towers and moats and carvings and corridors, all in the middle, the random middle, of the Cambodian jungle. It was wild. It was so wild, and so much in the middle of nowhere, that before we started David and I decided we needed an extra day here, so we ended up spending three nights here, with two full days on the temples.

I have hundreds of pictures (If possible, I think my photo collection of Angkor stone rivals Ari's pictures of Turkish tile...) up the wazoo and will show them when I get home (to the brave and the very patient). The highlights, for me, were many: the Elephant terrace of Angkor Thom, which was a huge, long terrace with hundreds of elephants carved into the wall; Angkor Wat itself was magnificent, so much so that we went twice, once in the afternoon and the following morning; a temple called Bankong, one of the first temples, the Rolus Group. about 12 km out of the way, which was very stirring and peaceful and beautiful in its (comparative) simplicity.

Phnom Penh is kind of like Siem Reap, if it was a city of 1.5 million instead of 100,000. The roads are paved, there is a plethora of restaurants and really big day and night markets, with a lot less tourism (but it's the off-season). Whereas walking in Bangkok smelled of a Thai restaurant, Phnom Penh smells of rainwater, rancid fruit, and trash. It's not particularly pleasant. Our hotel is fine, probably the nicest places we've been in (it has a TV and I watched an episodes of The Wire this afternoon while David napped). We walked around and sweated (I decided I really need a Dune stillsuit in this weather; it would save a lot of hassle dealing with the buckets of sweat and sontinually buying bottled water) and we saw the sights, from afar. Tonight we had dinner on the river. Tomorrow we're going to the killing fields memorial in the morning, and then the national palace, silver pagoda (oo!) and maybe a temple or museum in the afternoon. And the next day we fly to Chiang Mai, in Northern Thailand.

In case you're keeping track, I finished The Audacity of Hope, and really enjoyed it, and then moved onto The Beach, which is about backpacking culture in Thailand in the mid-1990s. It was also made into a Danny Boyle-Leonardo DiCaprio movie in 2000. I'm now onto Dune: Messiah (see refernce above), which is good, not as good as the original. The only book I have left is finishing The Poisonwood Bible, and at the rate I'm reading, I may be forced into doing that. I guess there are worse things in life.