Thailand
You must forgive the lack of posts in the last few days. We’ve been making our way in and about Bangkok and lucky for us we got to stay at the Hilton (free thanks to my mom’s american express rewards points- go amex). UNLUCKY for us they charge and arm and a leg for just about everything there including the internet. I mean, we were staying on “wireless rd.” with no free or even paid for wireless… ya what’s that all about.
So Bangkok, bustling, glittering Bangkok- where to begin. The city is much bigger than I anticipated and we barely scratched the surface in Bangkok but we DID make our way through the heat and the sweat (lots and lots of sweat, some of us more than others- I won’t mention any names…) to the Grand Palace and grand indeed it is. I would have to say it’s pretty much the sparklefest of Asia. The best word to describe the palace is opulence, pure shimmering opulence in every inch of detail at the palace, just glimmer and sparkles everywhere. The glitteratti of Asia. By the way, Will totally “borrowed” that word, glitteratti. He types faster and therefore posts faster and so I will move onto another topic.
We are now currently on the lovely island of Phi Phi (where the movie The Beach was filmed. Oh Leonardo, where art thou?! Kidding) and I think we may just hole up here for a while, being as lovely as it it. Beaches, good food, bungalows, snorkeling and water fun- who could ask for more.
When we finally made our way over from Phuket on the ferry we floated past Koh Phi Phi Ley, Maya Bay to be exact, where Leonardo first arrives in the film. And after we floated past this picturesque view the captain of the ferry got on the loudspeaker and announced:
“all chinese passengers, please shanes boash, please shanes boash” (for all you who are not fluent in broken english that is: ”change boats”)
“if you are chinese from china on a tour please change the boat”
People, including us, were looking around confused as a boat tied up next to us, wondering who is supposed to get off now. And to clarify the matter the captain once again on the loud speaker:
“if you are chinese from china. not singapore. not malaysia but from china please change the boat. only you can know if you are chinese from china”
It’s true. Only you can know.
Welcome to Phi Phi Island.
phuket
prounounced “pooh-get” according to the reputable lonelyplanet. phuketaboutit.
so we just did a quick 3 day jaunt through bangkok. it’s good we did cambodia first, because otherwise we would’ve never seen the cambodian royal palace. in a faux-SAT analogy:
thai royal palace to cambodian royal palace is as mercedes to
a.) hyundai
b.) kia
c.) datsun (although i actually really like datsuns. especially the ancient one parked next to me in the garage back home that is covered in dust and cat paw-prints and hasn’t been moved — except by brute force — since i moved into my apartment a year and a half ago)
d.) all of the above
the answer, obvee, is d.
the temples in bangkok totally blew away everything in phnom penh, but still didn’t compare to angkor wat. again, obvee. totally glitteratti with the shiny gold and sparkly glass plastered over every available surface. we also got to check out the reclining buddha. 150 feet long. each toe bigger than your head.
so bangkok was fun. and we got to live the life of luxury thanks to american express and hilton rewards. and ted. thanks ted.
now we’re in phuket for a night, since our flight was delayed and we missed the last ferry to ko phi phi. there’s an absolutely ghetto fabulous hotel we’re staying in. we forked over the extra ten bucks to get AC to go along with our shabby decor and twin beds.
i have a little over a minute left on my internet. which means, byebye.
Tuk tuk, Sir?
Our primary mean of transportation zipping around Phnom Penh and Siem Reap has been by “tuk tuk”- a moped with a little carriage like apparatus attached to it. Since my descriptive skills fail me, please see here:
Like most transactions over here, bargaining for your tuk tuk fee is also required. We were quickly reminded of this after we failed to ask the fare to the old marketplace in Siem Reap BEFORE arriving at our destination, when we pretty much lost all bargaining leverage.
After a semi-sketchy taxi ride in Saigon, paying a few “high priced” ($2) tuk tuk fares and getting bombarded by drivers every 30 seconds walking down the street: “tuk tuk sir? madame?”, I decided to implore the method my mom uses for picking blackjack tables in Vegas to picking tuk tuk drivers in Cambodia.
On my first trip to Vegas (post 21 of course), my mom imparts her “secrets to never losing (not winning, just never losing. there is a difference)” in Vegas:
“Now Con, the key to gambling is the luck. How much luck you have, cannot change- so you must find a dealer who is unlucky.”
Now you’re probably thinking what I was thinking- how the heck do you know who is unlucky?
And so my mom walked me around the blackjack tables in the casino, twice:
“Con, you have to look for someone who looks unhappy, grouchy and like they’ve had a hard life. NOT a fun, bubbling and cheerful dealer”
And so I learned how to pick unlucky blackjack dealers. I decided to use the reverse method here in Cambodia, in essence to pick “lucky tuk tuk” drivers to carry us safely to our destination, and for a good price too (of course).
The first night we decided to try and find “lucky tuk tuk drivers” we were in the old marketplace of Siem Reap and we walked up and down the streets lined with drivers but all of them looked “unlucky” to me. We came pushing through a crowded alley, known in Siem Reap as “the alley”, with still no tuk tuk driver in sight.
And then-
The river of people parted and amid the hollering of “tuk tuk sir? madame? tuk tuk? tuk tuk?” I saw a young guy with a wide grin holding up a sign (we actually got a picture of this amazing sign on Will’s camera, but we lost/left the camera, in all places- a tuk tuk):
Do you require a chariot? to your abode. No hassel
(and yes, that’s where the question mark was. hey, the guy was pretty close)
There was our “lucky tuk tuk driver”. We’ve been using this method of choosing “lucky tuk tuk” drivers ever since to find our chariots to deliver us safely to our abode. But we still have yet to find another driver with such an amazing sign.
The morale of the story: find the luck (“oh and con, always hit on soft seventeen”)
guess the author
i just realized that wordpress doesn’t visibly denote who authors a post. feel free to guess which one of us posted each entry. guesses should be posted in the comments.
winner receives a free subscription to this blog.
smorgasboard
an underutilized word, in my opinion.
today, in phnom penh, we visited the Killing Fields — a quick way to grasp the scope of the atrocious acts committed by the khmer rouge. they have an enormous stupa filled with the skulls of the bodies disinterred from the mass graves at the site. with almost 9000 skulls on display, it’s fittingly uncomfortable and personal to see the skulls of the victims up close, yet the foreignness of the idea behind the act — the concept of shortening the lives of that many people — keeps the experience at a distance. very disturbing.
anyhow, the past couple of days have just been spent hanging around. the royal palace yesterday was, well, royal. got to examine a few hundred buddhas. some small, some large. some copper, some silver, some bronze, some gold. some with diamonds, some with emeralds. one made out of emerald. none made out of diamond though. on the little handout Read the rest of this entry »
The bearded lady of Phnom Penh
As you read from our last post- we’re in Phnom Penh. However, what I failed to mention is how we got here. We had two options (okay I lied, we had three but we already decided we didn’t want to fly):
1- to bus it, or
2- to boat it
Now the bus, the nice air conditioned bus, only takes 5 hours and you have several choices on what time you can leave throughout the day. And the boat, leaves once at 7am, costs more and takes 7 hours. As you can see, the choice was simple- obviously, the boat…err?
-7am departure time,$27 fare, 7 hour duration: us out in the open air- priceless…or so we thought.
After we played musical chairs below deck Read the rest of this entry »
Pictures!
Greetings from Phnom Penh! It’s pretty exciting- on top of being by far the most lovely of the accomodations that we’ve stayed in so far, our guest house also has…*drum roll please*… WIFI! Yes people, and that is the cause for extreme excitement because that means that you all get to see pictures. Whilst resizing the photos I selected for posting Will says “babe how MANY are you posting?!?”.
Ummm… and well- this is for my picture crazed family and friends:
ANGKOR WAT! The picture really does not do justice to 1- how awesome it is and 2- how ridiculously hot it was. Despite our smiling/squinting faces shortly after taking this picture we couldn’t Read the rest of this entry »
wat?
ankor wat. amazing. out of nowhere, this ancient, unbelievably big, unbelievably beautiful city. but whatevs. if you’re really interested in that, go look it up. it was way more impressive than i thought it was going to be — that’s for sure.
things i learned today:
1.) anh is more photogenic than me. we’ve been holding back with the picture taking, but in the tourist haven of the ancient temples, we felt no shame.
2. british people have amazing accents. reeealleee?
3. somebody must have misspelled the name of the ancient city years ago. i think it was originally ankor hot. 33 degrees celcius. that’s like… 130 fahrenheit? this i discovered after our taxi driver and us got our pick-up spot mixed up. i got to walk about a mile back in the direction we had just come from. anh had no problem sitting in a cafe and sipping some coconut juice whilst i did the trekking. love that word. whilst. maybe because it’s got my name in it. reeeealleeee?
4. even if you’re in a third world country, food at tourist spots is still marked up about 600 percent.
5. certain taxi drivers in siem reap, possibly with the name of raya, have karaoke systems built into their taxi-vans.
and that’s all. raya is waiting outside the ice cream cafe where they make lilikoi ice cream that really (reeeaalleeee?) tastes like lilikoi.
Hello/Goodbye
Our quick two-day stay in Saigon/ Ho Chi Minh City has come to an end and as I sit in the airport en route to Siem Reap I ponder these thoughts:
1. The new airport is QUITE nice. The last time I was here I grimaced at the thought of going to the bathroom and when nature finally came a calling it was just as horrendous as what I imagined. However, now the airport is 1st class. In fact, I’m using the WIFI at the airport right now- impressive.
It’s not just the airport though, during our quick trip it was apparent that the city has changed a lot since the last time I’ve been back… much more tourist, helmets for moped riders, chic new cafés and even street cleaning. However, some habits die hard.
Standing in line at the customs check there was an older Vietnamese man standing in front of me. He was noticeably fidgety and nervous. Before it was his turn to show his paperwork and passport he pulled out a couple bills of Vietnamese & American currency and shoved it into his back pocket. I kept my eye on his interaction with the official to see Read the rest of this entry »
and… we’re there
finally. after 17 hours of flying. and 6 hours at various airports.
flight #1 wasn’t the best — sfo to narita. in choosing seats for the flight, i forgot to account for the sun. see, in flying west the daytime creeps by awful slow. and the left side of the plane gets the sun the whole time. this means that even though the handy trip-display told me that it was negative fifty-something degrees outside, the sunshine made sure that my window was toasty hot. and made sure i woke up every fifteen minutes in a serious sweat. awesome.
but… no big deal. we got here. and our room/box has ice cold AC. and that was yesterday. we made a couple of journeys into the city today. just walked around and checked it out.
here we are getting some snacks. don’t i look ecstatic? ice cream snacks. they’ve got soursop shakes over here. delish. i had them a bunch in costa rica — they call it guayabana there — but i could never figure out what fruit it was. my cousin finally clued me in. she said soursop and it all came together. a moment of revelation.
