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”)
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.
