Into the future

Suddenly last week all the markets are filled with Mandarin oranges, in clusters attached to short cuts of branches with leaves. Its beginning to look a lot like Christmas.

I haven’t updated the blog since before our visit to Seim Reap and the temples of Angkor. Partly because of travels (we were in Singapore last weekend and our friend Ashwin, who we were visiting there, has been here for the past few days), partly because I’ve been marking my second set of essays, and partly because I’ve been overwhelmed with the 800 pictures I took on our trip to Angkor.

Tomorrow we start our travels within our travels. We leave in the morning for Ho Chi Minh City is Vietnam. This is a six-hour bus trip, including the stop at the border. We already have our visa permits so this should be painless. As we leave at 8am and buses never leave on time we will get into HCMC mid-afternoon. This will give us time to find our way around a bit, get a room, and book a train ticket for the next day. We plan to keep stays in the biggest cities to a minimum.

We are traveling by train for a couple of reasons. Buses and trains move at extremely slow paces by our standards. Buses average about 60k/h and don’t travel after day (too many bikes and pedestrians wondering aimless about on the highways—which are also people’s front yards). Our destination by train will be Danang which is just sound of the skinniest part of Vietnam (the former north south divide) and will take about 30 hours, though its only a little over 1000 km distance. The train travels at night, is more comfortable, and unlike the buses won’t involve the driver blowing the horn non-stop at other traffic. They start blowing the horn when the traffic is spotted on the horizon and keep blowing it for a few seconds after we have passed them just for good measure. Traffic in this case ranges from cars and trucks to sleeping dogs, grazing cows, and wandering children. The train also travels up the coast that will give us an additional choice of scenery. If we are lucky (booking one day ahead may be too late) we will get a berth, otherwise just a standard reclining seat.

From Danang we will retrace our steps a bit, heading south again for an hour by bus to Hoi An. During what is called here the American War, Hoi An was an R+R spot for GIs. It is a beach resort famous for, among other things (like sand), small wooden fishing boats shaped like bowls. Expect pictures later. We plan to spend a few days lolling on the beaches.

From Hoi An its back to Danang and then north to Hanoi. We weren’t going to travel the length of Vietnam, planning to cut into Laos just north of Danang, but several people have told us about a wonderful spot north of Hanoi so off we go. In the mountains between Hanoi and the Chinese border is Sapa with vistas over mist covered mountains and valleys. One guide book notes that all the guest rooms have fireplaces. Finally, those long sleeved shirts I brought will get used.

From Sapa we return to Hanoi and fly to Luang Prabong in Laos. The flight will save us many hours of bus time, including having to retracing the journey north from Danang. There are a few border crossings from the north into Laos but all the guide books advise avoiding them as they are hard to get to, inefficient, sometimes closed when they should be open, etc. Luang Prabong is invariably describe as one of the most beautiful cities in SE Asia. It is the former capital of country of (I think) the same name, is small for a city in this part of the world, located in a beautiful setting with colonial architecture and has a few exotic day trips around it. Just north of it, up the Mekong river, is a cave that seems to have used as a burial ground for decommissioned statues of the Buddha.

From LP we head south to the capital of Laos, Vientiene, from there to Bangkok (for as short a time as possible given the current situation there) and further south to spend as long as possible on an island that our friend Sandra spent time on before she arrived in Phnom Penh. She will be there for her Christmas break so we will get to connect up with her again.

From there its back to Phnom Penh by boat via Sihanoukville, which is a beach resort on the Sea of Thailand. Early in our adventures we spent a weekend at Kep, which is south of Sihanouville. Finally, its New Years Eve in Phnom Penh, back to Seoul for a day and then home to the snow.

During December  I’m not sure how often I will get on the internet, so updates for the blog will probably be even more spotty than usual.

Singapore

Singapore

Welcome to the cleanest city in the galaxy.

Our friend Ashwin is in Singapore for a conference (of most of the worlds top quantum computer mathemeticians), so we have taken this as an excuse to fly over for the weekend (when will we ever be so close again). The flight out of Phnom Penh is ridiculously early—especially as the airline only has one flight a day. We flew JetStar; sort of like WestJet without the jokes.

There are lots of jokes in the city-state about caning and odd rule: no chewing gum on the island and no transporting Durian—a particularly smelly fruit—on the MRT (subway). You can even buy T-shirts with 16 things you can’t do here—a grid of the universal no icon (the circle with the slash through it) and under each the amount of the fine and number of lashes. I’m not sure what the locals think of this of marketing the place.

The city is beautiful, and very clean. However, on Sunday morning Anna-Marie and I wander down to the Starbuck for 10 dollar cups of coffee. Our route takes us along the riverside restaurant strip that was packed on our walk the night before. The pedestrian mall is covered in litter, but I am absolutely certain by noon it will all be gone. The city also has the best mass transit system I have encountered. The picture is of a group of mathematicians trying to figure out how to buy MRT tickets.

We spent Saturday wandering around Chinatown, going to a Hindu and then a Buddhist temple. Sunday we headed off to the only undeveloped part of the Republic, the island of Pulau Ubin, where we rented bikes and toured around for the day. A weekend of contrasts, the island is home to wild pigs, a great variety of birds, and a mangrove swamp. This was the highlight of the visit for me, as I am intrigued by them and it didn’t look like I was going to encounter one on our travels. The island is also home to an English cottage, the former vacation spot of a local land surveyor. They always get the best spots.

My Birthday

At the end of October I turned fifty. In the spring a few friends, already past this milestone, insisted I must do something memorable for the occasion. It had not occurred to me before this conversation, but immediately the idea of spending it in Cambodia seemed exceptional enough.

I spent the entire week of my birthday in bed (possibly with Dengue fever—the non-medical opinions are mixed). Suffice to say I had an incredible fever, the worst headache for seven straight days (and I get some pretty bad migraines), and ate a total of two pieces of toast and some steamed vegetables during the week. On the plus side I enter my second fifty years with my girlish figure back.

On my birthday proper, Anna-Marie sat me up in bed and paraded in some friends and staff and a garish Cambodian cake. For hers I had picked the simplest cake from the Bayon Bakery at the end of our street. But this cake was selected from their catalogue—the criteria being how much and how ornate can the icing be. Anna-Marie intends to take me down to the bakery to see how marvelous it looked in the catalogue, though as you can see, it is no plane jane.

The celebration consisted of me blowing out some candles, cutting pieces of cake for everyone (I’m still not sure why they let the sicky even touch the cake), opening a few cards and presents and immediately returning to bed. I look remarkably alive in the photo.

To my great surprise and astonishment a few friends back in Waterloo took up a collection before we left Canada and presented Anna-Marie with a lump of money to spend wildly for my birthday. I could have bought 200 bottles of Guinness with it or 25 hours of massage, but didn’t. Instead Anna-Marie released me with matching funds and I spent four days hunting for the best buy of a new DSLR camera. The result: the Canon EOS Rebel XSi 450D. With thanks to those who made suggestions to Anna-Marie, we are back in the picture business.

That's the good news. The bad news is I've taken 800 photos at Angkor!

Angkor Wat

Riverfest begins this week. This is the annual celebration of the reversal of the Tonlé Sap river. During the rainy season it flows down from the lake at Siem Reap into the Mekong; during the dry season it reverses its flow slowly losing a battle to keep the lake of any substantial size. There are several floating towns on the Tonlé Sap Lake that relocate as the lake shrinks from 13,000 sq km to 2500 sq km. We walked down to the river this morning and watched preparations for the festivities. Judged by its current rate of flow the Tonlé Sap is not going to reverse its course during the festival.

But Riverfest is also reportedly a celebration of boat races, alcohol and the pickable pocket. As the studio is closed for the week this seems a great time to flee to Siem Reap and Angkor Wat. At its height in the 11^th to 14^th centuries, Angkor Wat was a city of one million (compare that with the population of London at the time: 50,000).

We will spend four days centred in Siem Reap and then travel by fast boat upriver out of Tonlé Sap Lake to the city of Battambang for two days. The boat ride is reported to be spectacular. So if ancient temple ruins in the jungle aren’t enough…

Independence Day

In a semi-sleep I am aware it has been raining since 3:00am. We are supposedly coming up on the end of the wet season, but some days this hardly seems possible. The weather has changed since we arrived in September; the days then were unbearably humid, and the storms frequent and spectacular. There is less humidity now and the rain more infrequent, but still two or three times a week the skies just open up and the rain comes down in sheets. Two nights ago Sandra reported peddling her bike home in a foot of water (the curbs that delineate the mixed functional sidewalks can be nearly a third of a metre high). It is now 5:30am and Dara is knocking on our door: can she borrow our umbrella? We haven’t had it since Kampong Cham. It is Sunday, but it is also Independence Day, and all the school children are heading off to school in the pre-dawn rain (Cambodians, I notice, love to do things in the pre-dawn). From school they will head to the Independence Monument, which is quite near us, to celebrate. At a more civil hour, after coffee, we are about to set off to the monument ourselves, when Dara arrives home. She informs us events are still underway so off we go. The monument is all but deserted, though the streets are still cordoned off. As the monument stands in a busy traffic circle this is an opportunity to cross beyond it and head to the river (something we have not yet done). Returning from our inspection of the Riverfest preparations, we find ourselves in the midst of a parade, complete with floats, marching bands, and squadrons of sailors, soldiers, bankers, surveyors, agronomists, and any other group that could be organized into a uniformed square of marchers or perched on a float. Expectantly we await the final float. How do you mark independence? Parades in Canada end with Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Grand Marshall of Oktoberfest, and other dignitaries of that sort. The final float, while not the biggest or most imaginative, has the largest contingent of marchers and is met with the most sustained cheering. It is the CMAC, the group dedicated to removing land mines from the Cambodian jungle and rural farmlands. It is followed by group after group of uniformed workers outfitted with a staggering array of detective equipment, electronic and canine.

Street Meat (for Todd)

Here are the contents of one street vendor’s cart (and two funny signs). We’re pretty sure Ag Canada won’t let us into the country with any of these goodies. Todd wants us to return with some little exotic snack, but these photos might have to do.

On the cart this evening we have:

· artfully arranged barbequed snake

· large black spiders

· small speckled eggs (possibly fertilized, so with bones etc inside)

· little birds (pigeons?)

· crabs

· grubs (barbeque and plain)

· cockroaches

· other, unidentifiable edibles

Tamao

The second part of our Sunday trip is to the Tamao Animal Sanctuary. At the end of the day Sandra’s digital camera is full and I upload all her pictures to our laptop to burn a CD for her. In exchange I get to pilfer some images of the zoo from her.
We weren’t sure what to expect of a zoo run by private funding in a jungle in a developing country. But given the mandate of Tamao we expected, as bad as conditions could be, these animals would be in better condition than without the zoo. But by and large it turns out to be a good zoo. Most animals have the run of an area where we interact with them. You can pet them if you can catch them; and some are quite friendly. Obvious exceptions are the bears, tigers, elephants and alligators.
In addition, a number of enterprising local boys have become unofficial liaisons between the animals and the public. Being a bit dim-witted, I originally thought they were zoo staff; they were feeding the animals, carried knives, knew the animals by name—personal and zoological. Trotting around the yards with small machetes and coconuts, they latch onto visitors, offer a wealth of information about the animals and, for a dollar, to throw a coconut toward the animals so we may watch them eat. A symbiotic, Pavlovian relation has developed; the animals knowing the boys are a source of food, the boys coaxing us to pay up. “Look, the animals are hungry.”
The sun bears are quite interesting. They are an endangered species, a small, elongated black bear with a dog-face and a pale yellow crescent on their chests. They are quite comical and seem easy-going. Until someone throws a whole coconut over the fence. Suddenly, three-inch claws come out and the bear that wins the catch rips the coconut open in one casual swipe.
Also of interest are the storks, completely unrecognizable as the Warner Bros. baby carriers. These are massive, heavy, ungainly things that look like they shouldn’t be able to fly, except some are perched atop trees, where they have eaten the eggs out of other bird’s nests. The male has a crop that must weigh in at 30 kilograms.
The road to and from the sanctuary is also of interest. Stunned on the drive in, on the drive out I count sixty-six beggars. Equally spaced down the lane from the highway, they splash (ditch) water from a bowl or bottle in front of the truck tuk and hold out a hand beseechingly. The vehicle in front, a large black SUV, pulls up at each beggar and passes a small stack of riel out the window.