It's odd here
Tuesday, 8 February 2005
Well, its the end of our 3rd day in Cambodge and I have to say so far Im finding it very odd in a very good way. So far, we've travelled from the border to Siem Reap, got to Siem Reap and spent to sweaty days roving around the immensely famous and immensely immense Angkor ruins where westerners take the most gigantic of cameras to take arty pictures of things that have had a million arty pictures taken of them already. In the true bowelwatch style, Im not going to go into any of that. Im going to tell you about the catalogue of oddness that we've experienced so far.
Firstly, the journey. This particular journey, as Catherine said in the previous entry, is particularly notorious in SE Asia as being long, complicated and fraught with scams, theives and a few years ago, bandits and stuff. Now, it's all calmed down a fair bit but there's still an enormous amount of discussion about how to best avoid all the corruption, cons and arse breaking to the extent that Gordon, the guy who runs talesofasia.com, has written a fucking massive immense essay about it that spans 22 pages of A4. We printed out the essay and memorised it then set of from Bangkok expecting hell but in fact it was mostly fine. We walked over the border at Poipet, the notorious gambling wild west style borer town and started negotiating a Camry taxi (ALL and I mean ALL cars in this country are Toyota Camrys - why!?!?!?!) so eventually we got a driver after lots of negotiating with random blokes, some telling us about how Cambodge imports all it's products from Thailand (and the relevence of this was??? anyone) and we set off. This poor dude needed to bribe the whole population of this little town. No shit. The first 45 mins of the journey was us driving around Poipet while the driver bribed everyone! There were also a couple of bribes for each major settlement we went through. No wonder it cost us $25...
Eventually after going down kilometer after kilometer of dusty dirt road we arrive at Siem Reap. It's plush. Really plush. There's litterally hundreds of 5 start luxury hotels lining the road in. Why no proper road but all this? Some of it is Vegas style nearly. A sharp contrast to Laos which is pretty much undeveloped everywhere. The thing is surely there's not enough tourists here (especially rich ones that can afford these places) to even half fill these rooms. The whole place is a huge tourist town now and a good one at that. Shame about the roads...
Then there's Angkor. While climbing around on the Bayon we here this weird kind of hispanic american accent say "Ey, Bro! How's it goin? Where you guys from?". I turned around and it's the a Khmer policemen...Where am I from....where are YOU from? I asked him whether he'd live anywhere else to get his accent and he just goes, "No, man, this is temple accent". He's worked in Angkor for 15 years and just got this mental board hispanic accent from somewhere. It was interesting. I suppose it's kind of indicative of the proportions of different nationalities that visit. After chatting to him for a while it turns out that hes well bored of the job so he just wonders round chatting all day. I was like, "Don't people fall off the ruins regularly enough to amuse you?" which I was sure they must. There ain't much health and safety going on round here. In the end he took us to a place where you can get a funny photo of you kissing one of the big buddah faces and spent ages getting the photo perfect for me. You will see that soon...
After that, I was waiting for Catherine outside a piss area watching monkeys play in the trees. Next minute this dude (who is a park attendant) wanders out with a massive catapult and spends ages trying to get one of the monkeys. Eventually he gets one in the head and it just drops straight out of the tree. The attendant jumps up with glee and runs towards me then shouts "HA HA HA! MONKEY NO GOOD!!!!" then wanders off congratulating himself.
Also today, while eating, we got hassled major style (as you do) by legions of people selling you all kinds of stuff. But in a strange way, in Cambodge at least not yet, the hassling is good fun. A woman was talking to Catherine and it went something like this:
"You his sister?" (I hate it when people say that...the only thing worse is when people think we are German. Arrggh!!!)
"No, Im his wife", says Catherine.
"You have kids?"
"No, not yet", says Catherine.
"No kids, no problem...", then she pause for a while thoughtfully.
"You wanna buy my kid? I got two...."
"Erm, No thanks", says Catherine.
"Postcard then? One dollar!!"
All the little kids speak almost fulent english (and some even Japanese and french) which is entirely learnt from tourists as they don't teach it at school. It's a shame to see these incredibly intelligent trilingual kids just selling postcards.
Cambodge, eh? comedy all the way it seems. Although, most of the billboards around do sport posters with the slogan "We Don't Need Guns Anymore". It really is an amazing place, but there is a very evident tragic side to it no matter how much they try to glam up Siem Reap.
Finally, travel tip fans, we are staying in Two Dragons GH in Siem Reap which is owned by the talesofasia.com guy and it's really good. Hes got a bunch of good moto drivers out the front that'll take you round the temples and are nice blokes and hes full of good tips. The food is well nice as well. So there.
More Angkor ruin climbing tomorrow then we are off to Phomn Penn.
Helen and Jez - Are we gonna be in time to meet up...drop us a mail....
On February 09, 2005, Dan said:
One supremely odd incident slipped by me last night amougst all the other ones so I thought I'd add it on:
In another one of the temples a patrolling policemen tried to sell me his police badge (you know, the ones that come in a leather wallet that get flashed alot on cop shows) for a dollar. "For holiday souvinier...", he says. Surely selling your police ID is unwise....
On February 15, 2005, X-land said:
I hope you bought it? That would provide hours of fun!
On February 15, 2005, Dan said:
It's in the mail. We knew you'd want one....i poked a few air holes in the box so it should be fine when you get it. You and Kate will be able to fix it anyway, won't you? Your medical types....
On February 15, 2005, Dan said:
Oh, you meant the police ID......hmm.....