saigoheiki.com

That’s Cambodian or Khmer for “thank you”.

I actually dislike posting my entire backpacking trip on a day-to-day basis, but since the amount of photos would be a killer to load on our average connection, I don’t really have a choice.

Day 1 – 9th June 2007
Most of my Day 1 progress can be found in my previous entry, but I left out the massive details of the Angkor complex, in which everyone should visit if they happen to be in Cambodia.

A picture of me snapped while I was riding in a tuk-tuk, a motorcycle lugging a shaded makeshift hut behind. Note that I was quite overwhelmed by the entire prospect of being alone on my first day, so much so that I find a compelling need to talk to everyone I meet.

As mentioned prior to this entry, the roads in Siem Reap are quite dusty for some reason – moving at even 30kmph would have sand and dust biting at your eyes and nose.

How some of the shops there look like – it quite resembles my village’s shoplots.

My room at Siem Reap Riverside, a fantastic stunning little room that’s made for 2 people, and powered only by a single ceiling fan. It was better than I expected anyhow – I was imagining an even smaller room in a dark and damp building.

Skipping all of that I want to see, let me lull you to the Angkor complex (most people call it Angkor Wat, which is really an inaccurate name considering that Angkor Wat is merely one of the dozens of temples scattered in a complex as large as a town). Entrance fee was USD$20 for a one day pass, and USD$40 for a 3-day pass, with a photo of yourself stamped onto the pass wtf.

This was snapped while I was in the tuk-tuk, where Sky brought me around. It was a serene, mythical place, though I’ll be very honest and tell you that if you’re not interested in history, you won’t be that fascinated by it, as was I.

The gate to another section of the Angkor complex actually has a name, but I don’t quite remember.

Bayon, the first temple I went to.

I was looking up at it in awe, although partly lost at this junction as to what I’m supposed to really look at. It wasn’t really as simple as walking up towards the shambled ruin and making a large round, because there were many very steep stairs (made out of stone, some looked like they were gonna fall off) and very many rooms and buildings.

At one point while I was ambling away into the ruins, an old woman hollered at me from the top in an almost pitch-black room, so I went up to see her. She was holding a couple of incense sticks and motioned if I’d like a prayer – why not, I thought, I want to continue living past my first day in a foreign land. After I sat down next to her and she chanted and prayed in front of the Buddha image, she pointed to a bronze, ceramic bowl, in which I saw a single USD$1 note – fuck, that’s the first scam I came across, and that other person was as unlucky as me. Not wanting to be cursed by the lady, I duly paid the dollar.

One of the many ways to make quick bucks off foreigners and tourists is to have a child pose for a photo. I was observing the two for quite a bit – after the photo session was completed, the child held out her hand and demanded money. Heh.

The gateway to the scorching heat.

Halfway navigating through Bayon, I passed by this Cambodian girl and smiled at her for no particular reason. She turned out to be friendly and really chatty, telling me how she came to Siem Reap from one of the Cambodian provinces to work at a restaurant. Mei (or May) had her male colleague following her to Angkor, gushing how it was her first time visiting this place, in which I concurred the same

She was actually very sweet and kind, offering me a bottle of water when she clearly saw me quite dehydrated from the punishing heat, but I declined. I was being a little paranoid with the whole meeting-strangers fiasco, especially since it was my first time out of my own country – regretted this little fact for not travelling with her throughout Angkor.

The water surrounding Angkor Wat was noticeably clear like a giant mirror.

I was walking into Angkor Wat when a 50+ Chinese uncle stopped me and asked if I could snap a picture of him. I obliged, and we chatted a bit and found out that he’s a Malaysian too, from Setiawan. A little bit of a coincidence how I stumble onto two Malaysian uncles in a single day, and we proceeded looking around Angkor Wat together. He said it’ll be convenient for him to have his and my pictures snapped if we were to travel around Angkor together, as I’m a fellow Malaysian wtf.

Me in front of Angkor Wat.

Me sitting next to carvings on walls that were supposed to bear deep meanings, but seem senseless to me as I didn’t have a guidebook on hand.

The stairs leading up to the temple on top was so fucking steep – it angled at 70 degrees at least. I managed to climb up with little difficulty, but even though I was inches away from entering the temple, I stopped and looked beneath me and that was all needed to instill my fear of heights. The Malaysian uncle had to instruct me how to climb back down safely – these were the exact steps where a foreign woman died when she fell from the steps.

After Angkor Wat, Sky demanded an extra $3 if I want to visit Ta Prohm, aka the temple where Tomb Raider was filmed. I went to Baphuon first, a temple with nothing much to look at, then went to two other temples nearby – one of which is the Terrace of the Leper King. Obviously without a guidebook about every temple in Angkor, I had no idea what the elephant statues in the terrace signified, nor the carving of what looked like the Leper King.

But it was all worth it to pay the extra money to get to Ta Prohm. You have to hike through about 500m worth of forest before reaching this secluded temple, with large, ancient trees overwhelming it. Roots snaked down through the temples, and in the midst of the quiet, blissful silence, you can feel its majestic aura ringing loudly as you enter an ancient temple left untouched by destruction. A British guy (I think) I met there exchanged greetings and opinions, and he said, “I like the fact how they left this place alone.” It was every bit awe-inspiring.

It was already getting dark by then, so at about 5.30pm I had Sky rush me to this particular mountain which a zillion people climb to catch the sunset. Couldn’t see much as there were so many clouds obstructing the view, so at about 6pm after waiting for a complete 30 minutes while eavesdropping on other people’s conversations, I hiked back all the way down. It was quite a workout on my legs after having not doing anything strenuous for months.

Of course, one of my largest regrets was not buying enough bottles of water prior to going there, until I had to purchase an overpriced $2 (about RM7) 1.5 litres mineral water bottle out of desperation. After doing Angkor Wat, I was so thirsty and exhausted I could drink an entire river.

The mountain also housed a temple in ruins, in which you have to climb very steep stairs, but probably not as terrible as Angkor Wat’s.

After posting that previous entry, I walked around for a bit to savour the night life there, which looked quite lively. My anus is still intact from the end of my previous entry, because instead of walking back to my guesthouse in total darkness (there weren’t any street lamps at where I stayed), I had another tuk-tuk driver convincing me why I should subscribe to his driving services while proclaiming that he could bring me to see some ladies (“No thanks”) or ladyboys (”..I’m not into that, no thanks”) wtf. He actually took me to a massage parlour which I originally thought was a disco due to its dim lighting, until he brought me to a room in which I saw a row of ladies in heavy makeup sitting behind a transparent glass panel, and he asked me to choose wtf.

I declined vehemently, and he proceeded to bring me along silent ol’ Siem Reap with its very few streetlights, back to my guesthouse. With nothing much to do alone in my room, I turned on the telly and proceeded to read Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood.

Day 2 – 10th June 2007
I woke up staring at the bright sunlight piercing through my room. I looked at the alarm clock the room had, displaying 6.30 very clearly, when I thought it would have been at least 10.30am. I slept back, woke up again an hour later, and since I couldn’t sleep back with a long day ahead of me, I proceeded to read Norwegian Wood.

I actually contemplated if I should continue visiting Angkor, but my aching muscles were groaning against it, plus I’m not too keen to be cheated by any tuk-tuk driver, especially since my bargaining skills suck.

At about 10.30am, after a few hundred pages through the novel, I went out and walked to the main town for about 10 minutes under the very blistering sun to get some souvenirs for my family, and walked back. I’ve complained about it and I’ll say it again – it was incredulously dusty that any vehicles that zoom past me would kick up enough dust to choke an asthmatic to death.

I ate my lunch at the guesthouse – it was a little more expensive than what you eat at the streets, but after the first bad encounter with completely unhygienic food, plus the idea of being drowned in my own sweat wasn’t exactly appealing, I chose to pay a little more. Noodles tasted nice for once after eating completely mediocre food.

I went to the airport at 1pm after checking out at 12pm – the tuk-tuk driver that promised to get me around town and to the airport for only $1 didn’t come, so had Sky ferry me to the airport for $3. =.=” I was brought to Siem Reap International Airport domestic building, where apparently I had to wait outside it without a single fan and with a dead roach on the floor. The officers insisted kindly that I go to the main building where there was aircon, but I’m not about to lug around a 10kg bag for the heck of it, considering that the main building was far.

After a while a lady officer invited me inside, shielded away from the sun and the heat, bursting with excitable energy. The interior of the domestic building was nothing like the main building, and it was without air-con or even fan wtf. Imagine sitting there sweating reading Norwegian Wood for 3 hours – it wasn’t exactly entirely uncomfortable to the point that I couldn’t sustain enough concentration to read the book, but it was quite discomforting.

Once the appointed time of 4.10pm nears, we boarded on Siem Reap Airways, a boutique plane with propellers wtf. The interior of the plane has two seats divided by the aisle with another two seats on the other side, and the entire plane was full while I was sitting.. alone.

Thing is, the boutique plane has food! Considering that I paid about RM200 for a really short flight, it has to be good food. It’d be a change from AirAsia’s no-frills flight, I thought, but the food they served was merely a single curry puff lookalike (tasted quite good though, I was hungry) and two glasses of juice (a choice between orange and apple).

I thought it was funny how all air stewardesses speak with the same alternating accented speech when talking through the speakers – announcing flight details, safety precautions, etc. It’s funny because it’s hard to understand sometimes what on earth they’re rambling about with the alternating pitches, as if it’s an international standard or code of conduct for air stewardesses to speak that way.

Soon my flight landed (it was only a 40 minutes journey), and walking out in the Phnom Penh airport near the baggage collection centre, I saw Gopi and Siew Kiat from afar. Meeting up with them finally and listening to them insulting one another had me laughing genuinely after being alone for almost 2 days in a foreign world.

After dumping my bag into Sunday Guesthouse where both of them are staying at, we went out to have dinner at Mama Restaurant, where a Cambodian lady, Panna, who used to work at SS18, Selangor for 5 years beforehand ran it. She could speak a little Bahasa Malaysia too.

We walked around the streets at night, and they remind me of Chow Kit road, what with the old stalls, old apartments, old buildings, lining around the city. We bought a deck of cards too (“the most expensive cards I ever bought”, said Gopi, at USD$1.50), played poker in our room, watched telly and slept.

Day 3 – 11th June 2007
I woke up around 5.30am on my own accord, and Cambodia was already very bright. Slept back and kept waking up intermittently till 7.30am, and we had breakfast at Mama Restaurant – good food at cheap prices, it was listed in Lonely Planet’s Cambodian book for this very reason, making it attractive for backpackers.

Panna was also joking that if Siew Kiat wears his Vietnamese cone-shaped hat on Cambodian streets, not only would people stare at him (SK was relating how people keep staring at him when he wore it in Phnom Penh), they would probably be thinking of ways of how to kill him too. Apparently the Cambodians and Vietnamese are not on very good terms.

Gopi gobbling down food – the Cambodian food was just alright to me, even its delicacies.

We had our tuk-tuk driver ferrying us to Killing Fields.

There were zillions of motorcycles everywhere, most probably because the people couldn’t afford cars. If you think Malaysian drivers are the worst, you have yet to see Cambodian or Vietnamese ones.

In the centre of the Killing Fields is a large monument, inside which were stacks of skulls.

All the skulls were categorised into gender and age, and it was a little hard to believe that a genocide had beguiled Cambodia 3 decades ago. Since most of you wouldn’t be aware of this anyway, here’s a short important piece of historical note: Pol Pot was the Prime Minister of Cambodia and the leader of the Khmer Rouge from 1976 to 1979, in which he conducted a mass extermination of the people who do not bow down to his command. He wants people to blindly follow his orders, and anyone who are not of use (the lame and the crippled) or appear to be intelligent (those who wear glasses) would be killed – about 1.7 million people were tortured, killed, and subjected to all kinds of abuse that only a Vietnamese invasion succeeded in ending his rule.

The atrocity was masked with a sombre peace, with crickets chirping in the background. We visited the mass graves and they were all downright depressing, especially when you read notes on how the locals were tortured and killed in ways unimaginable.

A random pic of a particularly large cow peeing.

As the note says, this is the ‘Killing Tree’ against which executioners beat children to death upon. It was completely peaceful and serene being there, but only 3 decades ago at the same spot you would hear children’s shrieks and cries and sputtering gasps while men pummel them to death.

We circled around the place, and there was a kid who kept following us outside the fence like a persistent ghost asking for donation. I don’t know what’s sadder – the fact that a genocide had taken place and forgotten in time, or the aftermaths of the genocide. There were kids outside the fence circling a huge mass grave (it almost looked like a lake overrun with weeds), going “Sir, take photo? 1-2-3-cheese!”

We headed then to the Russian market, bought a few souvenirs and whatnot.

Also went to Happy Herb’s, an infamous place in Phnom Penh which sells happy pizzas. Happy, in the sense that it’s achieved by ‘illegal’ means, though illegal is really quite subjective, don’t you think? :p The pizza is as tasty as it looked, layered with green stuff which we assume would be marijuana.

It was hilarious how Gopi tried to talk to the waitress when ordering it.

“Marijuana? Pizza with marijuana?” Gopi gesticulated wildly. That drew blank looks.

“Ganja??” More blank looks.

“Say you want it happy lah,” I told him, and the waitress understood that instantly.

The happy pizzas come in various varieties – like the usual pepperoni, hawaiian, etc, with the only exception that the waitress would ask whether you’d like it in $1, $2, or $3, denoting the amount of marijuana laced on it. We ordered a few $1 pizzas (the pizzas actually cost about $4 or $5, just to let you know), and while we sat around waiting for the effects to kick in, we felt virtually nothing. I only felt a little light-headed and silly about an hour later but the sensation vanished as quickly as it sets in.

There was also a slight drama between a crying Cambodian waitress and a Western man about a lost handphone two restaurants away – apparently a Canadian woman slapped her and accused her of stealing it.

We visited the National Royal Palace and Silver Pagoda next, which was just okay. The usual vast gardens and grounds befit a palace, but it was ironic to think that the palace would be this beautiful, and the streets just next to it inundated with poverty.

We went to this shopping complex which was only 2-storey, and bought a few essentials there. Our tuk-tuk broke down, and our driver used a spanner of all things to accelerate the motorcycle wtf.

Phnom Penh reminds me too of Kuala Lumpur’s old colonial buildings.. of course, complete with the haphazard experience of crossing streets by tuk-tuk wtf. NOBODY follows the rules, hell – at least, for the motorcyclists and tuk-tuk drivers. And if you think Malaysia is hot, wait till you get to Cambodia, although the alcohol here’s tax-free so it’s relatively cheap to drink, though not as cheap as Langkawi.

We ate at this decent-looking restaurant as recommended by Lonely Planet, I can’t recall what mine is called, but it’s a Khmer delicacy and it’s pretty tasty, while SK’s wasn’t really that good. There was also a crazy woman standing right outside our restaurant smashing and clapping plates together, drawing quite a commotion.

We wandered around the streets for a bit while waiting for our tuk-tuk driver to arrive. When he did, he brought us to a stall selling fried crickets, fried grasshoppers, silkworm larvae, and fried spiders wtf. We were all quite squeamish about it – imagine eating a huge, whole fried grasshopper (complete with legs, head and all WTF). Staring at the damn thing made eating it worse, so I closed my eyes and quickly popped it into my mouth, and unwillingly chewed, crunched, and swallowed the entire thing, which tasted like shrimps. The silkworm larva tasted awfully weird though. Seriously not something I’d like to try, but what the hell, it’s not something you’d come across everyday anyway.

After that we returned to our guesthouse (henceforth known as ‘hotel’ for convenience’s sake), and both Siew Kiat and I walked through dark, dirty, and almost empty streets in search of a cybercafe. The internet cafe is cooled by several table fans, which wasn’t the most comfortable piece of equipment on earth, but that alone would suffice. We used it for barely an hour and it was already closing wtf.

Detailing the next few days of the trip soon, aw kohn (pronounced as “aw kun”) mates!