Phnom Penh

The capital of Cambodia is a vibrant, enjoyable city. Formerly known as the pearl of Asia, the city was severely marred during the rule of the Khmer Rouge and the following war with Vietnam.  It is impossible to visit Phnom Penh and the whole of Cambodia without becoming aware of its tumultuous and violent recent past.  The Khmer Rouge, under the control of Pol Pot, ruled for 3 short years (1975-1978) as a communist government and saw the destruction of much of the country and the death of over 1.7 million Cambodians, out of a population of only 7 million at the time. Most people died due to starvation and malnutrition.

The city today is highly walkable, with a beautiful river walk, nice restaurants, and the Cambodians we have met are friendly, helpful, and have consistent joyous smiles on their faces.  We get the sense that this is a people moving forward from a painful past with much optimism.

National Museum

Riverside

Water and music show in one of the parks

Royal Palace lit up

The last three days served as a culinary delight.  Our first meal was at a street stall where lots of hand gestures got through the language barrier to some delicious fried tofu with spicy dipping sauces.

Our next meal was recommended by the Lonely Planet as a "good cause dining" option.  The restaurant, Friends, is a nonprofit that employs former street children as well as does outreach and health education.  The food was tapas style and was AMAZING.  Pictured below are spinach ravioli, zucchini and cheddar cheese fritters, and sweet potato fries.

Our last meal was at the Boat Noodle Restaurant where we dined on some delicious Thai soup (Tom kha) and a traditional Cambodian dish served untraditionally.  Amok is a fish dish usually served in a banana leaf - we had amok made with mushrooms and served in a coconut but with the same coconut and lemongrass flavoring.

Tom kha Soup and Mushroom running Amok

We leave Cambodia in the morning for Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) but we are sad to leave this beautiful, welcoming, and enjoyable country.  We highly recommend anyone out there slightly curious about this country to book your tickets now!

Sihanoukville

After Siem Reap we headed to the third most popular tourist destination in Cambodia called Sihanoukville (Sihanouk was the King of Cambodia in the 1950s and also held many, many political offices in Cambodia). It is a beach town with a relaxed feel. It is hot and humid, but we scored a hotel with AC.  We've been here two days and will stay two more. The beach has tons of beach chairs and at night the beach chairs are put away and tables with candles and BBQ stalls are everywhere. There are lots of people selling stuff on the beach (mostly children, which is hard to see) but the most popular are definitely the women selling massages and pedicures. We haven't bought one yet, but it costs about $5 for 30 min massage.

There are lots of activities around here like diving and snorkeling, but we are enjoying just relaxing on the beach, reading, and swimming in the warm water. And the 0.50 cent draft beers served to your beach chair don't hurt!

Next up will be the capital of Cambodia, Phnom Penh, where we will stay a few days and acquire our Vietnam visas. We plan on being in Vietnam around April 1^st.

The lounge chairs we spent a few hours on today

Jeff enjoying a cocktail on the beach before our tofu burger dinner!

Cambodian Food

If you are anything like me, then you are completely unaware of what makes up Cambodian food. After four days in Cambodia, we've found a lot of BBQ (meat is a huge component of the diet), lots of noodles, and lots of fried rice.  We've been eating only at the Cambodian food stalls here because they are super cheap. The flavors are not like Thai or Vietnamese food, but more similar to some basic Chinese dishes.  And there are always two or three types of hot sauce or peppers on the table, which we use liberally.  As vegetarians, it has been surprisingly easy to order rice or noodle dishes with only vegetables.  Of course we are aware of the use of meat based broths in soups, or cooking with fish sauce, and we are ok with that. There is no way for us to be completely vegetarian!

Below Jeff is eating some fried yellow noodles. That plate of food cost $1 and was nicely joined by a can of Angkor beer (not to be confused with the Anchor beer, which is another worse brand of beer here). A can of beer runs for about $1, so we can have dinner and beer for $4!

Angkor Wat - Part 2

The second day touring the temples at Angkor was just as impressive as the first.  As per many peoples' suggestions, we decided to get to Angkor Wat for the "sunrise" which typically takes place between 5:30 and 6:00am.  I say "sunrise" because it was a bit of a bust for us, getting up at 4:45, leaving the hostel at 5:00 by tuk tuk, (we had an appointment with an awesome driver who had driven us around the day before) and patiently waiting at the lotus pond with a few hundred other anxious tourists.  Lo and behold, the sun did rise as we suspected it would, its just that it did so behind layers of impenetrable clouds.

Angkor Wat at "sunrise"

The other people there for photos

Angkor Wat complete with scaffolding

We got the jump early on seeing the rest of the temples though, getting up and leaving before the rest of the tourists seemed to catch on that there would be no spectacular sunrise.  Angkor Wat was truly impressive too, but our most favorite temples were yet to come.

Tuk tuk everlasting

Angkor Thom is another part of the enormous temple complex that has many insanely beautiful sites within extra long walls.  Although the main temple itself is not as large as Angkor Wat, Claire and I both found some of the structures within its walls even more awe inspiring.  The walls of the Anchor Tom measure nine full kilometers per side enclosing an ancient city of an estimated one million people at a time when London's population was a comparatively paltry 50,000.  The Bayon structure, our favorite part, was built near the end of the twelfth century and features 54 giant towers famously decorated with 216 enormous smiling faces.  The Bayon features 1.2 km of bas-reliefs incorporating more than 11,000 carved figures.  It is important to note that only religious structures were built of this stone at the time.  Personal dwellings were typically made of wood because stone could only be used to house the gods, a mixture between Hindu, and later Buddhism which took over the previously Hindu temples.

One of the four gates to Angkor Thom

One of the faces at Bayon (stone faces)

Each tower has four faces

Another favorite part of Anchor Thom was the "Terrace of the Elephants."  This was a 350m-long public ceremonial stand which was also used as a base for the king's grand audience hall.  The terrace is decorated with parading elephants at both ends and along its entire length.

Terrace of Elephants

You can see the elephants carved into the side here

We wrapped up our two day tour with another one of our favorite sites of our entire trip, Ta Prohm.  This is the temple at Angkor that typifies what foreigners imagine before they come here.  Set apart from Angkor Thom, we were awed by the stunning architecture of an ancient civilization, combined with the beauty and power of the jungle.  The photos do a better job that my words at explaining.

Angkor Wat Part I

We made it through the Thailand-Cambodia border crossing yesterday and arrived in Siem Reap (the town outside of Angkor Wat).  We had a bit of culture shock walking around the town because it felt like Rosarito Beach in Mexico (think lots of cheap beer and restaurants that all look the same and are charging exorbitant prices for Western food).  We definitely do not love the town, although it is easy to navigate. We also found out that Cambodia is one of the most expensive countries in this area because they use the US dollar.

Enough of the negative.  This morning we headed to the Temples of Angkor in a tuk tuk and bought a 3 day pass for $40 each.  We toured half of the area in about 5 hours.  Angkor was a former religious city of the Khmer from about the 12th century.  The most iconic structure is Angkor Wat, which is the largest religious structure in the world.  We will see Angkor Wat tomorrow.

Today we saw many other temples in the area with beautiful stone work and impressive structures.  Many of the walls and ceilings are collapsing with some restoration work being done. It was super hot today (about 95 degrees) and we were thankful to have a tuk tuk driving us from temple to temple. 

Some of the statues lining a bridge

Entrance to Preah Khan

Some of the carvings into the walls.

Jeff at Preah Khan

One tuk tuk driver had a hammock in his cab

A temple in a pool surrounded by four smaller pools (that were empty)

The wood is holding up the wall

This reminded me of Olmec from "Legends of the Hidden Temple" (Nickelodeon show from the mid-1990s). I know Ashley will get the connection!

Jeff descending some very steep steps

We finished the trip with a nice cold Angkor beer at our hostel

Tomorrow we will get up early to catch the sunrise over Angkor Wat.  Consider today a teaser for the big reveal tomorrow! That's how we see it!

Bangkok

We made it to Bangkok early Wednesday morning.  Our guide book said that March and April are the hottest months in Thailand, but we got lucky and it has been cloudy and cool the three days here.  Our first day we rested and enjoyed our great hostel.  The second day we wandered through Chinatown, and today we visited the Royal Palace and the Temple of the Emerald Buddha. One difference we felt walking around is the number of tourists here compared with any Indian city we visited.  We saw more foreigners walking around Chinatown than we saw in any city we visited in India (including Agra).

In all, we have really enjoyed Bangkok. We didn't see that much of the city though; we do wish we were spending more time in Thailand and will add it to our long list of places to visit in the future.

Reclining Buddha

I'm enjoying some pad thai on the street

Part of the Royal Palace

The Emerald Buddha is atop the gold tower behind the people.  It was about 3 feet tall.

Lots of gold used at the palace

Farewell India

It is hard to sum up what 11 weeks in India has meant to us. It has been a difficult, and often emotionally trying experience, that may take months or years to digest. What we have seen, felt, smelled, tasted, and experienced here is unlike anything we will ever do again. Some things we loved, many things we hated. We met one traveler who said the only way to get through India and enjoy your time here is to let go and see the world as Indians do. It is wise advice that we were never fully able to do. We may see a rickshaw driver as trying to rip us off, but the driver only sees it as negotiating. There is a different flow to life here, colorful, chaotic, and uniquely Indian.

So instead of boring you with some half-baked insights into our time here, we came up with a short list of things we liked and things we didn't like about this overwhelming country.

Things we liked:

1. Cows hanging around and hearing them moo from our hotel room
2. The Golden Temple in Amritsar
3. The food (for the most part)
4. Watching monkeys swing across rooftops
5. Being up close and personal with historic sites
6. Masala dosa (look it up if you have to. Awesome.)
7. Watching chaiwalas (tea servers)
8. Riding in rickshaws
9. Colorful bazaars
10. Watching mini communities form on train rides with people sharing food, space, and stories

Things we did not like:

1. Overnight buses
2. Anise flavored food or sweets
3. Paan spit everywhere, including inside national monuments (paan is like chewing tobacco, but the spit is bright red and stains everything) and the general number of people spitting
4. Paying 25 times as much as Indians for a ticket to a tourist sight (10 rupees for Indians, 250 rupees for foreigners)
5. Crossing busy streets with no regard to pedestrians
6. Getting stared at on buses, in the streets, at monuments
7. Seeing child labor
8. Burning trash and mounds of trash everywhere (plastics included)
9. Hearing the excuse, “Its India” (said with a big grin) for anything and everything that might be slightly off, for example a bus arriving two and a half hours late.
10. Feeling sick sometimes (and not knowing why)
    
    

    

    
    

    This photo is of Gandhi's last footsteps (in concrete) before he was assassinated in 1948. The memorial in Delhi was very moving and beautiful.

By the Numbers

For those of you that may be interested in the numbers side of our trip I've written this post at the conclusion of our stay in India. Jeff and I have been keeping a spreadsheet of all our expenditures (give or take a couple rupees). Before we left, I outlined a rough travel budget with a per day expenditure amount, which I came up with after looking through our travel guide and talking with people that had visited India. I projected a $40/day budget, and after 69 days in India, we have averaged $35.11/day.

Average: $35.11

Lowest: $19.11 (In Hampi – we were both sick and didn't leave the room)

Highest: $81.67 (Included a first class train ticket to Amritsar)

Mode: $29/day (per rounded $)

Most expensive city on average: Agra (Taj Mahal is very expensive to visit)

We also kept our spreadsheet based on how much we spent on certain items. I created the following pie chart* to illustrate our expenditures:

*We are using Open Office, not Microsoft Excel, so I do not have access to super fancy charts!

And by percentages:

Room: 40%

Bus/Train: 15%

Food: 32%

Sight-seeing: 7%

Internet: 1%

Rickshaw/Taxi: 2%

Misc.: 3%

We did not include some items into our daily budget such as souvenirs and big expenditures like our flight to Bangkok, but we have included those in our overall total. In total, we have spent about $2800 (this includes expected expenditures through the last few days in India).

We could have spent less money, maybe $30/day if we had reduced our room standards. A cheap hotel in India goes for about 300-400 rupees, ($6-$9), but those usually mean a squat toilet or a shared toilet, and a mat atop wood planks for the bed (very hard). We stayed in a couple of these types of rooms, but we were miserable. So we averaged 720 rupees/night ($16). This typically includes a private toilet, a soft mattress, and a TV. (BTW, the movies on TV here are way better than at home.) Prices definitely range across the country and given how many tourists visit a city, so some cities everyone pays a premium, like in Bombay. We wouldn't change our room allocation – we found that with how overwhelming the streets of India can be, we needed somewhere comfortable to be to escape at times.

In all, I am pleased with where we are budget-wise; although I may have under budgeted the upcoming countries. It will also be good to have the money saved here for the end of our trip – the Trans-Mongolian Railway and Russia will be expensive.

McLeod Gang (Dharamsala)

After the overwhelming streets of Amritsar and a long day of bus travel, Jeff and I made it to the hill station known as McLeod Gang. An aptly named area for it feels like we are up in the clouds. Dharamsala is known internationally because this is where the Dalai Lama lives in exile from Tibet, as well as thousands of Tibetans, and a place for Tibetan refugees. Our hotel room has a view over the valley as well as a view of the Dalai Lama's residency, called the Tsuglagkhang Complex.

The view from our room

Tsuglagkhang Complex

We wandered around the Tsuglagkhang Complex yesterday and visited the temple there. The Dalai Lama is in his residency now and will be giving a public talk on Thursday. We will try to go, but we aren't sure if we need tickets or if we can just show up. We also happened to be in Dharmsala for Tibetan New Year, which has been fun. Little kids have been setting off fireworks and the Tibetan businesses have been closed for a long weekend. For the Tibetans it is now year 2138.

Offerings to Buddha

It is so beautiful and peaceful up here. It is quite cold at night (low 30s) and in the high 50s during the day. This is a big backpacker destination, so there are plenty of tasty restaurants and more importantly, Tibetan women selling momos on the streets (a momo is a Tibetan dumpling, stuffed with potato, vegetables, sometimes meat).

We may have another McLeod Gang post coming up, once we see a bit more of the area. One more week in India!

The Golden Temple

On March 3 we arrived in Amritsar for a two night stay. Claire and I had been looking forward to this location from the beginning of our trip because it is the location of the Golden Temple, the holiest shrine of Sikhism.

We headed into the temple with throngs of other people, Hindu and Sikh

The Golden Temple.  The top round part represents an inverted lotus flower.

We decided to visit the temple around noon on the next day. Our hotel was only a few blocks from the temple, so we were able to walk. One of the requirements for visiting most temples in India is that you have to remove your shoes and socks. This is something we were accustomed to from having visited so many Hindu temples before. In addition to this though, Sikhs require that your head must be covered before you enter. Claire was able to wrap her pashmina scarf over her head. There are many different scarf vendors selling saffron colored handkerchiefs, so I happily bought one for ten rupees gaining both a head covering for the temple, and a unique little souvenir.

Upon entering the temple, there is a little stream of heated running water that all visitors must wash their feet in. After washing, we descended some marble steps into a huge central plaza. The entire plaza was paved in beautiful white marble. In the center was the beautiful temple itself, seeming to float out on the water. The number of pilgrims and visitors inside the temple grounds was phenomenal. Easily approaching our emotionally charged experience of seeing the Taj Mahal for the first time, the Golden Temple is simply breathtaking in its beauty.

Sikhs pride themselves in the democratic nature of their religion. The temple was 100% free for Claire and I and anybody else who wants to come. We were able to check our shoes without paying even a single rupee. Perhaps the most impressive part of the temple was that anyone who visits can eat a full lunch if they want to. The kitchen is run entirely by volunteers, and feeds anywhere from 40,000 to 100,000 people per day. Not only this, but the kitchen has been operating continuously, twenty four hours per day for 450 years! I wasn't sure what to expect, but we got a decent and tasty Indian meal for no charge. We did make a small donation to the temple to cover the cost of our meal and visit, but it is still just incredible that any Sikh or non-Sikh who visits the temple is treated equally.

Waiting for our meal

Our free meal (and Claire's pant leg)

Volunteers shucking garlic for the meals

Our afternoon experience was so amazing that Claire and I really wanted to see the temple at a different time of day as our guidebook suggests. We decided to return around 9:00pm, knowing that the ceremony for returning the holy book to its nighttime resting place happens at 9:30 pm. We were pleased that the line across the bridge to enter the Golden Temple itself was much smaller than it was in the afternoon. We waited about ten minutes, and were able to actually go inside and see the Sikh holy book being read from. We were standing no more than 15 feet from the man reading it, and there were absolutely no security checkpoints for entry. Pretty incredible.

After seeing the book, we sat by the side of the lake and witnessed the procession of Sikhs carry the book out of the temple, along the bridge, and place it to rest for the night in a building just across the water. We left then, knowing the book would be returned to the temple at 5:00am the next morning.

Nighttime before the book was moved to it's "bedroom"

The book is carried in this to where it spends the night