Ladies and gents, hope all is well!
Colleen and I are doing great, feeling good, healthy, all that stuff (except for maybe Sunday morning, after indulging on $0.75 mugs of Angkor Beer). The past week has been a lot of fun.
After our stint in Northern Thailand, we made it to the Bangkok airport, and flew into Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia. The flight itself was fine, and a steal at $60, taxes in... we were so zonked from the overnight bus ('recliner seats'.. hmm.. I think VIP bus in Thailand stands for "Value Is Poopy"), that we slept for pretty much the whole thing, including the normally loud and turbulent take-off. Getting into Phnom Penh was wild. Cambodia is still a very poor country, only emerging from hellish civil war and genocide recently. It's one of the few capitols out there without tall buildings. The people live on very little money, and competition for everything -- taxis, guesthouses, etc -- is very fierce. When you arrive at an airport or bus station, it's like a scene out of "Night of the Living Dead," with a dozen people or so surrounding you and soliciting business. When we finally made it to our guesthouse, the friendly owner offered us some services... "you want tuk-tuk (motorcycle taxi) tour, shoot an AK-47, weed, anything?" To re-use a line I've spouted all year, we weren't in Kansas anymore.The next day, we hired a tuk tuk driver to take us around the city. He didn't cost us much at all, made us feel like big wheels... which I spose we are, in Cambodia.
Our first stop was The Killing Fields (see the movie of same name), which was the primary site of Cambodia's mass genocide back in the 70's under the Khmer Rouge. We then went to "S-21," a former highschool turned prison/torture chamber under the Rouge, and now a museum. This stuff was staggering, to say the least. Seeing skulls, mass graves, tiny horrible prison cells evoked a real gutteral sickening feeling. This rivals the holocaust as one of humanities worst moments, and it happened while many of our parents were disco dancing back in North America. Absolutely chilling, heavy stuff. Made us feel a lot of sympathy for today's Cambodians, and we turned off the heavy bargainers inside us for the rest of our stay, leaving big tips and donating lots.
The next day we caught a bus into Siem Reap, which is the home of Cambodia's pride and joy, the magnificent temples of Angkor Wat. We arrived, experienced the same zombie onslaught of tuk tuk drivers, and finally settled in to a very posh hotel at the ripe price of $15/night. Big fuckin' wheels, we are. We rented some bikes and cycled out to Angkor to catch the sunset before they closed. The next day we hired a tuk-tuk to take us around the temples, which is a vast complex of stone and jungle. You can google it, or stay tuned for our pictures, because it really is something else. Some may know it from Tomb Raider, all the ancient temples with crazy jungle trees growing through and around them. The driver was a great guy, so we bought him noodles and beer at lunch... one or two can't hurt, right?
That night we indulged at Siem Reap's "Bar Street" (official name), and actually ran into a couple of StFXers, and Colleen met one of her old friends, apparently a girl who she consistantly runs into in weird places (i.e. lifeguarding courses, Ireland and now in Cambodia, no less!) Later we came across a bunch of Koreans at a bar, and freaked them out when we started speaking Korean to them. We later convinced them to hit the dance floor... hence the slow morning after cheap Cambodian beer.
The next day we headed back to Bangkok, by land, along Cambodia's infamous "shit road from hell" (unofficial name). We shared a taxi, becasue the buses are worse than horrible, so we hear. We got into Pla's, did some laundry and exchanged our long sleeved shirts for some bathing suits and flip flops from our suitcases currently parked in her apartment.
We then flew down to Phuket Airport, in Thailand's south, (a steal at $50 return trip each!) from which we took a boat out to magical Koh Phi Phi Island ("The Beach").
We're on the island and have fallen in love with everything about it except for the rain! It's been raining everyday here since our 1st day, but we've still managed to do lots. Tune in next time for our full Ko Phi Phi adventures!
All our love,
Jake and Colleen
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