The highlights include:
- Ben and Paige. My travel companions deserve prime position here, as they made the trip possible. I'm a pretty solid solitary traveler, and have been doing a lot of it for the past year. Traveling alone is nice. But it doesn't really compare to being able to share the travel experience with two great friends. After not seeing each other for 9 months, the three of us didn't miss a beat. Of course, getting to take advantage of Paige's platinum Starwood hotel status didn't hurt!
- Angkor Wat is a stunning and wildly impressive place. What may not be apparent to those who haven't been to Siem Reap, as it wasn't apparent to me before going, Angkor Wat itself is just one of many (a couple hundred) that remain in what now is known as the Angkor Wat Park. The early temples, including Angkor Wat, were built by Hindu worshippers, who settled in Cambodia before the Buddhists took over somewhere around 1200 AD. The newer temples are Buddhist shrines, distinguished from their Hindu counterparts by the distinctive faces on the four faces of each temple tower. On the vernal and autumnal equinox, the sun rises directly over the central tower over Angkor Wat, creating what we were told is one of the more breathtaking vistas on Earth. We had to settle for a less-than-symmetric sunrise, marred somewhat by early morning Cambodian clouds, but still good for an ethereal, pre-dawn glow, intensified palpably by the hundreds of fellow tourists that had braved the 5:30 AM pilgrimage to greet the day in the shadow of the great temple.
- In addition to its physical beauty, Angkor Wat is still a functioning temple, with real monks studying there to this day!
- We rode ATVs through the Siem Reap countryside, which starts maybe 30 seconds outside the heart of "downtown".
- We had a lovely Khmer guide in Siem Reap named Sun, who, after two days of showing us around Angkor Wat, a "floating village", and a temple outside the city called Beng Melea, insisted on taking us out to dinner. "If you guys want to pay, then I'm not coming," was his way of graciously inviting us. He took us to a traditional Cambodian joint, with no English anywhere in sight (a far cry from the cute but palpably touristy "Pub Street" in downtown Siem Reap), where we enjoyed juicy and tender (albeit very fatty) cubes of beef paired with herbs, carrots, and a healthy dose of fish sauce (SE Asians use fish sauce generously in their cuisine as their primary source of salt).
- Speaking of food, it was both terrific and plentiful. Cambodian food was far less distinctive than either Vietnamese or Thai, with the exception of amok, a savory and sweet coconut milk based curry filled with fish and other goodies. Its lack of distinctiveness isn't to say the food in Siem Reap was bad - far from it - particularly at the family-run restaurant Tuiche, where we were wowed in equal measure by the subtle delectability of the Khmer cuisine and the friendliness and service of the staff (all siblings). In Chiang Mai we discovered khao soi, a mildly sweet curry served with egg noodles and veggies. We also took a cooking class in Chiang Mai, which included a tour of the traditional Thai marketplace, as well as the opportunity to choose four Thai dishes to whip up by hand. I cooked the aforementioned khao soi, drunken noodles, spicy tom yum soup with Thai basil, and chicken stir fry with cashew nuts. In Bangkok we went on a food tour, which consisted of an ungodly amount of food (eaten directly after a large breakfast, which I ate not realizing that the food tour was happening directly afterwards), from sour sausage stuffed with rice noodles, Thai pork buns, roasted duck with rice, green curry, and a selection of Thai pastries and desserts.
- I chilled with tigers. No biggie.
- Bangkok is a legitimate metropolis, replete with the hustle and bustle of a city that rarely, if ever, sleeps. What it lacks is a functional system of transportation. There are two elevated subway lines, called the Skytrain, and one underground metro line, which combine cover about as much ground as New York City's G train. The city is, by all measures, huge, and traffic is as bad if not worse as any city of its size, so one wonders how the locals every get anywhere on time.
- We biked through the backstreets of Bangkok, weaving our way through markets, pedestrians, and ferry passengers.
- Thailand is, for better or for worse, known for, at least among backpackers and bar-goers, its ladyboys. Those scantily clad cross-dressers (or, in many cases, surgery-aided transgenders) help populate the legend of the debauchery that permeates Thai nightlife. In Chiang Mai, the three of us, along with several friends made at our cooking class, hit the streets in search for a cold drink. Unsuspecting and without raunchy ambitions -- this wasn't Bangkok, after all -- we opted for a harmless looking Irish-style dive bar called the Shamrock. In a flash, seemingly out of nowhere, we were surrounded by women offering to serve us drinks. Except...they weren't women. As it turned out, the Shamrock was entirely staffed by ladyboys. Three of us ended up getting challenged to a game of pool by one of them (she/he was terrible, but so were we), and after a beer and a good deal of nervous giggling about the absurdity of the entire scene, we left, not without gawking at the various middle aged men chatting up the bar staff. Apparently, for some, this is what coming to Thailand is all about.
- Instead of announcing that they are going to the bathroom, it is custom for Thai people to say "I'm going to pick some flowers" (if they're women) or "I'm going to shoot some rabbits" (if they're men). We joked with our Thai tour guide in Bangkok, who shared this little tidbit with us, that the ladyboys therefore probably say "I'm going to shoot some flowers."
Next up: Taiwan.
