Arriving at the Conservation Center

     Based on what we learned at various hotels and travel agency, the local bus to Saiyabury leaves at seven or eight or nine.  Definitely.  Unless it leaves when it's full.  To be on the safe side, we planned to arrive at seven to make sure that we got seats.  The one thing everybody agreed on was that you couldn't buy tickets in advance because it was free seating.  (That wasn't true).
     When various factors outside of our control aligned to make us late, the bus was mostly full but we found two seats next to eachother in the way back and one nearby.  Too bad that while we were sitting there other people bought them.  Instead we joined the people sitting on plastic stools in the aisle.  Make it clear that there wasn't a backrest, at every turn the stool went sliding one way or another, add on a dozing French girl on either side perilously close to using one's shoulders as a pillow and a mini dust storm centered mostly on us aisle-ers and three hours later you'd have our busride.  At least the music wasn't too loud or obnoxious.
      The ferry across the swift river held vendors selling snacks.  By the time we reached land again bags of snacks were being passed around with complete disregard of who bought what and who knew whom.  A man laughingly offered me some roasted crickets and my dad tried some.  He says they were tasty, but I was too vegetarian to sample any.
 

       A tuk tuk was waiting for us and the three French girls who I sat near.  Though bumpy we were going to slow for much dust to assault us and the ride was fairly short. The boatride that followed was also pretty short, though fitting seven people plus luggage on a bought with three one-person benches was a feat.
       The lake we motored through was covered with water plants.
 

        I almost lost a flip flop in the mud when we disembarked but saved it just in time.  There were a couple of planks that we could step on and some dry patches but it was a bit of a scramble to the path.  The bungalows only housed maximum of two people but we were next too eachother. Sandwiches from a Scandinavian bakery as well as the last of the Siem Reap mustard made a delicious lunch and afterwards we had about an hour before we needed to do anything.
       After meeting up again in the dining area we got a tour of the complex before going down to the pavilion where the elephants were brought.  Introductions were first, but I can't remember any names other than Mae Bou Nam (19) and Mae Do (over 60).  'Mae' is an honorary term meaning 'mother'. The other elephants were 21 and 35, male and female respectively.
       Elephants are such large, beautiful creatures.  I'm afraid that pictures don't do them justice at all.
       The mahouts had them demonstrate the various ways the elephants could let us climb up to ride them, such as kneeling or lifting one knee to work as a step.  It seemed unkind.  My mother and I almost didn't ride but changed our minds at the last second and took our turn around the small loop. Elephants can drag very heavy things but cannot carry much weight on their backs.  One, or even two if they sit forwards, are comfortable for the elephant but howdas not so much.  Particularly if they hold two or more people.
         Here I rode sitting on Mae Do's neck, my legs tucked behind her ears and my hands on her head to steady myself.  Elephants have what is basically a ball-joint in their ankles and so are immensely stable, but the rise and fall of their shoulders makes it a bit scary.  No falls, but when I was concentrating on keeping my shoes from falling off and petting her head it felt a bit precarious.
 
    

                            

                              
 Once I had half-climbed, half-slithered from her back she joined the others by the benches to one side of the pavilion, asking for bananas.  We were each given a bunch to share among them and they went quickly.
 u
    What with their tough skin and coarse bristles elephants are not the cuddliest of animals but it means that they aren't hurt by thorns and branches when in the jungle.  After dinner (veggie options consisting of meatless meat options--that is, exactly what the other people ate and without the protein) we walked with Mae Bou Nam's mahout Pang over a couple of hills to where she pulled here chain from the bushes.  Practically, it makes sense to attach her to something during the night as it is a lot harder than one would think to spot a elephant in the trees and 300 meters is really long but it was depressing watching her pull her own chain towards her.  
    

Leaving Cambodia

    I decided that Angkor Wat needed its own post so this is a recap of what we did in Siem Reap both before and after that day.
     The day we arrived we didn't do anything other than swim and walk around a little bit. We didn't even go out to dinner, but just went to a minimarts to get some bread, cheese, and pickles.  For the first time in months the pickles were good and I OD-ed a little bit and had to drink a few bottles of water for the salt.  Breakfast was at our hotel and I didn't know that it was April Fool's Day until my parents convinced me that they were dragging me out to these temples more obscure than Angkor Wat and less touristed because to get there you needed to do a homestay and hike about seven kilometers each way.  I wouldn't put it past them, but I was NOT happy.
     April second my parents got our airplane tickets to Luang Prabang.  In the afternoon we took a tuk tuk to Artisans d'Angkor, a school teaching traditional crafts.  There was a large shop there so after we booked a tour of the factory we browsed a while.
       About forty five minutes before the bus left we went to a streetside cafe for lunch.  The food was good but the service excruciatingly slow.  Sitting through a brief downpour was pleasant but when our food arrived only ten minute before the bus left my unhungry dad went back to keep the bus from leaving without us.
      It only took about twenty minutes to get out of the city and to the factory, and there we only six other people on the bus.  First in the factory we were taken to see the mulberry bushes briefly and then to the silk worms.  They have a forty seven day life span, but eighty percent are killed for their silk before then.  The eighty percent have their silk spun into skeins of raw silk and some is respun into fine silk.  Strands from dozens of cocoons feed through a hand-cranked wooden machine and twist up to create one thread about four hundred meters long. 
     The thread is then washed because though it is naturally a beautiful yellow color that will wash out. Traditionally, Cambodian textiles have employed natural dyes. Red dye comes from  lac insect nests, blue dye from indigo, yellow and green dye from prohut bark, and black dye from ebony bark.     There are two main types of Cambodian weaving. The ikat technique, which produces patterned fabric, is quite complex. To create patterns, weavers tie and dye portions of weft yarn before weaving begins. Patterns are diverse and vary by region; common ones are lattice, stars, and spots.  I could find no websites that talk about this in great detail or I'd include a link.

                                

      A bit before the tour ended I started getting the standing-with-my-knees-locked low-blood-pressure fainty-feeling so when it concluded and there was a place to sit down in the store I gladly took advantage of it and held the backpack while my parents walked around.  Much of the items were the same as in the store in town but now I was less inclined to browse because, though I had known vaguely before, it didn't really hit home that the worms were killed to make the silk.
     For dinner my mom found a restaurant she really wanted to try that was another charity organization restaurant.  Meaning, it was a good cause and we were glad to support it but my scalding soup was spilled on my lap while being served and not the deliciousness we still aren't too disillusioned to hope for.
     The next day we went to Angkor Wat (see last post) and for dinner walked half a block down to Rosie's Guesthouse.  The portions were on the small side and the salad weird, but my jacket potatoes were good.  I find that it's easier to write about what is wrong with a meal than what is good with it and part of it may just be natural pessimism or that bad food sticks in the memory more than food that is good but not astounding or even that we've just had bad luck with restaurants but I am so sick of eating other people's unsatisfactory food.  Lucky for me my mom REALLY misses cooking and is making a list of all the stuff  she plans on making so for a long time we will be set and at least there will be the ingredients for me to whip up some good pasta... Or a salad.... Yum, salad....................
     The day after Angkor Wat we slept in a little before taking a tuk tuk to drop off some laundry and to bookstore and walking around from there.  We each got a book, and just in time because my kindle broke the same day.  It was either serendipitous or I jinxed something.  Unfortunately the crisis was diverted only temporarily because the Michael Conelly was gone in two days.  Of course this happens at the climax of my book!  I was so relieved when I found the kindle app, connected it to Amazon, and found that all my books were saved.
     We walked around for a while looking for a second bookstore but gave up when it wasn't where it was supposed to be and the direct sun and ninety-plus heat started really getting to us.  The power was out for a large section of town but we found an ice cream-based restaurant called the Blue Pumpkin with fantastic ice cream.
      On our way home we took a tuk tuk.  Despite planning on staying in for a couple of ors we got hungry and found a place that got amazing reviews called the Peace Cafe.  Do not go there.  Tis is not just me missing home food--the service was horrible (despite them being in a part of town with power!), the food utterly tasteless, and the flies awful.    
     Without a particular restaurant in mind after a lazy morning the next day we headed out on foot to a late lunch.  It was just as well I was the only hungry one because our attention was diverted by a movie theater.  Claiming to be the 'number one tourist attraction', somehow bypassing Angkor Wat, it was a genius idea.  Choose your own movie and get a private viewing room with a big couch against one wall and a ginormous screen onto which the movie was projected.  Also serving noodle soup for peckish people such as myself.
      From the list of fifty or so movies we chose Life of Pi and though the cinematography was beautiful and the movie well-cast I have to say that it didn't even begin to compare to the book.  The book seemed like such a vivid, slightly surreal but above all believable story of amazing survival with such huge ambiguity and slow revelation and this was... Pretty.  Really pretty, especially in the ocean-at-night scenes, and not so pretty in others and I'm glad I saw it but it lacked so much.
      Afterwards I wasn't hungry anymore but my parents were so we walked over to the alley where a bunch of restaurants are clustered.  We picked a vegetarian restaurant called Chamkar.  I sampled the dishes my parents ordered and the food was really, really good.
      In the morning the next day, which might have been Friday, I skyped first with one friend and then a different group of friends.  It was so good to see everybody and instead of making me melancholy I just got excited to be home.  
      My parents went out to do errands while I dealt with the picture formatting for Angkor and the after one last swim we left for the airport.  It was smile day and we were given palm sugar candy after breezing through security.
     While waiting a little over an hour for our plane to take off we found out that the airport had a Blue Pumpkin and we entertained ourselves with milkshakes.  It was my first time in a propeller plane but since we didn't fall out of the sky it was fairly anticlimactic.  In this case, that was a good thing.
     It was a smallish airplane, with only about thirty rows of four seats.  Eight of these seats were filled, two people a few rows behind us and two ahead.
     Leaving Cambodia was really sad but that kind of got pushed out of our minds when we land in Lao.  I say 'Lao' because that's what people here say.  It wasn't a long walk from the plane to the airport and it was super quick to get visas and grab our bags.  The Laotian visa is shiny and silver and pretty, much prettier than the Vietnamese one.
 
     A car from our hotel came and picked us up.  Luang Prabang is tiny!  The area where we are, a peninsula surrounded by rivers, is four streets wide exactly.
     Our first night here we learned how to say hello and thank you and set out to explore.  It was an outing of several hours, stopping at hotels to investigate moving, looking at menus, stopping in shops.  We finally ate at a guesthouse that I don't know the name of but that had many great veggie options.
       This morning my parents went on one more hotel-scouting expedition without me and then we all set out to explore.  After a while we stopped at a cafe for cold drinks before heading out for a little more meandering and lunch.
     Finding our way across one of the rivers on a bamboo bridge to Dyen Sabai was a feat of navigation but we made it and were glad in the end.  Sitting on cushions around a low tile table we tried the vegetarian fondue.  Laotian fondues are not cheesy, but instead are a cook-your-own-soup and fry-your-own tofu arrangement made with a bucket of embers and a metal burner/pot to put on it.
     A small store on our way back to the river caught our eye because of the kitten and puppy inside.  The cat was sweet and very vocal but the puppy was the star of the establishment.  Typically, she chewed on my arm but was exceedingly cuddly.  I also forgot what it was like to pet a dog distinctly more on the chubby side rather than the skin-and-bones one.
      Tomorrow we are leaving to spend a couple of days with the elephants.  I should be back within the week.

Day of Heat and Temples (In Mostly Pictures)

     
     As per the advice of a Croatian woman that we met on a day I have yet to write about, we went to the temples early and late.  By waking up at four thirty we made it to Angkor Wat as it was opening and joined the crowd gathering for the sunrise.  Because of the clouds we left before the sun was visible and evaded the throngs temporarily by going to Angkor Thom.  When we arrived there were two other people there.
     Instead of biking through the complex we hired a tuk tuk for the day.  A guide was also hired through the hotel but we had mixed feelings about that, as though he helped us figure  out where to go when and what everything was his accent was difficult to understand and there were points when we wanted to wander through the abandoned rooms rather than listen to a lecture about them.
                                     
     Various countries are assisting with the restoration of the sites and go about it in different ways.  France sorts through the daunting piles of rubble and fits the pieces back together like a puzzle while Japan carves completely new pieces that look like the originals in their original state.  I hope that they only do this in some place and leave others in their original state.
 
     To get to Angkor Thom we passed over a bridge lined with gods and demons playing tug-of-war, gods to the left and demons to the right.  The gate at the end was built with dozens of small chunks of carved rock fitted together and built in a way that seemed very insecure.

After our guide described the gallery of carvings we walked through the temple. The religious aspect of the buildings figured a large part in our day, but the details on the walls that really say that a human carved them hundreds of years ago were more interesting to me.  I know some people are really interested in the symbolism of the carvings but I was more intrigued by the stories carved in, like the man turning around and yelling at the woman whose turtle is biting him.

                                    
     At the second building in the complex there was a giant reclining Buddha built into the wall of the building and steep stairs that led to it.
      At the third there were more steep stairs, and a legend of a snake turning into a woman every evening.
      Our last stop there was at the Elephant Terrace, where the king would watch parades and games from.
     From there we got back in the tuk tuk and went to the library and university of Preah Khan.  Every few feet there is a doorway and lintel used to hold up the ceiling, and the walls are covered with holes that were used to hold up the jewel-studded copper that was looted in the fourteenth century by the Thai.  Every so often we would come across an irregular pedestal in the ground that had held a statue of a Buddha centuries until the same time the copper vanished.  The structure was very long, and to the side were stupas dedicated to generals.  The walls to the stupas were decorated with intricate carvings but in many places there were large chipped-away places where a Buddha was removed by King Jayavarmin the eighth, who converted the country back to Hinduism.  In the back of the complex there was a two-story building used to house the sacred sword and trees growing over a couple of the walls.
                                     
                                 
     By eight in the morning it was getting hot so by ten we were glad to be heading back to the hotel.  Our guide told us that his parents never took him to Angkor Wat and he eventually went with a friend while in secondary school.  Like so many people, he was good-naturedly bitter, remarking that he always knew he would be a guide.  He lives in Siem Reap, what else could he be?
     Our hotel serves a flexible breakfast that we ate when we got home before a quick swim and a long nap.  We met the tuk tuk outside the hotel at two.
      After driving for about ten minutes we heard a loud bang that signaled the popping of one of the back tires.  The driver drove back to trade out his vehicle but was back in less than ten minutes.
    The path to Ta Prohm was filled mostly with tourists leaving but that didn't mean that there weren't clusters of people taking hundreds of pictures and being in the way in many places.  Ta Prohm is notable for all the trees that have taken root on the walls and it was definitely surreal and beautiful.
                                  
                                
                                 
                               

    Finally we went to Angkor Wat.  Most people go to the temple in the morning because it's cooler than so we decided to go in the afternoon to get some space.  I don't know how the crowds compare but it was really hot and not hardly deserted.   The road we walked on to get to it had a few dozen whisker monkeys on it, the babies holding on to the mothers' bellies and the big males staring at us and being scary.
 
     The entrance we went through had a wooden built up to it not because the original stone stairs were too worn down to be safe but because the king would ride up and disembark from his elephant.  Through a passage filled with statues decapitated during the Khmer Rouge we reached a courtyard with a tall structure in the center.  The line was long and the stairs were steep so my mom opted to wander through the relatively empty rooms lower down while we went up.  From there we could see the entire complex and honestly were a bit relieved that it wasn't as huge as we feared.
                                                                            
                                     
 
                                   
                                
     When we came down we saw another long gallery of carvings before coming to a hall with several pools once filled with water and a surviving Buddha. We also saw an intact Vishnu statue that people had put incense in front of.
                                   
                                                                                     
  I don't recommend falling asleep in a tuk tuk.  My head kept snapping backwards but I couldn't stay awake long enough to get home.  

Beachtime

    The joys of having a corporeal keyboard were very shortlived because now the 'o' and '!' don't work and I'm back in the land of unwanted autocorrect and virtual typing.
     Somewhere along the way my criteria for a really great hotel room have changed.  When we set out I don't think 'walls that meet the roof and don't have cracks that are too big' was a requirement, but being back in a room where bugs aren't handed invitations on silver platters is amazing.
      Actually, the Rainbow Lodge near Tatai (though remote bungalows in the jungle) had fairly solid rooms and the mosquito net didn't have any obvious tears.  At the bus station in Phnom Penh we bought a newspaper and the ride was only four hours, though the last couple on twisty roads.  The bus stopped at the end of a bridge to let us off and we were met by a boat sent by the lodge.  A few minutes downstream we arrived at a dock and were met by one of the people who run it.  It was a short walk up a dirt path to the scattering of bungalows and dining room where we were briefed on mealtimes and the excursions the lodge had to offer.
     Lunch was served until three and we just made it in time.  The afternoon was very laid back, filled with reading in hammocks and a swim in the river.  There was a huge inner tube we floated in but had to get out because the water was too warm.
     I had mixed feelings about having a set time for dinner--on the one hand, everybody eating together is nice but in the other we had had a late lunch and I don't like being told when to eat--but everything was tasty.
      The next morning we woke up early to kayak to a waterfall about an hour and a half away from the lodge.  I like kayaking even more than my parents, maybe because when I'm lucky it's synonymous with 'best naps ever'.  There was a family from a different lodge already at the falls when we arrived but luckily we avoided the major tour groups we passed on our way out.
       Under the surface of the water were dozens of smooth, slippery rocks so while we didn't cut ourselves it was really hard to get traction to sit under the rock shelf the water was coming over.   Sitting under it was a perfect shoulder massage.  The only trick was to not slide off, because you might not be able to stop for fifteen or twenty feet.
      It was getting late and the sun strong so we read in the shade of some rocks for a little while before a quick last swim and kayaking back.  At the turn to get to the main river we passed a half dozen boats, many filled with monks, and everybody waved enthusiastically as we passed.
       The return trip was made in exactly an hour, thanks to a feverish sprint at the end.  By the time the kayaks were pulled up away from the river and the dry bags returned we still had time for a late lunch.  I recommend the pizza-style oven melts.  It was still really hot a few hours into the afternoon and we had a second lazy afternoon.  There were some paperbacks  but none that even vaguely interested me.  In Phnom Penh I found a Jodi Picoult book that I suffered through for the sheer joy of turning actual real pages but I didn't even have the questionable luck of finding a similar book this time.
      That night we shared a table with a couple from France.  The had much less time than us for Cambodia but had already been to Angkor Wat and suggested taking a tuk-tuk around the complex rather than bikes because of the heat.
      There were two cats there and the orange one liked to sleep on our porch but I stopped paying attention to it after it attacked my hammock unprovoked.
     The next day the plan was to take the lodge's boat back to the waterfalls and kayak home when we were ready but I woke up with a fever and aches and sat out.  My parents went without me and I slept for most of the morning and woke up feeling a little better.  My fever was back and stronger than ever by nighttime and we were worried that it was dengue but in the morning I was back to normal.
      That afternoon there was a thunderstorm for a couple of hours and rain absolutely bucketed down.  It was a nice change from the utter dryness of the past couple days and completely eliminated any fears we had of the controlled burns nearby becoming uncontrolled burns.
      To catch the bus to Sihanoukville we had to make an early start.  After the boat dropped us back at the bridge we waited by the side of the road for some time to be picked up.  Surprisingly it was quite prompt and it was with relief that I saw it was a tourist bus instead of a van.
       For a while we backtracked up those winding roads but at some point we must have diverged because when we disembarked a few hours later we were in Sihanoukville.  From the dingy bus station we took a tuk-tuk first to a grocery store and then to the travel agency the guy had a commission from.  After a phone call and some possibly artificial miscommunications we left for the correct travel agency and waited there for the bus to take us to the ferry to take us to Koh Rong Island.
        On its way to the docks the bus stopped at a couple places to pick up passengers and by the time it made its last stop people were standing in the aisle and it was almost unbearably hot.  It didn't take long to collect bags from the truck that had followed us from town and we found seats on the ferry expeditiously.  The ride was only two hours but the benches were uncomfortable and there was an Australian sitting across from us who was a constant talker.  He was bellowing about something or other the entire trip.
     Upon arriving in Sihanoukville we had wanted to look at a hotel other than the one we were booked for (Paradise Bungalows) but didn't  have time.  When we first caught a glimpse of the island we saw the stretch of white beach that was separated from town and the majority of hotels by a rocky outcropping.  This was where Pura Vita, our back up bungalows, were, and again we regretted the lack of opportunity to look at it when our hotel turned out to be just a short walking from the music-blaring town and they didn't even meet us at the boat.  By speaking to people at a couple of the restaurants we found out where they were but dragging rolling bags across fluffy sand was not appealing and my dad walked over there to ask them to send us a boat.
      The bungalows had locks on the door but because there was a three-foot gap between the walls and the roof and a perfect step to climb over it I doubt that would have stopped a determined burglar. It certainly didn't stop the bugs.
     There was no room to put bags or anything and my bed was a makeshift mat-on-a-bench thing with a torn mosquito net and we used the restaurant's wifi to find out the welcome news that Pura Vita had space for us the following night.  With this resolved we enjoyed the amazing beach for a couple of hours.
 
      The next morning a little after ten a boat came for us.  It was amazing to get away from the pulsing generator a few feet behind our room and the raucous music!  Not to mention our new room, which while airy, had walls that met the ceiling.  Pura Vita has three bungalows and two rooms above the restaurant so since we booked last minute we got the rooms.  Apart from the fact that the shower and bathroom were in a separate building this was no hardship.
     No fans in the room and a hundred degree weather but that doesn't matter when there's an ocean outside.  The water here was amazingly clear.  Even when I walked out to a depth where I could barely stand I could look down and see the shadow I cast on the sand as if we weren't separated by a few feet of water.  The sand--oh, the sand, we saw an empty bag from a shipment of bulk flour and joked that that was what the beach was made of.  The sand was so fine, and such a brilliant white.  The pictures make it seem way less beautiful and white than it actually was.
                                      
      After seeing that I had taken over two hundred pictures of the cat that climbed over the roof to hang out in our room my mom announced that I was not a dog person and, though it feels a bit disloyal to Lillie and though I still know that she is obviously far superior to any cat, I may have to agree.  Not that I'm a cat person!  Maybe I'm both.  Right now I'm mostly trying to move past the anti-cat propaganda that my dad has fed me.  Regardless, she was really sweet (and photogenic!).  Though it's possible that she came and sat on my lap and purred that one time because she wanted my lunch...

      Apart from the pressureless showers our only gripe with Pura Vida was that that only had two veggie options on the menu.  Twice we hiked the forty minutes to town for a little variety but overall we took the food at home over the assaulting noise and dozens of twenty-something-year-olds.
     It was nice to borrow the paperbacks they had there, and I enjoyed 'The Lincoln Lawyer' and enjoyed poking fun at 'The Forgotten Garden' with my mom.  I don't really need to go over our days in detail, but they were filled with beachwalks, lots of swimming, some panting in the shade and scratching of mosquito and sand flea bites, and more swimming.
 
     On one beach walk we found these creatures covered with a sort of sensitive, mobile fur.  The design in their back but not their shape suggested at they might be sand dollars but we don't really know.
 
      In the end we were glad for the bugs because without them we would have been just too sad to leave.  As it was there was some melancholia as the boat (luckily less crowded this time) pulled away from Koh Rong.  Like always the ride back to the mainland seemed much shorter than the one away from it.
 
      Back into the stream, drifting along with when and how people tell us to go where.  The packed bus was avoided by a tuk tuk that met us at the dock, and it dropped us off at a Greek restaurant in town for an  hour before coming back to take us to this room on the side of the road where the nightbus to Siem Reap came to pick us up and calling a friend with a tuk tuk to meet us when we arrived.
      Somehow the bus seemed less comfortable than the Vietnamese ones but I fell quickly back into the pattern of sleeping until my neck or legs cramped up and then switching positions to doze back off.
      Unfortunately, as the tuk tuk was pulling away my dad remembered that we had left our instruments on the bus and was able to retrieve them.
     It was before seven when we arrived at our hotel so we had an early breakfast upstairs while we waited for our room to be ready.  The setup is really nice here, with a dozen or so bungalows, each holding two families in rooms upstairs and two downstairs, set back from the road in a sort of garden.  There's also a pool.  And it has air conditioning, which is really a necessity in the city.