Bangkok to Sihanoukville

Bangkok

Bangkok is a big, vibrant, diverse city. In particular it's big, with a population of roughly seven million. Chinatown, one of the oldest parts of the city, has ½ million people in a quite small area. So, it's large, densely populated, choked with cars and growing rapidly. Like many of the cities and towns in this part of the world, this makes it fundamentally ugly – of course, there are the beautiful wats (monasteries and temples) and palaces dotted around the place, immaculate and shining, and the huge, gleaming skyscrapers, but apart from that it's mostly built quick and cheap, as close to the road as can be. The Eternal East of western imagination has certainly vanished under an amazing sense of activity and growth!
Niamh's mate's place was a good way out of the city, well over an hour by moto/taxi and the wonderful, new metro, so we didn't see as much of the centre as we may have. It did, however, give us a feel of a random bit of Bangkok (although I have no idea where it sat socio-economically, culturally, etc., so don't know how representative it was), largely away from the tourist track. We went to a few local places, courtesy of Patsy, eating gorgeous Thai food then moving on to a slightly surreal karaoke experience. From Indonesia on karaoke has been very popular, with no-one showing the diffidence and embarrassment characteristic of westerners, or at least Australians. They don't need to be rolling drunk to get up and sing. But the other noticeable thing is that they get up and sing with very neutral body language then leave with no fanfare; all the while everyone else shows no sign of listening or acknowledging the performance.
We did also see some of the city centre, doing the usual traipsing through smoggy streets with minimal footpaths, but my highlight was a morning bike tour, which took us through all the nooks and crannies where, because of politeness, timidity or confusion you would not normally venture. We started by going through Chinatown, where the streets narrow to backstreets, which narrow to laneways, which narrow to alleyways, which narrow to passageways until your shoulders are almost touching the sides! As we went down orders of magnitude I kept being surprised that another one awaited!

After going through the flower market, we emerged into the light of day next to the Chao Phraya, Bangkok's river, and got a public ferry across to a large Wat, inside which was a huge seated Buddha, all plated in gold. I can't help but feel old Mr. Gautama would be pretty disappointed at the way many of his essential teachings have been missed, particularly the bit about not worshipping idols (notwithstanding the pretty weak get-out-of-gaol-free card that an idol is an image of a god and Buddha isn't a god). But, as a piece of art and architecture it is impressive.

After that we rode around the old capital, across the water from the current capital and abandoned a few centuries ago because it's flood-prone. We weaved through streets, past and through more of the hundreds of wats in Bangkok and got on a Longtail boat, going along the river for a while, then off into canals through the backwaters of Bangkok. Longtail boats seem to be the main design of craft around Bangkok – long and thin with a graceful arch on the prow, they seem perfectly designed to handle the chop of big waterways with barely a bump as well as squeeze along the many small side canals.


We then jumped on the bikes and went through a food-growing area where people make a living from large market gardens. This area is under threat as the new rich from across the river are buying up land and building obscenely ostentatious residences – with very high walls and good security systems – right amongst this stable, productive community.
After this we were back on the boat for another tour of the waterways, where we saw a few of the very large (well over 1.5 metres!) monitors that inhabit the area. They are apparently a sign of good luck and welcomed – they also live by preference of rotting fish, so that might account for some of their popularity as there was plenty of dead fish floating around what must be pretty polluted waters.

Lunch at a floating market. Salt-rubbed snakefish grilled over coals.

Prettily laid-out ingredients for paw-paw salad

*Riding and boating around Bangkok*

While we were gallivanting around, Thailand was at another peak in it's long-running political crisis, with the Prime Minister being removed from office for corruption or the subject of a political coup, depending on your analysis. We saw little of this, except on our last evening, traipsing around yet again through petrol-filled city streets, vainly looking for an area with food on offer, and came across a park or stadium filled with people listening to a booming, angry voice, which turned out to be a rally for the yellow shirts side of the dispute. Earlier we'd been trying to get to an area Niamh knew from a previous trip and – with our minimal Thai – not being able to understand when the tuk-tuk drivers tried to tell us that it was no good there. We, in our uncharitable way, thought they were trying to scam us for a quick and easy fare, but we eventually found out that there were protests and street fights going on there. In Bangkok there did seem to be a bit more cheeky rip-offs than we'd yet seen, but all pretty minor and this was another reminder not to get into the us-and-them mentality of the locals are out to get us. That said, when we eventually got a lift, the driver dropped us off to a shitty, overpriced restaurant with nothing else in sight! So we resumed our weary traipsing and ended up having a light, tasty meal right next to our hotel (where we moved for the last night as our train left before 06:00).

Dinner at long last!

A few more Bangkok photos

Some of the many gleaming towers of Bangkok
Bangkok's early wet season was early this year. Rain approaches the city
One of the large Wats along the river.
Niamh discovers the table where she first heard about couchsurfing, without which our lives would have been much poorer!
A nightview of one of Bangkok's highest buildings

Bangkok to Siem Reap

We left Bangkok on the 5.55 train – yet another underslept departure! Mercifully our hotel was 50 metres from the station.
The train was a third-class train, absurdly cheap, austere but comfortable enough. It was a lovely old train with big open windows, with panes and shutters that you could pull up if you wanted. It strongly reminded me of the old single-decker red rattlers I used to get as a teenager – I'd often choose my travel time based on a red rattler usually servicing a particular time I loved them so much. I was very sad to see them go – built in 1926, they'd stood the test of time and were a lovely way to travel, so I'm very happy whenever I get to travel in something similar!

The day was a long one, with the 6 or 7 hour train trip, the tuk-tuk scam to get you to 'the border', which was actually a faux official visa issuing office with a hefty mark-up, the trudge to the actual border and then the crossing, which was simple enough although as slow as might be expected. The border was fascinating – after leaving the fairly clean and official-looking Thai immigration building there was a few hundred metres before the Cambodian crossing, where there were road-side stalls, traffic bustling back and forth and, apart from the big arches, nothing to make the average person suspect it was a border at all! I'm convinced we could have just walked through, but we did the sensible thing and got our visa properly!
In no-man's land between Thailand and Vietnam!

Siem Reap

Then it was another three hours on a shuttle bus, then a minivan to Siem Reap, where, just after dumping our bags in the guesthouse a huge procession started marching by, hundreds and hundreds of monks in single file, in celebration of Vesak, the commemoration of Mr. Gautama's birth, enlightenment, and death.

There were lots of signs of these celebrations in the time we were in Siem Reap, including at Angkor Wat, where we spent a long, and very pleasant day on another cycle tour.

##The Angkor Wat complex These huge and beautiful tributes to human faith, folly or ingenuity – or more accurately to the Hindu deities! – are hard to comprehend. The scale is huge, the engineering superb – they had highly effective drainage systems, vital for massive stone buildings in the wet tropics; they used foundational materials (sand and laterite) that were porous yet stable and, to my mind, most amazing, the buildings were entirely of drystone construction! You have to see the height and scale of the buildings, and the intricacy and delicacy of the walls to appreciate what immense skill this would take. The whole place is too large to adequately describe in a few paragraphs, so I won't even try! But, I would say, if you're going to do it anytime, definitely do it by bike! It's a lovely relaxing way to travel, you get off the beaten track to more out of the way places – and it's healthy! Who could ask for more?    ##Siem Reap Siem Reap is a lovely little town. It's mainstay is tourists coming to see the Angkor Wat complex and there hordes of us, even in what is now the low season! Despite this, it's managed to mostly avoid the worst of the tourist pitfalls and you can stroll along the river or through streets that haven't been extended right to the kerb. There is still a strongly touristy aspect of course, including a thing or two they've learned from their Thai counterparts such as foot and neck massages everywhere and the dead skin eating fish. Anyone who's ever seen my feet will not be surprised to see I was by far and away the most popular!  Another aspect of Cambodia, amongst the corruption and incompetence and injustice, is the presence of many local and foreign NGOs that are working on a whole range of social justice issues. These include helping landmine survivors, who are often unable to find work. Strolling around Siem Reap we came by these landmine survivors playing beautiful traditional music, able to support themselves without having to resort to begging. ##Kamikaze drivers The next morning we left on a terrifying van trip to Phnom Penh. It brought back all my previous memories of road travel in Cambodia and Vietnam – constant honking, running motorbikes off the road, veering into oncoming traffic and generally driving like an idiot. If was just westerners like me who were worried, I would think perhaps I was overreacting, but on this trip, and the one from Phnom Penh to Sihanoukville – where we hit what was presumably a side mirror of an oncoming vehicle – there was obvious fear on display from Cambodians as well.

The view from the van. Another reason to travel by train!

Phnom Penh

We had a night in Phnom Penh, which included watching a fireworks display for the king's birthday from the rooftop lounge area of our hotel and a morning where I caught up with Viva, a friend I met there when I came to Phnom Penh in 2009, and a trip to a tailors, where he helped me get measured up for some new clobber.
Viva and me after our trip to the tailors

Otres beach

Then it was another unpleasant afternoon ride down to Sihanoukville and nearby Otres beach, where I settled into a high fever that had me on my back for a day and convalescing for another, so I haven't seen a great deal of it. My impressions are not fantastic - although its a lovely beach in a nice setting, it feels like yet another place infested with (in this case low-budget) tourists – or travellers as many insist on being called. Since leaving Indonesia, where we had enough language to just get by and the locals generally had minimal English, I've felt like I've fallen into a little bubble of westerness and have even fallen into the unforgivable sin of addressing people in English, without having even bothered to learn how to say 'Do you speak English?' in their language – in days gone by I would have thrown myself out of a window for that!
Anyway, tomorrow we're back for a few days in Phnom Penh, to spend a day with my mate Viva and his wife, then perhaps some museums and other sights the next day then off on a boat down the Mekong to Vietnam.