Sarah: Happy (belated) Thanksgiving to those of you in the states. Patrick and I survived our first big holiday away from family, and had a delicious dinner Thursday night at the Foreign Correspondents' Club here in Phnom Penh. There was no turkey or cranberry sauce on the menu, but the chewy herbed focaccia bread with pesto dip was drool-inducingly good, and we even managed an apple crumble for dessert. The next morning, while we ate breakfast at a little Khmer restaurant near our guesthouse, our parents and families passed the phone around the dining room table (it was still Thursday night back in DeKalb) and we got to say a quick hello to loved ones.

I'm thankful for so many things, and it was good to take some time to step back and remind myself of them. Family and friends, all of you who I miss and think of daily (even if I'm not always the best about emailing you). Good health. The incredible opportunity I am currently taking advantage of to travel and see so much of the world. There is so much to be grateful for.

Earlier this week, we had started to get to a bit of a burnout point in the trip -- feeling not as energetic and excited about the places we were going and things we were experiencing as we had been early on. The heat is part of it -- the end of the rainy season has meant that Cambodia during the middle of the day is pretty much intolerably hot unless you're inside under a strong fan, and that limits what activities you can do. It also doesn't help that even $5-a-night guesthouses here almost uniformly have cable TVs in every room, and, having been deprived of TV for months, we went on a little bit of an HBO/Cinemax/Star Movies binge (and watched some really bad movies, like The Perfect Man, and some so-bad-they-were-almost-good movies, like Tomcats, and the occasional good movie, like The Searchers).

But there's nothing to snap you out of a funk like meeting some great people, and that's one of the other things I'm thankful for. In Pursat, a provincial capital about three hours northwest of Phnom Penh, where we were last week, our moto driver Vuthy ended up becoming a friend. He spoke great english and we spent a fun day exploring the beautiful countryside around Pursat with him, visiting temples and lakes and taking in the spectacular views. It's a shame that there's no such thing as high-speed internet in Cambodia, because we have some gorgeous pictures of the electric green rice fields and lakes rimmed with water hyacinths and mountains off in the distance. The Cambodian countryside is really incredibly lovely, and so going on a moto ride to any particular destination (a temple or waterfall or what have you) is mostly about the journey getting there. Having the chance to explore it with someone as fun as Vuthy made it particularly special. If you're in need of a moto driver in Pursat, let me know -- he comes highly recommended.

After Pursat, we headed down to Phnom Penh, where a friend of ours from college, Daniel, has lived on and off for the past four years or so. He's got a whole network of friends here, and we immediately found ourselves invited to a gathering at a bar where we met some other fun people. On Saturday, a big group of Daniel's friends went in together on chartering a boat for a Mekong river cruise in the afternoon and early evening. There was beer and chips and some people put together a delicious crab boil -- we had a great time and met some more cool people. It was great to be at a party after so many months of solo travel. Later that night, some of us headed over to a local bar called the Rock Zone to see one of Phnom Penh's only real rock bands, Betty Ford and the GT Falcons. We drank cheap and tasty Beer Lao and rocked out.

All the new people have helped re-energize us, and we're both feeling pretty excited about what's to come, although we're not sure quite what it is. We're headed down to Kampot in southern Cambodia for a few days, and then back to Phnom Penh next weekend for a day or two, but afterwards, it's still up in the air. We'll likely be heading to Laos or Thailand, but it might end up being Vietnam or Nepal? We'll keep you posted. Lots of love and we miss you!

November 27, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Sarah: We've been travelling for long enough now that the things that seemed exotic or exciting, alienating or just plain weird, when we first started, have now become completely normal. Families of five on a motorcycle, water buffalo grazing on the side of the highway, footprints on the toilet seat -- these things don't phase us anymore. But every once in a while, something will still happen that's surprising enough to make us giggle. Like the new phrase we've coined for those times when you have to use a bathroom you'd really prefer not to. "Okay, I'm going to step over the crocodile." Allow me to explain.

We started off the week in Siem Reap, the town in Northwestern Cambodia that is the base for exploring the nearby Angkor temples. We arrived from Bangkok with Patrick's parents, and spent the first four days in Siem Reap with them. It was lovely and made the world feel a whole lot smaller to be with family. It was great to see them. After they left, Patrick and I stayed on in Siem Reap for a few more days, exploring some of the more remote temples. Then we headed to Battambang.

The trip began when we were picked up at our guest house at six a.m. to make a seven a.m. boat departure. A pick-up truck already filled with seven people and their backpacks pulled in to Smiley's Guest House and the four of us standing there -- me and Patrick and a German couple -- stared incredulously at the remaining space in the back of the truck, wondering how we were all going to fit. Fortunately, three of us instead were invited to climb into the cab, behind the driver, our knees tucked up to our chins and our backpacks in the back of the truck, added to the pile. What we didn't realize is that we weren't the last stop. There were in fact four more people to pick up. It was a clown car by the time we pulled onto the road to head for the boat dock -- six people in the cab and at least ten, plus all those backpacks, in the back.

On board the boat, the seats quickly filled up, and some people headed for the roof of the boat. Again, we weren't done picking people up. Along the route, through Tonle Sap lake and up into the river to Battambang, we passed through a number of floating villages, where people live on houseboats of sorts, tethered together, close to floating shops, restaurants, and gas stations. The boat would blast its horn as we pulled into each village, and sometimes a family would paddle out in a little wooden canoe, and hand off a passenger and suitcase to the boat before waving goodbye and paddling back home. One such late arrival was travelling with more than just a suitcase -- the boat crew helped him heft burlap sack after burlap sack on board. Some they put down in the hold in the front of the boat, and others they carried down the aisle to the back, near the door to the W.C.

We all started to notice that the burlap sacks were wriggling.

The word went around -- crocodiles. We all turned around in our seats and watched what was clearly tails twitching through brown cloth. The sacks did seem securely sewn shut, and Patrick said, "They probably know what they're doing with these things. They've probably got this down." And I said, "I'm glad I already used the bathroom, because now you'd have to step over the crocodile."

We'd been on the boat for two hours or so at that point, and we'd been told it was about a three-hour trip. But three hours came and went, and when we pulled over for a lunch stop for the driver at a little floating convenience store, that seemed like a bad sign. So a few hours later, it became clear what had to be done. "Okay," I said to Patrick, "I'm going to go step over the crocodile."

I'm writing this from an internet cafe in Battambang, where I'm happy to report we arrived, safe and sound with all our limbs intact, after a six and a half hour boat ride where we took way too many pictures, which we'll post next time we have a high-speed connection.

Tomorrow, we're headed a little more off the beaten track, into the Cardamom Mountains, to hopefully see some nature and wildlife and maybe experience a little bit more of rural Cambodia. I'll let you know what we find. In the meantime, the next time you're on a road trip or at a bar and find yourself having to use some less-than-pleasant facilities, feel free to say you're going to step over the crocodile.

November 16, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Sarah: The problem with the fact that I’ve been letting weeks go by in between entries here on Wandery is that then there’s so much to say that I’m never sure where to begin, which just serves to make it even less likely that I’ll get something posted. So I’m going to attempt to turn over a new leaf and post more often, even if it’s just a short note to let you know where we are and what we’re up to.

At the moment, we’re in Bangkok. We arrived on Sunday, after a thirteen-hour all-day bus ride from Phuket, where we had spent almost ten days. We happened to arrive in Phuket just as the annual Vegetarian Festival was beginning -- the Veg Fest is a nine-day extravaganza observed in a few cities in Southern Thailand, but Phuket’s version is by far the biggest. During the festival, which honors nine emporor gods and is observed mostly by Chinese-Thai Buddhists, devotees dress all in white and abstain from meat, alcohol and sex. There are daily parades and lots of drums and firecrackers and street after street lined with food vendors selling tons of yummy vegetarian food. Curries and stir fries and sticky rice and pad thai and spring rolls and doughnuts and coconut custards and mangos and fruit shakes and french fries and little fried potato balls and pancakes filled with chopped peanuts and sugar and I think I may have gained ten pounds in Phuket from all the eating.

The other aspect of the Veg Fest is that many of the devotees, in addition to giving up meat etc., also perform a range of other ascetic feats, from hot-coal walking to bladed-ladder climbing to, most commonly, piercing sharp objects through one or both cheeks and out their mouths.

What type of objects do people stick through their faces, you may be wondering. Patrick and I compiled a list of things we saw pierced through faces during one two-hour parade the other day (links are to photos, not for the squeamish).

Things we saw stuck through people’s faces:

Swords
Skewers
Parasols
Umbrellas
Beach umbrella
Rainbow-colored plastic straws
Giant Chupa-chups lollipops
Two-inch thick red candle
Large paper fan
Flower baskets
Metal rod skewered through dozens of oranges
Bicycle pump
Hubcap
Robot action figure
Cymbal on stand from a drum kit
Bathroom sink
Kitchen sink
Wrench
Pruning shears
Chandelier
Long beans
Flower bouquets
Leafy branches
Thorned blooming cactus branches
Ten-foot sapling
Badminton racquets
Power drill
Scale model of Eiffel Tower
Huge butterfly wings on a rod
Flag advertising local beer garden & restaurant
Flag saying “Long Live the King” in Thai and English
Miscellaneous other flags
Chair
Handcuffs
Barbed wire
Semi-automatic rifles
Battleship

So that is a whole list of things I never really thought I’d see. And between the food and the festival, covers much of what we did in Phuket for over a week. Seriously, we ate, watched (and marched in) parades, ate some more, browsed around in antique shops and art galleries, ate more, watched movies, and, um, ate some more.

Now it’s a few days later, and we’ve been loving Bangkok. Patrick’s parents have joined us here, and the four of us are bound for Cambodia on Monday. I’ll try to update the blog more frequently with little updates on where we are and what we’ve been up to -- but it may be a little hectic over the next month as I’m also trying to do National Novel Writing Month again this November -- and so far it hasn’t been all that easy to find the time to get my daily writing done.

Happy fall to all of you in cooler climes -- enjoy the changing leaves and the crisp apples. It’s still 90 degrees and humid here most days, and the only time I get to wear a sweater is in movie theaters, which Thailand chills down to about 55 degrees. Lots of love.

November 04, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)