Siem Reap/Angkor Wat, Cambodia *EDITED*

The Cambodian side of the Laos/Cambodia border.

We traveled with an Estonian, who bought deep-fried whole birds...

...and proceeded to try and eat the little guys like chicken (I think the locals would pop them in whole).

Siem Reap's Pub Street. 

A couple of the people we drank with. She's a German/Russian musician who carries around an Iranian Satar. He is a Canadian record producer living in Los Angeles but building clean water wells in the Rift Valley.

Fish foot massage.

We decided to follow the crowd, and booked the tourist bus from 4 thousand islands, Laos, all the way to Siem Reap, Cambodia. A journey that would take 15 hours, hotel to hotel. We got suckered into the $30 deal to have the bus company get us our visa at the border. Turned out to be the right move: the travelers who decided to take care of it themselves were hit with so many $1 to $5 "fees", we only paid an extra $2 with a lot fewer headaches. As the other foreigners got off at various stops along the way, it got down to one Estonian guy and us, left in a desolate bus stop, waiting for the bus to take us the last leg of our journey.

Arriving in Siem Reap we found a tuk tuk driver who agreed to call our hotel to get directions (and not take us to the hotel of his choosing, this is a bit of a feat here). We dropped our stuff in the room and set out for a late dinner and a drink. I'm not sure if it was the 15 hour trip, the lack of sleep or food or what, but I was pretty taken aback by the full-on party we arrived into. I should have expected it I guess (it is called Pub Street...) but I was thinking about visiting ancient religious ruins, not parties 'til sunrise and sex tourism.

We were also a little surprised at the aggressiveness of some of the vendors and beggars. As the third dirty kid with a baby on their hip came up and assured me they didn't want money, "just milk from the store for the baby", and I denied them as their nimble fingers felt across my pockets, the child left us with a "fuck you, lady". I knew we were not in Laos anymore. I recognize that anytime extreme poverty meets with hoards of tourist dollars they have every right to get as much of it they can. It was just more jarring I think than Thailand or Laos or even India.

We were warned by our hotel owner not to trust our tuk tuk driver, and he encouraged us to arrange a tour with him. We were warned by our tuk tuk driver that the hotel owner bad mouths drivers, and then he set up his teenaged cousin/brother to drive us instead of him. Our young driver in the end complained of how his cousin didn't pay him anything, and asked for more tip. The Cambodians we came across who were not actively involved in relieving us of our money were incredibly warm and friendly and seemed happy to have us there (yes, maybe because their family and friends were making their living off us). I know that we (the oft-mentioned hoards) and our dollars (the ATMs only give USD!?!) brought all this on ourselves, it's just hard to suffer personally for the transgressions of the masses.

Angkor Wat is the big draw in Siem Reap, and, is its main redeeming feature. The whole site (30+ open temples and other structures) really do live up to the hype. I will admit we've been a little "templed out" for months now, but we were able to easily fill our 3 days, and wish we had more time. Unfortunately, our sunrise and sunset experiences did not blow us away, we were plagued with unimpressive weather, over-zealous guards wanting to kick us out as soon as the ball of fire hit the horizon (just as the good stuff gets started!) and an over-sleeping teenage driver. Still, the rare occasions when we stumbled across small paths and followed them to deserted and over-grown ruins were enough to satisfy our intrepid explorer fantasies.

(this was left off the original post, sorry!)

Next time, (and there will be a next time as Matt has more time-lapse to do than 3 days allow) we might stay away from town, and pack our own lunch (lunch at Angkor cost more than the veggie Khmer feast, with beer, we had for dinner). We will not go see the sunrise at 5am, and then tour temples, after coming home from Angkor What? the dance club at 3. We will also try to stay longer and combine bike riding with taking a tuk tuk for the farther sites. Finally, we will have to visit more of Cambodia, to get away from the isolated areas of concentrated tourists.

All in all we had a fabulous, albeit complicated, time there.


- Bree

And now a bunch of photos of Angkor:

Our hostel owner with us as we leave Siem Reap. After this photo was taken, he said "I run now." and he ran away.

Ellora and Daulautabad, Maharashtra, India

That night we went to Aurangabad, which is close to another set of ancient cave temples. We headed out in the morning to the Ellora Caves. Here there are three sections: more Buddhist Temples, a few Jainist and the very impressive Hindu caves. The centerpiece of which is the Kailasa temple. We managed to mostly avoid the big tour groups, though at one point Bree and I were swarmed by school kids wanting handshakes. 

We reached our cave temple saturation point and headed to Daulatabad, a sprawling fort that peaks with a citadel atop a massive rock outcropping. 

The fort was so coveted that after it was seized in the 1300s by Tughlak, the sultan of Delhi, he marched all the residents of Delhi to their new home in Daulatabad. However after a short time, water shortages changed the mind of the sultan, to which he order all the residents to return to Delhi. 

As we made our way towards the citadel, we passed several crumbling walls, a murky moat, and were faced with a narrow dark tunnel leading up. The design of the tunnel was said to have been so disorienting to any intruders that some would have taken their own lives after getting lost in the tunnels. In the tunnels were channels carved for smokescreens and hot oil to be poured. Now it's just a dark tunnel filled with bats and the nearly overwhelming stench of bat urine. Still almost enough to made you go crazy. Once through the tunnel, there wasn't much more to see but the view back down onto the rest of the fort was worth the trek up. 

We then got dinner in town. More veg Thalis. A thali is a set meal where you get a small amount of several dishes. They are usually pretty cheap and always very filling. From there we walked over to the train station. Next stop: Mumbai.

- Matt

Indian border to Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, India

Nepalis (among others) claim a saying regarding their apparent similarities to India, "same, same.... but different". From the Indian point of view I think it should be something like "same, same.... but more so!"

Crossing the border into India went smooth enough (considering the hassle it was to get the Indian visa in Kathmandu), and securing a shared jeep to Gorakhpur was easy. We waited while our driver, with his red chalky mouth and whiny grating voice harassed people walking by, trying to squeeze a couple more passengers in the jeep. We only had 14 people in a jeep that comfortably sat 10, and, in the US, would legally carry 6. We agreed to pay more than we had hoped, with the repeated assurance that the price included our bags. We squeezed in a couple more passengers and were on our way. Once we stopped at a gas station the driver and his assistant proceeded to shake down the other passengers, pointing at bags, demanding more money. One Nepali man didn't want to pay full fare for his kid, since the driver had forcibly removed the child from his seat and the kid had shared the driver's seat. I think the kid actually enjoyed himself since he got to play with the steering wheel when the driver was not paying attention. A couple of heated discussions later (where a Nepali man was informed that this is India and this is how it worked) we were on our way. There were a few more stops for food and chewing tobacco, and then were were at the Gorakhpur train station, in the dark and fog. We got our bags, and left the driver holding the other passenger's bags hostage for more money. For once over paying benefitted us.

Gorakhpur is a major entry point to the Indian rail system for travellers coming overland from Nepal. Our other option was a 10hr bus ride to Varanasi, which, I know I'm way premature in saying this, but I'm over that kind of bus ride. People at the station did not seem accustomed to having many foreigners pass through and we were stared at intently everywhere we went. We had booked first class on the last train of the night, which was to our surprise half the price of AC3 on any earlier trains. Our lesson on over-paying from earlier that night came too late, but really, we should have known the price was too good to be true. North India (we later found out) was in the early days of a fog bank that would eventually delay trains up to 30hrs. I'm not sure if other people were on wait lists, or waiting for delayed trains, but by the time our train was due every horizontal surface of the freezing cold, dirty, foggy station was covered with whole families bedded down for the night. Our 11:30 train was only delayed 2hrs (Happy New Year!) but when it arrived they needed to add the "first class" car to the train, essentially just for Matt and I. Indian railways is the largest employer in the world, but no employee was to be seen that night. A soldier patrolling the platform and another passenger ushered us into the car, made sure we found a compartment that locked, and then warned us to lock the door behind then. We did. We huddled together in our prison-like cell, freezing under our inadequate sheet, but made it to Varanasi only 6hrs late. 

Some of the ghats and boats on the Ganges.

The fires warming up on one of the burning ghats, looks like a scene from Apocalypse Now. 

Eventually the sun burned its way through the fog.

Bathing by a temple.

Laundry day (everyday is laundry day really). 

The ghats  many epochs of architecture, all 

Roofs are for flying kites, laundry, cooking, and drying cow pies. 

The nightly Brahmin river blessing ceremony (or puja) at Dasaswamedh Ghat. 

The Lonely Planet issues repeated warnings to "brace yourself" and "persevere" in Varanasi. Maybe we were lucky that the tout-rich tourist area of Kathmandu had numbed us to the constant offers of rides or products. We actually found that on the ghats the boat men were not that persistent, and it only took a couple of no's for them to leave us alone. 

Away from the river, Varanasi is hectic, bordering on chaotic. The guesthouse we stayed in was tucked into tight alleyways, where we had to dodge motorbikes, children, cows, water buffalo, not to mention cow and water buffalo droppings. We made use of a guide from the hotel for a crash-course in 

Hinduism and a tour through some of the temples non-hindus can visit. The tour naturally ended at a silk shop where we got to "see the weaving and then see some finished product", with no requirements to buy, of course! 

Wandering the ghats (which are the steps down to the Ganges river, each built at a different time and having a different personality) was fascinating. The mixture of the mundane (doing laundry, bathing) and the remarkable (ceremonies, human cremations) that plays out along the river is spectacular. 

We took the ubiquitous pre-dawn boat ride on the ganges. The phrase "oh, the humanity" came to mind. Not related to any disaster, but rather in the realization that so many people's lives are tied to this river in vastly different ways, yet in an essential way to each of them. 

- Bree