Contextless Quotes

I recently came across my old travel journal from my nine-month backpacking trip through Japan, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Nepal, India, Turkey, Syria, and Lebanon. Reading through it left me very, very amused. From it, here are some quotes for your enjoyment, taken completely out of their original context:

‘I’ve got the shits and I’m tired of traveling: Why I’m not cut out for this’

‘That was a terrible, terrible idea.’

‘My hotel (read: rooftop littered with rubbish costing a whopping $10 to lay a mattress on) is a dump but it’s all I could find.’

‘She was driving me crazy. Hopefully that thought will be a comfort once the solitude starts getting to me.’

‘The highlight of the night was probably me trying to say in Arabic, “My dear, you are so beautiful!” Instead, I managed to say, “My dear, you are so beautiful and big!” Ktiir vs. Kbiir. God…’

‘Loon was our raft captain who seemed either perplexed or offended when I tried to explain that he shares his name with our state bird.’

‘I’ll write more later about the moral conundrum going through my head at that moment.’

‘I met an 82 year old woman today who has been a Peace Corps volunteer three times – all after retirement. At one point she was the oldest current volunteer on the planet.’

“I just had a psychosomatic stress reaction to the Lao music coming from the bungalow next to mine.’

“Phnom Penh’s been great – almost too much fun, seeing as how a large part of our time was spent at a genocide museum.’

‘The hammock: I believe I’ve found my soulmate.’

‘I asked the weird Chinese girl in our hostel if she still had the tarantulas in the plastic bag up in her room. “Uh, I think so!” was her response.’

‘Suddenly serious, she told me, “Walking this path made me believe in God for the first time. It’s too beautiful, too incredible.”‘

‘I woke up at 4:30am to the sound of an explosion muffled by earplugs and a quick shake of the building.’

‘We danced to horrible techno music and took a “hard man” shot (snort salt, take tequila shot, squeeze lime into your eye).’

‘There’s something profoundly tragic about a people fighting justly to get back what was stolen from them even as there is little to no hope of success…It saddened me immensely, that rally. I walked away with a heavy heart and a bruised faith.’

‘”Are those nunchucks you got there?” I said absentmindedly toward, but not to, a rather pudgy but bulldoggish man on a sidewalk near Beirut’s waterfront. His posture snapped up immediately, as if he had been strolling along, just daring some ignorant fool to comment on his ‘chuks. “Yes,” he said. “Because I am master.”‘

‘I’m so lucky to be doing what I’m doing. It’s amazing, really.’

The Splendor of Angkor and the Screams of Prepubescent Salespeople

I just finished my third and last day of exploring the temples of Angkor here in Siem Reap, Cambodia and although I’m a bit templed-out, the experience of such magnificent structures still leaves me dumbfounded.

Here’s a short history of the area: The Hindu Khmer empire grew hugely powerful in the early 11th century. The center of their influence was here at Angkor, where a massive city of over a million people developed. The city itself is lost to the imagination; only the gods were deemed worthy of stone houses, all else lived in bamboo or wooden huts. What was left to be overgrown by the surrounding jungle after the empire collapsed in the 14th century are dozens of temples, some gargantuan and some tiny but all beautifully designed. You could take weeks to explore all the the remnants of Khmer religious life here, but in my experience three days is a perfect amount.

My Chinese, German, and Swiss travel buddies and I booked a  tuk tuk and driver to ferry us around the farthest temples on the first day. The last two days, only my German friend Peter and I rode bicycles the 10-20 miles to the closer complexes. Biking, although incredibly tiring in the extreme heat, turned out to be the much more exciting means of getting around Angkor. We often waved down passing tuk tuks to skitch (hold on to the side of the tuk tuk with our hands, letting them pull us along lazily) a mile or two before the vehicles had to make a stop. The best part of getting there and back was holding on to the back of a truck overflowing with burnt sticks going only a few miles per hours faster than if we could bike. The locals we slowly passed on this well-needed 4-6 mile rest found this to be a surprisingly hilarous scene. I think we’re the talk of the town this evening.

I’ll let the pictures I will eventually post speak for themselves as far as the grandness of the temple complexes, but I can’t let this post pass without referencing the hundreds of kids and young adults working at the makeshift shops and food stands adjacent to every temple. These watering holes cater to the hordes of tourists like me (though I bristle at the thought of being called a tourist, it’s what I was today) who need a drink of cold water, a bite to eat, or just a chair in the shade to cool off in. In addition, there are another 5-15 irresistibly cute little kids at every drop off point carrying little knick knacks, books, or postcards that they try so adorably try to sell.

Let me paint a picture for you. Imagine pulling up to a temple on your bicycle. Before you even begin to brake you hear “SAH, SAH, HANDSOME MAN!! YOU WAHN SOMETHEEN TO DRINK?! COLD DRINK SAH? YOU WANT FOOD SAH?!” coming from not one, but five teenage girls standing at stalls just next to one another, waving menus high in the air. At first you think this must be an anomaly, perhaps this temple is known for it’s ultra competitive shopowners. Throughout the day, in varying degrees and with differing age groups (strangely though, usually the same age group at each individual temple), you find out that no, it’s just the way things work here. If anyone of you is feeling like no one pays attention to you, just hop a plane to Angkor Wat and walk around for a few days.

But that’s not the end of it. After the hurdle of screaming shopowners comes the bunny-like hordes of sickeningly cute kids holding their wares up to your face and saying, “sah, buy scarf from me only 1 dollar, sah!” or “sah, you want postcards? only one dollar, sah!” I’ve never been called sir (or “sah!”) so much in my life. So you buy a few things to appease your assaulted conscience, but something strange happens. They’re everywhere (literally everywhere! even at the bathrooms!), they don’t stop coming up to you and they don’t get any less adorable. You might think to say “oh but I already have postcards! I already have that book! I already have your little paper birds!” but they will swiftly knock back your reasonable excuse with a puppy dog stare and the simple, “but this one is different, sah!”

Along with exploring magnificent temples, so went my last three days. Feast on my  gallery below – this is a bit different, you’ll have to click on each individual photo to see a larger version of it. Enjoy!

Straight from Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, Ta Prohm temple

One of the many towers in the Angkor Wat complex

Angkor Wat just after sunrise

Peter, Catherine, and Ines, my travel buddies at the temples of Angkor

The entrance to Bayon, a temple famous for the 262 stone faces and heads carved into it.

My friend Peter and I in front of one of the many mammoth trees that seem to grow right out of the temples’ stones.

Me on a hill temple overlooking Angkor Wat

Angkor inscription lit by sunrise

Skoal and Burger Night

I’m coming up on two months of backpacking in southeast asia. It’s been a blast but not without a small share of minor annoyances and weary spells. I’ve developed a routine of travel that includes washing my underwear in guesthouse sinks with shampoo as a detergent, learning to pack my pag with such precision that not a millimeter of space is wasted, avoiding the ubiquitous touts and scam artists, and asking the right questions when it comes to what’s the best place/sight/experience in town. My moneybelt smells like a boy’s high school locker room, my bag is beginning to change from white and blue to brown and stained, and my repertoire of hilarous/disgusting/crazy travel stories is growing steadily. It’s been a really good experience in so many ways and it’s not over yet. Wonderful.

I’ve been traveling for the last week and a half with a German named peter, an English-Canadian named Steven, and a Swiss named Ines.  We’ve formed a little travel family and it has been great. The other night we celebrated Chinese New Year in Phnom Penh with some mildly drunk tuk tuk (open air taxi contraptions) drivers outside our guesthouse. They gave us beers and almost forced up to share a home brewed liquour that (I think) they called skoal. Every other sentenced was punctuated with a “HAPPY NEW YEAR CHINA! CHO MOY (cheers)!” It was hilarious.

After two months of (usually) delicious Thai, Lao, and Khmer food, we were all hankering for burgers and our room had a kitchen so last night we went to the supermarket, bought all the supplies and made a feast. It was brilliant.

Tomorrow we’re off to explore Angkor Wat, an ancient temple that for years lay unknown and overgrown by the jungle. It’s the largest temple complex in the world; I’m spending three days on it. Should be great!