I’ll start today with “street” food, just because it’s relevant right now.
When you travel in the developing world, and you have relatively little money that you expect to last an unreasonably long time, nothing beats the world’s mobile food vendors. Each region has its specialties. New York has hot dogs. Mexico City has tortas and tamales. Southeast Asia has ducks, chickens and - in Cambodia, anyway - fried tarantulas.
They’re delicious. And you’re not supposed to eat any of them, not even one, according to almost any Western source of advice.
Bacteria, they say. Unsafe temperatures! Two chicken curries and your arms will turn six shades of green, fall off, come alive and eat your brains right out of your very head!
Unfortunately, street food everywhere is so tasty and so cheap that you’re morally obligated to ignore every one of those warnings. The best course of action, I’ve found, is to acknowledge beforehand that you’ll spend at least three days in various stages of horrible, gut-wrenching agony and just, well, dive in.
Which is where our run-down of the last two weeks begins. It started as a barely-noticeable, queasy sort of uncertainty. Sort of like having butterflies in one’s stomach before a big performance. At the time, I wrote it off as a bored God playing one of his sick little games with me.
Unfortunately, the butterflies turned out to be some sort of food-borne, flesh-eating bacteria who, even more unfortunately, had selected me as their target. All that bears mentioning about the illness itself is that it lasted approximately two days, and that the agony was indescribable.
I still support street food.
Upon my recovery, we set out for Cambodia. From the Thai border, our goal was Siem Reap and the ubiquitous Angkor temple complex - reputedly one of the wonders of the ancient world.
I’ll bypass descriptions of the Angkor wonder itself - pictures are worth a thousand words, so they say. Check out TrekEarth (www.trekearth.com) for some ruins-related entertainment.
Even as we passed through Cambodian passport control, the contrast became clear as to the differences between these very close neighbors. Thailand had been described to me, by one traveler, as a ‘playground’ for young backpackers - an easy country, full of culture and infrastructure, a place that had put itself in fine order for tourists.
Cambodia is … very different.
It hasn’t yet been 30 years since Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge and their Holocaust-esque “Year Zero” social experiment were brought to a halt by invading Vietnamese forces. Cambodia remains one of the most heavily-armed, heavily-mined countries in the world. Instead of highwayside reminders to avoid littering, painted signs urge residents to turn in their weapons to the authorities. Although the scenery is almost identical to that in neighboring Thailand, poverty is clearly more defined as one moves farther into rural Cambodia.
At the same time, tourism around the stunning Angkor temples was booming - even though it’s the wet season, when tourism dollars drop across the region. Tour operators were bringing in busloads of European and Japanese sightseeing groups, and restaurants were populated, if not bustling.
Having left Siem Reap this morning, though, I’m left to wonder if Angkor marks an unusually heavy center of tourism in an otherwise sparsely-visited country. We’ve been only three hours in Phnom Penh, Cambodia’s capital - hardly enough to warrant a description yet.
One first impression, for now: the first cultural symbol that one encounters when entering Phnom Penh is a large, circular park surrounding a pedestal and a monument. What the monument is for, I have no idea - it’s just a six-foot-tall pistol. A six-shooter, to be exact. On a pedestal, in the middle of Phnom Penh.
We’ll see what happens.
Closing thoughts:
- I have to find out about the pistol monument.
- Next up: The “killing fields,” S-21, and other remnants of genocide.
Mmmm, what a week.
Shortly after preparing last week’s review of the Thai’s wrangling to define their democracy in Bangkok, I went off looking for that 10,000-person protest that was supposed to take place on the city’s streets June 16. As predicted, I failed miserably. Several centuries ago, the original Thai capital was sacked by the Burmese army. Fearing a complete loss of the Thai kingdom, the royalty fled south to present-day Bangkok.
“Here,” they declared, “we shall build a maze of streets so complex and infuriating that should the Burmese Army get this far, they’ll starve to the last man as they try to find even the simplest of locations!”
Indeed. Foiled by truly zany city planning and the beautiful-but-impossible Thai script, I took a night train north with a Canadian student whom I met in Bangkok.
The train, contrary to a number of beliefs about “substandard” developing-world trains, was excellent. Granted, it takes a certain brand of openness to board a midnight train at 3 a.m., curl oneself awkwardly between wooden benches, and fall asleep to an arbitrary cacophony of bells, whistles and vendors singing (in Thai, at 3 a.m.) about candy, soda and god knows what else.
Then again, at only three hours late, the State Railway of Thailand still beat the logistical pants off Amtrak.
Once one leaves Bangkok, it becomes clear how 60% of this country’s wealth is concentrated in the city. Agriculture dominates the landscape more and more as you move north. Surprising indeed was the sheer magnitude of “postcard” Asian images - rice paddies, bamboo shacks and water buffalo where we’re used to cattle.
At the same time, Thailand isn’t the edge of the earth. Most multinational corporations (especially, for whatever reason, 7-Eleven) make noticeable appearances on city streets. An incredible number of Thais speak English and there’s a pervasive feeling (in the media and on the streets) that Thailand defines a modern Southeast Asia for less-developed neighbors Laos, Cambodia and Burma.
I’ve been in the northern city of Chiang Mai for several days with Lawrence (the original Canadian gentleman) and a second Canadian whom we met on the train. Stories of tourism aside, it’s worth noting that we had a motorbike stolen yesterday.
If streets are arteries in this place, motorbikes are the blood cells; people, trucks and whatever else ends up in the road are undesirable cholesterol. It seemed to us that renting three motorbikes would serve both as transportion and unyielding fun - and we were right.
And then some jerk stole one of them as we slept, damning the lot of us to spend five hours at a local police station and, ultimately, costing a significant deal of money in insurance deductible payments.
Aside from this, the Thai people have been nothing but welcoming, smiling and helpful. Tomorrow it’s off again, ultimately for the Kingdom of Cambodia.
Closing thoughts:
- In a comment to a recent post, it was asked whether the unrest in Bangkok is due to fighting between government forces and rebels in the south or whether it was due to unhappiness at the continuing lack of democracy in Thailand (a military government continues to rule following the 2006 coup d’etat). I’m no expert, but all of the media that I saw in Bangkok focused on the situation with former prime minister Thaksin; it seems as if the fighting in the south is a far lesser priority for those in, and north of, Bangkok.
- Holy mass media! Al-Jazeera broadcasts, in English, all over Southeast Asia. It’s surprisingly similar to CNN, CBC, BBC, MSNBC and every other news network that isn’t FOX.
- And, thanks to Al-Jazeera, I finally found out about the Bangkok protest - when I saw it on the news. Apparently I was a week early.
- Coming soon: Cambodia.
Headlines like “(Ousted former Prime Minister) Thaksin Shinawatra slams junta over ‘victimisation’” and “Govt mulls state of emergency” aren’t exactly what I was expecting to see this morning as I pumped quarts of life-sustaining coffee into my jet-lagged body.
Apparently, that’s how out of touch we’ve been with the Thais since their military overthrew Thaksin in September. From the perspective of U.S. media, it was a simple affair: the military junta waited until unsuspecting old Thaksin took off to represent the kingdom at the United Nations, and rolled in with a few tanks to seize control bloodlessly over a few days’ time. Game over.
Au contraire,
says the (seemingly) anti-Thaksin Nation. More than 10,000 people, mostly supporters, showed up at a public video conference last night to hear what Thaksin had to say from his exile in London. Today, they’re all planning a big protest - something the papers seem to indicate isn’t a rare occurrence - and the sitting Thai government is talking state of emergency.Lesson learned: CNN doesn’t have all the answers, and English-language expatriate newspapers are printed worldwide. I’m going to start reading more of them, and so should you.
But back to coups d’etat and states of emergency. Despite the grandstanding, nothing seems out of whack at all from a sidestreet youth hostel near the center of the city. Granted, threats of martial law are enough to get the old blood pumping again if you’ve just stepped off of a 27-hour pan-Pacific air odyssey, but what I’ve seen so far is nothing short of replete calm and smiling faces
Life is going on, junta or not, and no one seems especially worried. The airport was still filled to the brim with backpackers and package tourists, soldiers are still wearing the look of ambivalence that you see on any soldier whose only job is to stand watch, and I can still walk down the street and buy close to anything from the vendors who line Sikhumvit Soi 38 in Bangkok almost 24 hours a day.
Closing thoughts:
- “Jet lag” is way overrated. As an international studies major whose focus is Latin America, I’ve never had the acute pleasure of jet lag as I’ve never flown long east-west journeys. From what I’d read, I was expecting something that could at least rival a mild hangover. In a certain way, it’s disappointing.
- I speak almost no Thai, a fact that I’d conveniently forgotten until landing yesterday. By “almost no” Thai, I mean that I can say “hello” and “three” (but no other numbers). This is disconcerting. The goal for the day is to learn “yes,” “no,” and the numbers 1-2 and 4-10.
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