Bangkok on Valium

That was the description that an ex-pat gave me of Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City, officially, or if you're licensed by the government to give tourist information. Otherwise, Saigon), as we were riding on the bus from Cambodia. I think that's about right. There are still plenty of shops, markets, clubs, and traffic, but it's not as overwhelming as Bangkok. Crossing the street is difficult, but it's not a bloodsport.

My first two thoughts on entering Saigon:
1) "The biker gangs here must be super-competitive." For every car, there are probably 200 or more motorbikes. Vietnamese fashion allows for two kinds of hats: the conical, traditional farmer hat, and motorbike helmets.

2) "Who won the war again?" There are shops, neon lights, commerce, entrepreneurs everywhere--consumers, shoppers, and capitalism fill the streets of Saigon. Not exactly a socialist paradise.

A few other memorable experiences...
I went to the War Remnants Museum, which is the main museum in Saigon for the "American War." Very interesting to see the Vietnamese side of things, or at least the propagandized version of it. Think: pictures of LBJ where he's posed and shouting in a very Hitler-esque look. It did bother me a little bit, especially the particular arguments they used to demonize Americans and glorify themselves. They used two arguments that didn't work in concert at all. First, they claimed that the Americans were mercilessly and senselessly killing thousands of Vietnamese villagers for no other reason than barbarism. Second--and they make this claim more at the Cu Chi tunnels--they claimed that many of the Vietnamese villagers were fighting alongside and supporting the VC cause. So were Americans bombing these villages without reason, or were they overreacting to a set of awful circumstances that the the VC intentionally created?

Speaking of the Cu Chi tunnels, I took a tour of them. They're about an hour or so outside of Saigon, and they were used to sneak supplies through to various VC channels, and as a hideout for villagers. The size of the tunnels is really unbelievable--some of them were maybe up as tall as my ankle. The ones that we got down into (which I think were slightly enlarged for tourists) were just big enough so that if I squatted all the way to the ground, I could fit. And the air down there is unbearably hot and thick, even before the claustrophobia kicks in.

When I went through all these history-tourism sites, I definitely felt a range of emotions. I saw all of the pictures of the Agent Orange victims, and it's heartbreaking. The use of Agent Orange goes against everything I'm proud about as an American--human rights, decency in war, etc.--and there's no doubt that hurts. Seeing the propaganda posters--not being displayed as propaganda posters, but as historical record--that showed America as evil and our soldiers as barbaric made me angry. I know we deserve a lot of it. My Lai and napalm really did happen. Still made me mad. I don't mind America being criticized among Americans, or even among our enemies--it's when our dirty laundry is aired for the world to see that I get mad.

Naturally, after a few days of city-dwelling and browbeating, I'd had enough. Time for the beach...again haha.

Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Beach

For my first day and a half in Sihanoukville, I felt like the place was treading perilously on the boundary between heaven and hell. Beautiful waters, good sun, and cheap food. But the beach is maybe 20 feet from surf to concrete, the place is packed with Westerners all of their accoutrements i.e. beggars, drug dealers, scam artists, etc.

And besides that, I stepped on a sea urchin while out on a snorkel tour. The snorkel mask was broken (as were 2/3 of the masks), so I was trying to fix it, treading water, and I stepped on the sea urchin. The dive operator had forgotten his first aid kit on shore, so he didn't have a needle to get the spines out. So he takes a snorkel pipe and starts whacking at my foot for no less than 10 minutes...which would be plenty painful, even if I didn't have sea urchin spines in my foot. I figured he knew what he was doing--you know, lived on the beach his whole life, seen this kind of thing before--and of course he was totally clueless. Eventually, he gave in to the demands of a Swedish doctor on board and took me back to the mainland (the operator preferred riding around for another 7 hours on the boat and finishing the tour), where he made me pay for the tour and for a moto taxi to a clinic. After getting a shot for the pain and consulting with my insurance company, I found a better clinic and got the spines out. As I sit here writing this, 12 days later, the spine wounds are healed. The bruises from the operator still give me a little bit of a gimp.

So all of that was pretty bad. Then I realized I was in the best possible place to recuperate. That night, I went to a traditional apsara dance place, had a good meal, supported the former street kids putting on the show. Then I found a quiet bar right on the water, laid down on some pillows in the sand, drank my White Russian, and read my book. The next day, I took a moto down to a place called Otres Beach--it had all of the accomodations of the more crowded beaches, except no one was there. Laid down on a hammock, sipped my watermelon shake, had a baguette, and watched the waves. I stopped worrying. Sometimes life has to slap you a little bit for your own good.

Phnom Penh

Phnom Penh seems to get a pretty harsh rap among travelers--too small, too quiet, not much to see. I think I agree with all of those statements, but for me, they were the charm of the Cambodian capital. For one thing, the capital fits the country. Cambodia is much poorer and has a much smaller population than Vietnam or Thailand, and so Phnom Penh is bound to be a little more modest than Bangkok, Saigon, or Hanoi. It's charms are subtler, but I found them to be more enjoyable than Bangkok's. Take the royal palaces, for instance. Bangkok's palace complex is a must-see: huge golden stupas, an ornate Emerald Buddha temple, huge palace, expansive grounds, all in the middle of the city. In Phnom Penh, the palace is much smaller, and the colors are less flashy--but they're much easier to take in. You're not overstimulated from 25 different corners, as a first-time visitor to Bangkok's palace can be. You can quietly make your way through the shrines and actually enjoy the architecture, as opposed to drowning in the glitz. There's less Disney in Phnom Penh.

While in the city, I took the chance to go to the Tuol Sleng Museum, aka S-21, where thousands of the Khmer Rouge's prisoners were tortured and interrogated before being taken to the Killing Fields just outside the city. It felt like the Khmer Rouge used similar tactics (though far more brutal, and on a far larger scale) to Pinochet's goons in Chile. Tuol Sleng was a secondary school, not far from the city center, before Pol Pot's men took over. When you go there, it still looks like a school--chalk boards still standing, with iron beds and other remnants of the dark history of the place still in the rooms. Pinochet liked to use prosaic settings as torture centers too--an office in the middle of a brownstone neighborhood in the city center, or the soccer stadium. While Pol Pot was very different in a whole host of ways--for instance, he apparently largely emptied Phnom Penh of it's residents, pushing them into the countryside--it feels like this transformation of the everyday and the innocent and even fun into an instrument of a brutally oppressive regime is a tactic that these despots get some special sick pleasure out of.

Other than that, I spent most of the rest of my time in Phnom Penh exploring the streets and hanging out with a Quebecker named Antoine. Not a bad guy--an artist, a little bit older than me, biking around SE Asia for 6 months with a friend of his. Cracked a few beers by the river, and found out what the moto-taxi drivers do at night: they turn into pimps and drug dealers. "Marijuana man? Want lady, man?" Must've heard that 15 times in the few hours we were walking around the riverfront that night. Yes we both turned them down.

I meant to go straight to Vietnam after Phnom Penh, but it turned out I could only get a 15-day visa, or at least if I wanted to get it that day. I also knew that I could only get a 30-day visa once I got into Thailand (or at least without having to spend more money and waste more time). So, being as I'd had my fill of Phnom Penh after 2 and a half days, and my visa to Vietnam didn't start for 3 days after that, I headed down to Sihanoukville--beach resort town 4 hours southwest of the capital.

Angkor Wat

Going to Angkor Wat for the first time felt a little bit like going to Disney as a kid. It's really expensive, there are toooons of tourists, it's hot as heck--but holy cow is it great. Also like Disney, it's all almost too perfect, like cartoonishly beautiful. Angkor Wat has been called "perfection in stone"--and you get it as soon as you see it. Having been to a few other Angkor-style ruins at Ayuthaya and Phanom Rung, I had a sense for what a really well-preserved, millenium-old temple looked like. Angkor Wat is both much larger and in better shape than either of those, and the prangs are just incredible. Once you actually walk across the moat and up the approach--like most great temples in SE Asia, the length of the approach is directly proportional to the importance of the temple, so this was a pretty long one--you get to the outer walls that surround the 3 main prangs.

These outer walls were what really took me a long time to get over. They're covered in these massive and incredibly detailed bas-reliefs, showing stories from Hindu mythology and Angkorean history. Each wall is maybe 100 feet long, and maybe there are 2 or 3 walls per side of the temple. Every inch of the wall is covered in these bas-relief sculptures. And there are pillars, probably hundreds of them around the complex, each with bas-relief "wallpaper" type patterns--except it's not a stamped pattern. Each little flower in the pattern is slightly different, and there have to be hundreds of flowers on each pillar.

Going along with the Disney comparison, there are also several other temples right around Angkor Wat (no Epcot, thank G-d). Probably my favorite was Bayon. Bayon doesn't give that "wow" factor from a distance like Angkor--kind of rubble-y looking from far away. But you go up close, and there are 54 carved faces (all of the same Angkor-era kind) that give these Mona Lisa-esque look from and to all directions. If you've ever seen the show Legends of the Hidden Temple, I swear these faces were Olmec. Plus you get to climb all of the ruins, which is pretty fun. After that, we went to Ta Phrom, which is a pretty fascinating set too. Specifically, it was the set for one of the scenes in Tomb Raider, haha. All of these massive banyan trees climb over and around the ruins--so neat to see nature reclaiming these temples.

On my second day at Angkor, I mainly just sat at Angkor. There are a ton of other temples in the area, or some a little further afield, but I wanted to soak in Angkor a little longer. Once you've seen each little detail (which you can't really do, but ah well), it's really nice to sit there for a while. The air--while humid and stifling at first--is calm, and I hadn't gotten enough of being that close to one of the wonders of the world in one three-hour trip. So I sat for a while longer. Eventually, a Cambodian English student named Si Nahp approached me and asked if she could sit with me. I figured she wanted to sell me something--everyone does--but she only wanted to practice her English with me, which I obliged her to do for a few hours as we wandered around Angkor and to a few other sets of ruins not too far.

One other thought. A lot of people only go to Cambodia to see Angkor. I was thinking about it, and apparently Angkor is seen as the cultural heart of the country. Struck me as really strange that someone would go so quickly to the heart of a place, especially if they weren't planning on seeing anything else there. Maybe like flying from Cambodia to see the Super Bowl, knowing nothing about football or America. What a strong introduction, but sort of an empty one if it's all that you know of the place. I felt like I was out of place a little bit.

Anyway, after 3 nights and 2 days in Siem Reap (the town next to Angkor), I took a bus down to Phnom Penh.