Time Out

Since I left, myself and others have called this trip a vacation but I've come to realize that that title is completely wrong.

The term vacation conjures up images of pina coladas on the beach or some alpine ski resort with hot tub and pool. What ever it is that I'm doing now is very, very far from that.

Whether I'm trying to get across Bangkok to catch a night train or looking for shelter after hitting the ground in Ban Lung, this is a lot of work. Additionally, covering large distances in short time frames (a scenario which has become almost routine for me) is extremely exhausting. For example, 2 days ago I got on a bus in Phnom Penh at 6:30AM bound for Bangkok. After arriving in BKK at 9:30PM, I had to negotiate a fair price to the train station hoping that I would be able to get a sleeper berth for the 12 hour train to Ubon Ratchathani leaving at 10:30PM. As is often the case, things didn't go according to plan and every seat was full on that train. There were non-air con seats available on the last train of the night at 11:50PM and after weighing my options, I decided this was the way to go. A miserable 12 hours later, I had to find shelter in Ubon.

Next to my backpack, my closest companion these days is uncertainty. You never know if there will be enough seats on the bus or if it will make it to the destination in time for you to catch the next leg of your journey. Contingency plans are a must and almost get used as often as they become unnecessary. The huge question marks looming at the end of any day really do add a whole level of stress to this life that I didn't even consider before leaving.

Of course all the transportation worries could be avoided with 1 direct flight and though affordable shelter can be hard to find, there is always an abundance of hotels and nice rooms available which is where a budget comes in. For the same amount of money, I could travel for 1 month or 1 year and neither path would intersect. Those who knew me in DC knew that I was a slave to my budget to save for this trip and not much has changed. I spend around $30/day on average including all transportation, food and shelter costs. I am also constantly looking for places to cut corners. The other day I walked into a store that sells music to put on your ipod and convinced the owner that their selection was worse than the one down the street and it would be a good business decision to trade music with me and expand his collection rather than just sell it to me. That saved me about $5 (which is a night's stay).

Enough bitterness, I wouldn't still be out here if it wasn't worth it now would I? Despite all the tribulations, there are extremely rewarding moments throughout. Though transportation is stressful, getting to my destination a day and half earlier than I should have is endlessly gratifying. And travel in general gets easier the longer you do it. I have come back to Thailand and feel like I'm returning to an old familiar friend. I know how much stuff should cost, I know how their transportation system works and I know quite a few words in the local language. Though I leave this country soon, the open road isn't nearly as scary as it used to be.

Uncertainty has changed from a stressor to a source of excitement and spending 30 hours in transit gets easier with every passing excursion. No longer new and exciting, this transient life is finally familiar and I wouldn't have it any other way. I head to Laos tomorrow because I'm already restless having spent 2 days in this town. I've finally hit my stride and don't plan on slowing down any time soon. And why would I? When moments like this make it all worth it.

Ridiculous Situations Seem to Be the Rule, Not the Exception

The first place I ever felt like I truly arrived at the ends of the earth was Ban Lung... but a lot happened between Siem Reap and there.

After reading in the guidebook and asking around I was fairly confident that I could make it to Ban Lung in 3 days. Although it was pretty much due east of Siem Reap, the lack of paved roads or bridges over the Mekong required that I head all the way south to just outside Phnom Penh and then back north again.

After running around Siem Reap looking for a bus to take me the farthest on the first day, I eventually booked a ticket to Kratie (which is the stupidest transliteration ever because it's pronounced Krawtcheh... saying Kratie got me plenty of blank stares for awhile). Getting a bus with good air conditioning is like winning the lottery and it wasn't my lucky day so most of the ride was pretty toasty. The entire time a group of locals were talking loudly and laughing about something but I couldn't figure out what. Eventually, a Khmer girl in the seat in front of me turned around and explained to me that the woman at the center of attention had two younger husbands and this made her quite a curiosity.

Lena continued to strike up a conversation with me by asking me all about where I was from and how long I planned on staying in Cambodia. She explained all about how she is getting married in a month to a man almost twice her age but that isn't nearly as unusual as the other woman on the bus. She eventually explained how she has had foreigners stay with her in her house outside of Kratie plenty of times before and that she would love for me to stay the night with her family.

Before I knew it, the bus stopped by her house and she looked at me and asked whether I was coming or not. Without any time to really think it through, I grabbed my stuff and got off the bus. Lena, her fiance and I dropped our stuff off in her house and went to the Mekong for a swim. She told me to grab some shampoo if I had it as well. After walking across the street, down an embankment and across a large expanse of dry river bed we got to the water.

I stuck my foot in and was shocked by how hot the water felt. She assured me that it was cooler farther from shore so I swam out. The first foot and a half of water was probably around 80-85 degrees but it dropped dramatically below that. I swam around a bit and then washed my hair. Showering in the Mekong under a setting sun was probably not something I will forget for a long time.

After this, Lena and her mother started preparing dinner and I started preparing for whatever I was going to have to eat out of courtesy. Right as we were about to eat, much of her extended family showed up with cases of beer. Dinner was pretty good but I didn't much care for the cow stomach or liver. I ended up sticking mostly to white rice and stir fried vegetables.

After dinner, glasses full of ice were passed around as well as beers. Everyone filled their glass and gave a loud cheers and drank the whole thing. After a refill they repeated this ritual and made sure that I did the same instead of just sipping. Lena told me that they were trying to get me drunk but I let her know that I had been working in a bar for the last 2 weeks and I didn't think there was enough beer around. They continued their ruinous strategy until they were sufficiently tanked and then things got fun. Everyone forgot that I don't speak Khmer and I was just trying to figure out what the hell was going on. Enjoying friends and family over good food and drinks truly is a universal thing. All in all it was a really fun night.

The next morning, Lena's father tried to convince me to stay for a couple more days but I needed to head out towards Ban Lung. I packed up my stuff and said goodbye to my gracious hosts.

More on Ban Lung later but check the flickr page for more pictures and descriptions.

On the Road, Again.

Well my brief stint in Cambodian employment has been prematurely cut short. Long story short, the owner sees employment in his bar as a tourist attraction and not as a viable job so he had no intention of following through on a pay increase that he promised from the very get go. Oh well, I got about one and a half solid weeks of fun and money out of it and although I will be losing a small amount of money during my stay here, I did get 2 free t shirts and some astronomical number of free drinks out of those assholes.

People have been wondering what my living conditions have been like while I'm here. I've been staying in a guesthouse called the Mandalay Inn. For $6.50/night I get a TV, fan, hot shower and wireless internet. It's a bit more expensive than other places I could stay but what was most appealing was their claim that it "look expensive but not." I checked and sure enough it not expensive and they came down on the price since I was staying for awhile.

Food in Cambodia is nothing to write home about (well I guess that is what I'm doing right now but whatever). Most of it is pretty bland except for the curries which are not spicy at all but have plenty of flavor. I try to eat at least 1 meal a day for $.50 which is usually just a packet of ramen noodles fried with chili sauce, vegetables, salt, sugar and oil. High class? no, but it is filling. The street stalls in town sell all kinds of fried noodles or rice with meat for $1 a dish which is usually my dinner. Again, pretty bland but filling none the less.

Well these past 2 weeks have been the longest I've spent in any one place since I've left and now it's time for me to get moving again. I'll be heading to Ban Lung, the provincial capital of the Northeastern province of Cambodia where there are plenty of waterfalls and a volcanic lake to enjoy. It'll take me 3 days of overland travel to get there since the roads are sooo bad but I've heard great things about the destination. Internet access will be intermittent so expect fewer blog posts in the near future. After that, I'll be heading into Laos to meet up with some Swedish friends I made during my time here and then Vietnam beyond that (more on them later).

ahhhh sweet sweet unemployment... I'm back!

You Don't Have to Go Home But You Can't Stay Here

I was never entirely sure whether taking this job was going to be a good idea. Cambodia (and all of Southeast Asia for that matter) is getting hotter by the day which scares the hell out of me when I consider how miserably hot it is already. The pay is about $15 a night; enough to break even and then make a very small profit. Dealing with drunk foreigners is always a real treat (the Irish are consistently the most rowdy/drunk) and lastly, this is about as far from a cultural experience as I could get seeing as how very few if any locals stop in.

All things considered though, this is turning out to be an absolute blast! My nights start at 8PM when things are pretty slow. Usually just a few people sit at the tables outside and take advantage of happy hour specials. By about 10:30 things start to pick up as any number of tour groups come in asking for pitchers of long islands or whiskey buckets (half a bottle of Thai whiskey, coke and redbull served in a bucket with ice). After the initial rush things still stay pretty busy but there is always enough time to talk to people at the bar.

The bar is named Angkor What?, an obvious play on the similarly named temple complex nearby.
Described as a “Siem Reap institution [which] manages to pack them in every night” containing “regular drink deals to keep the punters well and truly liquefied” by Lonely Planet, we really do succeed in keeping everyone sufficiently inebriated. There are only 3 bars in town which stay open later than 11 (of which Angkor What? is one) which contributes to the nightly crowds.

Working conditions aren't too bad at all. There is no air conditioning but fortunately there are plenty of fans directly above the bar to keep us cool. Drinking on the job is not permitted but rather encouraged which always keeps things interesting behind the bar.

The job so far is a lot of fun and my living conditions aren't half bad (more on that later). The days are hot, the nights are cool and the fun almost never stops... For example, on my first night, the other bartender, the owner, some friends and I stayed after we closed and drank through the night. Stumbling my way home in broad daylight left me nothing else but the thought of how in the hell I got myself into this situation and what is in store for the weeks to come.

A Slight Delay

My trip through Thailand was a lot of fun but upon entry to the country you are only issued a 30 day visa. Just a couple days after Pat left, my visa expired so I had to book it for a border to avoid being fined upon exiting the country.

Wanting to take care of the southern part of my SE Asia circuit first before the heat became too intense, I hopped a bus for the Cambodian border from Bangkok. The border crossing at Poipet is filled with people trying to make you pay more money than you need too. Someone even went so far as to type out a ridiculously long guide to making this border crossing which you can find here. You need to acquire a Cambodian visa which many travel agencies at the border will arrange for you (they charge $10 more than the actual cost of the visa though). If you want to buy it for the standard price of $20, you must be prepared to deal with all manner of government immigration officers who try to charge more and keep the difference. Obtaining one for the actual price seemed impossible so I settled for $22.5 and payed to grease the wheels of this ridiculous process.

Once you obtain your visa and get stamped into Cambodia, the next challenge awaits. The border town of Poipet is about a 3 hour drive down a terrible unpaved road from Siem Reap (my eventual destination). Few buses run down this road every day and the most common way of making the journey is by paying a cab to take you. Complicating matters, organized crime in the area has taken over the cab business in Poipet by extorting drivers and 'pressuring' those who dont comply into paying. All of this results in inflated prices for travelers which can only be controlled by finding others to share the cab with you.

Having read about these difficulties before hand, I met a Canadian named Nailin on the bus from Bangkok and we decided to try and find 2 more at the border to split the cab. We ran into two Norwegian girls named Moeyfrid and Tova at the border who shared our goal and after rendezvousing on the Cambodian side it was time to negotiate a fair price with the mafia cabs.

After much negotiation, they very reluctantly accepted my counter offer of $40 for the whole car and we were on our way to Siem Reap for much less than they initially offered.


Siem Reap is the closest town to the Angkor Archaeological Park and is thus inundated with tourists year round. I spent three days exploring the temples and there is a ridiculous amount of pictures of them on my flickr page. Their seamless integration with the approaching jungle was unlike anything I had ever seen before. My original plan was to leave Siem Reap for points onward shortly after using up my entire 3 day pass to the temple complex but something kind of ridiculous came up.

There are quite a few bars in the main tourist area and a couple of them draw a crowd all night long. I went into one called Angkor Wat? which had an American girl working behind the bar and I asked her how she came to be a bartender in this crazy city. After talking for awhile she informed that they were currently looking for more staff and that I should come by the next day if I was curious about it.

Anyways, after coming by a few days in a row and speaking with the owner of the bar, I was offered the job on the condition that I stay for three weeks. This wasn't an easy decision because I'm already hating the intense heat out here and delaying everything by 3 weeks would place me in SE Asia during the hottest part of the year. After checking assorted climate charts, I decided that this was too cool of an opportunity to pass up.

I've spent the last couple days getting all the logistical issues of staying here for 3 weeks taken care of. I negotiated a great room at a discounted price, figured out what is involved with extending my visa and found a great place to set up shop. Tonight is my first shift there so we'll see what happens but if nothing else, I'm sure all of this will be one hell of an experience.

More details on this ridiculous event to follow....

"I wasn't always cargo"

It's been 3 weeks since Pat got here and we moved so fast that I barely had an opportunity to write anything much less communicate with the western world. I've uploaded plenty of pictures to my Flickr account with long descriptions so I'll spare everyone the details. I will however describe what is involved with covering large distances in a short time without the use of air travel.

We spent 4 nights in the Thailand's second biggest city and northern provincial capital, Chiang Mai. That city was awesome and we managed to do a lot in our short time there. On the 5th day, we boarded an overnight train to Bangkok at 4:30PM.

Traveling great distances via a second class sleeper train really is the way to go. For about 800B, you are given a large chair to sit in during the daylight hours which faces another chair of the same type directly opposite. A table is placed between the two chairs for food or whatever use you may have. As night comes, the table is removed and the chairs turn into one bed while another is pulled down from the ceiling. You can easily close the curtains and sleep your way across the country.

So anyways, we boarded our train at 4:30pm and just chilled for awhile. Apparently, Pat learned of an amazing trick for making train travel even more pleasant than it already is. I wasn't sure of the specifics but know that it involved 700ml of Thai whiskey and a liter of Coke.

Bringing our own alcohol made us no friends on that train. The ladyboy waiter/train attendant was not very happy at all since he/she was not going to get any beer sales off of us. He even went so far as to hit Pat several times with a menu and then pout his way down the aisle. Unphased, we were even able to acquire ice for our drinks with the help of a couple of Aussies in the berth across from us. The rest of the train ride was pleasantly drunk and resisting the advances of the mustached ladyboy got more fun as the night went on.

We arrived in Bangkok's Hualamphong train station at around 6:30am. We killed some time, got some breakfast and boarded a 9 hour train to Surat Thani. This town offers mainland access to the islands of Koh Samui, Koh Tau and Koh Pha Ngan, the latter of which was our eventual destination. We were hoping to catch a speed boat there straight from the train but after hitting the ground in Surat Thani and taking a public commuter bus to the pier we quickly realized that we were too late to make it to Koh Pha Ngan that night.

Koh Pha Ngan is the home of the infamous Full Moon Party which occurs monthly on Had Rin (the beach's name) and plays host to thousands of travelers in one night. Finding reasonably priced shelter near the beach around the full moon can be very difficult or impossible depending on how late you are. Knowing this, we planned to be on the island several days before to get a bungalow in a good location and every day lost made it much harder.

After considering all options we decided to take the overnight ferry even though we had already been traveling for over 24 hours. A description of the ferry and pictures are located on my Flickr page so I wont get too far into it but suffice it to say, it was a boat filled with cargo and tons of backpackers all with the same goal as us.

The ferry pulled into Koh Pha Ngan at 530AM and we hit the ground running seeing every other backpacker as opposition in our goal to find the best/cheapest place in a good location. After several hours, plenty of running and hearing repeatedly “sorry room is fool,” we finally found a livable bungalow and a bed to lay down on after 31 hours of travel.

It's funny how your budget increases the longer you walk around and the hotter it gets. Oh well, I guess you have to make compromises sometimes.

That's it for now, be sure to check my Flickr and Youtube pages for updated content.