Dear Family and Friends,
Tuesday, August 7, Martha and Dani got up early in the morning to call Doug by 7:30 AM to wish him a Happy Birthday (it was in the evening of the 6th in Pennsylvania). Dani really appreciated the opportunity to hear Doug and Kathy’s voices, and was rather pleased with the distinction of ‘Farthest Distance Birthday Wishes EVER’! The phone was tough to work with, as it went through the Internet and was rather choppy from the other side of the world. A three-second delay on any comments made for a shorter-than-wanted call. Regardless, it was worth the wake-up!
Back in the room after a slow stroll through the town in the early morning, we caught the lethargy after our three days of tromping through the Angkor ruins. We slept in, staying in the room reading and enjoying the overhead fan until close to 1 PM. When we finally motivated to leave the room, the afternoon had turned muggy, but at least the rain had stopped from the past two days’ downpours. We enjoyed time walking the streets once again, finding a meal of stir-fried pineapple with chicken and veggies for Dani and the local Tom Yum white-fish soup with rice for Martha. 
Khmer food is much milder than Thai food, although many of the ingredients and basic cooking steps seem similar. The bird’s eye chilies (tiny = hot) that are used en-masse in Thailand are shunned here, so the flavors are sweet without the heat. That suits Dani just fine, but Martha tends to reach for the chili sauce just to give it a bit of a kick! So, those of you who fear Asian foods because of the heat associated with most Thai dishes, know that Khmer food in Cambodia may be more to your liking! We finished the day with a slow walk through Bar Street, where artisans had booths with wares for sale, including a particularly interesting man of Chinese descent who was making stamps along the way, his pinky finger on each hand styling the longest nails we’ve seen this trip. He must have been having a good night, as he grabbed Martha’s shoulder and (drunkenly) said, “Come back tomorrow if you want stamps. I’ll try to charge you ten dollars, but don’t pay me more than six each!” Martha continued to drool over the artwork in this town, especially large paintings of Angkor Wat at different times of day. But she had not yet convinced Dani that the great Hindu and Buddhist temples of Angkor would go well with our collections of artwork from around the world, which we call ‘The Village.’ “Angkor Wat would not go well in The Village, Martha,” believes Dani. Of course, looking at Siem Reap—such a small village so close to the vastness of the Angkor ruins—why wouldn’t it?
With Dani not feeling her best still from the runny nose, we headed back to the room and then up to the loft at Ivy 2 to check out the television. Dani found an old 80s movie from America with Cambodian subtitles while Martha worked on the blog entries for our Angkor days. Two Aussies joined us for the bad movie, talking about their time in Beijing studying martial arts for 10 months. They’re now just a few weeks from returning home again, but have been enjoying a slow tour through the lands South of China in the meantime. They headed out on the town to party while we headed to our beds to give Dani a good night’s rest. 
Wednesday, August 8, we awoke to a cluster of dead flies in the room as the air in town had been soured, filled with anti-bug, anti-mosquito measures to reduce the dengue fever breakout. Dengue fever is spread by both daytime and nighttime mosquitoes, and we have encountered a few, so we have been keeping an eye on each other and mad
e sure to know the symptoms of this disease. Like several insect-borne tropical diseases, vomiting, nausea, high fever, and a rash are the prominent features of dengue fever. When Dani woke on Wednesday with nausea, we were on the watch for any rash or other symptoms, which thankfully did not appear. 
Dani’s bed was closer to the window, and ill-effects left her looking and feeling much like the flies sprawled on the floor. We attributed the nausea to the chemicals in the air with Dani’s compromised lungs still coughing from her tropical cold. However, Martha took photos of all of Dani’s bug bites to ensure that they were not at all related to a spreading rash and annoyingly checked Dani’s temperature all day, making sure that her best friend stayed hydrated and did not develop additional symptoms. If she had vomited, we would have been off to the clinic or the nearest airport to the hospit
al in Bangkok. No messing around … and, thankfully, rest helped and Dani felt a little better by late afternoon. We had breakfast at Ivy 2: a large fruit bowl with yogurt and honey for Dani and “the best poached eggs in town” for Martha. While Dani recovered, we spent the afternoon up in the loft at Ivy 2 once again, drenched in insect repellent. Dani watched the television and Martha continued to type away and collect photos to post the Angkor days. The loft provided a nice haven for work and post-cold recuperation; no one else came up to hang out all day. 
Martha tried to get some laundry done at the guest house, but their machine (one of the only washing machines in town … but even it still had to have water added by hand) was on the fritz, so we waited. As of Wednesday morning, we were intending to stay in town for a couple more days, thinking that turning the laundry in Thursday morning seemed like it would work just fine for a Friday departure. 
We had dinner in one of the restaurants in The Alley, recommended for its Khmer food by the guide book. The ambiance was sparse, and Dani was quite disappointed with her oven-baked pumpkin and vegetable dish, finally identifying the offending flavor as the mushrooms (Dani later learned that she does not like the mushrooms of Cambodia, so this is not a poor review of the restaurant). Martha’s vegetable curry was wonderful, and a large enough portion to fill both of us since these tourist restaurants cater more to Western-size meals. With a fruit shake each, our dinner was a whopping 6 USD. 
We continued to enjoy the markets of souvenirs with some shopping around town. When we walked by the stamp maker once again, we decided it would be a fun thing to purchase, and 6 USD was a good price to pay for these hand-carved art pieces. However, after we chose a few stamp options, the price was somehow 95 USD, discounted because we were so cute to 75 USD!! We thanked him for the time he had invested to draw the images he could carve for us, and prepared to leave. “OK, how much are you willing to pay?” We explained that we had expected a price of 6 USD that he quoted us the night before, so this was too significant of a difference, and his was a lovely art-form that we did not want t
o disrespect by haggling. We thanked him again and prepared to leave, the numbers still dropping. No, really, we’re in Cambodia and not supposed to haggle because we want to give this country as much money as possible, just not that much for these items. In the street, he finally pulled the number down to closer to what he had quoted us the night before, and we grudgingly agreed, especially since he was so unhappy about it, too! Feeling guilty for the unintentional haggle, we walked back to the hotel for our half-hour wait. We grabbed the lap-top for some e-mail checking in the local café after we picked up the stamps. We investigated bus options for leaving Siem Reap, and returned to spend the evening in the Ivy 2 loft. 
Martha cleaned up the fly carcasses—thrilled that no more had collected since the morning and careful not to touch a single one as she used Dani’s discarded contact lens box and a lid section to move the flies together and scoop them up for the garbage. Not wanting to spend more time than needed in the room, we turned the fan on high and ended up watching the moving Coach Carter up in the loft. Two guys joined us for the movie, the first commenting that it was a good movie, and early in the picture. When the second guy joined us, he said, “Oh, good movie; and it’s right at the beginning,” which caused the other three of us to giggle with the repetitiveness of it all. “Great minds think alike,” said the later-arriving guy to the other. It was a good movie, and it was close to the beginning when we all sat down, so we got to bed later than intended. 
Thursday, August 9, there were no more flies on the floor, thank goodness, but Martha called, “Let’s get out of here” anyway, since recent emails from family had encouraged us to ‘head to higher ground’ with the dengue fever scare throughout Cambodia. We figured it was also time to head out before we lost more days in this lazy town—we were surprised to learn that we had been in Siem Reap an entire week! It is amazing to have this pace where we no longer have a good idea of date or day of the week. Martha has even taken to wearing her watch less, which makes the space/time continuum even easier to lose. 
We had one errand that we really wanted to complete before leaving Siem Reap on the noon bus to Phnom Penh (the capital city of Cambodia): visiting the Catholic Church that Leng Heng had talked with us about during our time together. He had asked for some money to buy clothes and shampoo and sweets for the orphans that the church aids, but his numbers and some of his rhetoric put up mental flags for us, and we had baulked from giving him money directly. Even though our instincts were largely in favor of wanting to simply believe the young man and fork over some cash, we had no assurance that the money would make it to the kids that way, so we thought it best to go to the source. 
The tuk-tuk cost us a dollar to get to the Siem Reap Catholic Church, not a far distance at all, but we hadn’t known the location of the church. We entered the large teak open-air room that served as a chapel. We both commented after leaving the silence of that room that it had felt so nice to be in a church again!! We particularly were taken with the Khmer-style Mother and Child that stood on the simple altar, and the 2
007 Baptismal candle, especially neat for Dani this year. The Father was in the village with the orphans when we visited, and the Sisters were housed off of the complex and not available. However, we encountered a young Cambodian woman who worked in the office. The lady's name translated to 'Jewel,' and she confirmed that she knew Leng Heng and that he did do some work with the church. She was lovely to chit-chat with, telling us much about her country, including that Catholics and Protestants don’t get along in the predominantly Buddhist Cambodia either 
(she did not mistreat us when we admitted to not being Catholic ourselves!). Would we like an envelope and paper to leave Father Heri a note? We quickly sketched a note, telling the Father that it was Leng Heng who forwarded us, and leaving a small donation. We hope to hear from them as we might add this group to our future tithing plans. If your church is looking for a method of helping in a developing nation, you might email Fr. Heri at heribs@jesuits.net. 
We were concerned about missing the noontime bus at this point, so walked quickly back to Ivy 2 to pay the bill and pick up our packs, which we’d taken an hour to put together that morning. Our tab for the week we’d stayed at Ivy 2, including seven nights’ lodging, three breakfasts, a lunch, and a few beers before bed, totaled 88 USD! Not nearly the same as in the states where that might have gotten us one night’s lodging alone! 
The same tuk-tuk driver from the morning’s ride was lounging outside of the entrance to the guest house, so we paid him another dollar to take us to the bus stop just to the South, where we bought our tickets to Phnom Penh for 5 USD each. While we waited for the minibus to take us to the big bus, we talked for a bit with two ladies, friends from New
York who were traveling through some of the same territories as we were. One was teaching in China to save some money before returning to the high priced-life in Queens, NY; the other was younger, the sister of the other girl’s ex-boyfriend who had been a keeper in the break-up. 
On the bus itself, we were surrounded by two families of Frenchies. We surmised that two brothers with their wives and a collection of no fewer than seven sons had taken over the bus. They were not quiet folks, either, as the baby of the lot had a red mark on one side of his face and some serious bouts with the screaming crankies and the baby’s brothers/cousins took turns either singing to him, vomiting from the rough roadw
ay below the bus, or singing the glad tidings of ‘chauffer champignone’ (since we speak Spanish, we’re not sure if that’s ‘bus-driver mushroom’ or ‘bus-driver champion,’ for the record) at the tops of their lungs. So instead of the soft chitter chatter of Khmer being spoken amongst the locals, the right side of the bus kept the entire airspace occupied with their Frenchie family-holiday antics. 
When we finally arrived in Phnom Penh, it was about 5:20 PM, with a good hour’s worth of light left. The tuk-tuk drivers swarmed at the bottom of the bus steps, barely letting us off. For just a dollar, they would take you anywhere in the city. Martha and Dani had been sitting for five hours and wanted to walk the 2km to Smile Lakeside Guest House, recommended by Martha’s grandfather, Capt’n Harry, from his visit to the city eight years ago. We began walki
ng, with the tuk-tuk drivers following, through the unfamiliar streets in the direction of Lakeside. We arrived at a landmark, the town temple, and took the second left… or was that the third left around the roundabout? After ten minutes walking, another tuk-tuk driver came by and asked where we were going. “Oh, so far away!” In this part of the world, it appears by the large number of drivers an
d small number of pedestrians that any walking is too far, but we love the feeling of moving our muscles with the backpacks on. However, this kind Khmer man informed us that we were indeed headed in the wrong direction, and Dani called, “Get in the tuk-tuk, Martha.” We ended up spending that dollar anyway to get up to Lakeside but the bit of walking we had done was very welcome. 
Lakeside in Phnom Penh is full of character. It refers to the area on the East side of the Boeung Kak Lake, and it is quite a scene. The tuk-tuk barely made it through the narrow alleyway, which was littered with music-blaring pubs and other lounging drivers waiting to score their next fare for a few dollars, which goes a long way in this city. A man walked beside the tuk-tuk, calling out to our driver, and he slowed. We knew that Smiley’s was at the very end of the roadway here, and that we were not there yet, but the man came up and assured us that Smile was just back the way we had come, encouraging 
us to get out of the tuk-tuk. Dani looked down the alley and said, “The guest-house down there is on the map before Smile; I think we need to keep going.” Martha turned to the man, who said, “Smile full.” With a quick raise of the ol’ eyebrow, she let the guy know that we were in no way falling for that, he grinned and shrugged, and Martha told the driver to move on to where we wanted to sleep. The alley soon turned dark, quiet, and more residential away from the hub bub of foreigners wandering among the immense cluster of guest houses along the lake, and we hopped out at the quiet end of the road in front of a sign that read Smile. 
We looked at two rooms before settling on Room #12, which was very close to the main desk, so we felt safe and watched-over. We set up a tab for any coffee or food needs, agreed on a price of 3 USD per night, took a peek at the lake, barely visible in the darkness, and got settled in our room. We walked back out to the main stretch of Lakeside to find dinner at the Indian Curry Pot, where for 7 USD we dined like princesses on two types of naan (garlic and jam-smeared flat-bread) with potatoes in a red curry sauce for Martha and a lentil dish called daal masala for Dani. Each meal came with one free Beer Lao, which was pretty cool. We walked back to the hotel where we played a round of Embarrassingly-Long Billiards on the guest house pool table and headed to bed … for an unexpected, sleepless night. In love and light,
Martha and Dani
No comments:
Post a Comment