Craig's Blog: Southeast Asia

Halfway Around the World in Three Days

It might seem that having two red-eyes in a row (NY -> Mumbai: 15 hours; Mumbai -> Singapore: 5.5 hours) would be a hellish flying experience, but actually, a 15-hour red-eye is quite nice. I watched a few movies, caught a few winks -- or at least tried to; maybe watching Misery as my night-cap movie wasn't the smartest choice -- and woke up just in time for landing. Then it was time for...sleeping again! This is hellish how? I arrived in Singapore refreshed and ready for the new day. Or at least, for a shower.

Starting with a Wedding

Our hotel sat right across the street from the Maxwell Food Court, one of the best hawker centers in Singapore. (Hawkers used to roam the streets, but Singapore isn't into that kind of chaos these days, so everyone has a little booth in these giant tin-roof structures. Maxwell has over 100 booths.) Of course this is the first place I went. None(ish) of the food there was vegetarian, so I decided I wasn't hungry.

I figured if there is anyone who would sympathize with my vegetarian plight, it would be the Buddha, and luckily part of him was hanging out just across the street, at the ginormous Buddha's Tooth Relic Temple. (As Lonely Planet puts it, "Dental experts have expressed doubts over its authenticity.")

By 4pm -- 4am New York time -- my body was telling me that sleeping for 10 hours the previous night is not, in itself, enough to prevent jet lag. But too bad! it was time for the wedding -- not mine -- which was the proximate reason Jenny and I were in Singapore. So off to the famous Raffles hotel to meet the bride and groom for the first time. I happened to run across the groom first, so when people asked me which side of the wedding I was on, I decided it was his: I've known him much longer.

At dinner, I sat next to a guy named Kim -- "sorry to dash your hopes, but I'm not a girl," he said as he sat down -- who was visiting from Switzerland, where the bride had lived for 9 years. In fact, her friends came from all over, and many had never really met the groom. One toast went along the lines of, "Laura, you're really amazing and generous and a wonderful person. I'm honored to be your friend. And Don, um, you're at this wedding too."

The Day that Was a Tax Paid to Jet Lag

Jenny and I had a semi-plan for dealing with the heat of SE Asia: get up early, and come back to the hotel after lunch to escape the midday heat for a few hours. It turns out this semi-plan has a not-so-semi flaw, at least when jet lag is involved: our midday siesta lasted until 7pm.

Before the jet lag slayed us, we had explored some of the neighborhoods in Singapore: Chinatown, Little India (which I kept calling Little Italy, because that's what I'm used to saying in NY), and Commercial Area C. Commercial Area C -- this is what it was called on the map, I have no idea if it has another name or not -- was actually my favorite, full of colonial-era row houses and cute shops. And also a pub named O'Bama's (motto: "Change you can drink to"). How could you not love that?

Who Knew It Was a Holiday Today?

It turned out our last day in Singapore was National Day. This may seem like a stroke of good fortune, but National Day, just like July 4 in the US, is marked mostly by everything being closed for the day. (There were fireworks at night, but that was after we had already flown away.)

So, our great plans for the day evaporated. Walking tour: canceled. Baba House: closed. Restaurant I wanted to eat at: shuttered. On the other hand, the wedding couple from Saturday had the day off, and managed to meet us for lunch. So I finally got a chance to talk to them. (Later, the groom emailed Jenny that I struck him as "a good sport." I guess that's good?)

In the afternoon we went to the Botanic Gardens, which is a Thing to Do in Singapore. Hot hot hot. Sticky sticky sticky. I couldn't stop think about the mythical "cold room," an air-conditioned room at the far side of the gardens where they grow cold-climate orchids. We made it over there, and it was wonderful. I admired the cold-climate orchids for a long time.

On Food Holiday

We're in Penang! Jenny wanted to go to Penang because she figured any place they'd name a restaurant chain -- to say nothing of a curry -- after was good by her. Interestingly, they do not have Penang curry here. What they do have is tons of vegetarian food, since many folks here came from South India. (There are also Chinese, and Malays of course, and there even used to be a small Jewish population. Way to diasporize, guys!)

Our goal for our 3 days here was basically to eat our way from one end of the island to the other (Penang is not a city but an island). It turns out it's a bigger island than we thought. But we did make it to about a dozen restaurants and hawker centers. One was a night market across the street from our hotel. Every hawker center serves the same 10 standard Penang dishes, such as Hainan Chicken and Laksa, but some have their own unique entrants as well. Our night market had a hot dog stand, which was localized, in classic East-meets-West fashion, through the addition of Asia-appropriate toppings. For instance: crab meat. My favorite selection was hot dogs with chocolate chips.

In between eating, we visited the local-cultures museum, which was basically the same as the local-cultures museum in Singapore (the two places are not that far away). The museum had an exhibit on the local mancala variant, called Congkak.

They had a brochure with rules, in Malay and English. The English version started like this, "Two players sit facing the board supercilious face, started with the second-two players were at the same time achieving their villages..." I checked later, and indeed, this is exactly the output of putting the Malay version through Google Translate. I guess machine translation still has a ways to go...

You Can't Do a Food Holiday In Just One Day...

More eating today. I made one of the classic blunders, namely ordering Northern Indian food at a Southern Indian restaurant. I had done this a few days before in Singapore, with tragic-looking (and -tasting) results. Why did I not learn? I did not learn.

To make up for it, I had dessert: a typical Penang dessert, which is a mish-mash of all sorts of ingredients, including jelly, rose water, red beans, coconut milk, brown sugar, noodles, and corn. My theory is they sense the dessert is missing something, and they just keep throwing in more stuff in a desparate attempt to find the missing piece, which I'm guessing is probably ice cream. If they were me, after they added in the ice cream, they'd take everything else back out (except maybe the coconut milk). But they're not me, as I saw when I found a version of the dessert which also added in a scoop of ice cream on top. It was durian ice cream, though, which may be why it wasn't 100% successful in taking the local dessert world by storm.

In order to visit all these food places, we made heavy use of the bus system. The buses are amazing -- efficient, clean, and (best of all) air-conditioned -- but the system does have quirks. In the morning, the bus pulled off its published route and into a gas station. Everyone just hung out on the bus for 5 minutes while the driver fueled up. In the evening, it happened again! I guess they don't want to take the buses out of service for even a second.

The Two Malaysias

We went to the airport the long way around, so we got to see the hilly part of the island. It reminded me of Hawaii, or the opening credits of M*A*S*H (the TV version). That's also where the "nature" tourist attractions were, which we tried out. My favorite was the butterfly preserve, which had some beautiful butterflies but had clearly fallen prey to mission creep: not only had it branched out from butterflies into beetles and other insects -- Jenny liked the camoflogue insects like the leaf mantis the best -- but it also had a room of Polynesian religious statues.

The flight itself went by fine, but it wasn't long after landing that I said, "I don't like KL" -- that's Kuala Lumpur, but everyone, even green tourists like me, calls it KL. What green tourists like me don't do is know where to find restaurants open after 10pm, which is when we arrived in town. KL is the capital city, what business does it have shutting down at 10pm?

We ended up going to Chinatown -- "Chinatowns are always open late," Jenny said -- and barely got to a mediocre restaurant before it closed. Then, on the way back, the cabbie tried to rip us off. Well, technically, he successfully ripped us off. (Memories of Turkey!) He claimed night rates applied, so we negotiated based on that, but once in the cab we saw on the info sheet that night rates didn't start for another 30 minutes. Jenny showed real bargaining chops in reducing the agreed-on price. "We said 10 ringgit, but that's because you told us it was the night rate now. You lied to us! So we'll give you 9 ringgit. [This is a savings of about 30 cents, but it's the *principle* of the thing.] You still make 3 ringgit more than you should, and everyone is happy." "I am not happy," the cabbie muttered. But he accepted it. He took out his anger by speeding up to all the red lights and then slamming on the brakes.

OK, in retrospect it's pretty funny, but after all the friendliness -- to say nothing of the night markets -- we saw in Penang, it was jarring.

A Walking (Through a Maze to Get Where You Want to Go) Town

Today we walked around KL, a task that took twice as long as it ought because of all the freeways that slice up the town. In one case, traveling between what the map showed to be two adjacent buildings, required traversing no fewer than 4 overpasses and tunnels. And that was the 'success' scenario: in another case, the map showed two places as adjacent, and we couldn't figure out how to get from one to the other at all.

In contrast, the public transit -- what one guide book said was the "pride and joy" of KL -- worked great. We took the commuter rail outside town to see the Batu Caves with the huge statue and the local monkeys. We took the monorail to the Islamic Art museum, with its fascinating displays on Chinese Islamic art. And we took the light rail to, um, the mall. So maybe I'd grow to like KL better in time. But this trip we were only in town for a day.

Angkor and its Wat

On to Siem Reap, gateway to Angkor Wat. I thought Angkor Wat was a single complex -- like Macchu Picchu, say -- and that's true as far as it goes. But Angkor Wat is just one small part of Angkor, a temple-strewn region of Cambodia. It's as if all of Rome rotted away except the churches; there would be various church complexes scattered about a rather large area, some more impressive than others. Angkor Wat is the St. Peter's of Angkor. Another site, Angkor Thom, actually was a (walled) city once; the houses were all made of wood and are gone now, and only the temples remain.

So to visit Angkor, you need a driver -- it's up to 30 minutes by tuk-tuk from site to site -- and you more or less need a guide, to explain all the Hindu symbolism like the apsara (translated by Lonely Planet as "Celestial Nymphs") and the naga (a big snake) and the demon with 10 arms (a bad guy). Interestingly, half the hotels and restaurants in Siem Reap have "Apsara" in their name, but not so many with the naga or the daemon. I guess even when it's only carved stone, sex sells.

I shouldn't say "only" carved stone: the carvings in Angkor are as amazing -- as detailed, expressive, inventive, and overwhelming -- as its reputation suggests. I liked the pink elephants the best, and Jenny liked the carvings of 10th century Chinese immigrants (you can tell by the beards). We were a bit sad that the light is really only good a few hours a day, and we couldn't give all of Angkor the photographic justice it deserves.

A Fish Tale

We spent more time today visiting temples, but that's not all we did. Around 2pm or so our guide would say, "You're done visiting temples for today?" in a hopeful sort of voice. And we'd say yes, and retire to our Indochine-style hotel to wait out the heat of the day, and then head into town.

Today we decided to try one of the "Dr. Fish" tanks around town. Basically, you put your feet in the tank, and these fish nibble at your feet, cleaning away dead skin or whatever. I figured it would tickle, but OMG did it tickle. It was all I could do to keep my feet in the water. I was rocking back and forth and flapping my arms like a chicken to distract myself. It definitely got the attention of passers-by.

Dr. Fish was $3 for 20 minutes, which is ridiculously expensive for Cambodia. Siem Reap was actually quite a bit more expensive than Malaysia, which surprised me, even taking into account Siem Reap is a tourist town, since I always thought of Cambodia as poorer. It didn't help that everything in Cambodia is priced in dollars -- even the ATM machines spit out dollars rather than riel -- so it feels more like "real" money.

The Day I Acquired an Earworm

The best thing about touring Angkor -- and the most surprising to me -- is you can basically go wherever you want: nobody stops you from clambering over the ruins, climbing the trees, posing next to the statues, whatever. It's probably not good for the temples. Side fact: the largest number of tourists who come to Angkor come from South Korea, because of a clever marketing campaign to the effect of, "They're going to have to restrict access to these temples soon, so you better come visit now."

The worst part of touring Angkor, definitely, is being accosted by children (mostly it's children, and mostly it's girls) as you enter and leave each temple area. The problem isn't they accost you with their postcards and trinkets, it's their extraordinary persistence in doing so: they do not believe that no means no. They would frequently run beside the tuk tuk as we were driving off, trying to sell us the same 10 postcards we had been offered 25 times before that day (5 of those times by them themselves just a few seconds earlier).

While the kids' overbearingness annoyed me, the fact they were in that situation to begin with infuriated me. The area makes a lot of money from entrance fees, the prices in town are the highest in Cambodia, and the area is teeming with non-profit schools and training centers and the like for children. But all of that is (evidently) overwhelmed by what our guide described as pervasive corruption in Cambodia. (We witnessed a small part of this when a guard, telling us Angkor Wat was closing for the day and we had to leave, then sidled up to us and murmured, "Do you want to climb to the top of the tower [one of the few places in Angkor that was roped off to tourists] to watch the sunset? You can, with me." "Um, no thanks, we don't like sunsets," we said. Another telling feature is that even with the entrance fees, all the restoration work seems to be paid for by foreign governments.) It's dispiriting to see. On the other hand, their English was quite good.

With the beauty around Angkor, it's hard to stay dispirited for too long, so I'll end on a more upbeat story, one of musical genius. We visited one site that was an ancient health spa: a fountain in the middle would send water through channels in four directions, which would empty into four pools where patients could take in the waters. Each channel had a spout as it emptied into the pool, and each spout was carved as an animal head, with water coming out of the mouth. I was immediately inspired -- there's no other word for it -- with the following lyrics, to the tune of the A Team theme:

Horse's head,
Human head;
Lion's head,
Elephantine head.

See, now I bet it's in your head too!

Slow (Speed)boat

Ah Battambang! The jewel of, um, the Greater Battambang Metropolitan Area. Ha, just kidding! There is no Metropolitan Area. Two minutes outside town it's all farmland and rice paddies.

To get to Battambang from Siem Reap, we took a boat, which is advertised as the most scenic boat ride in Cambodia. That's probably true, but it's also one of the longest: it took us 9 hours to cover 110 miles. We went by fishing villages, a beautiful nature preserve, and more fishing villages before making it to Battambang, which is the second largest city in Cambodia, though you've never heard of it.

The ride costs about $20 per person, which is a lot in Cambodia. Jenny's like: "It's got to be all tourists. They make like $800 on these boat rides. That's a killing." Jenny was right it started out all tourists, but in some of the villages, folks would canoe up to the boat and get on for a spell (none went all the way into Battambang). I don't think they had to pay.

Phnom and Wat

Battambang ended up being my favorite city this trip. It's not very touristy, so we tended to be treated as people rather than business opportunities. And since it's a medium-sized town itself, with rural Cambodia just a 5 minute drive out of town, we had a great mix of activities.

Urban tourism included the Pepsi plant, frozen in time since the '70s, when it was abandoned by the Khmer Rouge. Rural tourism included visiting -- literally, our tuk-tuk drive just drove up unannounced -- someone's house where they were making rice paper, and a crocodile farm, which was just a bunch of ponds full of crocodiles with walkways going above them. Cambodia doesn't have an active Consumer Safety Division, so there wasn't much in the way of railings. We were careful!

The most touted tourist activity in town is the bamboo train. Due to previous research, I thought I knew all about it: how the 'trains' are just mats on wheels; how there's only one track so you when two trains meet, one has to be disassembled [brief video] and moved aside so the other can pass (we ended up always being on the losing end of those); how the train tracks are warped and overgrown. But I ended up being surprised by two things. One is how loud it was. (Maybe all trains would be this loud if they weren't enclosed.) Two is how much the track warping made the ride like a roller-coaster. We were really pulled around from side to side. It was scenic and an adrenaline rush!

But my favorite tourist activity was a visit to Phnom Sampeau, a local hill. At the top of the hill there's a temple (a wat), and next to it there's a canyon (Lonely Planet described it, accurately, as an "enchanted canyon"), full of stalactices and ferns and even some old statues. You can also climb onto an outcrop for beautiful panoramic views of the surrounding fields. Oh, and there are monkeys.

But, halfway down the hill, there's the Killing Cave, where the Khmer Rouge killed hundreds of local villagers and threw their bodies down a skylight into a cave. All that's left now are their skulls. That mix is Cambodia today, in a nutshell.

Travel Days

We took the bus to Phnom Pehn, arrived just in time for dinner, and got up the next morning to take the plane to Shanghai. When planning this vacation, I decided Shanghai would make a nice layover on the way back to the US (my flight back to the US ended up being only 11 hours, compared to the 21 hour flight out). One reason we decided on Shanghai in particular is that both Jenny and I have friends here. It was the only place on this trip I had been to before.

Revisiting our Vacation

We spent the morning with my college friend James and his family. It was the day that the kids were allowed to open their piggy banks and spend their allowance, so we went to the local mall. The kids were very excited by the toy store. I was interested to see that the knock-off DVD places were just like newspapers described. I think there were some movies there that haven't been released yet.

The only thing Jenny really wanted to do in Shanghai was see the Expo. (That's what World's Fairs are called these days.) Shanghai is really into the expo, there are signs and banners all over town, and they apparently had 1.5 millions volunteers helping out in various ways. Some of the countries represented in the expo are smaller than that! Over 400,000 people visit per day.

With those kinds of attendance numbers, the lines to get into any of the actual country pavilions were prohibitively long (over 5 hours for the popular pavilions like Japan), so we just wandered around and looked at the buildings and their architecture. We saw all the places we had visited on this trip! Singapore, Malaysia, Cambodia, China. And, relegated to the far corner of the expo, probably 2 miles away from the China pavilion, the USA.

That's All He Wrote

A long day, due to time zones. Landing in San Francisco, I had the following first impressions. No heat! No humidity! Everyone speaks English! It was kinda comforting.

I had a great time visiting all these places, and I enjoy traveling with Jenny so much because we like doing the same kinds of things. So unlike some trips where I might have to argue with people about whether it's safe to eat the street food or worth it to take a long but beautiful boat ride, almost everything we did on the trip was really enjoyable. That said, two weeks is a long time to be away, and by the end I was ready to be home. And now (depending on how you define "home") I am!