Cambodian Countryside

Like I mentioned last time, we went to Siem Reap primarily to see Angkor Wat, but getting into the countryside outside of town ended up being my favorite part of our time in the area.  A small tour company called Beyond Unique Escapes offers tours in rural areas near Siem Reap (and in other parts of the country), and we ended up doing two of their tours.  They pride themselves on showing the “real” Cambodia, and, to their credit, we were the only people on both tours and never saw another foreigner during either one.  We definitely got to see places we never would have seen on our own, and got a small taste of what a Cambodian village is like.

Our first outing into the countryside was on a day-long village tour, called A Day in the Life.  Though we only drove about twenty minutes out of Siem Reap, the area felt very rural and like it was worlds away from town.  Suddenly, the roads were dirt, the houses were bamboo, and electric wires were non-existent.  And the scenery was gorgeous, wide-open spaces and very green, with palm trees everywhere.  After stopping to greet the village chief, we set off on an ox-cart ride, which was really fun and allowed us to see houses and fields way off the main path through the village.  We spent the rest of the morning at a family’s house in the village, learning about their daily activities.  First, they taught us how to thatch, and we wove together dried leaves to be used for roofs or walls of the houses.  Thatching was actually easier than I thought it would be, and it was a lot of fun.  Then, we prepared lunch, which took quite awhile.  We started by mixing together some spices and vegetables, but, instead of stirring them together in a bowl, we chopped everything on a cutting board until it was all ground together.  Then we added prahoc, a salty paste made of fermented whole fish (bones, fins, and everything) – prahoc is unique to Cambodia, and probably not something that needs to be exported!  Lastly, we added red ants – yes, ants, a whole pile of them with their legs all tangled together – to the paste.  The ants were alive when we added them, but most got chopped up while mixing them into the paste.  Cambodians eat this fish/ant paste either raw or cooked, and we cooked a portion of it in a banana leaf over charcoal.  Once the cooking was done, we had lunch with the family, eating the paste (full disclosure: I didn’t actually have any, more out of repulsion by the fish paste than the ants) along with rice, chicken, and mango.

After leaving the family’s house, we visited a local monastery, which had beautiful buildings and dozens of small shrines holding the ashes of deceased Buddhists.  We learned a lot about Cambodian Buddhism during the visit.  One of the things I found particularly interesting – while a small number of people become monks for their entire lives, much like Catholic priests in the U.S., most Cambodians stay at a monastery for a week or so as young adults to experience living as a monk.  We ended our time in the village by visiting a primary school nearby.  Most students in rural Cambodia go to school six days a week, for either the morning session (7-11am) or the afternoon session (1-4pm).  Students try to get into the morning session if possible, because everyone knows the afternoon sessions are not as good, since most teachers don’t return from their lunch break on time.  We arrived at the school around 2:00pm, at which point there were no teachers around, and all the children were playing outside.  Seeing this obviously raised the question of how the government or school administration could better motivate teachers to show up on time – but that’s a big question for another time.

The following morning, we set out early on a sunrise bike tour, which offered not only beautiful views but also another chance to see village life.  We left town on our bikes at about 5:00am, and it felt very rural again within about half an hour of riding.  Just outside of town, we stopped to watch the sun come up over a rice field, which was beautiful.  We then climbed to the top of a small hill, considered by Cambodian Buddhists to be sacred, which offered great views of the village below and the lush countryside.  This stop also gave us an opportunity to talk more to our guide, and he told us more about Cambodia’s history and societal norms.  He talked a lot about marriage in Cambodia, and said that arranged marriage exists but is becoming less prevalent, and that dowries are always paid to the woman’s family.  I also found it interesting that, after the wedding, the new groom typically leaves his family and moves in with the bride and her family.

Next, we biked over to a monastery, similar to the one we had visited the previous day, where we met some monks and nuns, who gave us delicious dried mango and told us about life in the monastery.  One of the nuns said she moved to the monastery when she started getting older, as there are no nursing homes in Cambodia, to become a nun and focus on finding enlightenment.  Our last stop on the ride was at a local market, where our guide treated us to a typical Cambodian breakfast of rice pudding, which was pretty good.  It was like a clear porridge with rice and pieces of chicken, as well as chunks of what I thought was tofu covered in something but turned out to be congealed cow blood mixed with an unknown solid.  It was fine as long as you didn’t think too much about what it was.  Regardless, we were pleasantly shocked that, as the only foreigners around, we were able to look around in the market and sit down to eat at a table full of Cambodians without anyone hassling us at all.

Siem Reap & Angkor Wat

After a flight from Jakarta, a day of walking and shopping in Bangkok, and a five-hour bus ride to the border, we arrived in Cambodia!  Our first Cambodian destination was Siem Reap, gateway to the world’s largest religious structure, Angkor Wat.  Going there mainly to see Angkor Wat, I didn’t have any expectations for Siem Reap itself, but it turned out to be a great town.  Getting out of the town and seeing some of the villages in the surrounding countryside, though, turned out to be the highlight of our time in the area, at least for me.

Siem Reap is perhaps Cambodia’s best-known town, home to about 172,000 people.  Parts of the town felt a lot like Europe, particularly in the architecture – leftover French influence, I guess.  (Cambodia was a French protectorate from 1863 to 1953.)  The area of town we stayed in was pretty happening, the streets lined with bars, restaurants, shops, and guesthouses, and filled with both Asians and Westerners.

Our hotel the Mandalay Inn, was great, and the staff were very friendly and helpful.  It was $18/night for a triple room, though it didn’t include breakfast.  We had an attached bathroom with hot water, a fan, AC, and TV (with CNN!), and the hotel even had a little gym on the roof.

Cambodian food is a bit different from Indonesian, but just as good, and everything we had in Siem Reap was delicious.  My favorite Cambodian dish so far is amok, which is a coconut curry-based sauce with vegetables and chicken, beef, or fish, served with rice.  Apparently Cambodians eat amok only with fish, and chicken and beef amok are served only because Cambodians realized foreigners like variety.  I also tried Cambodia’s Angkor beer, which was very good and cost only $0.50 during happy hour.

Another highlight was the night we ate at one of Siem Reap’s several BBQ restaurants.  For $5/person, we cooked noodles and pieces of raw meat and vegetables in extremely hot oil over a little grill at our table.  It was a fun experience, and the food was really good – though we skipped the crocodile and squid options, having just chicken, beef, and pork.

I can’t talk about Siem Reap’s dining scene, though, without talking about the street food: street food in Siem Reap is abundant, diverse, cheap, and delicious.  One of the main street dishes is fried noodles, which we ate one night while sitting on little stools on the curb.  Another staple of Siem Reap’s street food were the banana pancake carts, which were all over.  For $1, the vendor would pull out a lump of pre-made dough, fry it into a thin pancake, cook in some slices of banana, drizzle it with chocolate sauce, and wrap the whole thing in a piece of paper for easy eating on the go.  They were delicious.

Siem Reap also has quite a few very interesting markets, catering to both locals and visitors.  The best-known is the Angkor Night Market, which gets going around 4pm everyday.  It has tons of stalls with vendors selling all sorts of clothes, accessories, and souvenirs, as well as street food carts offering fried noodles, sliced fruit, and banana pancakes.  There were also multiple stalls set up as makeshift spas offering massages and other services.  We went to the same spa-stall for foot massages a couple different times – only $3 for 30 minutes!  There are spas all over Siem Reap, in and out of the market, and they were almost all extremely cheap and pretty nice-looking.

As I said, we went to Siem Reap mainly for the purpose of seeing Angkor Wat.  Originally intending to go back a couple times, we ended up spending only one day at the temples, but it was very interesting.  Part of the world’s largest pre-industrial city, Angkor Wat (literally “City Temple”) is a huge complex of Hindu temples built in the twelfth century, during the Khmer Empire.  Though the name Angkor Wat is now used to refer to the complex as a whole, it is actually just the name of the largest and best-known individual temple, which is an iconic image here.  The Cambodian flag features an image of Angkor Wat, and pictures of it are found in many hotels, restaurants, and shops, as well as on most souvenirs.

The complex also includes Angkor Thom (literally “Great City”), the Khmer Empire’s last capital, which is believed to have had a population of as many as 180,000 people.  Within Angkor Thom are two of the complex’s major temples: Bayon, known for the 200+ faces carved into its stone towers, and Bapuon, a “temple mountain,” designed to represent Mt. Meru (considered by Hindus and Buddhists to be the center of all universes).  Located outside Angkor Thom, another of the best-known temples in the complex is Ta Prohm, which has been largely untouched and now has trees growing out of its ruins.

Though the oldest structures in the complex were originally built as Hindu temples, it shifted to Buddhist use during the late-thirteenth century, and is still used by Buddhists today.  In fact, most visitors to Angkor Wat will see monks and nuns, in orange robes and white gowns respectively, all with their heads shaved, while at the temples.  Because Angkor Wat is still in use, visitors must cover their shoulders and knees in order to enter the temple.

On the day we went to the temples, we left town at about 5am and got to see the sun coming up over the temple of Angkor Wat, which was beautiful.  We visited the other main temples, which were interesting but less awe-inspiring, and then went back to more thoroughly explore Angkor Wat in the afternoon.  The sheer size of it, and the intricacy of the detail, is pretty astonishing.

Getting out into the countryside, away from the town and the tourist attractions, was actually my favorite part of our time in the Siem Reap area, but I’ll get to that later!

Another Side of Indonesia: The Island of Java

After the overnight bus journey from Bali, we arrived in the town of Yogyakarta on the island of Java.  Our hotel in “Yogya,” Venezia Homestay, was about $17/night for a double including breakfast, making it our cheapest place yet.  It wasn’t as nice as our prior hotels, but was a really good value.  We used a shared bathroom with a cold-water shower, and the room, though it had a floor fan, was ungodly hot – especially on the top bunk, where I slept.  The family running the hotel, though, was very nice, and they even let us check in at 6:30am – and gave us a welcome drink!

To be honest, coming from Bali, Yogya itself was a bit underwhelming.  It was a pretty big town, seemed to be largely industrial, and lacked Bali’s interesting architecture and general beauty.  Like parts of Bali, it had Pizza Hut, KFC, McDonald’s, and Dunkin’ Donuts – I’m not sure when seeing places like that is going to stop being really strange to me.  As usual, we skipped the American chains, but we did indulge in frozen yogurt at J. CO, the Indonesian equivalent of Bourbon (though J CO. wins, hands down).  It was about $2.20 for a cup of yogurt with strawberries and chocolate chips, and was definitely as good as PinkBerry!  On our first night in Yogya, we had dinner at one of the cheapest restaurants I’ve ever eaten at – I paid about $1.10 for a dish of vegetables and rice with peanut sauce, and it was delicious!

Yogya’s main attractions are the temples of Borobudur and Prambanan, both UNESCO World Heritage sites, which we visited, along with the smaller temple of Mendut.  We left town at about 5:00am, to get to the temples before it got too hot (most days this time of year are in the high-90s) and crowded.  Borobudur, Indonesia’s single most-visited tourist attraction, dates from the ninth century.  The world’s largest Buddhist structure, it is huge – essentially a nine-story building – with the six square stories topped by three round ones.  Indonesian Buddhists still use Borobudur for pilgrimages and for celebrating the holiday of Vesak, which commemorates the Buddha’s birth, enlightenment, and death.  Prambanan, which also dates from the ninth century, is one of the largest Hindu temples in Southeast Asia.  It is actually a compound of numerous smaller temples, originally a total 240.  Today, the sixteen main structures have been reconstructed, but only two of the original 224 smaller temples are still standing.  Mendut is another Buddhist temple, also built around the ninth century.  It is known primarily for its three large stone statues of Buddha – one each to liberate devotees from bodily karma, from karma of speech, and from karma of thought.  Like Borobudur, Buddhists in Indonesia visit Mendut during celebrations of Vesak.

We also attended a dance performance in Yogya – a ballet, technically, though not a ballet in the Western sense.  Accompanied by traditional gamelan music, the Ramayana Ballet is a dance-drama based on the Sanskrit epic Ramayana, believed to have been written around the fourth century B.C.  The performance was similar to the one we saw in Bali, focusing on slow, deliberate movements and featuring incredibly elaborate costumes and make-up.

The following day, we boarded a second-class train to the Indonesian capital of Jakarta.  The train ride took about eight hours and cost $20.  Trains on Java have three classes, known as economy, business, and executive.  We ruled out economy class, having heard horror stories about the number of people that get crammed on each seat, and settled on business, since executive was nearly twice the price.  I guess most foreigners spring for executive, though, as everyone else on the train except one Dutch couple seemed to be Indonesian.  The ride was pretty enjoyable, and the train was much cleaner, less crowded (actually, probably about half the seats were empty), and more comfortable than expected.  Business class doesn’t have air-conditioning, but there was a fan and, with the windows open, it was very comfortable.  People came by every few minutes selling food, drinks, and other random goods including paper fans, flip-flops, and moist towelettes, and also renting pillows to passengers.  Vendors would flood into the aisles at certain stops, stay on the train selling things for a bit, then get off a few stops later.  Sometimes, they would set things down on the tray next to a passenger’s seat, leave it there while they continued to the next car – I guess hoping the passenger would eventually be tempted to buy it – and come back for it a few minutes later.

Unlike the seemingly never-ending sprawl of city we passed on the bus in East Java, the train took us through beautiful rural areas of Central Java.  We passed small towns and villages and rice fields, and saw banana and palm trees right by the tracks and mountains in the distance.  Perhaps another difference between business and executive, our train stopped a lot, often staying stopped for quite awhile.  At some stops, children stood on the platforms of the station begging, and I saw one Indonesian throw a coin through the window onto the ground as his train was pulling away.  The children noticed us, of course, but most of them left more or less immediately after I shook my head.

Late in the afternoon, we arrived in Jakarta, a mega-city of about ten million people.  The urban poverty was visible from our seat on the train, as we saw small shacks, with children playing and women cooking and doing laundry, mere feet from the tracks.  It was also fairly dirty, which I suppose it to be expected in a place housing that many people, with lots of trash on the ground and floating in the waterways.

Our hostel in Jakarta, Six Degrees, was the first place we stayed in a dorm.  As Jakarta is apparently relatively expensive, even compared to Bali, it was $13/night per bed.  Other than not having a hot water shower (which, again, was not needed), Six Degrees felt very much like a European hostel.  It was air-conditioned, immaculately clean, and included sheets, a blanket, and a towel; and, each bed had its own lamp and outlet.  We shared our room with two German guys, a Swiss guy, and an American girl – not only the first American we’d met, but also a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer from Paraguay!

The food in Jakarta was as excellent as it had been everywhere else.  For dinner, I had a particularly delicious gado-gado, a dish of raw vegetables covered in peanut sauce that had become my favorite Indonesian meal, for about $3.  The breakfast at our hostel was equally great, and not only included very legitimate toast, but also had peanut butter!

We only had a few hours in Jakarta before our flight to Bangkok, and we spent it wandering around, trying to see what there was to see.  The traffic was as crazy as any huge developing city, with lots and lots of motorcycles and tuk-tuks, and there were carts and stalls of street food everywhere we looked.  I also have to note that Jakarta has McDonald’s, KFC, Pizza Hut, Starbucks, and Domino’s, as well as, believe it or not, The Cheesecake Factory (five of them, actually).  After an hour-long bus ride from the city to Jakarta’s main airport, it was time to leave Indonesia for a brief stop in Thailand en-route to Cambodia!

From Bali to Java

We had initially thought of flying from Bali to our next destination of Yogyakarta, a town in Central Java.  Ultimately, though, we decided to embark on the adventure of the 18-hour overnight bus/ferry trip, which cost about $24 and turned out to be just fine (other than the fact that our driver drove like a crazy person).

We left Kuta for Bali’s central bus station in Denpasar, and were surprised to see how orderly it was.  There was basically a platform for each bus, with posted schedules of bus times, companies, and destinations at each platform.  Crazy!  The bus itself was even more impressive – air-conditioning turned up so high it was actually cold, seats that were practically recliners, a blanket and pillow on each one, wastebaskets in the aisle.  There was even a sign that said the bus had WiFi, though it didn’t seem to work.  I might have thought that was just a marketing lie, but we could see the router at the front of the bus.  Given how fancy the bus was, it was actually a surprise that there weren’t TVs.

After about thirty minutes of driving (and we left exactly on time!), we stopped and the conductor hopped off.  A minute later, he returned with stacks of small cardboard boxes and distributed them to the passengers – it was snack time!  Each box contained a little pastry, a package of something that tasted like saltine cracker sandwiches with chocolate cream, and a box of jasmine tea (like a juice box, only a tea box).  The tea tasted like perfume, and we’d later learn that this perfume-y jasmine tea is something of a staple on Java, but the food was decent.

The drive from Denpasar to the dock was about three hours, and took us through the most rural parts of Bali I’d seen.  The scenery was beautiful, with banana and palm trees everywhere, bright green rice paddies on the right and hills in the distance, nearly deserted beach and crashing waves on the left.  I briefly considered (actually, I considered it pretty seriously) jumping off the bus to just stay in Bali.

I stayed on the bus, though, and then got on the ferry, which held cars and buses on the bottom deck and had a passenger lounge and deck (as well as concessions!) upstairs.  The ride from the western tip of Bali to the eastern tip of Java took about one hour, and the views of the hilly islands were gorgeous.

As the sun had set during the ferry ride, we didn’t get a very good first look at Java.  We stopped at around 9:00pm, though, for dinner.  The conductor passed out coupons to everyone on the bus, which were good for a buffet of rice, sauce, chicken, tempe, rice cakes, watermelon, and tea.  I was surprised, although maybe I shouldn’t have been, that we were the only foreigners on the bus or at the rest stop, and we’d only seen one white guy on the ferry.

I slept on and off for most of the rest of the ride to Yogyakarta, but every time I opened my eyes, we seemed to be in a town.  Basically, there was no rural part of the bus ride; it was urban areas, with a few rice fields scattered between, the entire nine hours from the dock to Yogyakarta.  Shockingly, we arrived at our destination around 6:00am, 2.5 hours early – the expected 18-hour journey took only 15.5!