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Tonle Sap, Cambodia
Picture yourself on a boat on a river, with tangerine trees and marmalade skies
After leaving Siem Reap, I booked a four hour boat ride along the Tonle Sap Lake and River to the Mekong River and Phnom Penh. From my fortress like western hotel I went through the heart of darkness (or, as it's also known, the road to the docks) before climbing aboard the roof of what could best be described as not the safest looking high speed boat. The four hour journey had its benefits and at least one drawback- when the clouds cleared I received possibly the worst sunburn of my life, I became painful shades of maroon and purple. Slowly peeling irregular patches revealing my regular pale inner self reminded me of my stupidity for a good week after Cambodia. This is typical of the journey, stilted houses on the lake and river framed small fishing boats that struggled to survive our reckless wake.
A typical banked turn on the Tonle Sap as our life-jacket-free, regularly scheduled high speed boat went faster than it probably should have across the great lake. More adventurous and dangerous than anything available in Queenstown (see the 2001 New Zealand slideshow for more about that).
Boats and murky water comprise the backyards of lakefront buildings at the Tonle Sap docks, thirty five minutes from downtown Siem Reap along what could best be described as a really bumpy path in the clearing between trees but is often mistakenly referred to as a road.
A world capital in name only, Phnom Penh (pronounced "Nom-Pen" by foreign nationals who want others to think they know what they're talking about, or "Pa-nom Pen" by actual Cambodians) still suffers the blinding effects of internal and external invasions, its four lane wide dirt roads are smothered with a population decimated by brutality more times than anyone could ever deserve. This is the other worldly Royal Palace complex, where a model of Angkor Wat shares the grounds with a nearly empty treasury, a state museum infested by bats and several prominent public buildings mired in a deferred maintenance program.
Ok, so it isn't Cambodia but it's still a Royal Palace. This is the Grand Palace in Bangkok, Thailand, which looked a lot like a richer version of the one in Phnom Penh. Hell, even the model of Angkor Wat was a lot nicer and more tricked out here than the one back in Cambodia.
Also Buddhist temples don't appreciate footwear, so luckily no lurking thieves wanted my now loved Lowa Sarek GT boots which retained an extra pleasant aura after several days of moderate walking about tropical Cambodia.
This is the view from my palatial room at the Peninsula Hotel where I stayed for one (more) night in Bangkok, far and away the nicest hotel I have ever stayed at in my life, yet another advantage of a strong US dollar and other recent events. Private, well appointed ferries shuttled me from the isolated hotel across the Chao Phraya River to the skytrain station and river express ferries; the wonderfully real, urban city only a short, luxurious, private commute away. Not much between despair and ecstasy indeed.
A typical scene in Bangkok, a city legendary for its traffic (among circles that care about such things).
Bangkok and Angkor Wat are halfway around the world, and this trip was an especially complicated one to plan. Luckily I used the service of Air Treks, an airline ticket consolidator based in San Francisco that can get you all sorts of amazing deals if you don’t mind a few stopovers every now and then. Pictured below are two such stopovers, first is Kuwait City (KWI) where it was nice to walk around the concourses after such long flights and the second is Kuala Lumpur (KUL) where it was nice to sleep- I booked a few hours for a nap at the in-airport day hotel.
Angkor was the first leg of a month long trip that also took me to Australia, to the Milford Track and to Los Angeles. And, thanks to Air Treks, unintentionally around the world. Sixteen takeoffs and sixteen landings for ten different destinations on flights that crossed all 360 longitudinal degrees of the planet. Damn.
If you’re the kind of person into logistics and airport codes, the flight was from New York and back again: JFK —> LHR —> KWI —> BKK, then BKK —> REP, then PNH —> KUL —> MEL —> ADL, then ADL —> ASP, then ASP —> SYD, then SYD —> CHC —> ZQN, then ZQN —> CHC, then CHC —> AKL, then AKL —> LAX, then (finally) LAX —> LAS —> JFK.
It doesn’t have to stop here
If you memorized all of your airport codes (and who hasn’t, right?), then you already know that ADL, ASP and SYD are in Australia, which was the next stop in this unintentional around the world trip. See Kangaroo Island, the red hot centre and Sydney by clicking below.
