Here is part 3 of the Vietnam blog, part 2 of the bit about Cambodia. You should read them in order if you have the time. The final part will come tomorrow from India! We arrive in approximately 8 hours and I am nervous but excited. I will give everyone a rundown of my planned itinerary as well with my final Vietnam blog.
The flight to Siem Riep was on a prop plane, which I am not a fan of, and to get into the plane we had to walk out on the runway. I’ve had to do this once before out of Charlottesville, but it is still odd to do. The flight was loud and gave me a headache, but I sat next to Luke, who worked for SAS and had a good conversation with him. We landed in Siem Riep after a 40 minute flight, hopped on our bus, and drove to the hotel. On the way we got our first view of Angkor Wat in the distance and everyone was pretty excited. We wouldn’t get a chance to go in until the next day though. We had an hour or two to kill at the hotel where we all took showers and hung out, meeting up with another SAS trip that was there, and then got ready to go to dinner. Dinner was at a dance show buffet thing where they had traditional Cambodian dance or so they say. The buffet was good, really good dumplings that I had seconds of. The show got old pretty quick and it was about 85 degrees in there, so I was ready to go by the end.
We left dinner and got dropped off at the downtown area which had a market and a number of bars. The highlight of the night was a fish tank where there are a bunch of minnows that eat dead skin. You stick your feet in and they literally swarm you and bite you little by little. It is a really strange feeling, kind of like being electrocuted slightly on your feet constantly. I don’t know if it helped at all but it was unique. Apparently you can get diseases from it if they bite too hard and make you bleed, but I did not bleed and I’m still alive so we are good to go. Afterwards I hung out with some friends, my friend Jose and I lost in pool to a couple of drunk Australians, but nothing else eventful happened. We hopped in a rickshaw to get back to the hotel, and on the way the driver tried to take us to a brothel saying “Happy Ending? I know good place”. It was pretty funny, but we insisted on being taken to the hotel instead. We went swimming, witnessed some pretty funny drama which is not fit for a blog, and then I went to bed.
The next morning we were supposed to be in the lobby at 5:15 to see sunrise over Angkor Wat if we wanted. I was there at 5:15 but found out my phone was 5 minutes slow, so I watched the bus pull away without me. About 7 other people did the same thing so we all went back to bed for an hour and a half until it was time for breakfast. The bus made it back and we ate breakfast with the rest of the group. Turns out the sunrise thing was overrated anyways, so I’m not too disappointed to have missed it. It would be a long day at the temples anyways, so I saw plenty.
Our first stop of the day was the Jungle Temple which was where Tomb Raider was filmed a few years back. It was the filming of that movie in Cambodia that led Angelina Jolie to adopt Maddux I believe, if you wanted an interesting fact. Anyways the temple was awesome, it was our first view of the temples of Angkor Wat, and there were trees and vines growing in and out of the walls. The temple was small and crumbling but awesome nonetheless. We finished up there and got back on the bus to head to the main temple, Angkor Wat itself. We passed monkeys on the way to the temple which excited everyone, but we were all there to see Angkor Wat and it did not disappoint. The complex came into view and towered above us. We entered on one of the corners and learned a bit about it. The carvings were still fundamentally intact and the whole thing was intricately designed, every part of it. As we got to the center, there was a line to get to the top of the temple where only 100 people at a time are allowed up. We waited in the 20 minute line, climbed the steep set of stairs, and found ourselves at the top of Angkor Wat. The view was fantastic from all sides, and the design was really a marvel. It’s amazing that they managed to build it without the use of modern equipment and that even today it still maintains its architectural integrity without having to be reinforced. We climbed down and headed back to the bus to catch lunch before finishing up at the temples in the afternoon.
Lunch at the hotel was good, and I ran into friends from the other trip again. Part of me really wanted to just hang out at the pool that afternoon, but I came to Cambodia to see Angkor Wat and wasn’t going to miss it. I’m glad I didn’t, the afternoon temple was the coolest. It was smaller, but had these huge faces carved out of stone, more than 50 of them in all. There were all kinds of stone towers and corridors, and the place was fairly deserted compared to the zoo of people earlier. It was a ton of fun and a cool site, definitely a design marvel perhaps moreso than the other two we saw. Afterwards I went to a market right next door and made friends with about 20 kids who wanted to sell me stuff. They were hilarious and I had a hard time saying no, so I depleted my store of US dollars buying bracelets, magnets, a small flute, and anything else they wanted to sell me. I also got a couple more pieces of artwork that look great on my cabin wall on the ship. After running out of dollars I only had a 50, which none of the kids had change for unfortunately, so my shopping spree was done. I got on the bus and zoned out as we went back to the hotel, picked up our stuff, and headed to the airport for our flight back to Vietnam.
The flight was uneventful other than me realizing that there were 90 students, the academic dean, executive dean, some other dean, and a number of faculty on board and that if the plane went down it would be thorough devastation to the entire program. Fortunately for us all the flight was normal, it was just weird to think about it that way. Honestly it would be the same as having the President, Vice President, Secretary of State, and half of congress on a plane. That’s my analogy and I’m sticking to it. We got back to Vietnam, I dumped all of my stuff on the ship, called Eric and made plans to meet them in downtown Saigon. I jumped on a motorcycle taxi and told him to take me to the night market, which he did. After pacing around it I did not find Eric like I expected, so I went back to the entrance and talked to another motorcycle guy. I thought I was at the wrong place and that there were two night markets, so I told this one “Ben Tanh Market”. He seemed to understand, I hopped on, and he took me there. It turns out he basically took me in a 10 minute circle and dumped me off literally 100 yards from where I started, but that happened to be right next to where Jay, one of my other roommates, and some other friends, Max, Nick, and Lindsey were all standing. Having met up with at least someone I knew I got them to help me look for Eric and the two girls he was with, JulieAnne and Deirdre. We found them pretty easily, and with the group at a satisfactory size we looked for something to do. We ended up taking a cab across town to some place that someone in the group recommended that happened to be closed. We ended up listening to a pretty good local band nearby, then found another cab and headed to the backpacker’s district to try and find some other SAS people. After watching another band at a place that looked straight out of Texas, we walked down the street to a place called the “Crazy Buffalo” which had a giant, spectacular neon sign. We ended up sitting there and talking for the rest of the evening. At about midnight we called it a night and went back to the ship to catch some rest.
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