'Bye 'Bye Cambodia! So Long Southeast Asia!

Two lovely sisters and one long-armed photographer in Angkor Borei, Cambodia

A while back, a friend e-mailed that it seemed we'd really "gotten rooted" in this part of the world. It's true, we've been in the countries of what is referred to as SE Asia since late December 2006 - over a year. My friend sent that e-mail back in June. At the time and after, I worried that we may have stayed in this area too long. We should have been out covering more diverse ground. We should have picked a less developed region. Yada, yada, yada... Now that our time here is coming to an end, though, I'm very happy we landed where we did.

I think we've gone slowly enough and stayed long enough to say we got a fair taste of SE Asia. And on reflection, if you're going to get rooted someplace on this planet, SE Asia isn't a bad place at all to have that happen. My biggest worry was that this area has seen budget travelers for over thirty years - lots of travelers. Even so, we still found plenty of interesting and inspiring things to do.

I never doubted that lingering somewhere was going to get into my heart. I just had no clear preconception of how that would manifest itself in my feelings. Now, during the last days in this region, feelings of sadness and satisfaction come strongly. We could have landed anywhere. For a number of reasons, we could easily have not stopped. We did, though, and Southeast Asia has, despite my initial misgivings, turned out to have been an excellent choice.

See for yourself...

Adaptation on the streets of Bangkok

Curious beetle buyers in Mae Sot, Thailand

Mobile brush and broom vendor in Bangkok

Me posing for scale at the base of the second level of Angkor Wat in Cambodia

A victorious (and very happy) duck owner after a prolonged and successful pursuit - Hue, Vietnam


Filtered light at the pagoda of the Emerald Buddha, Saigon

An almost empty beach on Quan Lan Island - Bai Tu Long Bay, Vietnam

Tami entwined in the roots of an ancient tree and an ancient temple - Preah Khan (Angkor)

Tami above Bai Tu Long Bay - Vietnam

Tami at a cool waterfall - Bac Ma Nat. Park Vietnam

Salt harvesting in Doc Let Vietnam

Some tough local girls in Don Det, Laos

Saigon traffic!

A family that rides together.... - outside Phnom Penh

Pigs in a basket - Near Ninh Binh, Vietnam

This noodle-laden bike couldn't quite make it - Cu Da, Vietnam

The fleet and the morning haul - Mui Ne, Vietnam


Monsoon dog wash in Phnom Penh

Huge, boom fishing contraption - Tonle Sap, Cambodia

Banana-laden bike - outside Phnom Penh

In twelve hours, we'll be back in India. What a ride that's going to be. What a ride this has been.

Home can be where you make it

As Tami and I planned our break from the career/life path that we'd been on, we discussed a ton of different reasons why wanted to leave our home in San Francisco. It didn't take long for a short list to develop. I don't know if I've gone back and articulated those objectives but, now that I look back, we've been able to "check" many off the to-do list.

We wanted to enjoy some warm weather. Check.


Night market scene near our house

We wanted to get out of a 9-5...or, more accurately...an 8-6 schedule. Instead of clocks and calendars dictating how we used our time, we wanted the rising and setting sun or the seasons to dictate. Check.

We wanted to see if we could let go of some of the stress we were feeling. Check.

We wanted to spend time outdoors. Check.

We wanted to use our bodies i.e. trekking, riding bikes, swimming, etc. Check.

We wanted to share some of our experiences on the road with friends from home. Check.

We wanted to try different foods and cuisines. Check.

I'd traveled outside the US a fair amount before this trip and enjoyed all the above experiences to one degree or another. There was one thing I'd never done before, though, and that goal topped my list. I wanted to live somewhere for awhile - call some foreign city or town or village, "home". As we prepare to depart Southeast Asia, I am happy to say that we have been able to enjoy a brief version of that experience now, as well.




Neon sign for the market where we shopped in Phnom Penh.

Our goal in "living" someplace, meant that we wanted to get to know it better than you would if you were just passing through. We wanted to work. Originally, we had hopes of opening a restaurant or some other business. For a variety of reasons, we got cold feet on that one. The next logical step was to try to contribute something helpful to the place where we settled. On that note, we got extremely lucky with our positions with Kiva and Maxima. Not only did we find work, but the work was fascinating and the people we worked with were so gracious and professional that I'll do well to try to match their examples. I feel very fortunate that I leave Cambodia calling many of them friends.

Some of the Maxima staff at the wedding of one of their colleagues.


Wedding procession at the same wedding.

We wanted to live someplace other than a hotel. In this case, we were also very lucky. We looked at several places but fell in love with a third-floor flat in a family's house. We had a big, tiled terrace in front, a great roof deck...and the thing we wanted most - a kitchen. Tami and I will be working off the extra pounds for a few months. :)

Thanksgiving crew on our roof at sundown.

We hoped get to know people - locals and/or expatriates. Cambodia is a great place for both. I sound like a broken record going on about how nice the Cambodians are but that's the reality. Come and check it out for yourself. Lots of interesting non-Cambodians have settled there, as well. One nice ending story is that, Bari (second from right in the above photo) took over our apartment. We had some very good times with him and were super-happy to pass on such a groovy pad to someone we knew. Funny footnote: Bari's originally a Michigander and was one of the founders of a vegetarian restaurant I worked at in Ann Arbor back in the late '80's. Now he's making a home in Phnom Penh working with local folks out on Koh Dach, a nearby island in the Mekong River.

So, now we move on - sad to go but very happy we had this opportunity. If you're curious at all if you can do it, have no fear. It's a great experience. Somehow I don't think this is our last time, either.

Fruit shake vendor at the night market near Orussey

Rough (In)Justice

The former main entrance to Sihanoukville's market - Psar Leu

A few days ago we were in the town of Sihanoukville on the southern coast of Cambodia. In the middle of one night I woke up to sirens, an uncommon sound I recalled hearing only a couple times during our months in the country. The next morning our French host told us that the city's market had burned, "Zayr iss no moah mahket."

When we went by to take a look, we were speechless. We'd shopped at this market before and complained that it was scruffy, even by Cambodian standards. It was where the city shopped, though. All over Southeast Asia, people buy almost all of their food from central or district markets - sprawling covered warrens filled with stalls of produce, meat, fish, dry goods, clothes....you name it. Each stall is owned by a family and, at least in Cambodia, that stall provides the main or sole income supporting a LOT of people.

Piles of clothes smolder

It's no wonder that people pored through every scrap of their burned belongings trying to salvage anything of value. I saw one woman carrying the melted remains of a fan. I assume she was going to try to pull the copper out of the motor to sell it for scrap. Very few Cambodians can afford to waste anything.

Over the subsequent few days, we heard from several different people that the local government had tried to "influence" the vendors at the market to move to a new facility. The land where the existing market stood in the center of downtown Sihanoukville had been sold for another purpose. Most of the vendors chose not to move because rents at the new market were too high. Then, after functioning in the same place for decades, the market burned entirely a few nights ago.


Not one person we talked to was surprised that the market burned. They weren't happy, but they seemed resigned because they knew they have little or no recourse. This type of eviction happens with sad regularity in Cambodia. As cities become crowded and the economy slowly grows, land formerly deemed not worth much can, over time, become coveted. Squatters, small-business people, anyone not connected to the powers-that-be are forced to move, often to places distant from their former locations.

And no, you can count insurance among the many things that these people do not have.

Getting Around Phnom Penh

Phnom Penh may be one of the largest cities in the world with no public mass transit. It's the biggest city I've ever visited where you can't find even a single city bus. Gettng an accurate census in a sprawling, ramshackle place like this isn't easy. Most current estimates put the population here at somewhere just over two million. The population of buses, trains or any other form of surface mass transport is ZERO.


Phnom Penh experimented briefly with buses three or four years ago. The experiment lasted only three months because, I've been told, no one would ride them. The denizens of this city have a more unique form of transport that they seem highly unlikely to stop using - the motodup (augmented by the larger and much more romantic tuk tuk - see second vehicle in the photo below). A motodup is simply a 100-125 cc motorbike (often a version of the Honda cub made by Daelim from Korea) and driver that will put you on the back of his bike and drive you around town for a small fee. The cost varies depending on the distance. As foreigeners, we ALWAYS had to negotiate but we invariably settled near the usual cost of about fifty cents per kilometer.


Many guidebooks tell you that the street corners are full of waiting motodup drivers easily recognizable by their ubiquitous uniform - the baseball cap. It's almost impossible to walk past them without hearing the song of the streets, "Hello Sir, moto?" or the more simplified "Moto?".


Cambodians famously do NOT like to walk. That, supposedly, is the main reason why the bus experiment failed. Motodups will take you from door to door. With a bus, you have to get off at some predetermined stop and walk to your final destination. Motodups are cheap. You can find one any time of day or night. They're very convenient. It's no wonder we see thousands of these guys (NEVER have we seen a woman driver) around the city. Women riders go sidesaddle.


When we started work, we needed to get from our house to our office. We toyed with the idea of buying bicycles but never got around to it. Instead we hit up the motodups on the corner closest to our house. Both of us can pile onto single moto and get to the office in less than ten minutes. Since our Khmer was limited, we drew a simple map of our destination. With a little deciphering, the driver seemed to understand and off we went.


After only two or three days, a strange thing happened. One of our drivers picked us up for the second time - a repeat. When we tried to fumble through the map description and directions, he smiled and waved us off. He remembered where we were going. It was amazing. Get on the bike; no need to give directions; no need to negotiate the fee; just roll and enjoy the scenery. It was like that every day going forward unless we had a driver who'd never carried us before.

I won't go into the hair raising aspect of trusting your life to another driver in some of THE MOST chaotic traffic on earth. Suffice to say that, if you're paying attention at all, it can be very scary. The rules of the road here are minimal and traffic flows based on lack of resistance more than any other factor. It completely common to drive down the wrong side of the street agains traffic as long as you stay closer to the shoulder. Red stoplights merely mean "slow down". Intersections ebb and flow with the cross traffic pushing and nudging until someone can break all the way across. Of course, all of this happens without helmets for the passengers.

Don't eat the bear paw

Yes...the trade in endangered animals. We've all heard the stories about how anything goes (...onto an Asian dinner plate). Just east of Phnom Penh there's a long string of huge restaurants frequented almost exclusively by Khmers (Cambodians) reputed to sell all manner of exotic cuisine - everything from cobra to dog to different parts of endangered deer among other things. The above billboard is just over the river from Phnom Penh right where the restaurants begin. It implies that you go to jail if you serve up anything threatened or endangered. One can only hope the authorities actually enforce whatever regulations might be on the books. As Cambodia, like much of the developing world, is open to the highest bidder, I wouldn't bet on the menu being close to what most Westerners would consider conventional.

Friends Make It Feel Like the Holidays

Staying put seems to be the right tactic if you people to visit....and we always want people to visit. We've been in Phnom Penh for a couple months now and it seems like this city is on the road "to" or "from" someplace or other for a number of our friends. Sherry, pictured above with Tami on the roof of the Foreign Correspondents' Club, was the latest familar face to spend some time with us. We hadn't seen her for almost two years. She was one of the stalwarts who saw us off on our last night in the States back in NYC.


Unlike other visitors - this is actually a first now that I think of it - Sherry came to visit as a result of work, not pleasure. She works for the United Nations and took a weekend out of a very hectic schedule to fly down from Vientienne, Laos. She's no stranger to traveling in the developing world and fell right into the rhythm of seeing the sights in Phnom Penh. We did some of our local favorites (riding in tuk-tuks - above).


You never know what you'll find on the streets of this city. Notice how at-ease Sherry is. I was afraid the rump of that beast might have swung over and crushed me.


One of the nicest things we've been able to enjoy by staying put, is our kitchen for cooking . . . . and our terrace for eating. Every guest has had to endure long brunches or dinners where Tami and I try to get satiated on all the foods from home we miss. This particular morning it was Latin American - desayuno tipico. Homemade tortillas and salsa, too.

One afternoon, a friend of ours who lives here, Bari (far right) arranged a private, sunset boat cruise on the Mekong. Ouch. You can't believe how peaceful and mellow it was out on the river. Phnom Penh can be kah-ray-zeeeee and the boat was an unexpected release. After a couple snail-paced hours, we were all smiling.



The icy beers helped, too.


Even the captain enjoyed himself. (Check out his Britney logbook...)


One morning, we had the bonus treat of two more people joining in from home. Perry and Mike, two friends of one of Tami's girlfriends were passing through and joined for brunch.


In and out. Two days and she was back on a tuk-tuk to the airport. Much fun. It'll be that much more fun to laugh about our little sojourn when we're back home someday. Adios amiga!