Cambodia - killing fields/s-21

We decided to cross the boarder from Laos to Cambodia by bus which means you essentially cross on foot. Since we were starting from the 4000 Islands in Laos, we took a boat to the mainland which, with its 10 passengers and 10 backpacks/bags, felt like we would most likely sink before we got there. When we reached the mainland a bus was waiting for us and we got seats right in the front with extra leg room. We knew it was an 11 hour bus trip and I somehow imagined that we were taking this bus straight across the boarder into cambodia for the whole 11 hours. That was a mistake. After my horrible bus rides in Laos I decided to take a sleeping pill. That was also a mistake. We reached the boarder much sooner than I had expected and before I could fall asleep but just as the pill was making me feel loopy. We had to then get off the bus and carry our heavy backpacks to multiple checkpoints where we had to get our passports checked, stamped, purchase our visas and had our temperatures checked. THe way they check your temperature is by putting what looks like a vibrator with a light on it against your forehead. It took us all by surprise. We had read that sometimes boarder patrol will try to get a dollar or so out of you but that it is illegal and that techinically you dont have to pay. At each station they would ask for a 1 dollar fee for passport stamps, etc. Some people protested and those people were told that they could sit down and wait but unless they paid they probably would not be allowed to cross the boarder, so we decided that the extra 4 dollars was worth it for our trip to progress. We were some of the first people to cross and then had to wait in the sun for about an hour for everyone to get across and then board a different bus. Cambodia uses US dollars and we quickly realized that everything you can buy in cambodia is at least 1 USD. Once we were back on the bus the ride was fairly simple and we arrived in Phnom Pehn around 10 pm. Katie and Laura were already there and had booked us rooms at their hotel so we settled in for an early night and went to bed.

The next day we went to the Killing Fields and S 21. And we were told to visit them in that order. When we arrived at the killing fields we got a guide who knew absolutely nothing about why they were there, or any information about the Khmer Rouge, only that his father and mother were killed there. He took us around and pointed out signs we should read and told us to take pictures of it all. With or without a guide, each point of focus was labled with a number and a path led you around. The experience in itself was sobering and at times horrifying, taking us back to the reactions we had when going to the Vietnam War Museum. Some of the "main attractions" at the killing fields were the Tower of Skulls, which held almost all of the skulls found in the graves (mostly from graves that were comprised only of human heads), The Killing Tree, on which babies were flung against until they were dead, the Loud Speaker, which played music to drown out the sound of the screams so passers by wouldn't know what was going on, The Graves, which at this point were just semi-large holes in the ground with a plaque next to it explainign how many people had been buried there. Next to these graves were the occassional bone that our guide would pick up and show us and say "arm bone" or "leg bone". There was also a museum room, which gave brief over views of the leaders of the Khmer Rouge, as well as some of the weapons that were used. Because they didn't have access to guns, or other military weapons, they used every day items to kill people as well as found items, i.e. a palm tree leaf to saw a man's head off (which happens to be very sharp) hence the necessity of the killing tree. There was also a 15 minute movie clip, which really explained nothing and, like our guide, went over the different areas of the killing field. We left depressed, but confused as none of us really understood the reason for the overtake of the Khmer Rouge and the necessity of killing all of these people.
Some of our questions were answered at S-21. S-21 was a school taken over by the Khmer Rouge and used as an interrogation prison for Cambodian people before they were shipped off to the killing fields. It was broken down into 4 buildings, which had each served different purposes. Some of the rooms were large, with a very small bed in the center with shackles hanging off of it. In each room there was a picture of a decaying man that had once laid on that bed to be tortured. Other buildings were broken up into many many small cells with barely any light and a small box to go to the bathroom in. Other horrifying items were the places where children used to play which were turned into torture devices where they would hang people and whip them in order to obtain information. Some floors of buildings were laid out with information about the Khmer Rouge which was very helpful in understanding why everything was going on. It was true that every one of the people who was being killed was innocent and it turns out there was no real concrete reason for killing any of them aside from the will to overturn an empire. It was purely the powerful against the weak and helpless, so it made a little more sense that our guide did not comprehend the ordeal. Again, just as seeing the kids who are still suffering from effects of agent orange, or hearing people's stories who had been through the Holocaust, most of the people who had grown up in Phnom Penh were just children who escaped the Khmer Rouge.

Laos

Before i start this post I need to comment on the fact that there is a 75 year old woman on the computer next to me playing a game where she owns a farm and is collecting animals. The sound is on.

From Hanoi we took a flight to Vientiane, Laos. This time the plane was small and crowded. Ashley sat next to a boy named Oliver on the plane and we ended up going out with him, and a traveler he met once we landed, Matt. We went to dinner and to a bar that we chose out of lonely planet because its description read "Beward of the women sitting at the bar eating beetles who claim to be hairdressers." Yes, Lonely Planet is on crack. There were no people eating beetles and no one asked to cut my hair. We were very disappointed. (I just heard two horse 'nays' followed by an elephant sound. What kind of farm is she running??) In Vientiane we went to the Buddah park which is literally a park filled with buddah statues. We took a local bus there which was really just a van with a few seats. Somehow 6 Loatians managed to sit in each sit which would fit 1/4 of an american. We stood for a good hour. We decided to take a bus from Vientiane to Luang Prabang which we were told was an 8 hour bus ride on the "VIP bus." Stupidly I thought VIP was actually going to be a bus for Very Important People who chose to spend the extra 50 cents. BOY WAS I WRONG. Not only did the bus almost leave without us (with our bags already on board) but everyone around me threw up. And they knew they were going to. They boarded the bus with a roll of plastic bags. It was a disaster. The bus ride also lasted 10 1/2 hours. I wanted to die the entire time and swore I'd never get on a bus again. When we finally got to Luang Prabang I was very shaken up from my traumatic experience (apparently it was only the people on the back of the bus that felt the need to vomit for the entire time) and we set out to look for a hotel. We found one but once we went out we realized that we had forgotten to take the card of our hotel and had no idea what it was called or where it was. I'm usually the one with a great sense of direction and I was totally lost. Ashley is usually the one who walks the wrong way to the bathroom when we're in our hotel room but after an hour of walking around, her instincts finally led us the right we and miraculously we found out hotel. I think she must have blacked out because she had no idea how she knew it was the right way. Laos has an 11 oclock curfew so we went to dinner and called it an early night. It was just a few days till my birthday and Lance came to Luang Prabang to meet me. It was a nice birthday present on top of the beautiful hotel my mother so graciously set us all up in. The night before my birthday we all went out to a bar that we had been told was open until 1 am so we could ring in my birthday with a bang! The bar actually closed at 10:30 though so the girls sang happy birthday to me in the room. It was sweet and I didnt mind because I've realized over the past few years that my birthday is completely overated. (she just bought 8 sheep and 4 more elephants) The Chang Heritage where we stayed for my birthday was really beautiful and the staff was really nice. The beds were comfortable and my nightmares of vomiting Laotians started to subside. On the actual day of my birthday we woke up early to feed the monks who walk down the street in a line with metal containers that you fill with sticky rice and bananas. It was the longest line of bright orange I'd ever seen, but it felt nice to do something for other people on my birthday. Later we went to see the waterfalls and mistakingly took the path less taken to the top. It turned out to be quite a hike. That night Ashley and Mimi took me to dinner at a restaurant across the Mekong River. We sat in a private little hut and ordered Laos Fondue which was a mixture of Korean BBQ and sukiaki and very delicious. After dinner we were all so full that we didnt know how we were going to walk back to the hotel, but somehow made it.

A few days later we took a one day "cycling" trip through green discovery. Cycling turned out to be off road mountain biking, and probably some of the hardest biking I've ever done. It was all up and down hill, but it was so rocky that the down hill was even harder than the strenous peddling the uphill required. For lunch we treked across the river on foot and had lunch in a tree house which was really very nice until I realized we had to keep biking. We biked through a few very small villages and saw some of the local children playing games. We finally made it back and were so tired that we sat in the green discovery place for about an hour before we could walk back to the hotel. Lance and I decided to go out to a big Lao dinner from which I got food poisoning :(. The next day we went to Vang Vieng and this time we decided to take a "mini bus" also known as a van. There were only six of us in the van, Ashley Mimi Lance and myself and another couple also from the US. Everything was great. We eat got our own row and we left the bus station with no problems. We were comfortable. About 3 minutes after we left the bus station we came to an abrupt stop. 3 Laotians were standing on the side of the road, all carrying feed bags. We picked them up. Everyone groaned and rearranged positioning but I knew that something horrible had just happened. THEY THREW UP THE ENTIRE BUS RIDE. True, our driver drove like a mad man and I thought we were going to go flying off a cliff, but what was worse than that was all the vomit. The noises, the smells and the bags of vomit shifting violently from one side of the van floor to the other as we rounded each mountain bend. It was my nightmare part 2.

We finally arrived in Vang Vieng. Vang Vieng is a weird weird weird place. The restaurants all have the same menu and each have 2-3 tvs. Some restaurants play episodes of Friends, and some restaurants play episodes of Family Guy. No one talks while eating they just sit and watch tv. We didnt understand this until after we went tubing. We had been excited to go tubing down the river in Laos for a while and were told it was a lot of fun but we did not expect what it turned out to be. Tubing in Vang Vieng was the equivilent of Spring Break on crack. Its jsut bar after bar that you can float or walk to that serves buckets of alcohol. We also happened to go tubing on Australia day so the ordered chaos that usually went on was not so ordered. Each bar had very high rope swings where you could hurl your drunken body into the water. I felt like an old jewish mother saying "oh be careful!" or "that looks so dangerous should he be flipping like that?" every time anyone jumped. It was almost too much for me to handle. We went to one bar that had a Tug-O-War in which the losers were pulled into a mud pit. I actually enjoyed that a lot and it felt like good clean dirty fun. That night all we wanted to do was sit and watch Friends. I finally understood the appeal. There was one bar/restaurant in Vang Vieng that had a food menu and it also had a happy menu. The happy menu consisted of drugs. They were legal to buy and smoke/eat/drink in this venue. The main 3 offered were weed, shrooms and opium but they implied that if you asked for it they probably had it. It was weird and exciting but I decided not to experiment. While we were in Vang Vieng both Lance and Ashley became violently ill for days and once they were feeling better we decided it was time to leave. We took a bus to Vientiane (no one vomited tomy knowlegde) and then flew to Pakse. From Pakse we took a 3 day kayak trip to the 4000 Islands. The first day was great, and we kayaked 4 hours down the Mekong River. That night we stayed in bungalos near the river that had working bathrooms in room and mosquito nets for the beds. it also might have been a chicken farm. About 20 hens and their chicks were running around and about 10 roosters all having cock fights over their women. The roosters in Laos are also retarded and crow all night and never sleep so between that and the heat, neither did I. The next day we hiked to a water fall and then kayaked 1 hour over some mild rapids and saw some river dolpins swimming. That night we did a "home stay" which actually meant that we slept on a family's porch. We never met the family. They all slept behind a wall, I think there were about 10 of them. We slept on the porch. In bug nets. See-through bug nets. No privacy. It was about 100 degrees. There were lizards and frogs and mosquitos everywhere and at that point I wondered why the trip had cost so much money. There was one bathroom we could use but the woods were more sanitary. I cried myself to sleep. Camping? Bring it on! At least a tent has walls. The last day we kayaked over some more rapids and did a little ceremony with a tiny drunk man who gave us some rope bracelets for good luck.

SIDENOTE: the cats in Laos have short tails that look like they've been hacked off badly with a dull axe. I asked our tour guide on the kayak trip why they cut the cat's tails and he responded, shocked "NO ONE CUT TAILS HERE!" I'm still not convinced.

We spent one more day on the islands on our own before heading to cambodia where we crossed the boarder on foot which I will discuss in my next blog!

Hoi An - Hanoi

Wow it has been a very long time since my last blog due to my laziness. At the moment I'm in Phnom Phen but I'm going to back track and talk about the rest of Vietnam and Laos first. It was a mistake to do this after showering because I forgot to put on bug spray and in the one minute I've started this blog I've been bitten by 8 mosquitos. Mosquitos love me more in SE Asia than at home. Not good. I look like a walking bug lamp I guess due to my pasty white skin. Oh well. Anyway, back to Vietnam. A few days after we got to Hoi An the 3 guys we met in Nha Trang came and met up with us and would continue traveling with us for the rest of our time in Vietnam which was really a lot of fun. My absolute favorite part of Hoi An was the food. For a very small place it had some of the best food I've eaten on my whole trip. There was one restaurant, Streets, that was owned and run by an expat from New York. The whole concept was upscale Vietnamese cuisine for a reasonable price that took local kids off the street, gave them jobs as chefs, waiters, etc and gave them a culinary degree from the ICE in NYC. A prix fix meal, 3 courses of excellent Vietnamese food, all for 5 dollars. We ended up going back twice and the owner gave us some tips about things to do in Hoi An which included a bike ride past an herb farm to a local beach which was a beautiful ride. (bug update: one of the bites on my leg just reached the size of a silver dollar and I'm scared) One night in Hoi An we went to a bar which was essentially just a small room with a dance floor. We danced for hours. At one point in the night, "Party in the USA" came on and we got so excited and sang so loudly to it that the bar ended up turning it off mid-song. No wonder foreigners hate americans, haha. A fwe days later all of our clothes we were having made were finished and it was time to go to Hanoi. On the day we left we decided to do something cultural so we went to My Son which had a bunch of ruins. It was very hot that day and after walking around for about an hour and taking some pictures we decided to head back. It was very beautiful, but disorganized and random. We decided to not waste an entire day traveling and take a plane from Danang to Hanoi. The plane was huge and about 1/4 of the way full.

When we got off the plane in Hanoi it was cold and we were not prepared. It had been very hot everywhere else in Vietnam and we didnt realize how far north we had traveled. We had figured out which hotel we wanted to stay in on the plane and asked our cab driver to take us there. He said he knew where it was but before we knew it we were in a dark alley at a random hotel and he was telling us to get out. Luckily it was 6 against one and he finally took us to the original hotel we asked him to. The hotel was, as Vietnam is, very disorganized and unecessarily complicated and for the first 3 nights we were there we all had to switch rooms each night. The first full day we spent there was Lachlan's birthday and we decided to go see Avitar, which, despite rumors that it was not all it was cracked up to be, we all enjoyed. The boys got very emotional and cried about 3 times each during the movie which only made the experience better. That night we went to a restaurant called 69 restaurant, but despite its name was just a normal, and good, restaurant. Hanoi has a curfew of 12 am so after dinner we went to a bar that looked closed. We asked our cab driver to just take us back to the restaurant so we could walk around and before we knew it we were at a club. This club turned out to be a late night underground bar filled with Vietnamese mafia. We were the only white people there and danced for a few hours. We were not allowed to take any pictures in the club and aside from bottle service the only thing we were allowed to order was beer. There were also very few women in the club which seemed strange and everyone pretty much kept to themselves. The next day we took a 2 day boat trip to HaLong Bay which is filled with these huge rock masses that stick out from the water. It was misty and very beautiful but even colder than Hanoi. The boat we took was very small, but the bedrooms were very comfortable and nicely put together. I was very nervous because I had been on a cruise before and the bedrooms on the cruise ship had looked and felt like little prisons where you had to sit down on the toilet in order to take a shower. These rooms very surprisingly spacious though and it felt like a little bit of luxury. However, unlike a cruise where meals are prepaid and unlimited, I remember my uncle ordering one of everything, just for the hell of it, food on this boat was hard to come by. They served us 3 meals a day, but there just wasn't enough food. Dinner was served at 6 pm, and it was over by 6:30. When we asked if there was any more food they sternly said, "No." and that was the end of the conversation. At night we flagged down a little paddle boat and bought some over priced pringles from the 2 women manning it. One of the boys bought some "pot" that turned out to be tea. Some people on board smoked it anyway, just incase it just smelled like tea, but having grown up in a house where even if we had nothing in the fridge we had about 20 types of tea, I knew I was not mistaken. Further than that I identified the tea as Earl Grey. During the boat ride we stopped at a cave and were given a tour. The cave was very large and was lit up with neon lights to look more like a dance club than an old preserved cave. Our tour consisted of a man with a red laser who would point to a stalagtite formation and say "This looks like Dragon." or. "See, this one looks like dog drinking water from stream," or my favorite, "this looks like one woman breast." The dragon formation even had little red lights where its "eyes" were. It seems very ridiculous to me, but obviously, a main attraction of the trip. The next day we stopped at a floating village which consisted of about 40 tiny houses literally floating on the water. None of the people who inhabit these houses can swim. Does this make sense to you? It does not make sense to me. Why would you live ON THE WATER, SURROUNDED BY WATER, NO LAND IN SIGHT, and not at least attempt to learn how to swim? What happens during the rainy season? They all drown and new people come and inhabit the houses? Obviously no one could answer my questions. Some things just baffle me. We returned back to land and took a bus back to Hanoi. The next day Lachlan left and that same day Mimi and Ashley decided to go to Sapa, a small village at the Northern tip of Vietnam. At this point I was feeling pretty sick, or as the australians say "shit ass" so I decided to stay behind and do some cultural things in Hanoi with Jamie and Ian who still had a few days left before they continued on in their own directions. We took a cyclo around Hanoi whichw as a good way to see the city. A cyclo is a man on a bicycle and you sit in front in a little seat and he just peddles you around. I thought walking across the street was intense, I thought being in a cab in traffic was intense, I thought being on a motorbike was intense, the cyclo though just seemed like the perfect way to die a tragic, painful motorbike-car-bus-gridlock related death. You're moving about as slow as possible, comletely exposed to all the elements, in front of your driver heading into oncoming traffic that does not slow down. It took me 30 minutes to start breathing and accepting the fact that before I died I would like to look around. It turned out to be a good way to see everything. Once I openned my eyes. The next day me and the boys went to the prison and the temple of literature which were both part of "the top 5 things to do in Hanoi." The prison, what was left of it, was really intense and furthered my interest in world wars and torture. 1/3 of the prison remains where as the other 2/3rds have been torn down to make room for a HUGE UGLY hotel. Yes, I'd like to stay in this hotel and please give me a window with the view of the prison. Again, I dont get it. The prison area that remains has been kept as it was though, and it was very hard walking around inside. The cells are so small and you can go into them and close the door. Luckily they've removed the locks, so your friends can't lock you in (even though they both tried). There is one room with a guillotine, still sporting a very sharp blade, and pictures of women's heads all over the room. At that point Jamie almost threw up and I definitely got chills. We then went to the temple of literature which, unless you do a ton of reading about before you go (as I did not) it is hard to really truely understand what it is all about. There was also a lot of constrution going on inside the grounds which made it hard to appreciate its beauty. The next day the girls came back and we said goodbye to the boys and went our seperate ways, which was definitely bittersweet. I'm going to end this blog here and start fresh with a new blog about Laos. Total mosquito bite count: 17. NOT JOKING.