Christmas in Cambodia

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Cambodia has been a whirlwind tour for me. I’m hopping to cram in Myanmar before I head home in a few weeks so Cambodia had to be fast tracked. I’m leaving bright and early tomorrow morning, which means that I’ve been in this crazy country for about 9 days, including Christmas! The people here have been wonderful to me and I’ve learned about 4 Khmer words while I’ve been here (hello, good-bye, thank you and good luck), yet locales are entirely too impressed. This says a lot about foreigners who come here and don’t bother trying to learn even a tiny bit of the language. I remember hanging out with 2 Dutch girls in Laos who actually got angry because our waitress didn’t speak English fluently. Well, her English was much better than the girl’s Laos. Talk about sense of entitlement! Okay, enough I’ll get off my soap box...wait a minute isn’t that the purpose of a blog? To be a virtual soap box? So I’ll damn well stay on it if I please. I’m sounding more and more like Herman all the time...

Back to Cambodia. Started off in Phnom Phen, which I really enjoyed. The city is big and busy but a lot more mellow than the Vietnamese or Thai equivalent. Obviously did the usual tourist circuit and checked out the Killing Fields, S21 (where the Khmer Rouge imprisoned and tortured their victims before transporting them to the killing fields) and shooting range (where Vincent shot off a few rounds). It seems so weird to witness the aftermath of such atrocious violence than go and shoot up a target (and pay a lot of money to do it!). I don’t quite get it. Must be a testosterone thing. Fortunately, tragedy wasn’t the only part of modern Khmer culture that I took in while in the capitol. Four of us foreigners from our guest house befriended a few moto-drivers and a girl that worked at the guest house and we all went out to a locale dance club, where I learned how to do a very slow Cambodian circle dance. It has a name but I forget. There was a live band that dropped some crazy ass tunes. Cambodian hip hop is actually quite good. They were like the Khmer Black Eyed Peas, at least in my opinion.

We only stayed in PP for about 3 nights then we left for Battambang where nothing much happened. The most eventful thing that happened to us in this slow paced town was that we made the decision to take a local bus to Siem Reap instead of the more popular choice of a slow boat. Basically we did this to spite everyone in the Cambodian tourist industry. In our 2 days in Battambang all we kept hearing from everyone was how awful the bus ride was (tales of roads riddled with holes to washed-out bridges). As our departure date neared the tales become more and more dire. They made it sound like a rattling death trap and I decided it couldn’t be worse than the bus ride I endured through the Laos mountain side. So out of pure spite and curiosity, Vincent and I opted for the bus (which by the way is also a fraction of the cost of a boat ride). And you know what? It wasn’t so bad after all. Okay, it was uncomfortable and not nearly as scenic as the boat ride boasted to be. We were the only foreigners on the bus so other tourist was too scared to take the risk. Suckers! We showed them (talk about cutting off the nose to spite the face).

Siem Reap for Christmas and marveling at one of the 7 wonders of the world- Ankor. I really wanted to be in Siam Reap for the holiday’s cuz I felt it was fitting to celebrate the most important Christian holiday at a place that was built to worship Buddhist and Hindu gods. We got a 3 day pass, which is more than enough to take in the major temples and then some. We pretty much did 2 full days and a half. The first two days we cycled to Ankor and around and the last day we took a tuk-tuk in order to visit some of the temples that were further afield. So with sore buts but happy hearts, was our Ankor experience. Christmas in Siem Reap was pretty fun. Both Vincent and I had Santa hats on so people kept wishing us merry Christmas as we roamed the town on Christmas Eve and Christmas night. On Christmas night we got pulled into the massive drunken party by some locales. It was awesome they kept giving us free beer and trying to make me chug. I tired but I just wasn’t up to my usual skill level. I had a 24 hour flu bug thing the day before so I wasn’t really at my best. But I tried and only made a bit of a fool of myself. We eventually had to leave the party to grab some grub and they made us promise to come back in an hour. We did come back about an hour and a half later but the party was over. That’s Asians drinking for ya. One hour knock out, all of us. So that was Christmas in Cambodia.

I’ll be back in Thailand for New Year festivities, then the plan is for Vincent and I to hook up with my friend Alexis (who I traveled with in Laos) and the three of us will catch a flight to Myanmar before I head home sometime in late January.

Happy holidays everyone.

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Comments

[ToniD]

Christmas Eve Siem Reap
Did you happen to catch the impromptu parade on pub street Christmas Eve? We were at World Lounge Pub for dinner when it passed by. I absolutely loved Siem Reap and I found the locals to be some of the most genuinely nice people I've ever met.