Worst Canada ever!

So our unabashed love for Cambodians was tempered slightly by the tourism-overdrive touts of Siem Reap and Sihanoukville for whom the word "no" actually means "no, but if you grab my foot, yell at me, guilt trip me, and pester me for twenty minutes I might then say yes". Whilst attempting to relax on smooth white sandy beaches caressed by crystal clear turquoise water the constant, aggressive, and shockingly emotionally manipulative sales pitches you get for something as mundane as a hastily made friendship bracelet can be ... overwhelming. The Cambodians know how to get at your soul with guilt and insults in a way that no other people we've encountered so far have even dared try. It's scary. After steadfastly refusing to buy a trinket of some sort, one Canadian girl we met had this yelled in her face:

"You are the WORST Canada I ever met!"

She was upset for the rest of day despite having done nothing wrong. Poor girl.

In spite of all that, however, we still find the vast majority of our appreciation of Cambodian hospitality and willingness to laugh and smile super-duper-endearing. If we sit down and think too much about it, it is at least half our fault as tourists that an entire generation of young people working the tourism scene in certain areas of Cambodia are total bastards. We try not to dwell on it.

Angkor Wat.

[insert obscenely long list of extreme adjectives of a positive nature]

Sorry, that was lame. How on earth do you describe it though? Uhm ... Indiana Jones? That at least captures the essence of the emotional impact for me (and Lynn too I believe). It doesn't even touch the historic, cultural, or architectural heart of it, but better writers than we have attempted to capture this place in words and most of them have failed. Suffice to say that we were duly impressed. Anyone with any even passing interest in ancient cultures, ruins, Hinduism, Buddhism, Khmer culture, sweeping natural vistas married to jaw dropping stone structures designed to capture mountains in spirit, and a whole lot of other cool things needs to visit Angkor Wat.

The details of our specific visit this time around aren't hugely interesting. For the record, however, it was a three day pass that let us see the Roluous grouping of early temples, Angkor Wat (Bakan), Angkor Tom (Bayon), and Bantay Sreay. We thought it might be a good idea to rent bikes on the first day and then got caught in a monsoon halfway through a 55km bike ride. The real kicker was that Lynn was wearing a white shirt that after being soaked in the rain cause a lot of neck-craning among the male Cambodians.

Honestly, further specific descriptions or details seem silly so I'll pass you along to the pictures and just once again say, "Go." Oh, and one last thing, despite being touristy and a bit pricey, Seam Reap is a haven of good food and cheap massages. We indulged.

And then things got worse before they got better ...

You know that saying "Don't let the bed bugs bite?"

HOW ON GOD'S GREEN EARTH DO YOU STOP THEM!?!?!?

After Angkor Wat, we headed south to Sihanoukville where Cambodia is attempting to get in on the beach action that Thailand has dominated for so many many years. We arrived late and so, thinking to save a buck, we (that is to say I, and I take responsibility for this) decided to head to a cheap bungalow style dive rather than fork out for the place with the nice clean white sheets and the swimming pool. Hideous, horrible, skin aggravating mistake.

Bed bugs, for those of you lucky enough to not have first hand experience, are a plague on humanity wrought by prince of darkness himself and spawned from the blackest parts of the primordial soup. When you sleep in a bed infested with them as we did, they make mosquitoes seem cordial. Breeding by the dozens within days, they can bite several times a night in order to gorge on your blood and inject you with that hideous cocktail of anesthetic and anti-coagulant that for some reason only Satan knows, itches like poison ivy on a mosquito bite. With enough of them around, you can wake up one morning with hundreds of bites all over your body. And that's not the shitty part. The really bad-nasty-horrible-evil-godforsaken part is that they immediately lay eggs everywhere infesting the sheets, your clothes, your backpack and your mind such that you can't think straight for days after.

My torment was immediate. I felt them, even killed a few, but ultimately lost the battle, barely slept, and woke up with close to two hundred bites. Paul, it's gross. It's not as bad as the India thing, but it's damn close. Lynn, the poor thing, got it even worse, but didn't know it for two days. See, as it turns out, bed bug bites have one last nasty little side note that helps them survive: the bites can take up to NINE days to appear. This of course gives them time to bite, feed, breed, and spawn the next generation before you even realize you have bed bugs. Gah! So, ignorant as we were, we thought, "Oh well, at least Lynn didn't get bit. Poor ol Dez!" When in fact, Lynn ended up with about a hundred more tiny bites that took even longer to show up and at least twice as long to subside (we're not sure why she didn't recover as fast).

Anyway, we did what we had to with regards to excessive laundry washing and whatnot. We checked our bags. We THINK we're OK. The well documented psychological torment kept us up at night for a while, but eventually we moved on. Needless to say we changed hotels. Being on a tropical beach paradise was just barely enough of a salve to get us through the horror, but it was enough. Sihanoukville with its 50 cent draft beer and endless tracks of jaw dropping beaches was what we wanted it to be. The bed bugs weren't a spectacular way to end Cambodia or the trip, but you can't win em all.

Tomorrow we're back to Phnom Penh for a day of sight seeing before flying back to Bangkok. There we're gonna do some last minute shopping (despite being crazy broke) before visiting my uncle in Hong Kong. After that, it's home for the maelstrom of our "real lives" that we put on hold. We're trying not to think about it. Haha.

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