Outtakes from Cambodia

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So I really did believe myself when I wrote that the last entry would wrap up Cambodia. But in the past week, my Facebook account has been flooded with pictures pouring in from group members who are now, like me, finishing up the training course in their respective countries. Seeing the incredible selection of photos posted, it made me realize that I had been something of a slouch with the camera and that many of these shots outdid my own. Also, a few of the pictures brought to light aspects of the experience and memorable moments that I had failed to touched on previously. So, that said, I’ve squeezed in one last Cambodia entry and used it to share 20 of my favorite photos taken by group members. To provide detail, I’ve numbered each picture and written a corresponding caption for each. And rest assured, an overdue Vietnam entry is in the works. But for now, enjoy the outtakes!

NOTE: I had to move some of the pictures to the bottom of the page because otherwise none of the captions would be aligned with the right image. If you want to read through this whole entry (and who could blame you if you don’t), it may be easier to click on one of the pictures and scroll through them in a separate window while reading the captions below.




1. Several monks posing by the Silver Pagoda in the Royal Palace grounds. Monks study at a temple nearby and are a fairly common sight walking around the university area. Several of us went one afternoon during lunchtime to meet with a monk and work with him on his English speaking. His bunk area was a small wooden shack that housed few items outside of essentials. It was raining and we spoke softly, listening to the patter on the tin roof. Then, suddenly, an abrasively loud cell phone chime made us all jump and as we looked around, the monk calmly reached into his robe and muted the call. Go figure.




2. This is a nifty shot of the university parking lot from the rooftop. Believe it or not, it is actually fairly empty in this picture; if there is any concrete visible it means some students didn’t make it to class that day. Whenever I looked over the edge of the roof it always made me wonder if there had ever been a student who had his friends turn his bike on down below as he climbed up to the roof and then casually jumped off onto the awaiting saddle in the same manner that cowboys are seen leaping from a prison window onto their trusty steed in old Western films; I wonder if Khmer have an equivalent in their language for, “Hi ho Silver, away!”




3. A great view of us playing ball on the university roof. As you might notice from the sky and the puddles, it had just rained quite hard and the brick floor was slick with moisture. Shortly after this picture was taken, Josh (seen here with the ball) lost his footing and to the delight of all lucky enough to witness, managed to orchestrate a fantastic legs-up fall much in the way a cartoon character might slip on a banana peel. In a previous entry I had trouble recalling the name of the sport that is played with this ball but I have since remembered that it is called sepak takraw and you can click here to read all about it.




4. A couple of new faces in this one. The man on the far right is Dara, one of the tuk tuk drivers for LanguageCorps who stayed at the villa with the group. He is a very sweet person and I often found myself imagining how perplexed he must have felt at times, surrounded by a crowd of out-of-place, babbling foreigners who I’m sure broke several local customs per minute. The man to the left of Dara is our instructor Steve, who I realized I never posted a picture of after going on something of a rant about him. Anyhow, this was taken on Steve’s birthday aboard the boat rented for him and only on those grounds is that face even close to excusable.




5. The very first night our group was, well, a group, we had a few drinks at a bar down the street from the guesthouse. Ben taught us a game to play and, to make a long story short, one of the many jokes and quotes to come out of it was our “Angkor Wat Wat” gang sign, which incorporates an “A” and a “W” as well as bearing a vague resemblance to the structure itself. This shot was taken atop the boat deck at Steve’s party; as you can see, everyone is flashing the sign except for one person who accidentally threw up some sort of devil-horns gesture. It must have been the rocking of the boat.




6. (BOTTOM) The majority of our group stayed at a villa a few miles away from the guesthouse and the university. It’s a magnificent building with a large deck area to lounge and a patio out front to play barefoot football (soccer) on with Chris’ takraw ball. This picture was taken during a particularly physical game played after Steve’s boat party in which virtually all participants ended up injured in one form or another; bruised shins, knocked knees, sprained ankles, missing toenails, it had all the gore of a Mel Gibson epic. I can’t remember who won but I think the game ended around the same time as the beer.




7. The villa crowd rode to class each morning split up between two tuk tuks (a tuk tuk is a motorbike with a covered seated area mounted behind - the same as which I described catching to the guesthouse in a previous entry). I was not present the morning this picture was taken but it seems one of the tuk tuks was out of order and so the entire group had to squeeze into one. Four is the recommended number of passengers, six can be uncomfortably tolerated. With three people off camera in the seat of the person taking the picture, this was the only time I’ve ever heard of eight people crowding into one tuk tuk and I was sorry to have not been there to make it nine.




8. While duck and quail heads are regarded as something of a delicacy in Southeast Asia, boiled chicken heads are generally considered the “untouchables” of the animal-head-for-snack caste, second only to steamed mule’s snout. Laurel and Chris made good on their dare to eat one and both enjoyed scraping uncooked brain matter from the skull with their teeth and catching gullet juices on their tongue. The thought of eating the head of any animal can be seen as a little barbaric but really, is it any worse than chewing on the flanks, nibbling the shoulder, gobbling tripe from the stomach? As an omnivore, I’d say meat is meat and one either eats it or not. Just watch out for the beak.




9-10. After the consumption of the chicken head, we all caught some bike taxis back to the villa. Laurel and Chris climbed onto one bike while Azalea and myself squeezed on to another. As the drivers revved the engines alive, Chris turned to me and shouted, “We’re racing you guys!” Unable to control the surge of competitive juice, I leaned over to our driver and growled, “We are not losing to them, you hear?” I don’t think either driver initially understood the stakes as we started off down the street but they slowly caught on the more Chris and I beat on their shoulders like jockeys in the Belmont Stakes whipping their horses to the finish line. The bikes started to go faster and faster, each one pulling ahead of the other for short periods of time with us clinging onto the back; Azalea and I had bags of hot soup in one hand, not the most practical items to hold in transit at high velocities. The drivers traded nervous grins with each other; they were probably torn between giving it their absolute all and making sure we were alive at the end to pay them. After all, Khmer are typically competitive people and vying for the same customers, there must be a sense of rivalry already in place with one another. Our bike dropped back for a minute before roaring around the inside bend with our driver leaning into the corner and us following suite without much choice. We arrived at the villa a few lengths ahead of the others and we slapped our driver big high fives. Then he demanded that we pay him more than the other driver for winning; I’m still not sure if he was joking or not but I gave him a nice tip for his effort and apologized for the soup stains on his seat cover.




11. I have had many inquiries from friends back home about the picture of the “Happy Herb’s Pizza” menu I posted in one of the earlier entries; specifically, is it really a pizza laced with cannabis? To which my answer is, yes, it certainly is, and here is a picture of Laurel enjoying a fully loaded slice. I’m not sure which I found more unbelievable: that the restaurant owners make their pizzas “happy” upon request or that they do so at no additional charge to the consumer. And these things pack a wallop. Without delving into too many details of how this night turned out for many of us, let me say this: eating five slices is probably eating about four too many.




12. (BOTTOM) We played poker at the villa one night using all of the small notes we had accumulated throughout the week. 4,000 Cambodian Riel is roughly equivalent to $1 US. The treasury stopped printing 100 and 500 Riel notes a while ago but we would always receive them as change when eating at the market or buying trinkets on the street. It was fun to pile wads of loose change onto the table and throw it up in the air like Scrooge McDuck. This is Ben posing with the winner’s pot; estimated total: $0.67.




13. Another bike taxi picture expertly shot by Laurel. After karaoke one night, in both a thrill-seeking and money-saving effort, we decided to up the ante by fitting three people onto one bike with a driver as the fourth. This is virtually unheard of and all of the other drivers fighting for passengers started yelling as though we were breaking some sort of unwritten law. The poor bike, hidden here beneath our collective bodies, groaned and wheezed the whole way back; in all likelihood the driver spent our fare later that night repairing his ride. This is undoubtedly a great picture but cannot be posted without also making note of a comment written to Laurel from her mother on Facebook concerning the image:

“WHERE ARE YOUR HELMETS…SEATBELTS…AHHH! (don’t do this again or you are GROUNDED!)”

Moms are the best.




14. Walking around Angkor, we were hounded by a multitude of children trying to sell us a variety of cheaply made souvenirs and bits n’ bobs. One of the most common items we saw children selling were flimsy music pipes decorated with a hastily scribbled Angkor Wat insignia. When played, no matter which holes were covered or uncovered, the pipe produced one earsplitting tone that likely summoned every dog in the greater Siem Reap area. Upon purchasing his flute, Ben set himself two goals for the remainder of the day: to visit Angkor Wat, and to get a video on his camera of himself playing the pipe while clicking his heels and leading the ensuing mob of children around the temple grounds like the Pied Piper of Hamelin. To the severe disappointment of everyone, the children were more perplexed than lured by the pale Aussie dancing around and quickly lost interest upon realizing that Ben did not want to buy a two-sided twirly drum as an accompaniment.




15. (BOTTOM) For $15 US, one can explore ancient Angkor by pachyderm. Or for free, one can take a picture of the elephants and be quite content to leave it at that.




16. (BOTTOM) It boggles me why anyone would choose to climb a wooden staircase with a handrail when right beside it there is a perfectly good set of uneven, cracked, mossy stone steps to scamper up. I imagine it was around this time that Sim gave up trying to keep us corralled in the tour group and probably started thinking ahead to where he would be getting his boom boom later that night.




17. Ahh, back to the well. In a previous entry in which I described my near removal from the gene pool via one pitch black well at Angkor Thom, the only picture I had at that time was the fuzzy, off-centered result of me using the camera flash to see what lay in the dark ahead. This is a shot that Chris took moments after while I was clutching onto the railing watching my life pass on the back of my eyelids and I must say, it’s really a gem. Again, it was absolutely dark outside of the milliseconds illuminated by flash. The frightening part of this picture is that it gets my feet in the shot; one can see how perilously close I really was to going in. At least I would have gone down wearing my favorite Tevas.




18. (BOTTOM) At Angkor Thom there are people hired to dress in traditional Khmer clothing and strike poses for passing tourists in the hopes of landing a photo-op. It’s very much the same concept that I saw at Machu Picchu where women dressed up in colorful wool sweaters and posed with “authentic” Peruvian items such as panpipes and a mangy llama. In both instances, it’s struck me as funny that the effort to appear traditional is motivated by tourist income, one factor that likely lead to a departure from traditional values in the first place. On another note, walking by this group I had to fight the overwhelming urge to buy one of those pointy hats in the hopes of later using it to roast marshmallows.




19. I was sure that I would have the best primate-related photo from Angkor Wat with my shot of two monkeys going at it like jackrabbits (a sight I found so exciting that upon witnessing I involuntarily screamed “MONKEY SEX!” and disturbed several birds roosting in trees nearby). But really, this one is hard to beat. Nice work Tricia - I’ll take a fat, lazy monkey over a frisky one any day.




20. This certainly is a beautiful shot, our tour-weary group posed with the sun setting behind the Angkor Wat temple. Funny thing is, it was never meant to happen. Our tour guide Sim had planned to take the group to a higher vantage point where we could watch the sun set over the entire temple from above. But thanks to Chris, Josh, and myself wandering away from the tour, accidentally taking a detour into the third world (recall: naked children frolicking in the water), and making the rest of the group wait for 40 minutes in the bus while Sim searched the temple ruins for us, we were running significantly behind schedule. I suspect some members of the group might still be a little sore at us for missing out on the “special sunset spot” but looking at this picture, can you really complain?


Much thanks to Chris, Tricia, Laurel, Azalea, and Ben for sharing their wonderful pictures!

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