12. Cliché yet Incredible

As an English Teacher in Korea, one is obligated to make the trip to Thailand just as Muslims are to make the hajj to Mecca. Ok, so I may be exaggerating a bit, but it is a very cliché trip to make and one that I had to make. So the final week of June, I left Korea for the first time in 7 months and met up with my friend in Bangkok, Thailand. Although I did standard tourist stuff, I refused to turn my already short vacation into an extremely overpriced trip to the tanning bed as I could have easily done. Instead, I made it a point to cram as much as possible into my valuable vacation time.

Being away for my birthday, I evaded the sometimes artificial congratulatory comments and unnecessary celebration that sometimes accompany birthdays. Instead, I walked Bangkok’s beautifully congested yet highly unsanitary streets of China Town with a German guy and Spanish girl with whom I’d spent the previous day. Because my friend works at the UN by day, I explored temples, took canal cruises, sat in on a protest, and even tasted my first scorpion, cockroach and grasshoppers independently and would meet up with him later on in the evening.

Thailand and Cambodia are too close of neighbors for me not to see the world famous ruins of Angkor Wat, the world’s largest religious site dating back over 1,200 years. That said, I took a 5:30am bus out of Bangkok and made the 5 hour trip to the Thai/Cambodia border. After crossing, I hired a taxi for $20 to take me directly to the ruins, another 3 hours away. So fascinated by the immediate changes in environments, I hardly noticed the bumpy ride across the long dirt roads. Rice patties were filled with workers, water oxen and of course rice. Motorcycles transported everything from humans to chickens to live pigs. Many kilometers, pictures, and jaw dropping sites later, I was in Seim Reap, the city neighboring the ruins. I found myself a $6/night guest house with TV and ac, checked in and watched the sunset from the remains of 1,000 year old Cambodian temples. I wasted no time the next day and met my hired motorcycle driver for the day at 5:00am to see the sunrise and the vast extent of jungle entrapped ruins. In all, I’d taken 400 pictures in 24 hours. Many temples later, an English woman insisted that if I liked native life as much as I said, I needed to get myself to a fishing village about 20 minutes away. I’m very glad to say that’s what I did. The village houses, school, church etc. were all built on water due to the seasonal flooding that accompanies the Southeast Asian rainy season. The simplicity of life was illustrated by small stick and wood homes floating everywhere and hand crafted boats being paddled all about by local villagers. With no actual property lines, the homes are moved when tides change and function perfectly for the fishing community that it was. I asked myself, “What if the person in that hammock or in that boat were me?” and “How would my life be if I were born in Cambodia?” It still impresses me now to meet and speak with people from every possible background from all around the world.

Just before leaving Cambodia, I befriended a Cambodian volunteer worker from a local HIV/AIDS clinic who was kind enough to invite me into his home and also give me a tour of the clinic for which he worked. Thankfully he had good English and we were able to communicate well. Seeing the AIDS patients in the clinic was a heart felt site, knowing that not one of them is likely to live to raise all of their children, or if children themselves, be old enough to have their own family one day. I saw little hope in their eyes and no smiles on their faces. I thought to myself that it was just by chance and that other days are different for them. I could hope so at least.

Back in Thailand, I enjoyed time with my friend and his UN counterparts in a Lebanese restaurant and a jazz club for one extremely long and enjoyable night. A trip to Ayutthaya, the former capital of Siam allowed me the chance to view temples aback elephant. Although they don’t move at the same pace as a horse, they nonetheless made the ruins all the more enjoyable for me. After an hour long Thai massage, I saw temple in Lopburi. The temple wasn’t the reason I traveled there. There were over a thousand monkeys that covered the temple grounds that I needed to play with. They kept me company for hours. A backpacker I was with that day fell victim to monkey theft. While we were talking with monkeys all over us, she had her eyeglasses quickly taken from her face by a monkey who brilliantly took them to the roof of the tall temple making them impossible to retrieve. Laughing, we regarded it to be yet another random traveler’s moment. O’ life!

---

---