Travel

My day in Angkor Wat was as near a perfect day as I could have imagined. I was up before dawn and went into Siem Reap town centre for breakfast. I‟m a coffee addict and this one was special. It came in a small, steel container filled with grind and water and the coffee dripped into a cup beneath. The result was a thick, nutty and super-strong coffee that was sensational; why isn‟t all coffee made this way? Two cups later and I was jumping. Add this to hot „pho‟, a noodle beef broth with liberal amounts of chilli, Thai basil and bean sprouts, with the temperature already at 28 degrees at just 7.30am, and you have one of the world‟s perfect breakfasts.

Angkor Wat is usually explored by hiring a motorcycle driver and shooting around the complex. Tourism is clearly the biggest income of Siem Reap and everyone wants to be your driver. I found a keen young guy called „Mr Go-Go‟; (that‟s how he introduced himself! “Hi! What‟s your name?” “Just call me Mr Go-Go!” “Er, is that your real name?” “Sure! I‟m Mr Go-Go!”) and off we rode to the temples about 10km out of town. Angkor Wat is the name that people use as an umbrella term for the temples in this area of Cambodia; however, the temples here are in fact a huge complex of temples, only one of which is actually the temple “Angkor Wat”; the name sticks as the collective label perhaps because it is the most famous of the many temples in the region. I decided to leave Angkor Wat until last and let Mr Go Go direct the order of events. We hit the smaller, less well known temples first.

The temples are incredible! They were generally built in the 11th or 12th century and are magnificent. They are generally constructed out of huge ancient blocks of stone (each block around two cubic metres) and built to several stories high without mortar. The blocks are then ornately carved with images of Buddha, Hindu Gods such as Vishnu and scenes from history. There‟re at least 50 of these temples in the area, about one kilometre apart from each other, surrounded by thick forests. There are lots of tourists visiting the temples but it‟s always possible to find some quiet spaces to enjoy. The access to these world heritage structures is unbelievable; you can just clamber off on your own standing on huge blocks of stone; you can touch the temples and step over the fat, giant roots of the unique trees that flourish here. The mystery, like with Stonehenge and the Pyramids, is working out how the Cambodians achieved such a feat of construction and engineering; the sheer will and ambition it must have taken to conceive and construct this incredible, monumental complex that long ago just shows what human beings are really capable of achieving.

That day, I saw Prasat Kravan, Banteay Kdei, the immense water temple Sras Srang (where I met my first of many sellers; a preternaturally persistent and gifted young salesgirl “You want buy book? Very good book? You want t-shirts? I have no money? I should be in school? You want cold drink? Cold water? Very hot today, yes? Ed, you said you would buy book?” “Okay! I‟ll buy it!”), the tree-root infested Ta Prohm, climbed the steeply terraced and mighty Ta Keo, Chau Say Tevoda, the wonderful, small but perfectly formed Thommanon, the phenomenally huge Angkor Thom with its four walls and huge gates (inside these walls stands the mighty Bayon (used in the movie Lara Croft – Tomb Raider) and the Terrace of Elephants battleground (a huge lushly green park studded with trees and ornate tiny (relatively) temples with a terrace on one side for royalty. Here, elephants used to fight each other for the pleasure of the King!)), the eerie maze-like Preah Khan, and finally, the mighty and awesome Angkor Wat itself, an unfeasibly enormous walled complex surrounded by the biggest moat (200m wide) I have ever seen, with perfectly still, mirror-like waters, and accessible only by a bridge. Angkor Wat is the biggest religious building in the world, bigger than the Pyramids, and way, way, way bigger than any Cathedral or Mosque. The four outer walls are a kilometre long each! And once inside it‟s a long walk to the temple itself which is styled on the Hindu Mount Meru, the Home of the Gods. The temple is set on a terrace and there are three rectangular galleries rising to the pinnacle, a central tower. “Stunning”, “magnificent”, “jaw-dropping” don‟t even come close to adequate descriptions! I finished my tour with a walk up a hill behind elephants to the highest temple ruin in the complex where, with about a hundred other travellers, I watched the sun set over the surrounding forest which extended all the way to the horizon. The Temples of Angkor are truly phenomenal – one of the greatest things I have ever seen; up there with Machu Picchu and the Bolivian Salt Flats. It‟s the apex of Cambodian and Khmer culture and justifiably immortalised on the country‟s banknotes.

“We are the pilgrims, Master; we shall go

Always a little further: it may be
Beyond that last blue mountain barred with snow, Across that angry or that glimmering sea,

White on a throne or guarded in a cave
There lives a prophet who can understand Why men were born: but surely we are brave, Who take the Golden Road to Samarkand.

Sweet to ride forth at evening from the wells When shadows pass gigantic on the sand, And softly through the silence beat the bells Along the Golden Road to Samarkand.

We travel not for trafficking alone;
By hotter winds our fiery hearts are fanned:
For lust of knowing what should not be known
We make the Golden Journey to Samarkand.”
James Elroy Flecker, from Golden Journey to Samarkand

Poipet

FROM BANGKOK, I took a local bus eastwards to the border at Aranya Prathet. It was at the Mo Chit bus station in Bangkok, where I saw the straight-faced devotion of the Thais to their King. I‟d heard that, whenever the national anthem was played, you had to stand to attention. So on the hour, every hour, at the bus station, the anthem plays at full volume and everyone stands ramrod straight. A video was playing on the large monitors recounting the whole of the King‟s life. I‟d heard about the recent case of an Australian novelist who‟d committed the offence of lèse-majesté (an offence against the dignity of a monarch) in a little circulated, self-published novel. He’d been arrested at the airport on the way out of Thailand, and thrown into jail for three years for his crime (he was subsequently pardoned by King Bhumibol Adulyadej). I stood to attention with my arms by my side for the full five minutes, just like everyone else around me.

It was six hours to the border. At Aranya Prathet, I saw huge signs telling Thais, that once over the border, their lives may be at risk and that nothing could be done by the Thai authorities to help them. You were on your own. This border crossing is well known to travellers as slightly hairy and I was well versed in the potential pitfalls. I crossed under the famous Khmer-style arches: Welcome to Cambodia!

Cambodia is bordered by Laos to the north-east, by Vietnam to the east and south-east, and by Thailand to the north and west. The Khmer people make up more than 90% of its population; the remainder includes Chinese, Vietnamese, Cham (Cham people are an ethnic group concentrated between the Kampong Cham Province in Eastern Cambodia and central Vietnam. The Cham form the core of the Muslim communities in both Cambodia and Vietnam) and Khmer Loeu people (they are Mon-Khmer or Highland Khmer or “Montagnards‟ as designated by the French colonialists.) The official Cambodian language is Khmer, a member of the Mon-Khmer subfamily of the Austro-Asiatic language group, a large language family of South-East Asia, also scattered throughout India and Bangladesh.

As soon as you cross into Cambodia at the casino town at Poipet, you‟re besieged by touts wanting to sell you a ride to Siem Reap, two hours away. Scams abound such as taking your money upfront for “gas‟ and then kicking you out of the car ten minutes up the road; or insisting that you exchange money in Poipet because there‟s no money exchange anywhere else; or driving all over the place for hours to leave you feeling tired and less able to refuse the guesthouse that they drop you off at, where they receive a tidy commission for leaving you there – the list goes on. Poipet is a Wild-West hellhole! I saw, I kid you not, in broad daylight, a bus driver take a picture of a man‟s penis and then give him money for it. The guy just pulled his pants up and got on with his day! Kids run ferally around naked. The roads are mudtracks. Nobody smiles. It’s like the guide book says – get the fuck out of Poipet as soon as possible. So I did, in the front seat of a battered Toyota Camry with several huge cracks in the windscreen, with an impassive driver saying “Yes, Siem Reap” and then getting on his phone. I didn’t leave Poipet for more than an hour; the car just kept circling the town, with random Cambodians getting in the back every ten minutes, then getting out, then getting back in, then dropping off huge amounts of hitherto concealed blood-splattered fish from the trunk. Toilet breaks were just on the main road as nobody wanted to step onto the potentially mined surrounding land. That ride into Siem Reap, about two hours away eastwards, was easily one of the most interesting journeys I have yet taken! I’d arrived at Siem Reap; the gateway to Angkor Wat.

After Koh Phi Phi, I took a 14 hour bus ride from Krabi to Bangkok, the capital of Thailand. The bus touched the east coast of Thailand at Surat Thani where the rainy season was in full flow. The rains came down in hard, fat drops and, what were dry streets ten minutes ago, were now under three inches of water. My bus dropped me off at 5am in a random looking road in the pitch black of night. Immediately, a flurry of taxi drivers and tuk-tuk drivers descended.

“Hello? Khao San Road? You want Khao San Road? Hotel? Guesthouse?” “No thanks, I‟m okay, not right now, thanks! KorpKun Ka!”

I took the next left and went for a quick coffee. I asked the girl behind the counter where the Khao San Road was and she pointed behind me at a non-descript street. I remembered the taxi-drivers offering to take me there from just one street away and I made a quick mental note to keep my wits about me.

The Khao San Road is the famous traveller ghetto in west central Bangkok. Seeing it in the early morning, I was reminded of the West End (the main street) in San Antonio, Ibiza, where we once arrived straight from the airport at dawn and were silenced by the view: broken glass and vomit on the streets; the sobering morning after the night before. Here, on the Khao San Road at 7am, it was much the same but now there were also hordes of aging, fat European-looking men with young Thai women. There was the odd argument and tired looking women going home for the morning. It was a different type of traveller here and there was no way I was staying.

After looking up my guidebook for other areas, I jumped straight into a tuk-tuk (a motorised three-wheel cab) to go to the river and catch an onward boat on a narrow canal called Khlong Saem Saeb. Bangkok has a network of canals feeding off its central river, Mae Nam Chao Phraya, and accordingly was once known as the “Venice of the East”. I love tuk-tuks! These are small vehicles, part car, part motorbike and very quick! My driver zipped around trying to get me to visit some travel agents for onward trips to Cambodia, darting across lanes when he wanted to, ducking and reversing into fast-moving oncoming cars; a wonderfully visceral start to the day! From the tuk-tuk, I jumped with my backpack and rucksack onto a canal boat, almost falling backwards into the water under the weight I was carrying, and chuntered off to the very centre of Bangkok where I stayed just off the major Thanon Sukhamvit road, in a great little hostel with dark panelled walls, low ceilings and bamboo stairs.

From the rural sleepiness of Krabi and the gentle pace of life in Koh Phi Phi, Bangkok is like an invigorating slap in the face. There are no trees or areas of greenery; it‟s all mono-rails, five-lane-wide highways and huge, brand-new commercial complexes. Like in Hong Kong, shopping is one of the major pastimes here; from the high-end luxury brands to every mid-range shop selling everything you can think of to the most shambolic and charming of street stalls. It‟s these street stalls that are the life blood of the Bangkok economy. There are pockets of stalls all over the city, wherever there‟s space, whether that be directly outside a shopping centre entrance, in a tiny alley or under an overpass. You can buy fake DVD players, DVDs to watch on your new fake DVD player, t-shirts, socks, pants, rucksacks, suitcases etc. and, to catch your breath, enjoy some street food of noodle soups and fried rice on the pavement whilst the throng seethes through the marketplace. It sounds like a cliché but you really are expected to haggle; it feels ridiculous when the opening price is still relatively low but if you don’t do it, you really are a mug!

Me – “Nice shorts.”
Any market trader in Bangkok – “Yes! Very good quality!”
“Got them in green?”
“Of course. What size?”
“30 waist. (I‟ll squeeze into them!) How much are they?”
“400 baht” (simply because you look like a mug and I want ten times what I paid for these!)
“Ooh! 400 is a bit too much!” (I pull my best pained face and try to judge what price to come in at without getting laughed out of town) “I saw these for 200 up there” (no I didn‟t but I still should have got these for less; I bottled it!)
“200? 200? No 200! 400 very good price!”
So she hasn‟t come down; what can I do?

“400 too much. The other place selling for 200 baht”
“This very good quality. Better. Better than other one”
Fuck! These guys are much better negotiators than me! I‟m rubbish at this! Walk away!
“Thank you! No Korpkun Ka”
Hope she comes in with a lower price…
“Okay! Okay! 350 baht. Very good quality.”
Yes!
“”250 baht”
“No 250. 350.”
“Okay! 280. No…300.”
“320.”
“Okay. Okay!” Done! 320. Bugger. Later…The shorts are a bit tight!

Bangkok has a seedy reputation that is fully deserved. I was staying in the centre of town in the main Sukhumvit area and at 7pm the streets are already lined up with prostitutes. Along Thanon Sukhumvit, the market-stalls selling fruit and clothes at inflated prices are in business next to prostitutes standing shoulder to shoulder. It’s sad but you quickly get bored of saying “No thank you. No Korpkun Ka!” after the tenth time in as many seconds. You develop a twenty yard stare. There are pimps, prostitutes and sex tourists; of the latter, the vast majority are aging, balding, overweight white men. These men are generally not shy. They sit in bars and openly discuss the prostitutes. It sounds exaggerated but it‟s literally like a cattle market where the prostitutes parade to be sold. There are so many prostitutes on the streets that I think it must be a buyers‟ market; prices driven low by the huge surplus in supply, with no trade unions to prevent competition. The issue is widespread and so embedded that hostels have to explicitly sign their receptions with „No sex tourists‟. The sex trade is so prevalent in Bangkok and Thailand in general; it seems that almost everyone is trying to sell you sex, from your moto-driver to the people selling fake DVDs; it is one of the images that Thailand as a country projects and does nothing at all to curb. I‟ve since read that around 2.7% of Thailand‟s GDP comes from the sex trade. More mindboggling is the statistic that maybe 10% of all tourist dollars spent in Thailand goes on the sex trade; it brings no credit upon the Thai nation at all.

Koh Phi Phi is eye-wateringly beautiful with beach and bay views to make you weep. The natural beauty of the island also provides welcome relief from the less attractive feel of Phi Phi Don‟s centre which feels like a tourist village resort with masses of diving shops, travel agents, tattoo shops, clothing stalls, hawker food stalls, bars, massage shops and internet cafes. It‟s not what I expected at all. It‟s as if an 18-30 holiday from Ibiza had been transplanted to the Andaman Coast. By this point in my trip, I knew the different types of traveller. There was the backpacker who was your archetypal “hippy”, very tanned, flip-flopped, newly tattooed, 3 week old matted hair, beads and crafted bracelets. There was your “lads” backpacker, in a group of other guys. There were also your “couple” travellers, far more prevalent in South-East Asia than anywhere else I’d been. I’d heard one story that a couple had been on the plane to start a year‟s travelling and actually split up before landing! The funny thing was that for all the non-conformist yearnings of travellers, there was a very definite “look‟ in common. Whatever the fashions of the time happened to be were completely driven by the market stalls around the classic backpacker haunts. This year, it was Trilby hats and scarves. Which type of traveller was I? Of course, I thought I was a unique, one-of-a-kind traveller (ahem!)

The resort feel of Phi Phi Don is reportedly much like the other Thai Islands such as Koh Samui and the nightlife is appropriately hedonistic. Buckets are immensely popular in Thailand and consist of generous amounts of alcohol and mixers (or not) in a small plastic „bucket‟. This isn‟t drinking in moderation! In one of the bars on Phi Phi Don, I saw audience participation taken to another level. Bar-goers were asked to fight each other in refereed bouts in the muay thai (Thai Boxing) ring in the middle of the room. The best fight I saw was between these two tourist women just kicking each other in the shins for three 3 minute rounds!

Tours around the islands are immensely popular around here and every operator tries his best sales pitch to snag your cash. For not much more money, I hired a longboat and its fifty-something skipper (a dirty old salt! He didn‟t have much English bar trying to recommend me some local girls he knew. Despite these faintly pimp-like tendencies, he had a gentler, nobler side to him as I saw during his rescue of a bird bobbing in the sea, its wings caught by some plastic. He fetched it out of the water, released it from its bondage and tended it. The bird gratefully and compliantly remained as a passenger until we were back in port) for the day and set off around the islands to explore the cliffs, the caves and, hopefully, hidden beaches by myself. It was just me and my boat. I headed anti-clockwise around Phi Phi Don past the cove at Long Beach to a deserted beach that I had all to myself – awesome! After two or three hours, I‟d gone all the way around Phi Phi Don seeing fantastic limestone cliffs and jagged rock faces jutting out onto opal coloured clear waters; I went across the strait to Phi Phi Lay where I found an amazing lagoon with the clearest waters and masses of beautifully coloured tropical fish in a bay surrounded by huge cliffs of limestone; just idyllic. All you had to do was to throw some rice into the water and, immediately, hundreds of small, exquisitely-patterned, fish would appear from nowhere to snaffle the food. Behind this is the legendary Maya Bay, as used in the movie version of Alex Garland‟s The Beach. It didn’t quite look like it did in the film but was still incredibly stunning. It points dead west and so faces the sunset; which itself is framed by the big, cliffs on both sides. It‟s the kind of view that makes you stop for a moment and then grin a big, wide smile. I still think Railay Beach has been the best beach view I‟ve seen so far though. After Maya, I stopped in the surprisingly still waters between the two islands to watch the sunset, where we bobbed gently with several other longboats, everyone just gazing at the dipping sun.

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn‟t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”

Mark Twain

I TOOK AN OVERNIGHT BUS from Ipoh northwards to Hat Yai, a town on the Thai side of the Thailand/Malaysia border. Whilst in the queue at immigration, I accidentally broke wind (must have been the long bus ride). To my dismay, who should be behind me, but a bespectacled middle-aged Buddhist monk in full saffron robes! Shit! Hopefully, I’ve got enough credit in my karmic account to bode me well in Thailand, the “Land of Smiles‟.

Geographically, Thailand is at the heart of the South-East Asian region; it’s bordered by Malaysia to the south, Cambodia to the east, Myanmar to the west and north, and Laos to the north and to the east. It‟s a large country with more than 62m people and is probably the most popular backpacking destination in the world. About 75% of the population is ethnically Thai, 14% of Chinese origin, and 3% ethnically Malay; the remaining 8% accounts for minority groups including Khmers and various hill tribes. The ethnically Thai speak the official language of Thailand, Thai, which is part of the Kradai language family, as distinct from the Austro-Asiatic language family. This distinction is one of the main differences between the Thais and the Cambodians who are mostly ethnically Khmer and whose language, Khmer, is part of the Austro-Asiatic language family.

My first impression of Thailand (Hat Yai at least) was that it was much more chaotic than Malaysia. It was early morning (about 7.30am) but already it was steamily hot. The water on the streets was already drying and I noticed dead cockroaches on the pavements. Tuk-tuks, buses and motorbikes were already honking and beeping down the narrow streets. Vendors were already on the street trying to entice you in for breakfast. There‟s not much in Hat Yai though; it‟s really just a border town that‟s used as a jumping off point for heading to the islands further north and to Malaysia and Singapore to the south. I decided to leave as soon as I could, and when buying a bus ticket out, I stumbled over the currency exchange adjustments; going from the easy mental currency exchange of Malaysian Ringgits to Sterling to working out the (slightly more taxing) Thai Baht (TB) to Sterling rate of about 55TB to 1GBP. Within an hour of arriving in Hat Yai, I was in a minibus headed northwards to Krabi.

Krabi

The minibus looked like it had been through an episode on the Thai version of MTV‟s Pimp My Ride; its seats were fully decked out in beige leather, there was an extensive stereo system with multiple speakers, a large flat screen monitor, a mini-fridge and tinted windows. The other passengers were middle-aged Thai women who immediately grabbed a couple of song catalogues. Thirty seconds later, the first ballad came on screen and there followed two hours of full-blooded karaoke love songs! (Unfortunately, there weren’t any English songs, because of course I was mad keen to show these girls how it was done (ahem)). Karaoke, evidently, is immensely popular in Thailand and it definitely brightens up a bus journey.

Krabi (pronounced Gra-bee) is a town on the Andaman Coast, on the West Coast of Thailand. Krabi Province is known as the global Mecca for the sport of rock climbing, where enthusiasts come from all over the world to test their mettle on the famous limestone cliffs, and the epicentre of Krabi climbing is at Railay beach. Never having rock climbed before, and seeing as I was in one of the finest sites for the sport, I simply had to give it a try. To get there, I took a traditional Thai long boat from Ao Nang, a beach near Krabi Town. Ao Nang was my first sighting of the Andaman Coast, famed for its beauty. The beach at Ao Nang is massive; it’s a beach that absolutely blew me away; the bay must be nearly a kilometre wide. The jetty in the centre is at least 500m long and just goes straight out into the deepest blue sea you’ve ever seen, and, in the distance, are more limestone karsts and islands, just poking out of the waters.

Railay itself was no less beautiful; it has almost the perfect beach: blindingly white sands gently curling round to forested limestone cliffs on either side, with mirror-still blue waters and moored longboats bobbing gently on the sea: idyllic. This was the beach where I was going to start learning how to climb. Much like Bolivia, health and safety is fairly broad-brush here in Thailand! It‟s just put your harness on, slip the rope into your harness with a quickly demonstrated figure-of-eight knot, pat some chalk on your hands, and off you go! At its simplest, rock climbing is about scaling a rock-face to a projected target. The rope you‟re attached to is connected up the rock-face through drilled-in hooks and, eventually, near your target, it goes through a final hook and comes all the way back down to another climber who acts as the anchor in what is, effectively, a pulley system. The rope doesn‟t hoist you up to the target but it does act as a safety net. Just getting started is often tricky as you have to heave yourself onto the first bit of rock, which due to erosion, is often six feet clear of the ground. You find nooks and crannies in the rock for your hands and feet. It’s generally easy enough to remain stationary as both your hands and your feet have secure holds in the rock. Some people describe climbing as similar to chess, in that it’s strategic, tactical and requires forward planning at each step. It‟s moving to the next correct position and so on up the rock-face that can be so demanding! Routes vary in difficulty according to the distance between holds, the depth of those holds and the overall gradient of the cliff. As to technique, you‟re supposed to rely more heavily on your feet for upward propulsion than your hands; easier said than done! By the end of my first successful climb to about 15m, my hands and forearm muscles were seriously aching! By the end of my third successful climb (this time to about 25m), the muscles in my hands and fingers were shot to pieces and I could no longer sustain any weight on my fingers at all. I couldn’t even apply any pressure when shaking my instructor’s hand goodbye!