Kurt Johnson

Buddha statue at Bayon in Angor Thom.  See more of our temple photos

The first headline on our Cambodia notes is that, like 80% of tourists who visit the country, we didn’t get much beyond the Angkor temples and Siem Reap. This city in north central Cambodia is home to the airport, hotels, and restaurants that allow over a million people per year to see Angkor Wat, and consequently it gave us about as valid a picture of the rest of the country as if we had just stayed in the airport the whole time.

Obviously the Angkor temples were the start of the show; my head almost collapsed thinking about the workplan required to coordinate the building and maintenance of such massive monuments. Something like 50-60 major temples exist in a radius of only a few miles, each with thousands of enormous stones transported 20-40 miles and engraved with incredible detail. The manpower required is mind boggling, not least because of the supply chain to feed so many workers and elephants living in a dense area. The empire eventually collapsed in part due to the cost of maintaining the monuments – a classic guns-or-butter problem except in this case it was rocks-or-butter.

Beyond visiting temples we managed a few quick detours to local homes and markets. We found an excellent guide, Sam, who speaks great English, knows volumes about every corner of every monument in the area, and thoughtfully answered all of our questions about how Cambodians live and work (email me if you want his contact info). Amongst other things Sam showed us:

Basic living

• People harvest the juice from Sugar Palms and boil it down to make palm sugar cubes (sold wrapped in palm leaf like a candy bar – yum!) and molasses-like syrup to ferment into booze
• Many families can afford a small black and white TV but have no electricity so they power the TV with a car battery, then take the battery into town occasionally for a charge
• On the banks of Ton Le Sap Lake (the “great lake”) families have small, way-overcrowded houses floating on the lake that are broken down, moved up the shores, and reassembled during the rainy season when the lake expands to roughly 10x its size in the dry season
• Mobile phones in Cambodia are everywhere, with a 40 day/500 minute SIM card costing about $10. Satellite TV costs ~$5 per month. Seeing prices like this in countries with bad infrastructure and scarce technical skills always makes me that much more annoyed about how US and European telecoms have managed to keep prices high via a regulatory process that nominally protects consumers; e.g. East Africa and India both have vibrant cell phone economies with average monthly revenue per user of <$10

Homebuilding

• Building a house is an all-prepaid enterprise as interest rates on personal loans are 60%+ APR. Because of the weak financial infrastructure families generally put their savings into gold bullion which is then hidden somewhere until they have enough to build what they want to build
• Most houses are still built on stilts between 6’ and 12’ tall; although the irrigation infrastructure goes back over a thousand years and has solved the problem of floods families still like to have a place to keep their bikes/mopeds/other property under cover and potentially add more indoor space if they eventually decide to finish out the ground level
• Outside the city, even brand new homes generally don’t have conventional electricity or running water; affluent families might have a small generator behind the house. Electricity in town on the grid costs 80 cents per kwh, probably at least 5x what most people in the US pay

International assistance

• I asked about programs where individuals can contribute to building a schoolhouse but Sam said that there is generally enough hard infrastructure for education (buildings); instead the problem is teacher qualifications and performance. Schoolteachers make roughly $40 per month for working 9 months a year, half days (students have one teacher in the morning, another in the afternoon). Construction workers coming in from the farms around Siem Reap make $5-$10 per day
• Sam believes that the most effective international aid programs around Siem Reap have been well and water related – either providing new wells so families have easier access to water or providing household filters to sanitize water.

Tourism

• Most registered tour guides charge $25 per day; there’s a shortage of Spanish and Italian speaking guides so these folks charge double. The huge volumes of tourists from Korea and lack of Khmer guides who speak the language means that 200 Korean expats have been brought to Siem Reap to give tours to their countrymen. 90% of tour guides are men because, according to Sam, Khmer women want to work out of the sun to keep their complexion fair (as in India, Vietnam, etc)
• The government is planning a new, larger airport near Siem Reap once the number of tourists reaches 3 million per year, but the size of the runways combined with the density of temples and sacred sites means it will be difficult to site the airport

Finally, Cambodia’s most notorious bit of history is probably the Khmer Rouge regime that killed between 1-2 million people due to starvation, political purges, and military action. Although most of the country’s current population was not alive during the troubles of the 1970s and 1980s there still seems to be a somberness in Cambodia that is not present in neighboring countries.

Cambodia tends to suffer a bit from comparison with Vietnam or Thailand since the majority of English speaking visitors include it as a side trip from these countries and both are richer in activities. Having said that we’re glad we made the trip and are looking forward to spending more time outside the tourist areas of Angkor and Siem Reap on our next visit.

The first of two albums from Cambodia is here. I am  now in Hoi An, Vietnam.

Kids on Cambodia’s Ton Le Sap Lake rowing over to sell us bananas; they are part of a community of ethnic Vietnamese who live on the water.  See EXIF data and an aerial view of the village

Kids spending a school day on the bank of the Mekong

I’ve put together a couple of photo albums from our time in the country:

1. River stuff
2. Off the river

One of the Hmong night markets in Luang Prabang

The 5 days in Koh Tao [Wikitravel, map] was dominated by diving and an uneasy relationship with the great outdoors.  Despite gorgeous beaches and a location in the Gulf of Thailand my beach time was foiled by nearly constant rain .  Fortunately we had previously committed to spending much of the week either in the classroom or underwater to get certified to scuba dive, so the weather didn’t impact me much.

Koh Tao is a strange island; it’s not very big and the expats and tourists probably outnumber the Thai.  Despite claiming that it’s not just a place for divers I imagine we’d get bored pretty fast if it wasn’t for the diving we did; the attractions consist of a couple of spas, one paintball shop, and ATV rentals.  Almost everything is open air, streets aren’t paved, and the soundtrack at every business in town is all Jack Johnson, all the time (seriously).  Food options basically consist of backpacker/diver hangouts with international menus (fly 8,000 miles to Thailand and eat spaghetti!) or the fly-saturated food stalls which cooked up some amazing Thai noodle dishes for us.

Diving ended up being much more technical and cognitive than I had expected, not that I had spent any time anticipating it.  In particular buoyancy control requires a fair amount of thought and took me a few dives to get accustomed to before I could really pay attention to the great stuff going on around me in the reefs.  While the rain over the island created a lot of runoff that compromised visibility the reefs in Koh Tao are amazing – full of sea critters and, less romantically, other divers like us.  We don’t have any plans to dive again on this trip (maybe Nha Trang?) but I am already plotting another trip to the cayes of Belize….However I will say that learning to dive made me appreciate snorkeling more; as you are closer to the surface the lighting and colors are much more enjoyable and you can just focus on looking around rather than being “task loaded” with buoyancy control, managing ascent/descent speeds, what your dive buddy is doing, etc.

A funny thing happened on the way to the dive shop…Because I checked “Asthma” on the enrollment form the dive shop asked me to get a medical consult in town for clearance to dive.  Despite the prestigious beachfront office next to 7-Eleven the actual doctor looked about 13 years old and charged us $5 to listen to my lungs for 10 seconds before giving me the all-clear.

As for the uneasy relationship with the outdoors, Koh Tao is very jungle-like with all the critters to match.  We stayed at a little individual bungalow at “Koh Tao Cabana” with a great view of the bay and exotic outdoor bathroom.  It quickly became clear that my bathroom hosted enough nature that if it were somewhere it Manhattan we could call it a jungle preserve and charge people admission.  Full grown Tokay geckos, spiders, millipedes, ants, and a bunch of insects I don’t even have names for were all sighted in the 15 square feet of the outdoor shower.

My photos from Koh Tao are here.

Next up: Luang Prabang, Laos

Two more albums of Bangkok photos are up:

• Wat Pho
• Bangkok (other than temples)

My album from the Grand Palace and co-located Wat Phra Kaew is here.  This was the highlight of our visits to temples in Bangkok, despite the fact that it was about 900 million degrees in the sun; at least one visitor fainted from the heat while we were there.

Link to album 

I just finished Philip Short’s book Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare.  I bought the book because I wanted to learn something about Cambodian history and culture before we visited and this appeared to be the best balance of my goals and reviewer opinions on Amazon.  For my purposes it ended up being too wordy and filled with minutiae about specific interactions between party members, but there were some interesting points of general interest:

Page 25 discusses historical cultural relations with the Vietnamese which eventually precipitated a purge by the Khmer Rouges:

Vietnam was the Cambodian bogeyman…They seemed to be everything the Khmers were not; a disciplined, vigorous, virile people, whose relentless, centuries-long southward migration had swallowed up Kampuchea Krom, or Lower Cambodia, in the area  of what would become South Vietnam, and now threatened a creeping takeover of Cambodia itself, aided and abetted by the French authorities, who encouraged large-scale Vietnamese immigration to staff the lower echelons of the colonial civil service and furnish the skilled manual labor which the Cambodians were judged incapable of providing.  The result was more than mere racial antipathy.  It was a massive national inferiority complex, which took refuge in dreams of ancient grandeur.  At a personal level, Khmers and Vietnamese might befriend each other…But the cultural fracture between the two peoples – between Confucianism and Theravada Buddhism, between the Chinese world and the Indian – was one of mutual incomprehension and distrust, which periodically exploded into racial massacres and pogroms.

Page 43 hints at French colonial policy:

Under the protectorate, the French had so neglected higher education in Cambodia that in the late 1940s, fewer than a hundred students a year left secondary school with the requisite qualifications [for a university scholarship]…This was especially true in the technical fields where even the humblest posts were filled by Vietnamese because of the lack of trained Cambodians…Although the numbers were rising, fewer than 250 Cambodians had been trained abroad since the beginning of the century [almost 50 years], including those sent by their families without government support.

Page 295 discusses backward bending labor supply curves:

Even Khieu Samphan estimated that on average Khmer peasants worked only six months of the year, and sometimes much less.  Theravada Buddhism has never placed much value on the acquisition and consumption of wealth.  Sihanouk has recounted the experience of an American aid expert in the 1950s who convinced a group of villagers to use chemical fertilizer, promising that it would enable them to double rice production.  ‘Sure enough, at harvest time, the yield was doubled.  Everyone was delighted…[but] when the official came back the following year he was horrified to find that each peasant had cultivated only half his land.  “Why” said the peasants, “cultivate the entire area when you can get just as much by cultivating half?”  Fifty years later, a Khmer businessman, seeking a regular supply of palm sugar for sweetmeat manufacture encountered exactly the same problem.  Once the peasant farmers he employed had earned enough for the year they stopped work, and neither blandishments nor the promise of more money could make them start again.  “From their point of view it was logical”, he acknowledged.  “Once they had paid their family’s expenses – seed for the next planting; fertilizer; clothes; offerings to the monks; school fees for the children – what would they spend it on?  There was nothing more they wanted.”…To Pol it was a roadblock obstructing his ambition to make Cambodia prosperous and strong…the Khmers Rouges had deliberately adopted policies of extremism to move “the inert peasant mass.

To be fair I read a similar characterization of the Vietnamese in The Last Valley except in that case it was used to explain how the Vietnamese could muster hundreds of thousands of rebel fighters since their primary jobs (growing rice) only took about 3 months per year, leaving them lots of free time.  There seems to be a "Vietnam is to Cambodia/Lao as China is to Vietnam" theme in the history I'm reading.

 The last part of the book (see page 420) is interesting; Vietnam eventually invaded Cambodia and the US subsequently elected to support the Khmer Rouges (in the midst of their governance killing something like 20% of everyone in Cambodia) because it was a way to punish the Soviets via the Vietnamese – very much the “enemy of my enemy is my friend” school of foreign affairs.

After an overnight layover in Bangkok last night at the Plaza Athenee (7,000 Starwood points well spent for ice-cold AC and hot showers) we are now in Luang Prabang, Lao.  This is my favorite place on the trip so far – a very chill place that oozes history and is friendly and very foreign at the same time.  Somewhat shockingly we have a wireless internet connection at our hotel that is better than anything we ever had in Thailand.  The country is clearly very poor – significantly behind Vietnam, let alone Thailand in terms of visible affluence.

Above: Street vendors on the bank of the Mekong selling enormous piles of tangerines by candlelight

Contrast: The view from last night’s hotel room in Bangkok

I’m going to try to split posts from this trip between either narrative or technical orientation, where “technical” means reviewing where I stayed, what I did right/wrong, etc.  Hopefully this avoids boring the two people who read this blog regularly (Hi Mom!)  and still serves people who get here from search engines.

The trip started on a familiar note – an American Airlines flight to Tokyo, a nice new airport with lousy $7 sandwiches (Bangkok), and an air conditioned cab ride into town where the driver was playing American country music (Rhinestone Cowboy, John Denver’s Country Road, and at least one song by Neil Young) and topped off by checking into the room at a midrange hotel and finding that the TV turns on to Fox News.  Once the sun rose and I started looking around I found Bangkok much better developed and with frankly a bit more class than I expected.  High rises and construction cranes are everywhere, the air quality is noticeably poor but not obviously terrible, and in general things were clean and pleasant except for the fact that I was drinking a pound of water per hour to replace what I was sweating out.  Maybe I only saw the nicest parts of town, maybe my preconceived notion was shaped too much by stuff I remembered reading in the early 1990s (AIDS crisis, terrible air, etc.), or maybe I expected more visible slums (a la Mumbai), but in any case Bangkok surprised to the upside.

I started a Skytrain ride to the local Vietnam Airways office to book some future flights; although the Skytrain is clean and mostly easy to use the trip ended up as a bust because VN Airways charges more if you book ahead and out-of-country rather than at the point of departure (maybe a good way to price discriminate between tourists and locals who have alternate modes of transport available?).  I started to get my bearings by walking a mile or two in “new” Bangkok where enormous shopping centers seem to be all the rage with several new ones opening up.  Within a couple of blocks there are both gigantic malls for luxury European brands (Prada etc.) and small local merchandisers.  On the topic of luxury European brands, literally almost every adult male in Bangkok is wearing a Rolex!  Who knew the place was doing so well ;-).  The other end of the spectrum, “MBK” center, is about 7 enormous floors full of small booths and storefronts.  Without any real confidence I’d say each floor was 150,000 square feet (think Super Target or Wal-Mart Supercenter) and most floors had a theme – cell phones, other electronics, clothing, jewelry, furniture, etc.  The fourth floor had at least 75 small stores/booths selling cell phone handsets, faceplates, and accessories.  I also made a stop by the home-turned-museum of Jim Thompson, an American who moved to Thailand, revitalized their export silk industry, and agglomerated traditional homes and artifacts onto a lot in Bangkok that he called home before disappearing in Malaysia in 1967.

At this point in the story I should talk about food since I could not have covered this much ground without stopping for food or drink a couple of times (not to mention the air conditioning that comes with it).  With one exception every meal here has been very good.  We’ve stuck to local dishes as much as possible and the cost is about as low as we’ve seen anywhere in the world; meaty entrees are ~$1.50-$3 with rice unless the venue is fancy or caters to tourists.  A 500ml bottle of mineral water sells for 20-30 cents US on the street or 65 cents in a restaurant.  The local dishes have been fantastic if a touch on the spicy side – nobody ever asks how spicy to make the order but most of what I get is spicier than anything I’d get in the US without asking for extra heat.  I’m happy because there’s curry (red, panang, green, joy!) and Thai coffee.  Both Thai tea and Thai coffee are heavy on some kind of sweetened condensed milk, and here it tastes like they’re adding extra sugar on top of that…so they’re hard not to like, at least until you realize you haven’t seen your toes in two weeks or diabetes intervenes.

The one bad meal I had, by the way, was an accidental trip into what turned out to be an expat neighborhood.  This was kind of an adventure in itself.  It’s wild to walk down the street in a country where the per capita GDP is $8,500/year and see nothing but full size German luxury cars and full service executive apartments.  The restaurants in this part of town tend to the Italian/Chinese/American and pedestrian traffic looks a lot more like you’re in NYC than Bangkok.  Out of fatigue I resorted to a “fusion” restaurant with mediocre whitewashed Thai food – the only not-good Thai food we’ve had here.

The second day in Bangkok started with a visit to Wat Po, one of the top 3 local sights in most people’s books.  Given the sunny weather and oily sunscreen I ended up drenched in sweat by 9am as per usual for me in the Southeast Asian summer.  Getting to the temple is kind of fun – walk a block from the hotel to the river, then catch a bus-type boat that runs up the river and sit next to local commuters as the boat stops off at piers in downtown Bangkok.  Because the traffic in town is so bad the boat actually makes a lot of sense – it stops every 500-1000 yards and just ties up for a few seconds so people can jump on and off before it takes off again.

After running through a couple of temples I desperately needed some shade and started looking around for a restaurant.  This proved surprisingly frustrating – in the parts of town I was in there were restaurants for foreign food or inside hotels but apparently no middle-class oriented Thai restaurants.  Most of the food that locals eat seems to come from roadside carts, which are probably safe but a little too covered in flies to be appetizing.  I finally succeeded in getting to a decent lunch place where I was the only non-Thai person in the restaurant (victory!) and commenced to scorch off my taste buds with seafood curry and stir fried chicken for about $5.  Back in the heat I headed for the Grand Palace and co-located Wat Phra Kaew, which proved to be the highlight of the temples/monuments I saw.

On Saturday I knocked out the final highlight of Bangkok, the Chatuchak weekend market. According to Wikipedia the market is 1.4 million square feet with 15,000 stalls.  While a lot of the merchandise is aimed at tourists there are entire sections of the market devoted to focused shops – several dozen stalls for freshwater fish, a few for saltwater fish, dozens for puppies, etc.  The puppy stalls inspired mixed emotions. There seems to be a constant process of wash-blow dry-comb the puppies to keep their fur extra soft and fluffy, so every animal you see is sickeningly cute.  However since there’s almost certainly an excess supply of puppies and it’s hard to sell 15 week old puppies when even cuter 8 week old puppies are available in the next stall there is probably an unhappy ending in store for a lot of the cute puppies I  saw.

I’ll put up some review/technical notes on Bangkok separately.  Next up, Koh Tao.