Hello Family & Friends,
This final dispatch from our 40 days in SE Asia & Borneo is coming from Seattle! We have been back for 10 days now, plowed through 25 pounds of snail mail, downloaded 1,762 pictures to our hard drive (just started the vetting process), re-stocked the larder, Maggie’s been back to her part-time employment and we’ve had time to reflect on the key takeaways from this adventure.
Our last dispatch was from Singapore, an important place for me personally as I needed dental work after breaking off 1/3 of a front tooth crown whilst tearing open a tightly sealed Pepto-Bismol tablet container with my teeth (resulting in a look that our son and daughter-in-law claim makes me look like a rice farmer). This was to repair the 1st attempt in a backwater dental clinic in the town of Lahad Datu in NE Borneo ($33 USD) which lasted 5 days versus the Toof Doctor (seriously, the clinic’s name) for $160 USD, which brought me home for a permanent solution.
Following that success, we took Singapore’s efficient and user-friendly MRT underground subway to ride the Singapore Flyer, a 165 meter (540 feet) high Ferris wheel (over 3 times the height of the new Seattle Great Wheel and 60 feet short of the Space Needle), which provided an amazing view of the architecturally pleasing modern structures, the city layout and this island’s water-based activities, e.g., cargo ships anchored in the harbor, the pleasure boats and sightseeing vessels plying their way through the inner waterways. Using the MRT again, we spent time at the infamous original Raffles Hotel, home to famous celebs during the 20’s & 30’s, where the original Singapore Sling was concocted. Naturally we had to spend some time in the upstairs Long Bar, with peanut shells strewn on the floor and pigeons flying in, roosting on window shutters with nervous patrons sitting below. We toured the on-site museum, replete with photos that showed the debauchery, decadence and splendor of those times, represented by the pictures of costume parties, wild animal hunts at the hotel, Chaplin, Somerset Maugham…ahhh, the good old days… the 1%-ers of their times??
Our next stop was Cambodia’s city of Siem Reap, home of the Angkor Temple Complex, a UNESCO World Heritage Centre site measuring 400 sq. km. (154 sq. mi.), including the famous Angkor Wat structure. In the 12th century, this capital was home to 1,000,000 Khmers (native Cambodians, not to be confused with the Khmer Rouge, of Pol Pot and “Killing Fields” fame, which name was for those members of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, an offshoot of the Vietnam Peoples Party). For contrast, in that century, London and Rome each had populations of 15,000!! Words cannot possibly describe this temple and others we visited for 20 hours over a 3 day period in the heat and humidity. Our guide, Sam, told us that Angkor Wat alone was built over a 37 year period in the 12th century, using 20,000 laborers, 6,000 sculptors, 9,000 elephants and 30+ million tons of stone. It was the most restored site we visited, uniquely surrounded by a 2-football field wide moat with 2 causeways crossing it from the East and the West. We spent 2.5 hours at this site alone on our 1st day, being awed by the 5 towers, the central one reaching the height of 213 meters (700 feet) from the ground. We were blown away by the repeated bas relief detailed chiseled sculpturing reflecting mythological “battles” between Demons and Gods, depicted with images of serpents and monkeys and not unlike a scene from a company picnic’s “tug-‘o-war” competition. In this case it represents the Hindu myth of the Churning of the Sea of Milk, an effort to obtain the nectar of immortal life. We returned to this temple on our 3rd day for the sunrise, approaching on the West causeway in the dark, facing East, with shadowy figures slowly filtering into view, feeling much like a religious pilgrimage, accented by the sounds of cicadas interrupting the silence of the dawning day.
Throughout our time with Sam, we were regaled and overwhelmed with political, personal, cultural, factual and religious/mythological information. One such sharing that related to the temples was the Hindu vs. Buddhist influences, which could change with leadership of Kings. The successor to Jayavarman VII (who was a really good guy and allowed both faiths to coexist) destroyed many of the Buddha facials reliefs, or merely added a 3rd eye to “Hindu-ize” those reliefs to save time, especially since, at Prasat Bayon in the Angkor Thom complex, there are 196 Buddha faces appearing on the 4 towers of this compact temple structure of narrow and maze-like passageways.
Every temple site was completely different from the last. For instance, the Ta Prohm site was the setting for “Lara Croft, Tomb Raider”, rustic in that it was not fully restored and show-cased huge white-barked Strangler Fig trees reaching down the stone walls with their skeletal-like, ghostly tendril roots, spreading over and taking hostage the stones of rubble surrounding the site. The most uniquely different temple was at Beng Mealea which was only recently opened up after a 6 year effort by Princess Diana’s NGO to remove land mines, completed in 2008. It is entirely as discovered, with no restoration, non-regulated and turns out to be a playground for local children. So, Maggie and I being adult foreign children scampered over the rubble and walked over some challenging and precarious pathways!
We loved coming back each day from our “rode hard, put away wet” excursions to our lodging (appropriately named The Golden Temple), being greeted graciously with a cool, moist and jasmine-scented cloth for our faces, along with the customary sompiah (slight forward bow, hands together in front of heart, fingers pointing upward). Our 1st night was spent with Kim, our Tuk-Tuk driver from the airport pick up, who escorted us to a children’s hospital where the head doctor puts on a cello performance and an “ask” for donations to support his cause in providing children free service, as they have a huge epidemic of Dengue Fever they are struggling with. Kim picked us up later and took us to an all-Cambodian outdoor eatery frequented by the younger set where we encountered the terms “service girl” and “taxi girl”. I’ll leave the rest to your imagination.
We said good-bye to Siem Reap with a truly unique non-temple experience, visiting the water village of Kompong Phluk. We boated for 2 hours over the flooded forest to the massive Tonle Sap Lake (18 km wide, 300 km long, populated around its perimeter by a million people eking out their living through fishing), which is fed by the lifeline of SE Asia, the Mekong River (13th longest in the world), when it turns north on its journey from China, before spilling into the South China Sea. The village has a population of 5,000 (800 families) living 30 feet above the ground on either wood or concrete stilt homes when the region is flooded. We were boating on water that was 3-4 meters (10-13 feet) above the agricultural fields below, which was less now that the waters were receding. It was hard to imagine the life for these people with all the ups & downs, literally and figuratively! The tree canopies appearing above the water reminded us of our sunrise in the Danum Valley of Borneo (only with a floor of water versus mist), an eerie, mystical, other-world. We saw a lot of fish and shrimp traps and, unfortunately, one sign of civilization: lots of plastic bags caught on the limbs of the surfacing trees, as well as floating just beneath the water surface.
We next traveled for 6 hours by Mekong Express Limousine Bus to Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, where the former King was lying in state at the Royal Palace, having recently passed away. We spent time in the Riverfront area, walking the promenade, having drinks at the Foreign Correspondents Club on the 5th floor, overlooking water vessel traffic on the Tonle Sap River, including one dark, unlit scow stealthily making its way downstream, presenting an eerie, phantom-like image.
We finished our stay in Phnom Phen with a rash of bargaining/purchasing at the Russian Market for silk goods and other handicrafts, followed by some general wandering around. That last day we came across even more amputees than we had seen in the days before, a testimonial to the ravages of war that can manifest long after, i.e., accidentally stepping on one of the estimated 3,000,000-5,000,000 land mines still buried around Cambodia. They were the only ones asking for something that we readily gave to, no hesitations!! We had one more 6 hour bus ride with our Mekong Express folks, ending up in Ho Chi Minh City. The scenery along the way was more of the same lush green fields, water buffalo so submerged in the paddies all you could see was their nostrils and horns, homes on stilts with hammocks slung underneath the main house floors and domestic animals wandering around the parked motor bikes and the clothes hung for drying.
Our last night in SE Asia was spent eating Pizza (very upscale though) with our son’s friend Tyler and his expectant wife Hillary, who are working for an International School in HCMC. We took pictures of her “baby belly” to compare to 37 days earlier on our 2nd night in SE Asia. So our adventure came full circle with this evening.
Now that we are back and have adjusted a bit, we are reflecting on how much we learned of the cultural customs and differences between Malay, Khmer, Vietnamese, Chinese, and Bornean Ethnicities. We were made humble with the history of the centuries of enmity between these neighboring countries (including foreign incursions) and their perseverance in moving forward after suffering great personal and societal losses. Watching people drive in the cities and countryside, we witnessed behaviors that were pretty much unregulated but not aggressive and were struck with how it all worked in a dance that everybody seemed to know the steps to and the rhythm. They “gave way” to each other. We also learned that, although we know much more than before we left Seattle, we realize how much we don’t know at all. Sobering thought! We leave you with a Robert Louis Stevenson quote that seems apropos:
“There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign”
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Appreciatively yours, Stan & Maggie