noodle quest 2006

Ugh. Arriving and traveling in Thailand has been nothing but really shitty. most people are rude (travelers and thais) or at least enough to make us unhappy, everything is way more expensive than we had thought and thaialnd is fucking heaving with party seaking loser backpackers. okay. that is the most extreme end of how i am feeling. obviously we are still open to feeling good in this country it is just extremely dificult to coem here from cambodia which we loved so desperately and where the people were os un-imaginably kind and loving. but let’s start from the beginning.
The morning after we arrived in siem reap we bought our temple passes (4 days for 40$) and went to bayon by tuk tuk. our driver’s name was limney and he was pretty nice. bayon, however, was amazing- giant faces on high monuments and endless old stone courtyards wth piled stone and amazing pavillions and crevices abound. this temple was the largest temple we saw after angkor wat. after this we went to the terrace of the elephant king which was a very ornately decorated pavillion from which an audience of noblepeople would watch the king and his people cross the valley. after this we went to a temple called ta prohm which is one of the jungle temples. this means that it has not been well preserved and the ungle has sprung up around, in and through the temple. this temple was super magical and there were lush trees bent around grasy peices of amazingly carved statues and wall carvings. also plenty of space to crawl around in and get lost and be by yourself- very cool. then we went to a temple called thom anom which i don’t realy remember, but it was probably pretty cool. after that we went to watch the sunset at pnom bakheng. the climb up there was minorly unbelievable. it was so steep and so high up this half staircase half mountain that at times we were on all fours. an older korean woman was walking up with her daughter but she was clearly struggling so i offered her a hand which she in turn leaned into with the full weight of her body so i ended up puling myself and this woman up the mountain. whew. very tiring. then up a very narrow super steep staircase on the outside of the temple and some more stairs to get to the top. completely exhausting and kind of worth it. there were tons of people up there. the scariest things about ascending and descending was thinking that someone behind or ahead of you would slip, fall and wipe you out. thankfully, this didn’t happen. after the descent we went to a dinner theater restaurant called ton le sap (everything is ton le sap) and watched traditional khmer apsara dancing. this is dancers who were these crazy high gold pointy empire state building hats. apsara means divine dancing godess or something in khmer.
the next day we took a looooooooong bump but amazingly scenic tuk tuk ride through wild jungle villages to banteay sreu which is a temple believed to have been built by women, for women, and in honor of female goddesses. pretty cool. the architecture here was not that astounding however the details of the carvings were truly amazing. this temple complex was relatively small. after this temple we went to pre rup which is a very tall temple with three main pinacles. some little khmer boys were hanging out at the top and i bought some bracelets from one of them. after this we tuk tuk’d to preah khan. this temple was very similar to ta prhom, the jungle temple but was much larger. we loved this one. after that we went to angkor wat in the afternoon to catch the sunset. i sat on a ledge outside a high tower for a while and jess checked on the bas reliefs on teh ground floor. i also met a nice monk who was very playul and we jumped around the wat for a while together pretending to use his umbrella as a parachute. he told me a pretty crazy story about his life. he was rpahned at a very young age and grew up alone in some abandones house in a village about 300km from pnom penh. he didn’t know his name and everyone in the village called him “twenty.” he said he did not know why. one day his village was occupied and everyone was forced to leave. he was 15. he decided to walk to pnom penh wich took 15 days. he lived off of fallen fruit from trees and water in puddles on the side of the road. someone took pity on him in pnom penh and brought him to siem reap to a monastery where he was given a proper name which makes him very happy, to have a name like veeryone else. he told me he was going to walk 8 km home so i offered him a ride home on our tuk tuk which he accepted. limney told me later that he used to be a monk and he thought it was very bad that my monk friend was talking to me and acepted a ride from me because those actions violated a whole mound of buddhist monk rules. whatever that is dumb. that night we ate really good salads and pizza for dinner and jess convinced me to like olives! i NEVER thought i would see the day.
the next morning we went to a temple called ta som which was pretty small but also jungle-y like a prohm and preah kahn. after this we revisited preah kahn. i re-climbed some favorite points of interest there and after a few stones shook under me in ways that felt pretty uncool- i settled on a nice quiet piazza with ornate carvings abound to sit and read by book for a bit. i am reading kurt vonnegut’s hocus pocus and am thoroughly enjoying it. i realized i have to space out vonnegut books throughout my life. if i always want to have a new one to read- i can only read one a year or so- i have not done exact calculations yet. then we went back to angkor wat. i visited the sights i had missed and jess went for some climbs up to the towers on the third level. every inch of angkor wat was covered in carvings and was pretty cool. i met a german guy who invited us to share a taxi with him and his friend to the border at poipet. after angkor wat we ate salads again and pizza and i uploaded ALL of my angkor pictures so check them out at the link to the right of the screen. it only took 4 hours this time, unbelieveable.
the next day we rode with the germans to the border at poipet. it was the worst ride of my entire life. the car broke down 4 times and the bumps were so hard that your stomach dropped to your feet and your head hit the ceiling every couple of seconds. ouch. what a terrible way to travel. after 4.5 hours or so we reached the border at poipet and had to get our stamp out of cambodia. we were charged 10$ each for the two days we stayed after our visa ran out. then walking over a bridge to the thai immigraion. we were starving as we had not eaten all day. we waited on line in the scorching sun for 3 hours to get a thaialnd stamp in our passports. the only good thing about this is that we met a guy named jess from the US that was leading a tour group who had extra spaces on their air con mini vans to bangkok. we shoved some pad thai i nour faces and then went with them to bangkok. we stopped at a 7 11 which outside of it had foodstands abound with DELICIOUS looking and tasting foods. thai food is really very VERY tasty. the journey to bangkok was shocking. the roads are completeoly paved and it is all super highways. there are electricty posts and cel sites everywhere and tall huge building an hour outside of bangkok. it was shocking. at one piint we were convinced we were in queens under a bridge on the grand central pkway headed out to long isalnd. this made me homesick in a sad way for the first time on the trip. being in environments that are so totally different- it’s had to miss home because everything is so new and interesting and cool. so far in thaialnd, especially in bangkok, everything is familiar and pretty uninteresting. so we get into bangkok and say goodbye to jeff as he and his tour are staying in a fancy hotel. we spend the next 3 hours searching for a hotel in the khao san road backpackers ghetto. everything is either too expensive or full. we are in thaiand in high season and it is a bit nauseating. all of teh backpackers that have 3 weeks to spend traveling are here in thaialnd right now. get me out! or something…. so anyway we finally settled in the UTC guesthouse which is israeli, as is everything else on the streets around our guesthouse. all young, semi- sleazy israeli guys who opened guesthouses but this one was the chepaest cleanes we could find at alost 10$ making it one of the most expensive places we have stayed an dthere was not a bathroom in the room. at least the walls were sealed to the floor which coul dnot be said for other guesthouses we had seen. uuuuuuuuuugh bangkok. i’m not sure what we ate for dinner- maybe just really good food on the street. the next day we woke up and decided not to move because we just really couldn’t be bothered. the other cool place we found was an aircon dorm room with all funky korean ladies staynging there but it was only 2 dollars cheaer and not worth moving our bags. so we spent the day walking the street, eating indian food for lunch, hanging at our hotel an dtalking to israelis and then we went to a fancy japanese dinner at the hilton which i thought julien had recomended but actually he ate delicious japanese food at the hyat. oops. now i have to eat fancy japanese hotel food again in bangkok. this woman Ning, a frind of a woman who works with Joe (Maffia) met us at the hotel to pick up a bag that she is going to store for us at her house which has mostly gifts that jess bought an ddidnt ship home in addition to some clothes we didn’t want to travl with anymore. our bags are much lighter now, thang god, as we have been shelpping them from here to hell and back for the past few days.
we decicded to head south and bought ticets to koh chang- some isalnd near the thai cambodia border. we picked these isalnds for a few reasons including weather and proximity. the next morning at 8am we were picked up by a very old minibus and taken 6 hours through uninteresting terrain to the town of trat where we were to catch a ferry. the ride was horrible- i was in the very back, had no leg room and my chair didn’t move back. ugh i was in such a bad mood. then we got on a ferry as it started to rain heavily. i was very scared for my life. every minute or so i would look out and fimd the closest point that i would swim to. shit i was really afraid. i figured i would find jess, then do one of the following- if she was freaking out and yelling and wasting energy i would knock her out and float her as far away from the boat as possible to escape the chaos that would be the peopl trying o hold on to th boat. if she was not freaking out i would swim with her far from the boat and then float as the current was going in the direction of some landmass in the darak distance. whew. sure glad that didn’t have to happen (read; life of pi/me). then we got on the back of these trucks which had nehes which serve as the taxis around here. it was still raining but not as hard. we could not find a hotel and got on and off these trucks a few times until we found one. it was pretty sucky. it was 8pm bu the time we checked in. there was a tranatula and a mini scorpian on the toilet an dred ants that burned your feet in the bathroom and all over the walk to the room. we ate some dinner at a beach place next door that had no rooms and then tucked in our mosquito net and settled in for bed after a couple of shreiks with small moving bugs around our pillows. uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuugh.
all of the rooms in this town are little hut of varrying qualities. the are al rip offs and bursting to capacity with the kind of backpackers that do not interest us. screw this town i am in such a bad mood. people told us that the rooms in town fill up by 12noon so we woke up at 7;30 and walked two towns to the south which was up super steep hills. we saw a sign for a hotel up the hill and walked into the jungle where the sign pointed. after a 1km descent down overgrown “path” (really not enough places o put you foot to b called a path) we had lost hopes that a hotel could be at the bottom but realized we needed to see what was. it was just a small patch of rocks overlooking the ocean. jesus. then this time 1km up th ejungle path, back to the road. we caught a ride to another town further south and hated it so we turned around and eventually found a bungalow pretty close to our original hotel but for half the price and on stilts- so no red ants. there appears to be only ne beach with sand in the few towns around here and it it is crowded with this super wannabe backpackers. ugh i am so not into these kind of people. GET ME OUT OF HERE! maybe we made the wrong choice with this island but maybe all of the islands in thaland are like this right now- just teemgn with people we do not want to chill with. so after hikinh around for a few hours this mornign we moved int our new place, and ate some food. i ate some beef curry that was the spiciest thing i ever ate after the jerk sauce that frank and alan gave me a few years ago at school. my eyes cried, my nose ran and oooouch my toung fet like i had shaved it and poured lemon juice on it. whew! so i was joking around with thomas we owns the bungalow and he after 10 minutes when my mouth and throat returned to semi-normal he somehow convinced my to eat this green chili which for some reason i did and ooooooooouch it hurt 27 times more than the pain previosly described. i never knew spice like this. jess, of course, could not be persuaded to have the experience. then we went looking for info to get to other islands or find a chill beach or soemthing. i fell on some sliiperrry rocks and decided to come to the internet and get a massage but i do not want to experience the frustration of traveling to the massage place, assuming i can get any kind of substantial information to find the kind i want. ugh. jess went in search of chiller spaces and continued alng the rocky beach where i fell. i am okay, just dirty and annoyed and frustrated.
is there any way thaialdn will do us right? so far everything really has sucked except for the food and the shopping. the people are s stylin in exactly the same ways the kids were in japan 5 years ago but here things are actually affordable. we swore off buying anything now but at the end of our trip before we fly out of nagkk we will go crazy.
to all of you who have written me e-mails lately i will not write ack for a few days. i must go in search of chiller spaces and places and DO NOT want to sit in front of a computer. it is likely that jess and i will head for the hills soon. very literally we will probably shoot up to chiang mai in a week or so and then cross into laos where HOPEFULLY (pleasepleasepleaseplease) the high season has not consumed everything in sight.
i haven’t had a shower in days and am praying that the one at the bungalow works. it is truly amazing tha t the country in SE Asia that is supposed to be the easiest to travel in has been the most painful. please send good vibes to us and thaialnd and allow us t olike it here or we are OUT!
don’t forget to check out the agkor pics under ”My Links.” they are totally out of order and i can not be bothered to figure out how to fix them. some of the beginning ones have captions but most do not as it really takes tolong to edit them on computers that run so slow.
ugh.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 4th, 2005 at 1:05 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.