Phnom, Palace, and Pagoda

February 23-24

Took it easy during our last day in Chiang Mai, Tuesday the 24th. We walked through a few soi and revisited a couple of temples, and spent the heat of the day at the hotel.

The highlight of the day was dinner at the Bodhi Tree Cafe with Anna, Charlie’s daughter. She has taken a year off from school and has already traveled to South Africa and India. She arrived in Chiang Mai that morning.

She was contemplating a meditation retreat operated by Buddhists, and is on her way next to Cambodia. She told us the country is often called Scambodia. I treat every country I visit, including my own, with a heavy dose of skepticism, but it was good information nonetheless.

After Cambodia, Anna may go back to India, but hasn’t decided yet.

We told her about a few of our experiences in Chiang Mai and Bangkok, including the water temperature problems at the S6. Things are considerably more rustic in India, where hot water is a rare luxury.

The next morning, we left Chiang Mai on time, around 10:30, and had lunch at Bangkok when we changed planes. It’s kind of funny. The scheduled layover was almost four hours (actually longer because of a delay). Flight time for the whole trip was less than three.

We tried the chicken at a franchise called Piri-Piri. The kid waiting on us was wearing a name tag on a ribbon around his neck. As these things are prone to do, it had turned around and I was reading the message on the back: "Fuck you, you fucking fuck." Did he have a clue to what it meant?

We also went to the Japanese franchise for octopus dumplings and soba soup with shrimp tempura and seaweed.

The plane to Phnom Penh was almost an hour late. But hey, We're retired now and didn’t have to make a connection there. So what’s an hour or so?

When we were still in the climb after take-off, white vapor started to appear around the air conditioning vents.

The man seated next to us asked, as calmly as he could, “What is that?”

Believe it or not, I did know. I had seen this before, in a depressurizing hyperbaric chamber at NASA Johnson in Houston. It scared the hell out of me until one of the operators explained how it works.

There was a thick haze over the Bangkok airport, so as the plane sat on the ground, humidity had time to build up in the cabin. 

Cabin pressure was falling as we climbed. That and the cooling from the air conditioning were causing the water vapor to condense rapidly.

The man was a Norwegian who lived in Thailand, or at least spent a lot of time there. The combination of his slight accent, the droning cabin noise, and my near deafness made it hard to get everything he said. He was traveling with a friend, who among other accomplishments, spoke Thai.

When we got off the plane, the second Norwegian man was walking with a brace and shouting, “Pulang, pulang.” Whatever that means, it was to the amusement of several passengers.

When you come from the plane, you line up for visa on arrival. Online, they tell you that you need passport quality photos, a valid passport, and a working credit card. When you get to the pay counter, they say they want only cash. It wasn’t a big deal, only $60 for two visas.

I found right away that ATMs dispense U.S. cash only. You have to change currency at a bank, and they take a 5 percent rakeoff. On our way to the bank window, a man selling SIM cards saw us and called out that he can exchange money too. Maybe so, but this is Scambodia and so you never know.

Like traveling in Bali, the cab ride took at least half an hour to make what was probably a five-minute ride. Motorbikes were weaving in and out of traffic. Everything was backed up.

It felt, too, that we were taking the long way around a block. We had a fixed rate, so the driver had no incentive for doing that.

The Royal Inn is in a colorful neighborhood. Almost half the businesses on our block are massage parlors. There are Korean restaurants, a Chinese restaurant where no one speaks Chinese, and at the corner a tenement that looks like the old Walled City of Kowloon–soot-covered concrete walls, bare wires, and stalls at street level where people do business.

When we passed at dusk, kids were playing on a pile of construction debris. There is a hotel undergoing renovation next to the tenement. This is all less than a mile from the Royal Palace, which is on the same street, Sothearos Blvd.

Royal Inn is on the old side, but OK. Our room has no windows and must be on the inside of the building. We had a similar situation at the Porcelain in Singapore, but here we have ample space to put our bags down. 

There is a desk in the room and an extra barrel chair, too. Also a wardrobe cabinet and space left over to walk around. High ceilings, hot water. All in all, it’s OK.

We found an interesting Cambodian restaurant up the street from the hotel. In addition to a menu that included frog stir-fried with ginger and pig intestine with pickled mustard greens, there was a man in white military coat buttoned to the neck, who looked surprisingly comfortable as he played hammered dulcimer and wooden xylophone.

Both dishes were good. Frog usually tastes like chicken because you usually get it French style–breaded and fried. It actually has its own flavor. Also an abundance of little bones, so it is a lot of work to eat. It was worth it to get the slivered ginger, which I was able to eat by the spoonful.

The intestine was a little chewy for me. It’s like calamari. High heat toughens it, but mixed with the mustard greens it was very tasty nonetheless.

I had a couple of the national beers, Angkor and Cambodia.

We later stopped at a Japanese bar called Kowa that served Carlsberg on draft. We met the owner, who was born in Illinois. He has also lived in Europe. 

His father was an executive with Toshiba, so they moved around a lot. He has two passports, one U.S. and the other Japanese. Very handy combination when it comes to meeting visa requirements, he said. 

Over here, countries that require a visa with a U.S. passport, often omit the requirement for a Japanese passport.

Prices of everything, even tuk-tuk rides, are quoted in U.S. dollars. You can pay in dollars or riel. Your change can be a mix of Cambodian and U.S. currency. The exchange rate is a little more than 4,000 riel to the dollar.

I haven’t seen a coin in the country. The smallest bill in circulation is a 100, worth about 2.5 U.S. cents. If the total price doesn’t end in “00,” the convention is to round up or down.

Anyhow, it seems I didn’t need to pay to make that currency exchange, after all.

February 25

Wednesday morning, we posed the big cultural riddle: Where can we have clothes dry cleaned?

The hotel not only knew what dry cleaning was; they offered to send it out for us. I was able to change jackets.

This was our first full day in the city, so we decided to visit a couple of tourist sites. The royal palace was closed till 2, so we went to Wat Phnom.

This is a temple built on the only hill in town. “Phnom” means “mountain.”

According to Wikipedia, it is an artificial hill 27 meters high. Anyhow, it’s at least a four-story climb. When you stand on the temple porch, you look directly at the gable of a four-story apartment building across the street.

Oddly, the climb seems more formidable from the top looking down than from the bottom looking up.

Legend has it that the temple was built to house four Buddha images that had washed up from the river and were discovered by a lady named Penh. She had the villagers build the hill and then put a shrine on top to house the images.

We lit some incense here and left an offering.

There’s a park around the foot of the hill. Aside from the welcome shade of the trees, the place is distinguished by a huge timepiece built into the base of the hill. I learned that it was a gift from China a few years ago, and replaced an earlier clock built by the French in the ’60s.

A sign says, “Keep off the watch.” 

The watch is about 20 meters wide. It seems to keep accurate time. It even has a sweep second hand.

We hired a tuk-tuk and headed for the palace. We got there early and walked around the neighborhood.

This is nothing like the neighborhood around the palace in Bangkok, which is reasonably prosperous. The narrow lanes in Phnom Penh speak bustling life and various business endeavors, but also poverty.

We saw a sign for Artillery, a vegan cafe that sells fruit juices. Joanna had a veggie sandwich and I had a fruit drink, apple juice with ginger and lime. It took a while to find something on the menu that didn’t mix things like pineapple and spinach juice.

Joanna liked the sandwich. I thought it was awful. All I could get out of it was the overpowering flavor of raw onion and the rubbery texture of mushroom.

There is a fee for foreigners to enter the palace. I forget what it was, $3 a foreigner, $6. Whatever it was, it wasn’t overwhelming.

We saw several grand buildings from the outside. There was a temple where you were permitted to look in, but not go in.

There is a park nearby with a billboard celebrating the king. You can see it through one of the palace gates.

The Silver Pagoda, which has a floor tiled with silver panels, is talked up all over town. It’s one of the sights next to the royal palace on all the tourist maps.

When you get inside the palace grounds, they hand you a map of the place with no mention of the Silver Pagoda. That is merely a nickname for what is officially the Temple of the Emerald Buddha. It seems Thailand hasn’t registered that name.

You can’t have herds of people walking on real silver for very long, so the celebrated floor is covered with carpets. You can see some of the silver pavers at the edges where people don’t walk and carpets don’t cover.

It was hot and there was little shade outside. And besides, palaces are generally boring. After the silver pagoda, I was eager to leave.

When we found our way out (you walk in the opposite direction of the arrow on the last “exit” sign), we walked to the corner where a particularly persistent driver was waiting for us.

More about him and his colleagues another time. This is getting long.

We went back to the hotel for a rest in the AC.

We walked out, grabbed a tuk-tuk before the driver could even pitch a ride to the Killing Fields.

We gave our destination as the Riverfront, a long stretch by the Tonle Sap full of night clubs, restaurants, and bars. On the way, he stopped at the side of a bustling traffic circle. We were concerned that he was going to try to leave us there. There’d be no way to cross the road.

But no, he wanted to see a map. I showed him a section in the middle of the Riverfront neighborhood and said to drop us there.

It was fun, bright lights, draft beer, all kinds of food. There was an Irish pub named Paddy Rice. Bars on one side street include the Pussycat, 69, Cavalry, and Hello Sweetie. In the middle of it all is the Tai Hok Huat Coffin Shop.

Just about everything you need all in one place.

My stomach had been giving me trouble, so I wasn’t in the mood for experiment. In fact, wasn’t in the mood for Asian food at all. We finally stopped at a small place with draft Anchor and Western as well as Asian dishes. Joanna had mixed vegetables with rice. I had a bleu cheese hamburger with fries.

It was pushing nine and I was ready to call it a night. But first, we needed to pick up a few things. We asked a tuk-tuk driver outside the restaurant to take us to 7-Eleven.

Blank stare. He called a couple of colleagues. No one knew what 7-Eleven was. We explained: a small market to buy beer and yogurt. There was a brief exchange, and he drove us around the block to Panda Mart.

I couldn’t believe it. There is an Asian country that hasn’t been taken over by 7-Eleven.

We bought what we needed, got back into the tuk-tuk, and made it to the hotel with only a half-dozen near misses in traffic along the way.

Saturday my stomach was worse. I didn’t even want coffee. We bought tea at the restaurant downstairs and brought it to the room. Joanna took the hotel tuk-tuk to the nearest market.

I had tea, yogurt, and banana, and slept much of the rest of the day. Was it brought on by the ice cubes in the vegan drink? By the burger or fries? Or was it just my turn? I don’t know.

This is way overlong, so I’m signing off.

More adventures to come.

Love to all and to all a good night.

Harry