I lost the entire email I wrote about our trip to Cambodia, so I'm in a state of rage right now.
I'll say that it was amazing, both the experience and the email. Just google Angkor Wat and let me get on with killing my brain cells with shitty beer to forget the last hour I spent writing jokes.
To say the email was a literary gem would be to downplay the nomination from the Pulitzer commitee that was sure to follow.
I'll say that Ed and I are complete idiots and are really learning a lot about the world, but not much about how to plan a trip properly. We never planned a visa into Vietnam (which you need for you future SE Asia explorers) and were going to be stuck in Cambodia for another three days. Fortunately we hired the cabbie who picked us up at the airport to be our personal driver for the three days we were there. For $40 a day we also hired his friend who is a certified tour guide who took us around to tour the temples. And they knew people who knew people who knew people.
We are wasting so much money on flights, and then rebooking flights, then rebooking the rebooked flights due to visa restrictions.
Angkor Wat, fuckin amazing!!!!! Google it, wikipedia it, basically save, beg, borrow or quite frankly steal the money to go visit it. I won't bore you with some shit you guys are probably gonna skip over anyways. If you're interested, check it out. If not, gafuckyaself.
Now since the boys had been hired by a couple white kids they were pumped! So at night we offered to take them out for drinks both nights in Siem Reap. Whats amazing is that Cambodians aren't like us fat stupid white people. They buy some beer, and everyone shares it. They pour glasses for everyone and you cheers every time you have a drink, so that there is no "cheating" by one person drinking more than the other. Since Ed and I paid for everything, everywhere we went, we were still being ignorant fat idiots crushing the 9% stout we were drinking. But nevertheless it was quite interesting to cheers 400 times in one night. Ed and I were even cheersing ourselves as we kept chugging the beers while our counterparts were still putting their glasses down.
The wonderful part about paying for everything including food, drinks, and even a hotel room for our boys one night, it all cost maybe a hundred bucks for three days. A meal that would consist of a bowl of soup to start, maybe some spring rolls or some other ish, an entire chicken, and maybe two veggie dishes, rice and drinks for 4 people would be like $20 total.
So these boys were stoked cause we paid for everything, one night they took us to play pool which I was looking forward to since I've been known to win the occasional pool game in the past. Of course when we get to the pool hall there are no pool tables only snooker tables. For those who don't know the difference. Snooker is for people who are good at billiards. The table is WAY bigger, and the balls and pockets are WAY smaller. Needless to say drinking 9% beer and trying to play snooker against semi-pro locals is a recipe for disaster. Thank god for Ed cause I think I hit two shots all night. They kept laughing at me and pointing at the beer cans every time I took a shot.
The second day the two of them took us to a river that hundreds of years ago the Khmer people carved the river bed with thousands of symbols that stretch downriver for over half a km. Out here I can barely WALK half a km without searching for shade and a water stand let alone spend a hundred years carving the river bed. Thankfully the water level was low enough we could see the carvings as we were told in the rainy season you can't see anything.
So we found out we weren't gonna be able to get into Vietnam while we were high in the hills of Cambodia from our cabbies cell phone. We were told that our passports never made it to the airport on time to be flown to the capital and if we couldn't get it done the following day we would have to wait another three days since it was national buddha day coming up. Since we had flights to India to catch, time was running out, and we needed to secure this shit ASAP.
So after touring the beauties of the ancient world, we raced back to Siem Reap, (not before stopping and unloading the fuck out of some M-16's and Kalishnikov AK-47's) cussed out the travel agents for crushing our dreams of visiting Vietnam and managed to get our money back. Our cabbie who might have been one of the coolest guys I've ever met in all my travels pulled me aside and quietly said "listen Jason, I got a friend in Pnomh Penh (the capitol of Cambodia). I can drive you to Pnomh Penh tonight and in the morning I'll sort out your visas."
Always up for adventure, Ed and I said lets do it!
We left Siem Reap for a 5 hour drive to the capitol. Now to say the road to Pnomh Penh was absolutely shitty, would be a complete lie. These roads are the reason that tire companies are still in business. I'm not sure if any of it at all was paved and since our cab had no shocks or struts left in the back we felt every single bump. At one point we hit a bump so hard Eds head hit the ceiling, the ipod and speakers went soaring through the air, all our shit went flying all over the back of the cab and I said, sheepishly "Ha Ha, I uhh sure uhh hope we don't have to stop and uhh change the tire out here", as now it was pitch black and we were hours from any town. The cabbie turned around while driving over a hundred on the worst roads I've ever seen (and people I've been to Jamaica many times where pot holes have been known to swallow entire families whole) and he said "I hope so too, since I don't have a spare tire." When he dropped us at the airport the following day, I also learned he had no insurance either.
Thats the kind of situations I roll in.
As we were driving I noticed out in the fields that there were what appeared to be hundreds of purple flourescent lights out in the fields. Not a house, street sign or any evidence of civilization for what looked like eternity in every direction but there were hundreds of purple flourescent lights in the fields. So I asked our boys (insert gay joke) what the lights were all about and they said, "oh thats to catch crickets, grasshoppers and locusts to deep fry and sell at the market." Lawd a mercy! I was witnessing the mass harnessing of disgusting fucking insects for human consumption and there are millions of people in this world who won't eat pork?
Help me with this one people.
At one point Ed says "hey asshole, turn down the music the cops are pulling us over." I was passed out after smoking a cannon of some brutal Cambodian weed (which the locals don't even smoke, they put it in soup, thats how hurtin it is) and woke up at an army checkpoint. The army was pulling people over looking for guns which apparently since the war ended in 1979 are everywhere. So I'm half asleep with a flashlight in my face trying not to make eye contact (growing up in Nova Scotia you learn that one at an early age) as the cops are talking to our driver. They yell some shit at him and he gets out of the cab. I start thinkin, oh shit, what if they look in the glovebox and find the bag of garbage weed. Well thankfully in Cambodia the kind of guns they were looking for can't fit in a glovebox unless its the glovebox on a jumbo jet. They popped the trunk, looked in for a split second and off we went. In a fit of laughter our cabbie looks back while reaching take off speed and says "good thing they didn't look in the glovebox eh boys?"
I often question my decision making and the answers I get back are astonishing.
So we got to the capitol, got hotel rooms for Ed and I and one for the boys. They joked that Ed and I should get separate rooms, so I was expecting some kinda you guys are gay comment but his comment was "what if you want whores?" I laughed, shook my head and said, "lets go get drunk, we'll meet you in the lobby in half an hour." For the record, prostitution around the world is considerably more accepted than it is where we come from. As if I'm gonna bang some hooker in Cambodia, but the boys were telling us that one of the signs of power in Cambodia was "being able to go to THE GIRLS every night."
So we go to a Cambodian club and it was basically some girls or guys singing karaoke on stage in Cambodian. It was like total mellow lame-assed music and when the people finish singing, some people clap, but it was lame as hell. However, our boys were stoked, it was like they were at a rock concert. Ed and I just kept crushing stout while checking out all the gorgeous girls singing, who of course were all hookers too. Ed's comment was "Canada could learn a lot from Cambodia. How awesome would it be if every club you went to in Calgary there were 12 hookers greeting you at the door?" I thought about it for a second, and what can I say, the guy is doing a masters degree, you can't argue with logic like that.
In the morning, our cabbie took our passports, pulled some strings, and for an extra $30 got us bumped to the front of the line. Our guide took us to the museum where the Khmer Rouge tortured and murdered thousands of people between 1975 and 1979. It was crazy, there were only 7 people who escaped the prison and one of them was standing next to us at one point. He pointed himself out in a photo from 1979. He was now in his late 70's and told us about how they broke his fingers while torturing him. Man, we've got it so easy it's insane.
While at the museum we got a call from our cabbie saying, not only had he secured the visas, but another friend of his had got us a dirt cheap flight to Vietnam for $50 less than we would have had to pay if we booked it ourselves. If you're ever in Siem Reap call our cabbie Punna. He's the man!
They dropped us at the airport, we tipped them largely, and got their phone numbers which of course I lost. If I find them I'll include them in a later post, for the three people who are actually reading my incessant ramblings.
All in all, Cambodia was beautiful. The people have nothing, but they have smiles on their faces. They will never see where I come from but the little girl begging money outside the temple knew our Prime Minister was Stephen Harper and we had 10 provinces and 3 territories. I realized the little girl was smarter than half my friends so I had to give her a few US dollars. And while the weather was hot as hell, it rained a few times so it was temperate.
No fuckin opium though. But on the positive, I hear its legal in India!
People I need guidance.
Love you all, and I'll fill you in on Vietnam if anyone gives a shit.
Jung
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