Blargh equals how I felt. My biggest concern this day was that I had an overnight bus ride to Luang Prabang and I was still not fully recovered from the day before. I was worried that I’d still be pooping water and I’d have to poop on the bus. Every 30 minutes. Around 11am, I ventured a walk around the city to test how I felt. I walked around for about 3 hours feeling okay. Not great, but good enough to not cancel the bus ride. Let’s power on.
Patuxay Monument. Should you go here? Naw, you can pass.
Seat belts not required.
The rest of my afternoon was spent hanging out in Backpackers Garden lobby just resting and planning other parts of the trip. At this point, I was running on only water and a couple bowls of rice. I didn’t want to risk eating anything else before the upcoming bus ride. At 7pm, a truck came to take us to the bus station. There weren’t enough seats in the truck bed for us all, so some of us, including me, had to sit on the edge. It didn’t seem like safety was a huge concern.
Regardless, made it safely to the bus. Below’s a pretty cool drawing of the Power Puff Girls and Optimus Prime at Backpackers Garden. Also, there are two people sleeping in the bottom right picture.
I stayed in a 4 person room the first night in Vientiane. It was a couple plus another person and myself. I met the couple, Pegite and Neela, the night before but all three of us had never met the fourth person. The couple said the only time they saw him was when he was passed out on the bed in the morning and had never seen him awake. I laughed at this statement, but woke up to find this mysterious fourth roommate passed out. I didn’t even hear him come in. Nor did I see him ever again.
Blah blah.
The only tour I went on in this city was to Buddha Park. It’s exactly that… a park filled with Buddha statues. I thought it was an ancient site but no, it was made to attract tourists. Got me, damn it. I do not recommend going to the park. It’s not that interesting, unless you love Buddha statues. Then you should definitely go… maybe.
Anyways, since the middle of the night, my stomach was feeling a bit odd. I thought I’d be able to walk it off, but during the Buddha Park tour, I didn’t think this was something that’d be going away anytime soon. Thinking back, I did think that the watermelon drink did taste a bit odd. I remembered there was some type of milk that went into the shake. I should have just thrown it away after my first instinct of “huh, this tastes weird”, but instead drank it. Thus began my first real food poisoning experience while traveling. Normally, during stomach aches, I just drink a lot of gatorade, eat apple sauce and plain rice, take some medicine, watch TV, and pray to God to let this pain go away.
So I did exactly that, except I just drank water and ate plain white rice that I found at a local Asian Market. No apple sauce overseas, I guess. I holed up in my room and didn’t leave for the next 21 hours. Curse you watermelon drink, but stupid me for drinking it.
I’m sorry to start with this, but Vientiane was the least interesting city I visited. There was not tons to do there in my opinion. Maybe others would have loved it. I think it should be worthwhile to visit in a few decades though. Also, it’s nice to fly into if you’re headed up to Van Vieng to go tubing down the Nam Song River. I didn’t get to visit there and in hindsight, I wish I did. There’s always next time, right?
This isn’t French…
Anyways, Vientiane is the capital of Laos. During the colonial period, this city was a French trading post, so there’s a lot of French architecture around the city. Let me be honest and say that I don’t actually remember this. All I remember is that the city did have a non-asian feel at times, but I couldn’t really tell if it was French or Australian buildings. If you’re into old French architecture, go visit this city. Or Paris.
My first night in Vientiane was normal as any other city. I checked in, ate, walked around, ate some more, and then went to the local Night Market. I don’t know why, but I always go to Night Markets. Maybe it’s cause there’s not much else to do if you don’t want to go sit in a bar, but also because I feel that I get a better understanding of their culture this way. I’m glad I went cause I saw something that really shocked me. There was this man drinking beer on the street, which is not shocking at all. What got me was when he let his toddler kid drink some beer! What the heck? I’m not looking down on this at all, and if this is fine, that’s fine. But man, that caught me off guard. I had to take a picture.
Dad, beer me.
Also, I got a watermelon smoothie from one of those stands. I love watermelon drinks. This becomes an important fact tomorrow.
I was a super tourist today. I saw Democracy Monument, the Giant Swing, Wat Suthatthepwararam (is the spelling right?!), the Grand Palace, Wat Pho, and Wat Arun. After all that, it was still only 3pm. Also, this is when I discovered that Bangkok is huge. I walked a lot more than usual this day and remember my feet being extremely sore around noon. What did I learn from this? To be honest, nothing. I walked back to the hostel after lunch. It took me a half hour.
This is the most grass I’ve seen in Asia.
After taking a well deserved nap, I headed back out to meet Minkyung, a friend I met in Siem Reap, at the W Market. We got dinner and caught up on each other’s travels. Again, quite nice to get to know someone and hear their adventures.
Later in the night, I met up with a college friend, Susie, who introduced me to a bunch of her friends and took me out. There was a lot of drinking and luckily I made it home by 3:30 in the morning so I could be up at 10 to catch a flight to Vientiane. Below’s a picture of a few of us and the remnants of a tray of vodka (or tequila, it’s questionable).
Pgeap, my driver from the day before, picked me up at 6:30am to drop me off at the airport. One of the benefits of hiring an all day tuk-tuk driver, in my opinion, is that this person becomes reliable and trustworthy. He was the first person I met when I got to Phnom Penh, and the last person I saw before I left.
I landed in Bangkok around 10:30am. Luckily this time, my check-in time was noon, so I headed directly to Hostelling to rest a bit before grabbing lunch. I had a “mild” green curry fried rice dish. I quickly learned that the definition of spice levels is very different in Thailand. I ate at the expense of my taste buds and went right back to the hotel. I was still pretty tired from the last couple days and also needed to do laundry (I purposely booked a hostel that had a laundry machine). I spent the afternoon reading waiting for my clothes to dry in the sun.
Later on that night, I ventured out to visit the famous Khan San Road. The simplest way I could describe it is to say it’s a block party for tourists. It’s a stretch of street that’s closed off to vehicles, lined with bars, random shops, live music, food carts, street entertainers, drinking, and dancing. Saw lots of very drunk people, probably due to the mixture of being in another country, alcohol, and potentially other relatively harmless items, such as laughing gas. Good times!
This guy’s performance was awesome.
At one end of the block, there are some food carts selling corn and other fried vegetables, and also fried spiders and scorpions. I was repulsed by the idea that some people would actually eat them. Some were huge and terrifyingly alive looking. My immediate gut reaction was to think “I’d never do this”, but something else kicked in.
Why do I immediately think “I’d never do this” or “I can’t do this?” I made a decision at that time that made a direct impact in my line of thinking for this entire trip. Whenever my initial thought went to “I’d never or cannot do this,” I decided that I should do it. I’d regret it otherwise.
Just thinking about this day makes me feel exhausted. At the time though, the excitement just beat the tiredness. The overnight bus from Siem Reap dropped us off around 5:30am in Phnom Pen. Check in wasn’t until 3pm, and I really needed to sleep. Or eat. Or poop. I wasn’t quite sure at this point what was going on with my body.
Earlier during the trip, I had gotten some advice to hire an all-day tuk-tuk driver if you’re going for a tour around the city. It’s cheaper and seems more personal in a way. You get a chance to build a report with your driver and learn something about the culture. They might even take you to some off the tourist path places to eat. All this being said, I met and hired Pgeap. First stop was to drop off my luggage at the Billabong hostel. I asked them if there was anywhere I could take a quick nap. Maybe in their lobby? The staff said there were tons of lounge chairs at the pool and that I could rest there. The lounge chair was much more comfortable than the overnight bus. Until I remembered mosquitos. I decided just to start the day right away.
I ended up visiting Wat Phnom, Independence Monument, Tuol Seng Genocide Museum aka S-21, Choeung Ek Genocide Center aka The Killing Fields, National Museum of Cambodia, Russian Market, the Royal Palace, and Central Market all before 3pm. I had breakfast at Nuron, lunched at Divine Cafe, and actually had dinner plans with an English couple I met on the Angkor Wat tour. Met with Jaspal and Naha at Romdeng. They had taken some time off from work and were traveling as well. It was nice to have a long conversation with someone other than myself during dinner.
Dinner ended around 10pm. I couldn’t stay out for drinks though since I had to get home to pack. Had to catch a flight to Bangkok in the morning, so early night for me.
Posts get harder to write as this trip goes on. My process to write these is to search through my photos for this specific day and see what I’ve done. As I’m doing more activities, I’ve taken way more pictures and seeing the amount of pictures lately makes me feel overwhelmed. I think “wow, I took a lot of pictures! I have to write so much today.” But in reality, I don’t have to write anything at all! Why do I make myself anxious thinking about posting a blog that is for me? Who knows. Who cares. Let’s get to it.
This day, I booked a trip to visit the Floating Village of Kampong Pluk outside of Siem Reap. This village sits near the Tahas River, which floods annually. The village has had to adapt to the flooding, so their homes are built either on stilts or on a platform with empty barrels that would float on the rising tides.
This entire street will be underwater in a few months.
What a wonderful adaptation to make this area habitable. What amazed me immediately was that so many people here were carrying around mobile phones. I wouldn’t have expected a floating village to have cell phone service. I mention it briefly in my instagram post. And because I like my caption from this day, I’ll copy it below.
“Cambodia’s floating village during the dry season and it’s cell phone towers. I have amazing reception here. The villagers keep an eye on ants and snails. The moment snails start making noises and ants start to crawl up the stilts, the flood is coming. They also rely on bees to know how deep the waters will be. The higher the bee hive, the deeper the water. Lately though, the flood waters have been shallower and weaker due to a dam built upstream. This has shortened the flood season and disrupted this village’s way of life.”
Isn’t it awesome that the villagers use nature as a sign to let them know when it’ll flood? Isn’t it sad that a dam was built without considering the downstream impact?
The rest of the trip took us through a flooded forest and to watch the sunset on Tonlé Sap Lake. Both were interesting; flooded forest more so, since a sunset on the lake isn’t something that special. But, we did get to sit on top of the roofs on the boat to watch. That was kinda fun because the more people that climbed on, the less stable the boat was. I secretly hoped a boat, or even ours, would flip over. Most importantly, is that I actually met a fellow solo traveler, MinKyung, during the floating forest tour. We happened to get paired up and found that we had similar plans for the rest of our trip. We actually got to meet up in a couple other cities and are still friends today.
Rode small boats through the forest. Got Black dots are all the other boat tours.Some interesting caption about this boat.
After the sunset, we headed back up the river to head back to Siem Reap. Later that evening, I hopped onto an overnight bus to head to Phnom Penh. It was not as nice as my first overnight bus trip. I actually think this is wear I had my Detroit Tigers hat stolen while I was sleeping. I can’t remember if it was this bus ride, or one of the several others I took. Either way, I lost my hat.
This picture is horrible but it’s the only one I have of this bus ride.
OutsideTheWell 