Hi all! We're out of India and well on our way to Egypt at this point...we get there in four days. We've been on the ship for about a week now and I'm starting to get cabin fever again, so I'm so excited to finally get to Alexandria. In other news, we entered the Red Sea early this morning and just a few minutes ago we passed by a recently-erupted volcano, which was amazing. (Not sure about the specifics of the volcano; I heard that it's currently erupting, but my friend's teacher told her that it erupted a couple years ago and the stuff that was coming out was volcanic ash from back then.) Either way, we could see something coming out of the volcano and how many people can say that?
Alright so there's a lot to tell and I know I haven't been the most devoted blogger, so I'll start way back with Vietnam and Cambodia. I can't believe it's been almost a month since I've been there!
We docked in Vietnam on September 27th, which was a Thursday. The clearing process went unbelievably quickly (to this date, the easiest country we've cleared) and we were able to get off the ship around 9 am. Rachel and I took our time getting showered and ready and we left the ship around 10:30 with our friends Erica and Bri. The port in Saigon wasn't super close to the downtown area, so SAS provided a 15-minute shuttle for us from the port to the city. We took the shuttle into the city center and immediately went in search for food. We weren't feeling too picky so we walked around for about 3 minutes, found a place that said "pizza" and headed on into it.
After our early lunch, we set out on our first order of business for Vietnam: having dresses made. Tons of students have dresses and suits made in Vietnam because the turn-around is so quick and the cost is so cheap. My friend Morgan had given me the name of a tailor that her sister had gone to and recommended, but we decided to look around for a bit and see if we could find a good place on our own. We couldn't find anything that looked promising, so we hailed and cab and headed to the recommend tailor's. The ladies who worked at the store were really nice, and we decided to have our dresses made there, even though there wasn't much of a selection on fabrics. (Silk only, and limited colors.) A lot of people went to the markets to pick out fabrics before they went to a tailors, but we didn't really care that much. I went with two designs in mind, and was measured, picked out the colors of silk, and sketched out the designs for them. We told them we wouldn't need our dresses until Monday and left hoping for the best.
When we walked outside of the tailor's, cyclo drivers immediately surrounded us. Cyclos are a form of transportation in Saigon that are basically bicycles with a seat/cart in front of them. We weren't quite sure what we wanted to do, so we looked at a list of places that the cyclo drivers could take us, and we decided to head to the War Remnants Museum. We settled on a price of $2 a person and each got into our own cyclo.
Traffic in Vietnam is something else. There are a fair amount of cars, but far outnumbering them are scooters and motorcycles. Also, there aren't really traffic lights and traffic is navigated by honking. The city is so loud with honking. It's so dangerous looking, but it somehow works. In addition to this, because there aren't traffic lights, there aren't really lights to help navigate pedestrian traffic. In Vietnam, if you want to walk across a street, you have to just walk. Everyone navigates around you. It's so frightening the first couple times you do this, but it's just how their traffic system works, and it actually, surprisingly, works.
We arrived at the War Remnants Museum around 1 pm. There are two areas to it: one building full of photos taken during the Vietnam war and blurbs about the war, and one building full of information on Agent Orange and the American war crimes. The photo building was interesting but it was really the latter building that got to me. Inside, there were tons of photos of people who had been affected by Agent Orange, pictures of dead bodies piled up, stories of people whose lives had been affected by Agent Orange, statistics about the way it affected following generations, even preserved bodies of infants dead because of Agent Orange. Plus, there was a wall of drawings by orphaned children in Vietnam, almost all of them having to do with peace. It was so hard to look at. Some people didn't like the museum because they thought it had a very strong anti-American bias, which it did in some respects, but it really made me think about everything our country had done to theirs. And despite everything, the Vietnamese people were so kind and so welcoming to us while we were there!
After the museum, our cyclo drivers offered to take us to some Chinese pagodas, which were pretty but not that interesting. Then we had a quick snack in the restaurant and, after a struggle with our drivers about how much we owed them, got in a taxi back to the ship. It had been raining almost all afternoon and we were ready to go back to the ship to clean up and get dinner. After dinner, I went with my friends Kate, Chris, and Stasi to a bar called Apocalypse Now (yep, themed after the movie) where we saw our Captain.
On the 28th, I went to Cambodia. You can only go to Cambodia if you're on a Semester at Sea trip, and it's a country I've always had a lot of interest in, so I was very excited for the trip. Our trip was supposed to have about 60 people on it, but it was split into two groups for some reason, a group of around 40 and a group of about 20, and I was in the bigger group. There was a parent trip organized by SAS that met up with the ship in Vietnam, and the Cambodia trip I went on was the one Cambodia trip that had parents on it. (Lucky me...no offense Mom and Dad, you guys are great, but my idea of a good time is not having other peoples' parents being bossy and parent-y when I'm trying to travel the world.) We left the ship around 12:30 pm and caught a mid-afternoon flight from Saigon to Phnom Penh, our first stop in Cambodia. It was a short flight, less than an hour long, and we got into Cambodia around 4:30. From the airport, we went to our hotel, which was sooooo nice. The total and complete opposite of my hotel in China! My roommate was a girl on the group that had been split from us, so she hadn't checked in yet. After putting our things in our room, we left the hotel for a sunset cruise on the Mekong Delta.
The sunset cruise might have been cool if it hadn't been raining, but there was no sunset so it was pretty anti-climactic. The Mekong Delta is really brown (I think from the silt, but definitely also because of pollution) and one of the grossest looking rivers I've ever seen, yet it's considered the "life-force" of Southeast Asia. What was interesting, however, was the riverboat village built over part of it. All these houses are built on platforms and are all tied together, and it was very interesting to see. They even had electricity in the houses, which I couldn't quite figure out.
From the "sunset" cruise, we went to dinner at a restaurant that was essentially a high-end buffet. I've never seen so much food in my life! Cambodian food is so delicious—lots of coconut, bananas, and soupy things. Then we went back to the hotel. A couple other girls and I decided to go get massages because there were a few massage parlors just down the street from where we were staying--$6/hour for a Khmer massage! After our relaxing massages, we had a glass of wine in the hotel bar and gossiped about shipboard life until the restaurant closed down.
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Ok, so I wrote all the above one day during class and didn't get another chance to write until just now—the day after Egypt! So here's the rest of the blog, written over a week later. The following parts talk about my visit to the Genocide Museum and the Killing Fields and if you don't feel comfortable reading it, please feel free to skim to the part where I travel to Angkor Wat.
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We had to be in the lobby by 8 am the next morning for our first stop of the day—the Genocide Museum. It was really hard to see the Genocide Museum at such an early hour because I felt like I was almost half asleep and my emotions weren't ready for it. The museum is housed in what was a prison during the days of the Khmer Rouge; before the Khmer Rouge turned it into a prison, it had been a high school. We saw the cells of the "important" prisoners first. These were small rooms with a bed that the prisoner was chained to. Next, we saw the regular cells. Brick cells were built in former classrooms and each cell was so small that a person could barely sit in them. There were several rooms filled with the photographs of the people kept in the prison, as well as photos of dead bodies and people post-torture. The Cambodian Genocide was so awful because the Khmer Rouge kept documentation of absolutely everything. It was so strategic and well-planned, and a lot of the people committing the crimes were just little boys that had been turned into soldiers. People were typically only held in the prison for a few weeks before being taken to the Killing Fields, but some stayed for up to four months.
We spent about an hour and a half at the Genocide Museum and then we went to the Killing Fields. The closest killing field to Phnom Penh was about 10-15 kilometers outside the city, and it was the area that all the people from the prison we had visited were taken. At the Field, there's a monument that's been erected which holds all of the skulls that had been dug up there. It's actually a very pretty piece of land, lush and green, and it was really hard to picture all the gruesome things that had happened there. The Field had 8 specific gravesites of excavation, and more people were presumed to have been buried there than they dug up; there was a swamp formed behind the main areas of excavation that couldn't be opened up. Basically, what we saw were relatively small holes in the ground, most of which had grass grown over them. The smaller holes had had between 20-40 bodies buried in them, but the two largest ones each had between 100-300 people buried in them; one of the larger holes was for children. Walking in between the grave sites, you could see pieces of clothing sticking up from under the ground, and I even saw a few teeth by the side of the path. The children's grave had a large tree next to it that our guide told us the soldiers beat the children to death on in front of their parents.
All in all, my visits to the Genocide Museum and the Killing Fields were frightening. It's hard to believe that humankind can possess the kind of evil in it that can justify the mass murder of people just for killing's sake. Previous genocides, like the Holocaust, make more sense (if that's possible) because they were based on hatred of classes of people. Cambodians were killed for almost no reason by their own peoples...their family members, their former friends, one-time colleagues. Generations and whole lines of families disappeared in several years of bloodshed. Seeing the places where this happened was the most sobering experience of my life. There are no Cambodians who didn't know someone who died. Our tour guide's mother and entire extended family had been killed.
Yet Cambodia was one of the friendliest countries I've visited. The people in Cambodia have had it so rough, with the genocide and then with years and years of political unrest. Somehow, they've managed to maintain a kindness as a population that I witnessed almost nowhere else; they seem so down on their luck and so eager to improve their country that I think it's impossible to visit Cambodia and not want to help them.
After all that was done, we went to the Russian Market, which was really just your average bazaar/market. It's called the Russian Market because in the eighties, Russians were the only tourists to Cambodia and the market became the hotspot for tourist shopping. Once the Soviet Union fell and the Russian economy collapsed, there were no more Russian tourists, but the name stuck. When we'd finished with our light shopping (I got more pirated DVDs, yippee), we went to lunch.
From lunch we visited the Royal Palace and the Silver Pagoda. I can't wait to post pictures of the Royal Palace because it was SO BEAUTIFUL. It's all made out of gold and looks like something out of a Dr. Seuss book. I believe they said that the king doesn't live there anymore, but he still holds diplomatic things there. The Silver Pagoda is on the property of the Royal Palace, and is also made of gold, so "Silver Pagoda" seems to be a bit of a misnomer at first. However, the floor of the Silver Pagoda is made out of sheets of silver. There's a gigantic emerald Buddha inside that is beautiful.
When we left the Palace, we went to the National Museum, which was in a similarly designed but red building. The museum holds pretty much only sculptures, and we breezed through it relatively quickly, but it was cool to see. From the museum we went to the airport for our flight to Siem Reap.
In Siem Reap, we went straight to our restaurant for dinner because we were running late. It was another buffet-style ordeal, but it was cool because we got to see a traditional Cambodian dance show with the meal. The Cambodian dancer women, who famously can stretch their fingers back really far, train their hands from the age of five. They were all so beautiful! We went to the hotel after dinner, which was another absolutely gorgeous place, and I went with some friends to the tourist bar area, where we frequented a bar called "Angkor What?".
The next morning, my roommate and I overslept through the optional sunrise tour of Angkor Wat, which I would've been disappointed about, but the people who went said it was really overcast and you couldn't actually see the sunrise. So I got up for a quick breakfast before we left at 8:15 for Ta Prohm. Ta Prohm is an ancient temple in the middle of the forest that is falling apart and one of the most stunning places I've ever been. Part of "Tomb Raider" was shot there. What makes it so cool is that the forest has grown around it and through it. Gigantic trees are growing on top of fallen stone walls. It's seriously so frigging cool. I wish we could've stayed there longer than the hour we were there.
After Ta Prohm came the big attraction in Siem Reap—Angkor Wat. Angkor Wat is the largest religious structure in the world (or at least that's what our guide told us) and was originally created as a Hindu temple, although it was changed to a Buddhist one later on. The main section of the temple is a huge building with very steep stairs that you can go up. The stairs were created so steeply so that people had to back down them and never turn their backs on the images of the Gods inside the temple. A lot of people went up into it, but one look at the stairs (seriously the steepest stairs I've ever seen in my life) had my stomach whirling and death fantasies spinning, so I opted to stay on the safer-looking ground. There were really complex symbols and stories carved in the stone all throughout the Angkor Wat, so I looked at those instead. In all, it was really cool and very beautiful but I honestly thought Ta Prohm was more interesting.
We had lunch at the hotel, and then went to Angkor Thom, which was the site of the ancient city that had been in the area. There was a large gate leading into the Angkor Thom, and when the city existed, people were searched before entering. If they were missing any fingers, ears, or toes, they weren't allowed into the city, because those were the signs of criminals; people had appendages cut off when they committed a crime. The gate was really cool and looked like something out of a Hayao Miyazaki movie; I feel positive that he must have visited Cambodia before animating "Spirited Away." Inside we visited several more temples, the coolest of which I believe was called Bayon—it was a large, winding temple that went up quite high and was ordained with somewhere over 200 faces of Buddha. So cool!
Then, to the airport once again for our flight back to Saigon. We were back to the ship a little before 8 pm, and I cleaned up quickly before leaving with some friends to go bowling. The bowling alley we went to was really neat—it was a combination bowling alley, Pizza Hut, arcade, sweet shop, bar...plus it was really clean and very new. Apparently bowling is cool in Vietnam.
On the last day, October 1st, I slept in until about 9 am and went out with my friend Kate. She and I hired a cyclo driver for the day and went to get our dresses, which were at different shops. We went to my shop first, where only one of the dresses was ready. It turned out really beautiful; it's a cap-sleeve v-neck dress in cream-colored silk with black silk around my waist and comes to a little above my knee. It fits like a glove. The other dress is a tacky purple color with thin straps and a drop-back, and it has a layered skirt that looks nothing like I wanted it to; the dress looks like a cheap high school dance dress and I think I'm going to wear it to a club in Croatia and never look at it again. We had to go back to my shop several times throughout the day to check on the production of the dress, which was irritating because I told them to have it ready by Monday. But that's Asia for you.
Then we went to Kate's dress shop, where they had neither of her dresses ready; they were apparently somewhere else and would be at the shop later in the day. So we went and had lunch, and then went to the Ban Pho market. Again, it was just another market. I've been to so many markets in the past two months that they have blurred together in my mind. They're all crammed full of stalls of people who shout at you in the language they think you might speak and hassle you to look at whatever shlock they're selling. We checked back at Kate's dress shop and they still weren't ready so we went and had massages; they were a bit pricier in Vietnam, a whole $12.
Finally, both of our dresses were ready and we met up with our friends Chris and Morgan for dinner. And then we said goodbye to Vietnam.
I wish that I had more time to spend in Vietnam, but I'm really glad that I was able to go to Cambodia because it's a country I've been interested in for a long time. Either way, they were both absolutely beautiful countries with so much to offer and I really hope that I get to go back to them someday.
Next...Thailand!
We arrived into Thailand on October 4th. I had plans to travel with Rachael (my roommate), Kate, Chris (from Japan, I'll call him Chris S), and yet another Chris (I'll call him Chris M to make things less confusing). We all had plane tickets to the island of Ko Samui for 2:30 in the afternoon. Well, Thailand ended up being the longest country to clear, and we didn't get off the ship until about 1:30 pm. On top of that, our ship was docked near Pattaya, not Bangkok, and the bus ride to Bangkok was about 2 and a half hours long. Needless to say, in the hours we spent on the ship freaking out about our flight situation, we ended up switching our flights to 7:30 pm.
Once our bus got into Bangkok, we took a cab to the new international airport. The new Bangkok airport is probably the nicest and biggest airport I've ever been in; it's absolutely gigantic. There were a ton of other SAS students heading to the same place as us, and we had 2 planes (the 7 pm and the 7:30 pm) almost completely booked with students. The 7 pm flight ended up being delayed and not leaving until almost 8, so they arrived at Ko Samui a few minutes after us. From the airport, we all were heading to the smaller island of Ko Phangan, which was a ferry ride away. However, the last ferry was at 6 pm, so we had to hire big speedboats to take us.
From the airport, we took vans to the dock and then got on the two speedboats. The ride to Ko Phangan was quick, less than half an hour. We got close to the island but the boats didn't have anywhere to dock so...they dropped us in the water, close to the shore, and we had to walk into the beach. It was absolutely hilarious and one of my flip-flops came off in the process, although I found it a few moments later.
Once we got to shore, we had to pile into taxis to our "resort," which was on the other side of the island. I use the term taxi loosely; taxis on Ko Phangan were basically pick-up trucks with benches in the bed. Finally, after a bus, a taxi, a plane, a van, a speedboat, and a taxi, we arrived at our "resort"—I'm putting "resort" in quotes because even though it was a really nice place, it wasn't a resort like the kind of places you would go to in the Carribean. It was called Milky Bay Resort, and we stayed in bungalows in the forest and around the beach. Beautiful! The bungalows were pretty nice, especially for the cheap $15/night we each spent to be there.
We put our bags down in our bungalow and cleaned up after our long day of traveling (it was close to 10 pm at this point), and then headed to the night's main attraction—a gigantic party in the forest. It was at this area that was cleared and used specifically for parties, and was equipped with crazy lights and DJ booths. Basically, it was a crazy European dance club, relocated to a forest. We danced the night away until about 5 am. There were Thai people there, plus all the SAS students, but tons and tons of foreigners—Australians, Europeans of all nationalities, and so many Israelis. In fact, we met a ton of Israelis all over Thailand. Almost all of them had just been discharged from the Israeli army, where enlistment is compulsory for people ages 18-20 and 2 years of service are required. However, after they've done their service, the state of Israeli sends the soldiers on a 6 month vacation to wherever they feel like.
The next day, we slept until about 10 am, got up and had lunch at Milky Bay, and then the 5 of us took a taxi back to the other side of the island, where the better beaches and the main restaurant/bar drag were. We spent the day laying on the beach, renting jet skis, and just enjoying the lovely weather. Ko Phangan was the best beach area I've ever been; mountains turned into beaches and then weather was fantastic. We went back to our hotel to shower and clean up, and talked for a while to one of the security men who worked there, an Australian who recommended a restaurant back on the main drag called Outback (not the steakhouse!). We had a fantastic dinner and then went back to the beach, which had turned into basically one big bar. There were fire dancers and dance contests and all sorts of wild things up and down the beach so we spent a couple hours walking and people watching, before going back to our hotel.
Kate and Chris S had an earlier flight from Ko Samui to Bangkok than Chris M, Rachael, and I, so they were up and out of the hotel by 6 am the next morning. We, however, stayed until about 10, and then took a taxi with a bunch of other SAS students to the ferry to Samui. From where the ferry docked, we took another short cab to the airport. The airport at Ko Samui was the coolest place—it was an outdoor airport with thatch-roofed open-air buildings, a testament to the perpetually nice weather on the islands. Our flight was at 1:30 pm but we were there so earlier that they bumped the three of us to the 12:15 flight.
We got to Bangkok around 1:45 and took a cab (real ones, this time) to the Davis Hotel. Chris M had several friends that were supposed to be staying there, and we figured we could either stay with them for a night or get our own room. After a lot of debate with the hotel staff about whether or not they had space for us, the three of us booked a room with a king bed. The Davis was a gorgeous boutique hotel, definitely too nice for us to be staying in, but I hadn't stayed in a nice hotel independently yet and the room was the equivalent, per person, to the guesthouse I stayed at in Japan. So we stayed there for two nights. The bed was so gigantic and comfortable, and the bathroom was all marble with both a large bathtub and a large shower and the whole experience was marvelous. I wish I had the kind of spare cash that I could travel like that in every country, but really all I ever need is a place to rest my head and hopefully shower. It was nice to feel pampered, though.
That night, we made friends with a waitress in hotel bar named Dao, and she decided to take us all out to a bar. She took us to the backpacking district in Bangkok, so we ran into a couple of other SASers. Here seems as good of a place as any to talk about Thailand's king. Thai people are OBSESSED with their king. He's on every bill, pictures of him are all over the place, there are huge signs at the airport that declare, "long live the King." It's the 60th year of his reign, and so Bangkok has billboard after billboard of pictures and sayings about the king. Anyway, on the cab ride to the bar, I asked Dao about it, and she rambled on and on for 5 minutes about how much she adored her king, what a great person he is, what a humanitarian he is, how he's done all these amazing things for Thai people. It was interesting to see because I've never seen a group of people that revered their ruler so thoroughly.
The next morning, October 7th, Kate and Chris S met up with us at our hotel at 9 am and we went to the Chao Phraya River for a boat ride. The river runs through Bangkok and is where the nicest hotels and apartment buildings are located. The boat ride was about 2 hours long and pretty uneventful, although we could see several monuments from the river, and we passed through residential areas, which were cool to see. When we got off the boat, we decided to head to the Grand Palace. However, when we got there, Rachael and I were the only people properly dressed (your knees had to be covered), so we broke off from the group and visited it by ourselves.
The Grand Palace is so beautiful! It's weird, though, it looks very similar in the architecture to the Royal Palace in Cambodia. Lots of gold, pointy buildings and fantastical creatures made of stone and precious metals. The main attraction in the Grand Palace is the Temple of the Emerald Buddha, which is the holiest place in Thailand. Buddhism is the Thai religion, and I couldn't tell you what makes the Emerald Buddha so holy, but there you have it. Once again, I felt like I was back in Cambodia, with the whole Emerald Buddha thing. In Thailand, when you're sitting in front of an image of Buddha, you have to have your feet crossed or tucked behind you, because the Thais consider feet to be the dirtiest part of the body and it's really really rude to point your feet at something holy. (On that note, YouTube was banned in Thailand for a while because there was a video of someone pointing their feet at an image of the king.)
Rachael and I felt good having gotten something cultural out of the way, so we rewarded ourselves by going shopping! We went to this store called Playground! which was considered a concept store. The first floor had a Starbucks, a restaurant, and a music and magazine area. I've seriously never seen so many magazines in my life, and I bought a few because it was the first time in over a month that I'd had access to American mags. The CD selection was also pretty fantastic.
The second floor of Playground! had a bookstore area (mostly of the coffee-table variety), a stationary area, all sorts of weird toys and knick-knacks, and clothes. It was all so cool and hip, but a lot of it was really expensive. The clothes were interesting but more like art than clothing I would want to wear on a daily basis. The top floor had two more restaurants and a home design center. All in all, it was a really interesting and enjoyable store; I wish we had something like it in Chicago, I know it'd do really well. Even without buying much, Rachael and I spent well over 2 hours there.
When we got back to the hotel, everyone had left to go to see Muy Thai fighting, which neither of us had any interest in. The plan had been to meet up after they all saw Muy Thai for dinner. The two of us decided to take a nap and ended up sleeping almost 4 hours (I'm telling you, it was a really comfortable bed...plus we're both fantastic at napping.) We woke up at about 9:45 and decided to go out on our own. We had intended to go to this bar called Vertigo, which was a rooftop bar/restaurant at a really nice hotel and apparently had the best views of Bangkok. We got sort of dressed up and went but we couldn't get in because we didn't have closed-toe shoes on. C'est la vie. So we went to a different bar, called Syn, at a different hotel. There weren't many people inside, and the lighting was low and colorful. There were lots of little lights in the carpeted floor that lit up and faded and looked like glittering stars, and the chairs we sat in were plastic half-globes that hung from the ceiling.
The next morning, our last day in Thailand, the Chrises decided to go try and see the Grand Palace, and Kate came with Rachael and I to go to a crocodile farm. We went because we heard there were elephants there and we really wanted to ride one before we left Thailand. It's supposedly the largest crocodile farm, but it really was just depressing. The animals looked mistreated and miserable, and the lone elephant was so sad. We just fed him bananas and moved on. The crocodiles were laying in these rivers of what looked like weirdly dyed water, and we found out later it was to dye their skins and make them into handbags. It was a depressing last thing to do in Thailand.
From there, we went back to the mall we had to meet the bus at and then got on the bus back to the ship. Thailand was a lot of fun, but I really felt like it was the most vacation-y country we went to. I probably could've done more interesting cultural stuff if I had wanted to, but after being thrown into 4 countries into the 3 weeks leading up to Thailand, all I really wanted was some relaxing time to clear my mind. And I did, and it was great. I don't regret the way I spent my time there at all, and I hope I'm fortunate enough to vacation there again some day, because it was a blast.
Alright, so now I've gone through India and Egypt and tomorrow I'm going to be in Turkey. I'd like to try to get the India blog done tonight and posted before I have yet another country to write about, but once again, I can't make any promises. India and Egypt were AMAZING, though, and I can't wait to write about them. I'm going to be staying in Istanbul, I think, and I'm staying on the ship to save money, so maybe I'll have a little extra time to write.
I love you all and miss you lots! I'll be home in a little over a month...yikes!
