It was raining one day, so I ended up having a drink at the Opera Bar with a great view of the Harbor Bridge while a waited for it to stop. Rain isn’t always such a hardship. I did buy an umbrella on the way home that night, which of course I haven’t used since. It’s a nice small one, so I’m keeping it.

Mom and Val got in early in the morning after a direct flight from San Francisco, and I went out to the airport to meet them. We went back to the guesthouse so they could check in and drop off their bags, and then I took them down to the CBD (Central Business District) to see some of the sights. The goal was to get out in the fresh air and walk around until it was somewhat close to local bedtime, to start getting adjusted to the time change. They made it until 8:00pm, so they did pretty good.

We spent a bit of time the next day doing some more planning, then went out to see the town again. The guesthouse was right on a bus line that went into the city, so it was quite easy to get back and forth. The downtown hotels would have been twice the cost. I’ve definitely been going through some sticker shock in Australia. The weak US dollar really shows here. The Australian dollar is currently worth about 96 cents, and a couple of years ago it was around 70 cents. If the value of the dollar was still at that level, things wouldn’t have seemed to expensive, but at the current value, prices were quite high.

There are two options for climbing the Sydney Harbor Bridge. You can do a climb with an outfit called Bridgeclimb that lets you climb up the actual arch of the bridge. People have to wear special suits when they do the climb, so they don’t drop things out of their pockets onto the cars driving below them. Or, you can climb up to the top of one of the pylons at the end of the bridge. The Bridgeclimb is $199, and the pylon climb is $9, so we opted for the pylon. The views were still spectacular, and we good a good look at people doing the Bridgeclimb.

We also did a sunset cruise on the Sydney harbor. The harbor is famous, but I didn’t really appreciate how big it is until I saw it. Ferries are still used to get around the harbor.

We took the ferry over to Manly Beach, one of the famous Sydney beaches, and watched all the activity. There were some young surfers out there, and lots of people just enjoy the sun. There weren’t very many swimmers, since it’s late fall in Sydney, and the weather was a bit cool for swimming.

I was coming down with a cold, so I took a day off on our last full day there, while Mom and Val went out for the day. They managed to have a good time without me :). I had arranged to meet Craig and Aphra, from the India tour, for dinner that night. It was great to catch up with them, and find out some of the local customs. For example, in most restaurants that don’t have a liquor license, you can bring your own beer or wine along to have with your meal.

The next day, we picked up our first rental car, and set off to see the Blue Mountains. We’d been flirting with the idea of going to Tasmania instead, when we found cheap airfares there, but when we went back to buy the tickets, the price had doubled, so we went back to the original plan. I’d arranged to pick up the car at a downtown rental place, so we could get to it easily and not have to pay the extra airport fees, and realized too late that it meant starting out driving on the left through busy city traffic. I’d driven on the left once before, so I was nominated to get us out of the city. We hoped that people understood that when the windshield wipers went on it meant I was about to turn. I was concentrating on what lane to be in, but the turn signal and windshield wipers were also reversed, and that I don’t tend to think about, and kept hitting the wrong one. We made it out of the city in one piece, anyhow.

I stayed in the Chinatown area of KL.  There were a few blocks that were pedestrian only, and full of market stalls.  I continued my trend of splurging on hotels, and got a pretty nice place in a good location.  The only problem was the market stalls set up on the street outside, which left only a very narrow lane about one person wide, with people trying to go in both directions.  There were all kinds of knock-off items like sunglasses, watches, and video games available.  I bought some sunglasses, which I immediately lost, and some games for the PS2 and Nintendo DS Lite.  I don’t know if the games work yet, but they were cheap enough to not be a big loss if they don’t.  There were plenty of restaurants, with the occasional street performer singing 70s lite rock music.

The big excitement for KL was turning on the news in the morning to see that the Olympic torch relay was going through the city that day.  Some things you just can’t plan for!  I took a hop-on hop-off bus tour of the city, and planned to get off at the relay starting point, but we got caught up in the traffic, and ended up watching the torch relay from the bus.  I could see the torch going by, but wasn’t able to catch it on camera.  It’s in there somewhere! The red flags are Chinese flags.

I continued on with the bus tour since the torch relay had gone by.  I took this photo of a group of Muslim women from the top level on the bus.  Malaysia is a Muslim country, though there are also many Hindus and Buddhists.  The Muslim women often wear these very colorful skirt and tunic outfits, with brightly colored head scarves.  I didn’t see any women wearing veils, and a lot of the younger women just wore jeans and tops with a head scarf.

The Petronus Towers are the most distinctive landmark in the city.  They were the tallest buildings in the world for a few years, but now they’re the second tallest, behind a building in Taiwan.  They’re still the tallest twin towers, though.  There’s a very nice shopping center in the lower levels, and the symphony orchestra is based there.  They’re beautiful buildings, especially when they’re lit up at night.

I also caught up with the Olympic torch relay again here, at about 4:00pm.  It was pouring down rain by this time, so people were standing under the overhangs waiting for the relay to arrive.  The torch runner was there for quite a while, for people to take photos.

The torch was proceed by a team of bicyclists that were apparently sponsored by Coke, then a couple of trucks with platforms of young people dancing to loud music and passing out flyers.  Then the torch arrived, and it was bedlam for a couple of minutes.  At least you can see the flame this time!

After the torch went by, I went to the bus stop to catch the bus back to my hotel, and much to my surprise met Claudia there.  I had met her in Thailand at Ko Tao, so it was a real surprise to run into her in KL.  It’s funny how travelers end up running into each other again.

I had an evening flight the next day, so went to the Petronus Towers in the morning to visit the Skybridge there that connects the two towers.  They have a very well organized system to manage the large number of visitors, with timed entries.  I got there at 8:00am, when the ticket line opened, and was at the end of a long line already.  I ended up with an 11:00am entry time, so went and had breakfast in the shopping center and did a little window shopping until it was time to go up.

The skybridge is at the 41st floor, and is less than half way up.  The view from there was spectacular, so I can only image what it must be like from the higher floors.

I didn’t really have enough time to do much after that, so went back to Chinatown for a bit more shopping, and picked up my bag for the trip to the airport.  I didn’t get around Malaysia that much, but it was very easy to travel in.  Most of the people spoke at least some English, and there were very few hassles.

The KL airport is very nice, but they have a very odd double security screening system there.  After you check in, you go through a security checkpoint and have your bag x-rayed, all the usual stuff.  There are shops and restaurants beyond this point, so I spent the last of my Malaysian money on some snacks and water to take on the plane.  Then I went to the gate, and was met with another security screening checkpoint, and they wouldn’t let me take my water into the waiting area, even though I had bought it in the airport.  I was pretty mad about that, though there wasn’t anything I could do about it.  There were no water fountains or restrooms in the waiting area either, so I was glad I hadn’t gone there too early.   Then it was on the plane and time to say goodbye to Asia as I left for Australia.

I managed to schedule my departure from Thailand for the day of Thai New Year, called Songkran. It’s held during the hottest part of the year, and the festivities include throwing water at everyone. There were people with 30 gallon trash cans full of water alongside the road, with bowls to throw water at passersby. Big water guns were popular, and some of the tourists had punched holes in the caps of their water bottles to make a sprinkler. It would have been fun if I hadn’t been on my way to catch an overnight train, but the prospect of having to sleep in wet clothes wasn’t too appealing. The taxi driver dropped me off right at the pier, and I thought I was going to make it without getting wet. Unfortunately, it was the pier for a different ferry than the one I was booked on, and I was pretty wet by the time I made it to the right pier. I stood on the deck of the ferry most of the way to the mainland, which was a two and a half hour trip, so I was pretty dry by the time I got to the train station. And the train was an hour late, which gave me more drying time.

The train got to the Thailand/Malaysia border at about 8:00am, and we all got off the train at the station to go through Malaysia immigration and customs. It was a pretty easy border crossing. Then it was back on the train for another few hours to the town of Butterworth to catch the ferry to Georgetown on the island of Penang. The train station, bus station, and ferry station were all together, so it was just a short walk to catch the ferry to Penang. The ferry trip cost about a dollar, and took 10 minutes or so. I had a hotel already booked, so I got a taxi right to the hotel.

I splurged a bit and spent $22 a night to get a place that had wireless internet access. It even had an elevator! I thought the sign in the lobby was funny. Durian is a very popular fruit in this area, but it’s notorious for being very smelly. I intended to try it, but it seemed like every time I saw a vendor with it, I was on my way somewhere and didn’t have time to stop.

I was a bit tired after the overnight train trip, so I just wandered around a bit in the area near the hotel, and found an ATM so I could get some Malaysian money. I was having shoe problems, so I didn’t want to walk too far. I’d left my sandals outside an Internet cafe on Ko Tao, and when I came out, one of the ankle straps was broken. I bought a cheap pair of flip-flops to use, but I’m prone to foot problems if I don’t have good arch support in my shoes, so the flip-flips don’t work for long walks. I had to put on the hiking shoes I’d only put on for airplane flights for about the last 3 months, and they were giving me a blister. I think my left foot has expanded after three months in sandals. It’s also possible I was a bit crabby from not sleeping well on the train the night before. I found an Indian restaurant and had a nice dinner, then went back to my room and played computer games.

In its heyday, Penang was a center for international trade. The British had an outpost here until after World War II. Malaysia is a very mixed country ethnically. There are large Chinese and Indian communities there, as well as the native Malaysians. I visited a house that had been built by a Chinese businessman who was known as the Rockefeller of the East. After his death it had been turned into apartments because the family had lost most of their money, and they weren’t able to sell it until his last son died. When it was sold, the new owners restored it and opened it up for tours, and to be a high-end guesthouse. The house was very beautiful, and had been used as the location for the movie Indochine with Catherine Deneuve. Many of the mosaics on the walls were very detailed, and were made from broken dishes. In this particular case, they had broken the dished to make the mosaics rather than using dishes that broke naturally.

The town wasn’t that big, but since it was so hot and humid I hired a cycle rickshaw to take me around town to visit some of the temples and sights. With the ethnic mix of people, there was also a mix of temples, and I visited Buddhist and Hindu temples. The Hindu temple was very similar to the temples in India, but the Buddhist temples were different from the ones in Thailand.

After a couple of days, I finally worked up the nerve to go to one of the Chinese restaurants. They were generally full of locals and most of them didn’t have English menus, and since I wasn’t familiar with the food, I was a bit leary about going in. Of course, once I went in to one, they pulled an English menu out from behind the counter, so it wasn’t a problem after all. Many people here speak at least some English. I order chicken with a strawberry sauce, which sounded interesting. It was like lemon chicken, only with strawberry instead of lemon. It was a bit too sweet for me, though. Just after I ordered, servers started coming around with dim sum carts. I got some egg rolls, but nothing else since I had the chicken coming. If I’d known it was a dim sum place, I would have just done that rather than ordering from the menu. I think they wanted me to order from the menu so I would know what I was getting. Dim sum is small servings of steamed dumplings and other dishes brought around on carts. You just select the dishes you want, and the servers mark what you’ve taken on a card on your table for you to take to the cashier when you’re ready to pay. Some of the dishes are a bit strange if you’re not familiar with dim sum.

I was going to take the bus up Penang Hill, but I couldn’t find the bus stop. My bus phobia had kicked in, so I didn’t really look that hard, though the city buses looked very clean and nice (and air-conditioned) when I saw them going by. The heat and humidity was also sapping my spirit of adventure. I checked out the shopping center, and found a nice used bookstore, and just bummed around a bit before catching the next overnight train to Kuala Lumpur. The Esplanade along the seafront was a very nice place to people watch and catch a cool breeze.

I had my own little bungalow, with a bathroom but no airconditioning or hot water. The weather was warm enough that cool showers felt good.

Not too fancy, but comfortable.

The view was amazing.

My days consisted of reading, eating, snorkeling, and drinking beer. It was a very relaxing stay.

I booked a tour through my guesthouse that went to all the main sights around Phnom Penh for the next day. The morning was spent visiting the Choeng Ek killing fields and the S-21 prison. I remember when the movie The Killing Fields came out in the 1980s. It was the first I’d heard of the Khmer Rouge and what they had done to Cambodia. It’s still hard to grasp.

The Khmer Rouge took power in 1975 after years of civil war. They were going to turn Cambodia into a peasant society. The cities were evacuated, and the people sent to the countryside to grow rice. Anyone who was educated was at risk of being executed. The ruling regime was very paranoid, and imprisoned and executed thousands of people. It’s estimated that up to 2 million people, almost a fourth of the population at that time, were killed before the Khmer Rouge was toppled by a Vietnamese invasion in 1979.

This was only one of many fields that were used for mass burial of executed prisoners. I kept thinking of the Holocaust memorials that I have visited, and the slogan “Never again” that is so often used when referring to that genocide. But it keeps happening again and again in other parts of the world. It’s taken a while to be able to write about visiting these sites.

The S-21 prison is a former school that was turned into a prison. Almost everyone who was held here was executed, except for a few who were still alive when the Vietnamese army entered the city. Some were tortured for months first, some were killed almost immediately. It has been kept pretty much as it was when it was in use.

There was a spot under a stairwell where people had left messages with their feelings about what they had seen there. It was graffiti that did not feel like vandalism, but that people felt so strongly that they had to share those feelings.

The afternoon was less traumatic. We visited the Russian Market, which is a very large covered marketplace. Since my bag is getting full, and shipping is expensive, I didn’t buy anything but took the opportunity to find a nice air-conditioned restaurant for lunch.

Then we visited the Grand Palace, which contains several beautiful building, including a shrine with a silver floor.

There were a lot of restaurants and bars along the riverside, so I went there in the evening for dinner. One type of restaurant that I’ve seen quite a bit of around this part of the world is the “happy herbal pizza” place. And the herb referred to is not oregano.

I really liked Cambodia. The people there were some of the most friendly, outgoing people I’ve met while traveling. I had some fun conversations with teenagers that wanted to practice their English. Speaking English and Japanese or Chinese is the key to getting a good job in the tourism industry, and that’s where a lot of the well-paying jobs are now. I want to see more of the country, but between the heat and travel fatigue, I hit the wall in Phnom Penh, and took a flight back to Bangkok so I could head to the beach in southern Thailand.

I’d arranged to have the tuk-tuk driver who’d taken me to my guesthouse come back the next day to drive me around the temples. He spoke good English, and was very nice. Most of the other people I talked to were also enthusiatic about their drivers. I think the Cambodian people in general are very friendly and outgoing, though there’s a fair amount of corruption to deal with.

I didn’t have an agenda for the temples, so I let my driver plan it out for me. He spends all his time driving tourists around Angkor Wat, so he knew what would make a good route. Passes for Angkor Wat are available for one day at $20, three days at $40, and 7 days at $60, so it’s not a cheap place to visit. I opted for the three day pass. When you buy your pass, they take your photo and print out a pass with the dates and your photo on it. Each time you enter a temple, a guard checks your pass, and there’s a $30 fine for trying to enter without a valid pass. Those figures are the actual prices, because although Cambodia’s official currency is the riel, the US dollar is what is actually used. The riel usually gets used as change, so if you buy something for $4.50 and give the clerk a five dollar bill, you’ll get 2000 riel back in change.

The Angkor Wat complex was built between the 8th and 13th centuries, and were rediscovered by Europeans during the 1800s.   Many of the temples have been reconstructed, but a couple have been left in a sort of managed state of being overtaken by the jungle.  One of these is the temple of Ta Phrom, which was used as a movie location for Tomb Raider with Angelina Jolie.

This spot was the only one that had a fence, so I’m guessing it’s a movie location, though I don’t remember the movie well enough to say for sure.  They may just have wanted to keep people away from a dangerous area, though they usually just put up signs.  There were plenty of places that had wooden supports holding up walls and ceilings.

On the third day, we went to two of the more remote temples.  Banteay Srei is a small temple about an hour away from the main group, but it’s one of the most elaborately carved ones there.  It was also the most crowded one I visited.  We ran into rain on the way out in the morning, for only about the fourth time on my trip, so I didn’t have any rain gear.  My driver, Letgo, gave me his rain poncho, and then stopped to get a couple more when we went past some shops.  It quit raining by the time we got to the temple.

Then I wanted to see the Roulos group of temples, which is another remote group that are much less visited.  Letgo asked if I wanted to take a shortcut that would be over a bit of unpaved road, and I said sure.  The carriage behind the motorbike was  actually pretty well sprung.   Only the main roads in Cambodia are paved, the rest of them are dirt, not even gravel, so they’re very rough.

The main temple there was very interesting, but I was templed out after three days.

This little group of local kids was climbing around the  temple while I was up there.  Quite a spectacular place to have in your back yard as a playground!

It was getting well into the hot and dry season while I was there, so I was getting started by 7:00 or 7:30 in the morning, and going back to my air-conditioned guesthouse by 2:00 or so.   I spent a fair amount of time sitting in the shade contemplating the temples while I was out there as well.  There were a lot of locals with shops selling souvenirs and cold drinks.  At the less busy places, there would often be 2 or 3 women sprinting towards you when you arrived offering drinks or food.  Whoever you acknowledged first had dibs on your business while you were at that temple.   They weren’t allowed inside the temples themselves, so you just had to get through the vendors on the way in.  Having cold water for sale everywhere was a life saver, though, so they got a lot of business from me.

They had good restrooms there, too.  Many of the tourists are other Asians, from China, Japan and Korea, so they’ve got a sign warning them not to squat on the Western style toilets.  The feet spraying sign is because Asian bathroom all have a sprayer next to the toilet for cleaning your bottom.  Between the way I was sweating and the dust I was walking through, my feet could have used a good spraying down!

I went down to Pub Street most evenings for dinner.  There were cheap foot massages available in town too, which felt wonderful after a day of tromping around over rough ground.  I’m going to miss cheap massages and facials when I get home!  There are more pictures in the Cambodia gallery, so take a look there if you’re interested.

I spent a couple of days in Bangkok, mostly shopping and not buying much. I’d been there during the week before, and missed the huge weekend market, so I made a trip out there on Sunday. I’m still not big on city buses in strange cities, so I got a taxi to Siam Square and took the Skytrain from there. The Chattuchak market is near the end of the line, so it was easy to get to. I spent a couple hours walking around there, until it got too hot. They sell just about anything you can think of there, from furniture to t-shirts to pets.

Then I took the Skytrain back to Siam Square, which is the main shopping district in Bangkok.

You can see the railway line and the elevated walkways connecting the shopping centers in the area. In the center of the picture is a shrine that’s in front of the MBK shopping center. It seems like most businesses have a shrine near the entrance for good luck.

It was actually pretty entertaining wandering through the shopping centers. The fountain is in front of the Siam Paragon shopping center, which bills itself as the pride of Bangkok and contains stores like Cartier and Valentino. I think the Starbucks was the only shop I could have afforded to buy anything at.

The Siam Discover Center is where all the teens hang out. They even have a DJ, whose booth is in the picture above. They also had very cute signs for the restrooms. Check out the knees:

My next destination was Kanchanaburi, to see the bridge on the River Kwai, famous from the book and movie of that name. I must confess to having a bit of a bus phobia, which isn’t a good thing for a traveller. I’m always afraid I’m not going to be able to communicate with the ticket seller or get on the wrong bus, and end up in the middle of nowhere with no way to get back, which is kind of silly, because if buses go there, they also go back. But I still don’t like buses. However, it’s much quicker to get to Kanchanaburi by bus than by train, so I bit the bullet and went to the bus station. The Bangkok bus station was really nice, with lots of shops and places to eat. Each bus route had it’s own ticket booth, and the platform the bus left from was printed on the ticket. Kanchanaburi was the last stop so I didn’t have to worry about missing it. It all turned out to be pretty trauma-free.

The bridge on the River Kwai is part of the railway built by the Japanese during WW II to carry supplies from Thailand to Burma, using prisoners of war for labor. It’s known as the “Death Railway” because of the number of people who died during its construction. The British had surveyed the route earlier, and decided that it would be too difficult to build. The Japanese built the railway in 18 months, but at the cost of the lives of 16,000 POWs and 9000 Asian laborers.

The bridge is still in use, with about three trains a day crossing it, but it no longer goes all the way to Burma. It’s possible to walk across the bridge, but there isn’t a pedestrian walkway, so you have to walk between the tracks. There’s plenty of room to fall on the outside edge of the tracks, and since I’m not very good with heights I didn’t walk very far out onto the bridge.

I got a picture of the motorcycle taxi stand near the bridge. Motorcycle taxis are just that - hop on the back of the motorcycle and hang on to the driver as he whips through traffic. I’m not that brave, but they’re very common in SE Asia.

In the afternoon, I booked a tour out to the Tiger Temple. It’s a Buddhist temple that became an animal sanctuary in 1999, apparently when the monks were given a tiger cub rescued from poachers. One of the volunteers told me that there are now 23 tigers, most of them born there. They’re in the process of building a large natural area for the tigers, but for now they spend most of their time in cages. They’re brought out in the afternoons for tourist visits. That’s nap time for tigers, and most of them were asleep. They’re on chains, and you are taken around to several tigers to have your picture taken.

They also had a couple of 3 month old tiger cubs that I got a chance to pet.

When it was time for the big cats to be brought back from the visiting area, they brought the cubs over to an enclosed area for us to see, to keep us out of the way while the adult tigers were walked from the visitor area back to their cages.

After that long day out in the sun, I was glad that I’d sprung for a guesthouse with a swimming pool. It was a particularly nice one, too, with flowers planted all around. Not bad for $20 a night!

And then I finished up my day watching Dirty Dancing 2 dubbed into Thai with English subtitles while mending my underwear.  The romance of travel!  Usually there’s CNN and an English movie channel on TV, but for some reason the only English language stations here were the Golf channel and Bloomberg, which is all stock market reports.

I hadn’t made an advance reservation, but I’d looked up a few places, and asked a tuk-tuk driver to take me to my first choice. He asked if I had a booking, and when I said no, he said they would be full. I had him take me there anyhow, and of course he was right and they were full. The drivers in Laos are much more likely to be honest than in other areas where I’ve been traveling. The place next door was full too, so I asked him if he knew a good place nearby. He took off, and we went around several corners and down a few blocks, then up an alley. I was wondering what kind of joint I was going to end up at, but the guesthouse was quite nice, so I took it for one night, figuring I’d find a place a bit closer the next day. Then I went out to look around, and after the manager showed me the pedestrian walkway next to the guesthouse, I discovered that I was only a block and half from my original choice. It was the one way streets that made the trip by tuk-tuk so long. They actually had a comfortable bed (hard beds appear to be the norm in Asia), so I stayed there for the three days I was in Vientiane.

I ran into a couple of people I’d met on the boat from Thailand to Luang Prabang, and one of the women from the cooking class. It’s funny how you meet people in different places, but the tourist areas can actually be relatively small. I joined up with Sally for a trip out to the Wat Pha That Luang, which is on the Lao currency.

The place to be in Vientiane is along the Mekong River for sunset. There’s quite a collection of bars and restaurants there, as well as hot air balloon rides, and a lot of locals riding up on their scooters.

There’s a tradition of removing your shoes before entering temples or people’s homes in much of Asia, but in Laos you must also remove your shoes before entering guesthouses and many places of business. Many shops have a shoe rack in front of them. Internet cafes usually have a heap of sandals piled up out front. Most local people wear flip-flops that are easy to kick off as they come to the door. I have a pair, but my feet would be in agony if I walked more than a few blocks in them, so I’m wearing sturdy Chaco sandals. They’re great, but they strap on firmly, and it gets annoying taking them off so frequently.

The bus was completely full by the time they picked everyone up, and they decided to split us into two other minibuses that weren’t quite so full. Unfortunately, I ended upwith a group of six young Israelis traveling together, and no other passengers. They spoke English and were perfectly polite, but I felt like the odd person out.

Vang Vien is rather notorious for being an example of what Laos doesn’t want tourist development to end up like. It’s a small town, and the reason for visiting there is to see the incredible scenery, and to visit the caves and go tubing on the river. It’s also become kind of a party town, full of bars.

I stayed in my cheapest hotel room to date, at $4 a night. The places I checked when I first arrived were all full, so I ended up at a rather shabby guesthouse on the main street. I was going to move to something a bit nicer the next day, but it was clean and pretty quiet, so I didn’t move since I was only planning to stay a couple nights. Unfortunately, I got hit with a bit of diarrhea the next day. Not too bad, but I ended up relaxing at a bar next to the river instead of going tubing.

I’d met a Belgian couple before they split up the minibuses in Luang Prabang, and met up with them again for sunset at the Smile Bar by the river both evenings I was there.

I booked a seat on the VIP bus to Vientiane, the capital city of Laos, rather than a minibus, since it was a bit cheaper and a shorter trip. I thought the VIP bus was a large coach bus, but this one ended up being a small 28 passenger bus with seats that folded down into the aisle, so it was pretty crowded. We were all complaining until we made a rest stop and the large passenger bus stopped just before we left. They had over booked that bus, and had people sitting in the aisle on backless plastic stools.