Memorial Day

On a devastatingly beautiful Memorial Day in 1999, Joey’s wife and my friend, Becky Galentine, died after a long fight with breast cancer. Traditionally, Memorial Day is a day of remembrance for soldiers who’ve fallen in battle. Since 1999, we instead remember one strong-willed, charismatic, and loving “R” chick who lost a battle of her own.

Our lives, particularly the parts enjoyed together, are not what we would have imagined eight years ago. Marrying each other and then leaving on this incredible trip would have seemed an impossibility during those first years after Becky passed away. But here we are. This trip is one that Beck would have found so cool. In part, her death at too young an age prodded us into taking this journey. We learned that you only get one chance to fully live and that opportunity can be taken away at any time.

This lesson became even more evident during the past six months as we lost two more women way too young. Alyssa (Sonnier) Mayfield passed away just a few days after we first landed in New Zealand. Like Becky, Alyssa also lost a battle against breast cancer. As the younger sister of one of Joey’s best friends growing up in Kinder, it was almost like losing a sister. On the day we learned of her passing, we raised a glass to her in a far off pub in Auckland in a fashion she would have appreciated. On our Memorial Day, we once again remember this vivacious, almost sister of Joey’s and send our thoughts to her family and friends.

In March, Joey’s cousin’s daughter, Whitney, died from pregnancy complications a few weeks after giving birth to her son, Hayden, at the age of 16. It is difficult to describe how this tragedy affected everyone who knew her. Whitney’s mother, Deanna, has set up an online memorial which can be seen here: http://whitney-cappel.virtual-memorials.com. For the second time, we felt the agony of being far away, unable to give hugs, support, or, in this case, change a few diapers.

Throughout our travels, we have told each other stories about Becky, remembering the sad times but focusing on the happy ones. We wish the same healing story-telling for the families and friends of Alyssa and Whitney.

As with each of the past eight Memorial Days, our thoughts are with Becky’s parents, Dave and Liz, and her close friends. Life has continued on in strange and wonderful ways but we still remember our loss.

Scariest car ride EVER!!

The road between Poipet on the Thai border and Siem Reap is rumored to be one of the worst. We heard gossip that Bangkok Air, the only airline that flies between Bangkok and Siem Reap, has bribed the Cambodian government not to fix the road until after their contract runs out in 2009. We don't know if this is true but...

The guidebooks and the Tales of Asia website scared us off of making the journey by road from Bangkok to Siem Reap. The hassles are many and the risk of running into someone who wants a bribe is high. So we flew there. Having heard that the return trip is easier and not wanting to shell out a second time for an overly expensive air ticket, we risked our backsides and returned via the road.

It was hell.

Not an eternal hell, not even a burning hell thanks to the Camry's air-con, but it was a three and half hour foray into the pits. At the very least, the potholes were deep enough to see demons running across the hood.

The road is unpaved. At the height of the rainy season there is no guarantee that the road will remain passable. For us, it was just one dusty, bumpy ride with little attention paid by our driver to which side is the "correct" side of the road (to be fair, neither did oncoming traffic). For the first hour, we chit-chatted about Angkor, our future kids, our families, our house -- basically our usual transit day conversations. For the second hour, our conversation died down to occasional comments and shared "oh sh*t" looks. For the third hour, we both stared straight ahead, too exhausted from trying not to hit our heads on the ceiling, windows, knees to even share a look at the particularly terrifying moments (will the car make it up the other side of the pothole before that big truck tries to share our molecular space?!). Arriving in Poipet, an awful place, came as a relief. Teeth loosened, but intact, we crossed the border without difficulty and caught a minibus to Bangkok -- a much smoother ride.

We were both 16 once and have had our share of scary car rides with our partners in crime. This was worse than all of them together.

Thiefses

One of the things that stood out to us while visiting Angkor was the thievery. You can see in some of our photos that heads are missing from the statues and in some cases entire statues are missing. It is really heartbreaking to see a place which has been revered for so long being trashed by looters. We even read in our guide book that there are places where you can look at catalogues to determine which items you want stolen, and they will go and get it for you. Obviously, this requires quite a bit of cash - but it still happens. The looting has been cracked down on by both the Thai and Cambodian governments in recent years. As long as Cambodians are impoverished and people keep buying the stolen goods, the looting will likely continue.

In Cambodia, we hardly saw any Buddhas with their heads still attached. Looting, war, and religious upheavals have all led to desecration of the original images and figures.

You don't have to try very hard to get pictures of looted and stolen items, but we made an effort to take photos of particular scenes which have obviously missing items. In the photo below, the original statue was moved to a museum for safe keeping, which was a good idea because the replacements were beheaded multiple times. This one is still in one piece, but it probably won't be for long.

Angkor: Our Favorites

Or: Pictures we haven't found an excuse to post yet

Joey’s Top Pick: Neak Pean
Neak Pean is composed of a central pond with four smaller ponds in the cardinal directions. In Joey’s words, it was a functional ritual device – or, it was a cool toy. Water was poured from from the center pool down a channel held by a figure, which emptied through the mouth of a separate figure into the smaller pool. Each of the side pools had a different figurehead; the human and elephant are by far the best preserved. There was no water in the pool on the day we visited but it was easy to imagine the site in use almost a thousand years ago.

Erin’s Top Pick: Banteay Samre
Banteay Samre is a very compact temple that contains similar elements to its much larger cousin, Angkor Wat, but on a much smaller scale. It was not the most spectacular, best preserved, or most interesting but it was the most peaceful. Fewer people visit Banteay Samre and the coziness of the temple (one doesn’t need to touch the ground to go between the staircase down from the outer enclosure to the staircase up to the central shrine) invites people to sit and relax.

Ta Prohm
Many of the memorable pictures of Angkor come from Ta Prohm, a temple preserved in a state of arrested decomposition. Ecole Francaise d’Extreme-Orient decided to leave Ta Prohm in its “natural state.” Much of the undergrowth has been cleared and dangerous walls propped up but the temple has mainly been left as it was found. It is easily the most romantic of the temples that we visited.


Preah Khan
We sat out a rainstorm in the enormous Preah Khan complex. It was originally built as a Buddhist University by Jayavarman VII. Through every door and window, there seems to be yet another room, hallway, or open space to explore. But for the rain, we could easily have wandered through its rooms for hours. We particularly liked the "where the wild things are" carvings on the pillars leading to the entrance.

Angkor: The Lecture

I promised an Angkor lecture but find it difficult to follow through. In the drafts thus far, I either bore you with too many details or bore you with too many details. Here is a not so brief outline. If you have any specific questions (Dad), I will be happy to reply over email.

The Khmer empire was founded by Jayavarman II in 802 AD when he declared himself “world emperor” in his capital, about 30km from Angkor. Earlier Cambodian kings had built stone temples, Jayavarman II and his successors continued this trend, building some of the most magnificent temples seen in Asia. The Khmer Empire lasted until the fourteenth century, occupying Angkor and the surrounding area for over five hundred years except for a brief period when it was overran by the Thais. After the fall of the Khmer empire, the temples were not entirely forgotten. Some, like Angkor Wat, remained a place of worship for the local population through the centuries. Others were reclaimed by the jungle but were not entirely lost.

We visited only a portion of the Angkor temples but were able to see examples of the various types of architecture and building techniques that developed over the years. The early kings, Jayavarman II, Yasovarman I, Harshavarman, built simpler brick structures and the temple “mountains” that inspired later builders. We watched the sunset from Yasorvarman I’s Bakheng, which has a stunning view of Angkor Wat and the surrounding area.

Suryavarman II, 1113-1150, built the iconic Angkor Wat as his capital and State Temple. According to Freeman and Jacques, Angkor Wat typifies “the high classical style of Khmer architecture.” The central shrine, topped by a conical tower representing Mount Meru, is surrounded by four additional towers, representing mountain ranges. At the outermost edge, the moat represents the ocean at the end of the world. The three interior levels are enclosed by hallways and heavily ornamented. The bas reliefs are simply incredible.

Jayavarman VII, 1181-1220, was responsible for many of our favorite spots: Bayon, with its incredible face temples; Ta Prohm, the jungle temple; Neak Pean, the well-designed ponds. He was a Buddhist, in contrast to the earlier kings who were predominantly Hindu, and was responsible for much of the Buddhist iconography found in Angkor. His buildings, often a jumble of features, were the last high period of Angkor architecture. Later kings continued to build but without the innovation and expertise shown in earlier construction.

Throughout my studies of Sanskrit and Buddhism, I learned pieces about Hinduism. It was incredible to use those tidbits of knowledge to better understand the temple iconography. Finding a monkey from the Ramayana or a scene from the Mahabharata on a wall or lintel felt like discovering something for the first time. As I said, incredible. Three days were not enough.

Single-Serving Friends

While traveling, we have met lots of people – some we only meet for a moment, some we spend days with, and some we would like to see more of. One thing that many of us have in common is our tendency to blog about our travels. Below we list a few that we particularly like, please check them out when you have a moment.

In Siem Reap, we met a very cool couple from Denver, Paul and Monica. They are possibly two of the only people outside of Erin’s father who were willing to look at every single bas relief carving in the temples at Angkor. None of that “step out of the tuk-tuk, snap a picture from the first gate, and go on to the next temple” crap for them and they enjoyed a good BeerLao! Erin loved having someone to lecture to besides Joey about the religious iconography and Joey, as noted in the previous post, enjoyed having two extra playmates. Paul and Monica started their trip by working in Antarctica for a few months. Their blog is: http://antarctictales.blogspot.com

During our bus mishap in Laos, we met Sloan and Amy from Portland. They quit their jobs, sold their house, and our on a long mission to find reasons to wander. Their blog is: http://www.reasontowander.com

While on the elephant trip in Luang Prabang, we met a British couple, Charlie and Scott. They were at the tail end of their nine month trip. We shared many stories of home and a few delicious BeerLaos. They do not have a blog but you can see their pictures on Flickr: http://flickr.com/photos/scottandcharlie

Two people that we haven’t met but talk about as if they are long lost friends are Lee and Sachi from The World is Not Flat. While planning for our trip, Erin stumbled across their site. It provided equal doses of inspiration and education. Six months into our trip, we still find ourselves asking WWLSD, what would Lee and Sachi do?

Without a blog but worthy of a mention are Shelly and Claire, two Brits we met in a Chinese train station and proceeded to spend a “brilliant” twenty-odd hours with; Rich, from England but encountered in Singapore who introduced us to Bill Bryson, now known to us as “the Gospel according to Bill”; James and Gemma, more Brits who we shared a couple of buckets with and who gave us their India book; and Jessica and her parents, a lovely German family who we kept running into in Thailand and Laos. If you look carefully, some of these folks show up in our photos.

Angkor: boyhood dreams

I'm not sure where the idea came from or how it became a frequent fantasy of mine. But when I was a boy (ok - younger boy) playing "army" in the woods or hunting or whatever, I had this expectation that I would come across an abandoned ancient tomb or temple. Maybe it was Tarzan cartoons or some war movie I watched. Mabye it was a book I read. Maybe it is every boys' fantasy to find such a place.

Angkor Wat and the surrounding temples reveals just such an image. Angkor Wat proper is right in the middle of a moat, and has so many visitors that it didn't feel like it was in the jungle at all (except for the heat, humidity, mosquitoes, ants, etc). However, a couple of the places that we went to had trees growing right out of the temples and were surrounded by thick forest. In one temple (Ta Prohm), a tree's roots are growing right through some figures carved into a wall. If you know where to look, you can see the Buddha's face peering out from the roots. We were fortunate enough to be there towards the end of the day, and a bored tourist policeman walked us to some of the more magnificent views as well as past a few barriers and showed us some of the restricted areas.

Bayon was one of my favorites, despite the heavy tourist traffic. There are so many different areas, that you can get away on your own from time to time and really feel like you have the place to yourself. This really contributed to my feelings of being a boy again. If Erin hadn't been there, I think would have snuck around the corners to try and "shoot" Paul (a fellow we met at our guesthouse, who along with his girlfriend, Monica, are traveling from Denver - pictured below. more on them later).

Angkor: A Brief Taste

We spent the past three days touring the Angkor temples in Cambodia, the most famous of which is Angkor Wat. It was a magical, phenomenal, incredibly hot, awesome, intriguing, somewhat rainy, impressive three days. Our top ten list has had a rather mutable, amorphous existence. Angkor was on every iteration but it still exceeded our expectations.

After nine hours of travel today, I am not up for giving my "Angkor: the History, Architecture. and Religious Iconography" lecture tonight. Don't worry, I promise to regale -- or bore -- you with the details soon. For now, here are some of our favorite pictures from the first day.

South Gate of Angkor Thom, the city of Jayavarman VII, was our first sight of the glories of Angkor. That is me in the blue hat, trying to look at everything at once.

The intro picture in this post is of Bayon, located inside Angkor Thom. While Angkor Wat is iconic, Bayon, with its jumbled mass of face towers, is a more intriguing space. We spent a good hour wandering through the ballustrades and doors of the lower terrace, a small portion of which are pictured below.

It was a hot day but the tops of the temples caught the breeze nicely. We took a lovely rest break in the windows on the top terrace of Phimeanakas' Temple.

The Leper King's Terrace, also in Angkor Thom, is covered in elaborate carvings. Here a king is surrounded by the ladies of the court.

We arrived at Angkor Wat in the early evening, giving us an almost perfect view of the outer most gopuras of Angkor Wat across the causeway.

Muay Thai

Erica and I decided that we just had to go see Thai kickboxing. Technically it is called Muay Thai, but I'm not sure that everyone knows that name. Erin didn't really want to see guys beating the crap out of each other, so she stayed in and read a new book.

In any case, there are fights every Friday night in Krabi, so Erica and I bought some tickets and hopped on the local bus. I had heard of Muay Thai and it is on TV from time to time, but seeing it live was a real treat. There probably weren't 100 people in the entire arena, but it was a grand experience.

Each fight begins with a short ritual performed by each fighter in the ring. They start with a prayer and then walk around the ring in a steady dance-like pace. Meanwhile, they stretch their arms and legs, paying particular attention to hip stretches. You can see in the picture below that one guy is kneeling while the other is pacing. After seeing them kick and knee each other for a while, you understand why it is important to focus on the hip flexors before a match.

We saw 7 bouts and I was surprised at how little blood there was. Don't get me wrong - I wasn't there to see violence as much as I was there to experience a little culture. But after all I'd heard about how crazy the fights were, it was surprising to see how tame it turned out to be. When I say "tame" I mean that we saw one broken nose, several knockouts, and one dislocated shoulder. But still no blood. Weird.

My favorite part of the crowd watching was the betting section which was right in front of us. This area of the arena had no seats, since most of the guys in this area were pretty much on their feet the whole night. They would holler out bets and yell at the fighters during each match. I got the feeling that the gamblers would make a bet and then yell at the contestant to fight harder so that he wouldn't lose money. It was a riot.

Railay

After a few days on Phi Phi, we decided to go back to the mainland. Krabi is the main city on the coast from Phi Phi, but there are many beach options nearby. We chose to go to Railay Beach because it had a relatively inexpensive resort available - that's one of the bonuses of traveling in the "off season".

To get to Railay, we had to take a boat as there are no proper roads to get to this beach. In some ways, this is awesome because it means there are fewer people. In other ways, it was a little tricky since there were thunderstorms every afternoon. We got a little wet both going to and coming from Railay. Don't worry, we didn't suffer too much.

The Railay Beach Resort was incredible. On either side were cliffs rising out of the water and the beach itself was beautiful. We spent time in the water almost every day, and even the rain didn't keep us from exploring the next beach down the way (more on that in a bit). It was one of the more swanky options in the area, but we wanted to splurge a little bit since Erica was with us. By the way, this is our view from the breakfast table.

One afternoon, we decided to swim to the next beach down from where we were staying, Hat Ton Sai. It didn't look to far, and we knew that it was a popular place for rock climbing. We figured that we could watch some of the sporty folks, and get in a fun swim at the same time. Did I say "fun swim"?? In reality, it was easily half a mile to the next beach and we had to swim against the tide to get there. By the time we arrived, we were beat. And we had only done half of the trip. The return swim was a bit more than any of us were ready for, but the Carlson gals toughed it out and we made it back safely.

Here's the real adventure of the swim - on the return, it started to pour so hard that Noah would have been concerned. We weren't too worried about getting wet (heh), but the rain was pelting us and it kind of hurt. We joked about "Forrest Gump Rain" since it was coming down so hard that it was raining up just like he talks about in the movie. In fact, there were a few instances of Forrest Gump Rain while we were there. Next time, we're going to bring an umbrella.

Koh Phi Phi

Now that Erica is safely home, we have time to catch up on some blogging...

As noted previously, we visited Koh Phi Phi (including THE Beach island of Koh Phi Phi Ley) and it was spectacular. From Bangkok, we took a short flight to Krabi and from there we took a ferry to Koh Phi Phi Don.

Phi Phi is a typical beach town with lots of restaurants and bars. There were plently of fresh seafood offerings right on the beach, but nothing quite like what we had experienced on Koh Tao. We spent a few days wandering the streets and beaches generally relaxing and seeing the sights. The snorkeling tour (mentioned previously) made us quite hungry, so there were a couple of meals which were feasts. Fortunately, the food was fantastic.

One of the treats that we kept going back for was the banana-nutella pancakes. There was this one street vendor guy who made a great one, so we visited him more than once. If you've never had one, here's the deal: the chef takes a small amount of bread dough and flattens it to almost paper thin. Then he puts the dough onto a griddle and lets it start to fry. After that, he puts some banana slices onto the dough, and then folds the dough over into a little pocket. After the pocket of banana goodness has cooked through a bit, he adds some butter to make the dough crispy. Finally, he takes the pocket off the griddle and slathers it with Nutella. It is one amazing treat!

Pictures from Home

We are heading to Angkor Wat in Cambodia this afternoon. While we still haven't caught up on our Thailand posts, I wanted to show off our nieces.

As mentioned in the Mother's Day post, Joey's sister Marla had her third child in April. Libby had some problems early on but is now a healthy, happy, growing little girl.

Annsley, now the middle child (I know her mom and Erica will have lots of stories to tell her about the trials of being the middle child), had her spring dance recital recently. She told JoJo that she made one mistake.

Makenna just finished reading 100 books for a school program. She told her uncle that she is done with reading, now that she has gotten through 100.

We miss the girls very much and love getting pictures of them. We have even got to chat with them over video a couple of times. It is not the same as being there but still incredibly cool.

Erin's Thoughts about Laos

We may have been a little slow with blogging about Laos (blame Erica) but we truly loved it. Laos was not on our original itinerary but after our period of troubles, we were ready to escape from Thailand for a little while. Other travellers had raved about Laos, so off we went.

As I mentioned before, arriving in Laos felt like one deep, relaxing breath. Everything moved a little (or a lot) slower, the food was familiar and tasty, the people friendly, and no hawkers to be seen. It is a developing country with the attendant problems -- pockets of extreme poverty, deforestation, poor water quality, etc -- but is still a fairly easy place to visit. The bus breakdowns and electric outages just added to the experience.

The countryside is lovely, the wats are more to my taste than those in the Thai style, and the shopping is just excellent. Go to Laos. According to experienced travellers, it is changing fast. I don't necessarily think this is a bad thing but it is worth experiencing before it enters its next incarnation. I can't wait to go back.

(The first picture is from the walk up Phu Si to view the temple in Luang Prabang. The bottom two were taken from our balcony in Luang Prabang.)