Temples and More Temples

Chon charmed us into using his taxi services today, but for $25.00 for a day, it is a deal. The temples would be difficult to get to without a car or Tuk-tuk. Tuk-tuks are motorcycles with a carriage to seat four attached. There are hundreds of them around and each driver will beg to give you a ride. They are very inexpensive and show the devastation of the economy here. They are desperate for work, so we felt compelled to use Chon for our day’s travels to the temples to give something to the local community.

Chon is supposedly a trained tour guide, but has not taken the license exam yet. It is only offered every 2-3 years, depending on need and presumably costs $3,000, which he has not been able to afford. One portion of the exam is a language exam and I suspect his English is not up to par for that particular exam. Although we could communicate, it was difficult at times. When he was giving us information about the various temples, he was at a loss for words to fully explain what he wanted to say.

First order of business was finding a place to eat breakfast. Chon drove us to a restaurant on the temple grounds, where we could get the much needed coffee and some eggs. Coffee in most places is Nescafé, not brewed coffee. There is no Starbucks around. Chon looked a bit irritated that we needed to make this unscheduled stop, but once we were on our way, he returned to his happy self.

As you enter the temple grounds, you have to pass a check point where you show you entry pass. At each temple, there is again a control checking passes to make sure no one passed through the first check point. Fines for not having a pass while on a temple grounds is $350.00. We drove through lovely forested areas before coming to a wide and lovely lake. Chon explained this was the moat for Angkor Wat, but first a primer.

The Angkor area is the heart and spiritually center of the kingdom of Cambodia. Yes, they still have a king. Angkor was where temples were built from the 9^th to the 13^th centuries when the god-kings built temples to honor themselves or their parents. Angkor Wat is the largest and also has the distinction of being the world’s largest religious building. It was built by Suryavarman II in 1112. The temples switched from Hindu to Buddhist, back to Hindu and then Buddhist again depending on which religion held dominance at the time. Now it seems, most of them are rededicated to Buddha.

Now I have to admit that as magnificently superb as these temples are or were depending on their current state, I have never been one to pursue Asia studies with any great interest. I am more interested in the modern people then their ancient culture. After being to Thailand where the temples are bright and colorful with gold dripping down every precipice, these are colorless grey or blackened stones. What one needs to appreciate and I do are the intricate carvings on these stones. Gods, goddesses, demons, dancing girls, servants, and pictures of daily living are all memorialized in the stones. Depending on the religion of the time, determined which gods and demons were displayed. Just as the pyramids in Egypt, it boggles the mind how they constructed these temples without modern equipment. Then the intricacy of the carvings that go on for the length of a city block with such exactitude is awe-inspiring. To this day, no building can be built in Siem Reap that is taller than Angkor Wat, much to the dismay of the chain hotels. This was the same in Philadelphia at one time, when no building could be taller than William Penn’s hat on city hall, but when that law was changed, it ruined the skyline.

Chon took us to three of the major temples, each different and significant in their own way. By 2:30 we had had enough and returned to the hotel. He wanted to pick us up for a dinner buffet with Cambodian dancing, but we declined.

Fortunately, we were wearing our Crocs; the temple grounds are sandy and our shoes and feet were covered in red sand. Crocs go right in the shower with us to clean off. The air conditioning in the room kept us in for a few hours before heading out again. We went back to the Austrian restaurant for a beer and to use their WiFi, but it was not keeping a signal. After they rebooted their router twice, we gave up and left.

Dinner was at the Red Piano, a charming two level restaurant painted in a tomato red with dark wood beams and oversized pictures of the Wats on the walls. When we left, we were barraged by tuk-tuk drivers and finally accepted one’s offer to drive us the three blocks back to the hotel for $1.00. When we arrived, our driver Somat, wanted to be our driver for the next day, but we had arranged to meet Chon again, so we told Somat we would hire him for the day after.

Pin It Now!

Christmas Day

I have been reading the book We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver. In spite of the author’s name, it is a woman. The book won the Orange Award for Literature in 2005. We picked up the book in South Africa last year, but I never got around to reading it. Ron had and strongly urged me to read it soon. Well I finished last night before going trying to find the Sandman. However, my mind was in a tidal wave of thoughts about ATM cards, credit cards, worrying about cash if the hotel could not get our card to work, running out of money before our trip is over, which is really quite ironic. For the first time ever, we have enough cash in our accounts to cover this trip in its entirety without having to use credit cards at all. However, with Bank of America putting a stop on my ATM card and our Hungarian bank’s ATM not working, we are having to struggle with the cash on hand. Ron’s card has worked once. As a last resort, we will try his again, but the sadist/masochist duality in me does not want to draw money from that account. After all, we have over 3,000 Euros sitting in a bank in Hungary waiting to be drawn on for this trip, so I really don’t see the reason we should pay Bank of America $5.00 for every withdrawal PLUS their currency conversion fee on top of it. With these boil, boil, toil, and trouble thoughts, sleep was elusive. When it finally arrived, my slumbering nightmares were about school shootings and watching someone prepare for the next one. This is Kevin’s fault or rather Ms. Shriver’s. She is solely responsible for these transmissions into my subconscious, because for certain if they were mine, I would be lining up bankers, not innocent school children.

Knowing that Santa did not find us, there was no real motivation to crawl out of bed when the alarm went off other than knowing Ron rested well and had his heart set on more explorations. He was sweet enough to go the Italy for coffee and pastries while I showered and dragged myself together.

As soon as we reached the lobby, we told the desk we wanted to pay our bill. If we had to arrange for money, we wanted to know if they were going to have issues with our card also. It went through like a charm, averting one cardiac arrest. When I explained to the desk clerk our problem with the restaurant last night, she explained they had a chip reader also, but were trained in the other method also for instances like this. She claims there is no reason why the restaurant should not have been able to run our card. We are having to leave here at 3:30 am to take a taxi to the airport in KL for an Air Asia flight at 7:00 am. If I did not have enough material to produce a trilogy of full length nightmare movies, here is an added bonus. Air Asia has a luggage weight limit of 15 kg. When we left Vienna, my carry on, which did have the bulk of our clothes and six books was weighing in at 42 kg. We have dumped things, have not purchased a thing that has not been consumable, and hopefully they will know how to run a credit card machine to charge us for the excess baggage. There is nothing left to leave behind.

Being conscientious, we went straight to a money changer and converted more Euros and then on to Libra, the restaurant we owed the money to clearing ourselves of debt. It was 11:30 am, but they were not open for the lunch trade. Ringing the bell and pounding on the door did not produce any results either. We knew there was a historic mosque in the area, so we hunted it down and found it on Harmony Road. This road is so aptly named because there is a mosque, a Buddhist temple and a Hindu shrine with two blocks. When we were in Thailand, the Buddhist temples really spoke to my soul, but there is something about a Hindu temple that speaks to my imagination. This one in particular was dedicated to Ganesh, the elephant headed god. When I started to take a picture of a small Ganesh statue, a monk ran up to me waving his hands. I said “No pictures”, but without responding he placed a lei of flowers around Ganesh’s adequate neck and then signaled that now he was ready for his close-up.

Ron being the ever optimist, we went back to try out the other hop-on hop-off bus to see if we could get to the Portuguese neighborhood, though I reminded him that most likely they were all Catholic and nothing would be open. We entered the bus for two Ringgits for an all day ticket. We did the full circuit taking close to two hours of our time, touring neighborhoods reminding me of the time I lost my way in NYC and ended up in Harlem, back in the early 70s. We never did get close to the area of the city Ron wanted to see, so we let it go and returned to our starting point.

Again, we tried Libra to pay our outstanding bill, but still at 3:30 the place was closed tight. The neighboring business was open and when I questioned him, he said they would open at 5:30. He then asked if he could help and when I told him why we were insistent on finding someone, he called the manager for us. We arranged to leave the money with the neighbor. Cynically, I will now have to monitor Ron’s charge card to make sure that charge did not actually go through. We stopped at the Geographer’s Café for a beer where Christmas carols were BLASTING. I really cannot take it seriously hearing “I Am Dreaming of a White Christmas” when Ron and I are the whitest things around. “The Twelve Days of Christmas” and “Jingle Bells” are unnerving also in this environment. Perhaps they don’t play “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” because of moral issues; hmmm…I wonder.

Pin It Now!

Someday We Will See the Sights

We have to be out of our room by noon, breakfast options are few and far between. We were warned that many things would be closed today since it was a public holiday. This is the day when the Muslims slaughter the sacrificial animals: cows, pigs, chickens, and sheep. Thankfully, it is a family event and not a public one, but all government offices, banks, and many shops are closed. This did not stop the street vendors in our China town area from breaking open for business this morning. Even women who were obviously Muslim by their dress were out shopping around for bargains. As a last resort, we went to the great market in search of coffee. It is difficult to find here in restaurants. The only place there serving java is the White Coffee Company. As it turned out, this is more of a coffee enhanced creamy white drink served hot, rather than real honest to goodness down to earth Arabica bean coffee.

We took a long walk to the old colonial train station. The design was interesting, but it is used for a limited number of passenger trains now. By the time we returned, it was time to get our gear and get out of our hotel, but we had two hours to kill before we could check into the new place. Starbucks offers free WiFi Internet access in all of their stores and without a time limit. We hunkered down there and downloaded e-mail, mostly spam with 732 messages caught in the spam filter. One message I wish were spam was a notice from Bank of America. They cut off my ATM card due to suspicious activity; country unknown; if this is an error, please call this 800 number immediately. Well if anyone there had a modicum of critical thinking when they developed that message, it would have occurred to them that if the country were “unspecified” their 800 number was not going to work to call them. It went on to say that $299.49 was withdrawn from the account. Remember the airport fiasco? All I received were messages saying the PIN was invalid or the system could not complete the transaction at this time. So I sent off a secure e-mail through online banking to tell them where I was and what happened. I am positive I will receive a form e-mail telling me they cannot handle this through e-mail as secure as it is and I will need to call their toll-free number. I am planning on being out the $299.49 and never seeing it again. Bank of America is the 2^nd largest RIP OFF bank there is. Even the locals have not figured out how to use the phone cards here for make calls from pay phones, my chances are nil. Add that to the fact that the time difference is a major one and I know from experience though they say they have a 24 hour service, it is really only 9-5 PST. I went that route the last time from Hungary. It took seven phone calls and a dozen e-mails. I am just hoping that they have not cut off Ron’s card. If they did, we could very well be in trouble at some point in the vacation. I cannot remember if I have PIN numbers for my credit cards or not.

We checked into the new hotel. Ron went to check out the room, said it was okay and I paid for three nights. I am hoping that the stains on the sheets and pillow cases are only ones that years of washing were not able to remove. I intend to sleep in my clothes and with a towel over the pillow.

We took in Little India today. Definitely not as lively as China Town, but we did get a good meal at an authentic little place. Our seatmate across from us told us that this was a special menu today since “they” are celebrating a holiday. We were not sure if “they” were the Muslims or the Hindus and did not ask. While we were eating the skies opened and a torrential rain started. It was coming down so hard; the restaurant had to close the doors that normally would have made it open to the street. We were fortunate to have found seats inside or we would have been soaked within seconds.

By 8:30, Ron could not last any longer and wanted to return to the hotel. I pleaded otherwise and lost the battle. When I opened the wardrobe, I found a creature and shut it with rapid fire dexterity. I would rather have slept in the coffin room than one with visitors. Tomorrow may just include another move. I am sleeping with my clothes on, the sheets are not the cleanest and Ron has to have the a/c on all night. I am freezing. It sounds like the Malaysian Speedway outside and some Indian singer is crooning next door until the wee hours.

Pin It Now!