Gongs and Throngs and Visits to Farangs (westerners)

(by Neil)

Too many meals eaten and too many kilometers covered and too many hours have ticked by to give a thorough accounting. The thought of trying to “catch up” my writing with my experiences is always daunting. So I’ll be scattershot and hopefully compress the adventure into a trailer- length version.

Ubon Thailand was un-touristed by westerners and lent itself to internet access, watching movies, indulging in Swenson’s ice cream and having a pizza party with friends. We rented bicycles for the week we were there and road about to and from the language school where our friend works. On the weekend we took an excursion out to a village where they manufacture gongs. In my mind I pictured these as being cast, but most of them were welded from sheets of steel and then hammered into their characteristic shapes. The gongs ranged from 10” to more than 10” across and were fun to beat on. I enjoyed watching the workers hammering them (alas without earplugs) into shape.

We headed out to the confluence of the Mekong and the Mun river which is billed as “the two-color river” as the Mekong tends toward reddish brown and the Mun towards greenish-blue. Where they meet one is supposed to be able to see this mixing, (best in April I read)… I didn’t see it, but it is an impressive amount of water.. Our destinations for the day were two waterfalls. One was particularly distinct for the way the water has eroded a hole that the falls pour through. I stood underneath the flow and took my shower for the week. The water was the perfect temperature for refreshment without shocking the senses. After an hour or so of playing about there, we went to another waterfall that was broad and terrace-like with big jumbles of stones at the bottom. We scrambled over these and posed for pictures before heading back into the city.

The next day we ventured out for a quick excursion to a village that did bronze casting based on the lost-wax method. The people at the workshop were great at pantomiming the different steps that they followed to craft and cast the bronze. I bought a small cowbell as a souvenir or small gift for a teacher friend .

We crossed the border into Cambodia overland at O’smach and did Angkor temples for two days. Because of dear friends in this part of the world we succumbed for a few weeks of lugging suitcases from one port to the next. Despite weariness that on-the-move travel brings, the rewards can also be great and Angkor lived up to its billing as a magical destination. The weather was perfect for us on day- one as we did a 43 km bicycle trip about the temples. We were well steered by our guesthouse manager along a path that suited us – avoiding crowds and seeing a variety of sites: jungle temples and shrines, two troops of playing monkeys (including one juvenile who decided to climb up my leg that I had to shoo off), the wall of Angkor Thom from the south gate to the west gate seeing only a few crews of workers as we biked along shaded by the jungle on one side with a view of the moat on the other, the enigma that is Bayon with its huge carved meditative faces on all the towers. We splurged that evening and took a $1 taxi down to the old market and ate a $20 meal at a yummy Khmer vegetarian restaurant – we know how to be decadent! That night the heavens opened up and the rain came down. The ground floor of the guest house flooded as did half the town.

We had saved Angkor Wat for our second day when we planned to hire a guide – which we still did but a bit soggily. Angkor Wat is resplendent even without blue skies and sunsets. We eventually had “bas-relief fatigue” and went out 15 miles to Bantey Srei – sometimes called the women’s temple. It is a miniature temple compared with many, but exquisite in the detail and intricacy of carvings. I took my favorite picture of the day here of a man with his yellow umbrella framed in the red laterite and sandstone doorway.

Our tuk-tuk driver had been valiantly plowing through stretches with 8 – 10 inches of water on the road. He stopped at one point to ask if we wanted to see Cambodians fishing methods and we took some pictures and enjoyed watching the men casting the nets and the generally happy faces dealing with water everywhere. Yvette did note at a petrol station a man, his wife and 4 children piling off a motorcycle and they looked pretty wet and miserable – at least that is our projection of how we would have felt in that situation.

We have arrived now in Phnom Penh. Six hours by bus with lots of people watching along the way including a cute, cute kid that the dad joked with us as we took her picture and asked if we wanted to take her with us to America. I wonder what would happen if I said “yes”? We declined but shared a banana with her and took another picture.