Goodbye Cambodia, Hello Thailand

Sunday, Nov. 17

One great thing about our honeymoon trip is that we get to fly to a bunch of different places of our choosing in southeast asia for one low price. The bad part is that every flight has to have a layover in Kuala Lumpur. So when we were offered the chance to fly direct from Phnom Penh to Bangkok without a penalty, Andrew and I jumped at the chance.

We were told that if the flight from Phnom Penh to Kuala Lumpur was full, they would let us know and put us on a direct flight run by another airline. At the last moment, as this other flight announced its final boarding, we were quickly shuffled over to the new gate with our new boarding pass. Yet on the way to the jetway we were stopped by security, who scrutinized our new, quickly processed boarding passes, which had misspelled names and no departure tax stamp (which was on our old boarding passes and not transferred over). The person who orchestrated the switch of flights was nowhere to be found, and we unsuccessfully tried to explain the situation before we simply stepped aside and watched the crowd of airport personnel grow to about 20 people in about a 10 foot square area, furiously talking in khmer language, mostly talking on walkie-talkies. We have no idea how things were resolved but after many tense moments, we finally got the OK and we were off. Later we found out that a prince (country unknown) was on our flight - we delayed a prince!

Upon arrival to Bangkok, we hopped on a bus to the city and were given our introduction to the notorious Bangkok traffic with a very long (1 hour? 2 hour? and supposedly traffic is good on a Sunday afternoon?) trip into the city. After getting off the bus we were introduced to the notoriously poorly laid out streets in Bangkok by getting a bit lost. After finding our bearings and a nice clean cheap guesthouse, we also found a vegetarian Thai restaurant. We enjoyed the food so much that we bought their cookbook, I can't wait for Andrew to make me some meals from it!

Monday, November 18

New day, new narrator! Kelly and I decided make it a totally Thai day, and wander around the city enjoying all of the things that are only found in Thailand. [For contrast, the next day we went to the Hard Rock Cafe.] We started out with a tour of the Royal Palace and attached temple. The complex is quite an amazing piece of architecture. There are dozens of structures devoted to the Buddhist faith. The architecture is complex and draws from traditional as well as western sources. The keystone of the temples is the "Temple of the Emerald Buddha". The temple is a titanic room, at least 50x50 square and 30 feet high. The walls of the temple are painted with murals showing various events in Buddha's life, and in the center of the room, surrounded by a miniature city of gold and bejeweled buildings. Sitting atop the city is the "Emerald Buddha."  He's actually made of jasper but don't tell anyone. I guess he's about three feet tall sitting, and his garments are changed to match each of the three dominant seasons, hot, cold, wet. We missed the ceremonial changing from wet to cold garments by only two days.

The Royal Palace was a little less exciting. Essentially, every room but two weapons museums were closed. So our guide gave us a verbal description of what each wing of the three floors was for. The palace isn't really used by the royal family anymore. Instead, it is used as a guesthouse for visiting dignitaries. We met a lovely couple from Texas, and had a nice lunch just outside the temple.

After lunch, we went out in search of the one thing that we were told we must do while in Thailand... have an authentic Thai Massage. Of course, this being Thailand, finding an authentic Thai massage isn't necessarily as straightforward as you might like it to be. In the neighborhood where we were staying, you'd get a flyer for a massage about once every two blocks. Instead of checking out all of the flyer places, we chose the "safe" route, and went to Wat Pho, where one of the most respected schools of Thai Massage is located. We got to the temple and found out they had air-conditioned massage rooms just a few blocks away.

One of the common themes of our travels is: "where are we now?" This is slightly related to our other mantra "did we leave the compass in the other backpack AGAIN?" Needless to say it only took us about twice as long to find the massage school as it should have. The prices are amazingly affordable. For about $6/hr you can have a trained masseuse crack every joint in your body. He even cracked my ankle somehow.

You might not be surprised at how hard it is to move after such a massage, much less wander a foreign city for the rest of the day. But we certainly were surprised. We quickly gave up our walking tour and decided to get into a tuk-tuk. The nice thing about these three wheeled death-machines is that they can zoom in and out of stationary traffic. The not so nice thing is that they also zoom in and out of moving traffic as well.

After a relatively uneventful ride we arrived at our destination; a festival at the Temple of the Golden Mountain. The festival was not really an authentic Thai cultural experience. It was much more like one of those small carnivals that set up shop for a weekend in the US. They had midway games, snacks, and death-defying rides. We made our retreat fairly quickly.

As we wandered the streets - half lost, half looking for a money changer - we found what it was that we'd been looking for all along. An authentic Thai festival. This was Loy Krathong (sp?) one of the biggest festivals of the season. One of the unique things about the celebration is that they float candles down the river to make religious offerings.

We went home freshened up, and after a quick dinner found ourselves back at the festival location. The festival was great. They had an orchestra, Vietnamese acrobats, shadow plays, and an amazing variety of local delicacies. We tried jellied peanut paste fashioned into little fruit shaped candies. We marveled at the Thai version of the "corn-dog" and we tried some really yummy fried bananas. After watching the acrobats form a human tower five acrobats high, we meandered back to our hotel and faded into sleepland.

Goodbye for now,

Kelly and Andrew