Sunset at Angkor Wat

February 3, 2010 in Travel by Mark Beattie | No comments

People are like sheep. Tell them that this particular temple on this particular hill is THE place to view the sunset, and they’ll go there (or their tour buses will take them). As a result, come 5pm the normally overrun temples are nearly empty for the rest of us, and there is a great stillness (in theory, this is true for sunrise at 5am as well, but despite our intentions, we never tested it out).

The sunset view from Angkor Wat, the largest and most grand of the many Angkor temples, is nothing great. The sun falls behind a parking lot filled with vendors and waiting tuk tuk drivers and in the distance a tethered hot air balloon takes tourists up for an aerial view of the complex (like a ‘white diamond’, it floats over the jungles). But inside the temple the light of the magic hour casts a rosy glow onto the sandstone pedestals and bas reliefs of the 900 year old structure.

We were warned ahead of time Angkor Wat would be over touristed but it’s one of those places you just have to see anyway. It is true, there were busloads and busloads of packaged tour groups, predominately South Korean and some Japanese, but there is something magical about these stone monuments that are testament to a deep faith (and the power of the monarchy).

In the grandeur of Angkor Wat, or the enigmatic faces of the Bayon, or the intricate carvings of Banteay Srei, there is a reminder of the beauty and majesty that man is able to create. At Ta Prohm, the trees have so encroached on the temple that they couldn’t be removed without damaging the structure. Huge ancient trees strangle the stone walls to poetic effect (watch the end of Wong Kar Wai’s ‘In the Mood for Love’ and you will see why we wanted to come here). It’s a good reminder that as powerful and awe-inspiring as the works of man can be, nature is always stronger.

Cambodia by bicycle

February 3, 2010 in Bikes, Travel by Mark Beattie | No comments

It is a truth universally acknowledged in Siem Reap that a foreigner on the street must be in need of a tuk tuk (technically, these are not tuk tuks, they are moto-remorques, a trailer hitched to a scooter, but that’s a rather big French mouthful). It could be 9 o’clock at night, you could even be on a bicycle, but you will invariably be asked if you need a ride by every driver you pass.

We did take a moto one day to visit a few of the more remote sites, otherwise we mostly biked. Pretty much all of the bicycles are single speed steel women’s bikes. Kids will ride them to school, two to a bike, even children so small that their heads are the level of the seat and they have to stand the whole time, peering out under the handlebars. Rear racks support hanging bundles of coconuts or large woven baskets carrying who knows what.

Riding a bicycle around Siem Reap means being one with the traffic. You never stop before making a turn, you just kind of flow. The roads are shared use, and as a result of the constant passing vehicles seem much more aware of their surroundings. Slower vehicles stay right, so we’d pass food vendors pushing their carts, just about any Cambodian on a bike, and occasionally a slow moto. Passing us, in the middle of the road which is basically two way, are tuk tuks, faster motos, cars, minivans and tour buses, all of which constantly honk to let you know they’re coming, which is somewhat considerate, if loud.

The main temples are between 6 and 15k north of Siem Reap but our nicest ride was to a village about 10k to the south of the city, where a hilltop temple (both an Angkor ruin and a modern working one) affords a panoramic view of giant Tonle Sap lake in the distance and bright green rice paddies all around. The road there is raised, with the rice paddies below and simple houses rising up on rickety wooden stilts to the level of the road. Little children play in the dirt on the edge of the road as women tended shop in traditional skirts and checked cotton headwraps, and through the open doors of the immaculately swept houses we got a glimpse of rural Cambodian life.

Border Crossing – Poipet

February 3, 2010 in Travel by Mark Beattie | No comments

The Bangkok-Siem Reap route is infamous in backpacking circles. A Bangkok based airline has a monopoly on flights, inflating the price, and was rumored to have been paying off the Cambodian government to delay the paving of highway N6 which runs between the Thai border and Siem Reap. The road was finally completed in the middle of last year, cutting travel time from 6 hours to 2, but there are still other hazards to the crossing.

A long running scam involves buses from Bangkok to Siem Reap taking as long as possible to do the trip, sometimes detouring to a further border crossing. The bus company gets a comission from the Siem Reap guesthouse where it drops travellers off; the later that is, the more likely you are to stay there. As a result, there are horror stories of 20 hour trips.

We went the independent route, taking a train to Aranyaprathet then spending the night, a tuktuk to the border in the morning and shared a taxi from there to Siem Reap.

Before technically ‘arriving’ in Cambodia there are several casinos, hundreds of touts and many people pushing heavily loaded carts back and forth on the dusty road across the border. Cambodian visas are $20 on arrival, but that doesn’t mean that everyone won’t still try to make an extra buck or two.

Our tactic to expedite the Visa process involved an “express fee” of 100 Thai Baht each (lowered from the initial asking price of 2500 baht for two visas, about double their actual cost). Once that was out of the way we watched our passports immediately receive 30 day Visa stickers. Walking further down the same dirt road with casinos they would actually get stamped. At this point we’d ‘arrived’ in Poipet, Cambodia. Now all we had to do was negotiate a reasonable cab fare to Siem Reap…

Slow train to Aranyaprathet

January 31, 2010 in Travel by Mark Beattie | No comments

After 2 days in Bangkok seeing gilded palaces and temples, waiting for our Vietnamese visas to process and attempting to avoid the hordes of touts on Khao San Rd where we mistakenly spent a night, it was time to leave the big city.

We left the heavy backpack filled with climbing gear with Mark’s friend Hunter, who lives off the last stop on the skytrain and is starting a new job with Microsoft next week. Hunter has spent 2 1/2 years in Thailand and in addition to introducing us to delicious spicy catfish salad, he taught us a little about the Thai language. The grammar is quite simple; there is no verb conjugation and to indicate tenses you just add an additional word (or not, and it just has to be decifered by context). It can be a very literal language (the word for train translates as “car fire” and the word for cheers is “bang glass” according to Hunter) but somewhat lacking in nuance and subtlety.

To get to the Cambodian border, we took the local train. There are only 2 a day and only 3rd class seats are available for 48baht. When the train pulled into the station, everyone rushed on board to try to get a forward facing seat on the shady side of the train. A few stations in, there were no seats left at all.

We soon left the city behind. 2 hours or so from Bangkok, there were little station houses with flowers in pots and a train official in a smart green uniform waving a red flag as the train loads and a green one when it’s safe to leave. By the time we were almost to Aranyaprathet the station was no more than a dirt road leading up to the train tracks.

En route we picked up rural children heading home from school in the next town over and passed rice fields in varying states of cultivation. There were brilliant saffron colored monk’s robes billowing on drying lines outside a small temple, and from time to time ash would drift in through the open windows of the train from the burning fields outside. 5 hours after leaving Bangkok, we had arrived at the end of the line for Thailand.

Like so much chattle & freedom isn’t free (but it’s cheap and has good snorkelling)

January 31, 2010 in Travel by Mark Beattie | No comments

We made it to Ko Tao on the night ‘ferry’. Sort of like a Chinatown bus the cargo boats to the gulf islands load cargo and people onto the triple decks. Thankfully it was only French, German and Danish farang backpackers like us that we slept next to and not chickens or goats on the very narrow cots.

Ko Tao is the diving certification HQ of Thailand and in fact certifies more divers than all but one other spot in the world (it apparently has a lot of easy dive sites for learning, plus is very cheap). As a result (and perhaps also as a result of having a harbour deep enough to dock bigger ships) it’s far more developed than Hat Ton Sai. Our resort at Freedom Beach looked mostly new, and there’s lots of construction visible from the main road.

Our big adventure was a circumnavigation of the island of which Captain Cook would have been proud. Our first day on the island we scoped out the sail by trekking through nearly every resort on something of a jungle trail. In the afternoon we stumbled upon first the sailing shop and then the climbing shop. Our feeling was that we’d done enough climbing and a little 14ft Hobie Cat and some snorkeling would be a healthy diversion.

The winds were good, approximately 10-15 knots and we headed south around the island. By the time we made it to the windward side four foot waves with some chop were readily apparent. Zoe seemed fine with it. Mark stated, “So this is what it feels like to be in a teacup in the ocean.” It was something a bit like Mr Toad’s wild ride and Mark got pretty seasick. Nevertheless, we made it around the island to a beautiful snorkeling site back on the leeward side. The water was so clear, you could see over 20 feet down to the coral reefs below and thousands of tropical fish. All in all, a special day.

The next day we took a high speed ferry and bus combo package up to Bangkok…

Cricket and other creepy crawlies

January 22, 2010 in Climbing, Travel by Mark Beattie | No comments

We left Tonsai today for Krabi Town and air con. Yesterday was so hot that even the Thai ladies with the food stands at the south end of Tonsai beach were complaining. We brought something with us though, a large scary spider who hitched a ride in Mark’s backpack. We thought we had chased him away before we left the bungalow but he hung in there through the longboat ride and on top of the song-thaew and only resurfaced when we reached our hotel.

After 9 nights in the bungalow it’s nice to have a real hotel with hot water, AC, and a tv, even if the only English channels are news and sports (soccer, badminton and the utterly unfathomable cricket) and one movie channel from Pakistan. There was also a lizard on the wall above our bed when we got back from dinner at the night market by the pier (bad pad thai – the first time we’ve been burned by street food). He was small and cute and looked harmless enough and scurried off when we came in.

Tomorrow we leave for Ko Tao on the east Gulf Coast; it promises to be another epic travel day/night as we plan to take the overnight ferry from Surat Thani. Ko Tao has both snorkeling and more climbing and we hope it will be slightly cleaner & lower key than the Raileys and Tonsai. From there we’ll keep heading north.

Mai pen rai e.g. ‘No shirt, no shoes, no problem’

January 22, 2010 in Climbing, Travel by Mark Beattie | No comments

We had a nice long post introducing Thailand and the climbing here at Tonsai and the Phra Nang peninsula but then our Wordpress app decided to eat it so we’re trying again.

Traveling to Tonsai Beach from Malaysian Pulau Langkawi was about as epic as the sixteen hour trans-Artic flight we took from EWR > HKG. It involved catching a taxi at about 8am, then a ferry to Thailand, then riding in the back of a small pickup truck, then a long and bumpy bus ride over a short distance to Krabi Town, another pickup truck to Ao Nang, waiting at sunset for enough passengers for a Longboat to Tonsai and then finally a short jungle walk pecking around for accomodations. It worked out though. Our little bamboo and wood bungalow does the job with a mosquito net and small oscilating fan and we seem to have acclimated to the heat well enough. It’s even started to feel cool at night.

Our ‘resort’ is almost entirely filled with climbers; in fact, the entire Tonsai beach feels like a giant international youth hostel for scruffy sporty types. Tonsai is cut off from East and West Railey beaches by karst crags; climbers will take one of two rather rigorous (but relatively short) jungle treks over the rock and back down to get to the other beaches, but your typical sunseeker is unlikely to make the trek in the other direction, particularly when their beach is nicer anyway.

We’ve met a few other young American couples, but Germans, Scandinavians and Aussies/Kiwis definitely predominate. Regardless of nationality, everyone is fit, sweaty, and tries to wear as little clothing as possible. You hear a lot of Jack Johnson playing pretty much everywhere on the beach, Singha and Chang beer flows freely, and at night there are fire juggling shows on the slackline (tight rope) at the bar across the dirt road from us.

The climbing, well let’s just say it’s been challenging. The rock formations are incredible, large limestone karst rising above the water, full of tufas and stalactites. The holds are mostly big but the sea and rain have worn away at the rock and it’s almost all overhung. Our arms and backs are sore. Almost all easy, vertical routes are utilized by the dozen or so climbing schools that have sprouted up all over the peninsula, so they are overrun between 9am and 6pm. If you stay away from those areas though, and from the climbing areas closer to the cheap bungalows in Tonsai, it’s actually not too crowded. Nothing really is when you come from New York.

Mai pen rai is a Thai phrase that loosely translates to ‘don’t worry about it’ and has been described as the unofficial national motto. It definitely fits the ethos of Tonsai, where no one seems to have any idea what day of the week it is (including us) and even the resident roosters don’t start crowing until 10am. ‘Mai pen rai’ the route is a 6a (blissfully easy, maybe a 5.10a on the Yosemite scale) in the Defile area off of Phra Nang beach, just past the wooden phalli filled shrine to the ancient princess who haunts the island. When you reach the top of the 25 meter climb, you have a panoramic view of Phra Nang and West Railey beaches to the north, and sea with hazy islands to the west. It’s one of those moments that remind you why you did come to Thailand to climb.

Arguments against rolling suitcases while traveling in Thailand

January 18, 2010 in Mark by Mark Beattie | No comments

Although technically on the Phra Nang peninsula, Tonsai and Railey beaches are in effect islands, cut off from the mainland by the huge limestone karst formations that make this such a good place for climbing. Electricity is powered by generators and food and drink are twice as expensive (though that’s still cheap by western standards).

To get to the beaches, you must take a long tail boat from either Krabi town or the beach town of Ao Nang. The boats are so named because they have externally mounted vintage car engines with no mufflers (ie they’re very loud) welded to an exceedingly long propeller which allows the boat to be propelled and turned in extremely shallow tides and shoals.

Usually you can fit eight or ten or twelve passengers in these smaller longtails and during normal hours with the nominal six riders it’s 80 Baht per person. We paid 100 TB each our first night when arriving after sunset as it does become more troublesome at night with no lights or channel markers.

Tonight getting back from Ao Nang (the only ATM on the peninsula was out of service and we needed more cash, plus we were taking a rest day from climbing after too many pumpy overhanging routes) just before sunset it was low tide, so we had an epic 400 meter wade out into the Andaman Sea, well over knee high, before flinging ourselves into the low bottomed boat while the Thai operator pulled anchor. Pulling into Tonsai beach, the low tide exposed hundreds of meters of rocky bottom jutting up. The boat operators had dredged a channel but it was still a long muddy walk to get to shore. The Australian in our boat with the rollig suitcase did not look pleased; nor did the couple with a giant baby stroller getting out of another boat. Given that there are no paved roads or sidewalks on Tonsai, it will likely prove less than useful.

« Older entries § Newer entries »