Hong Kong - Just for One Day

We were only on a plane to two hours before we touched down in Hong Kong, China.  We decided to get out of the airport and use our 10.5 hours in the crazy city to the fullest. We took a train then a bus, both magnificently clean and exactly on time.  This emptied us out on the streets of Hong Kong Island in Kowloon.  We were both immediately overwhelmed by the smog and felt like every breath was a puff of a cigarette.  There were innumerable signs of all sorts all in Chinese everywhere.  The buildings seemed either disgracefully run down and a shambles or brand spanking new.  The rush of the traffic was more akin to that of city traffic at home and every other vehicle seemed to be a big bus, they have the public transportation thing worked out perty good.  The city felt suffocating as we wandered looking for somewhere to have dim sum or any sort of dumpling because other food places had pictures that were unrecognizable and not a lick of English was to be seen describing anything.  Eventually we found this wonderful tea shop with pictures of dumplings and descriptions in English and we had some of the most delicious dumplings we have ever had.  I also tried this very interesting and yummy aloe and honey tea that had big chunks of aloe meat floating in it.  

After that we wandered through a big market and found some cheap carry on luggage for our suits that we were carrying in suit bags on our arms.  We shared a beer and jumped on the subway to go down to the water to find the Intercontinental Hotel.  We had heard from our friend Trey, whom we met in Southern Thailand that we shouldn’t miss the opportunity to have a drink at the Intercontinental and get a good view of Hong Kong proper from across the water.

 

I am so glad we did!  It was a beautiful bar with a wall full of windows and a live jazz band.  We had a few drinks and a few apps over about 3 hours and soaked in the amazing view.  I didn’t envy the people huddled outside on the dock below as I sipped my dry Belvedere martini and munched on buffalo mozzarella caprese salad.  It was an amazing way to end our incredible trip.  It was romantic and relaxing and there is no where I would rather have been and no one I would rather have been with than my new fiancé!  Then we got back on the bus then the train and then the airplane and made it back to the Bay Area!

We are home now safe and sound…

Thanks for staying tuned everyone!

Love,

Devon and Breen

Bangkok – Second Time Through

We were lucky enough to hear about a chic, super-cool hostel in Bangkok called Lub D (translates to “good night’s sleep”).  It has a great location in the Silom part of Bangkok and a big central gathering room and bar, with very friendly helpful people at the counter 24 hours a day. We befriended some fun fellow travelers (many just starting their journey) and played a lot of Jenga.  The hostel’s design is wonderfully modern and deco with simple red furniture in the rooms and clean black and white décor.  We splurged and got a private room with a double bed, it was either that or bunk beds.

We felt a bit overwhelmed by the hustle and bustle of Bangkok after spending time in Laos and Cambodia.  We got hornswaggled by a few tuk tuk drivers who were participating in a government run subsidy plan designed to keep tuk tuk prices down for tourists and help the tourism industry that has been badly damaged by the red shirt coup of last year.  The deal is that the drivers get $5 gas cards just for taking tourists to government approved tailors or jewelry shops even if nothing is purchased.   This did keep the price of the tuk tuk ride way down but we were brought to a few too many jewelry stores and tailors basically against our will and then one driver even lied and wanted us out of his tuk tuk before we had reached our agreed-upon destination.  We didn’t pay him but had already gone inside a tailor and had to awkwardly say we had to go.  We ended up somewhere beyond the reach of the sky train in the rain during rush hour fighting with the driver who ended up telling us to get out and not pay him.  So much for this tourism subsidy thing, we are never getting in a tuk tuk in Bangkok again, that’s for sure!  We had to get on a random boat taxi and walk a fair distance just to get onto the sky train and get back to the hostel.

The boat trip down the river in a fancy long boat was fun.  We were both glad we took the optional detour to the “Snake Show” because we were able to really get a feel for city life on the river.  Many of the buildings are falling down and decrepit, but some nice houses with seemingly good foundations stand out in stark contrast.   We saw schools, wats, shanty towns, kids fishing or swimming or just waving, it was a beautiful ride.  We got to the snake show and it was sad to see some monkeys and deer in tiny cages.  The snake show was short but scary with one man hitting and teasing and then milking a pissed off king cobra just feet way, another dancing with a deadly viper, and sill another showing us the strength and jaws of a boa constrictor by throwing it around for a bit.  

 The boat trip back to the main river we caught site of a huge lizard in front of the hollow remains of a dark wooden building.  Our boat driver spotted it and backed our boat up so we could get a better look.  The thing was over 6 feet long from head to tail, I looked it up and it was one of the largest lizards in Thai Land, a Varanid Monitor Lizzard, similar to a Kimodo Dragon. After the boat ride we were dropped off to walk around the royal palace and Wat Poe.  Another fun part of the trip was running into a floating shop.  I bought a Buddha from the cute saleswoman in her small wooden long boat.

It was great to be able to trust the street food again, and we ate a lot of it in Bangkok.  So good!  We sampled a bunch of it when we went to the Loy Krathong Festival celebration with the beautiful Thai marketing director of Lub D. hostels named Nalin.  She had some friends meet up with us who were passing us caterpillars and grubs and round balls that were similar to corndogs.  We got swept up into the Loy Krathong Festival celebration at our hostel when we arrived just as a group of backpackers were finishing making their Krathongs, which are the flolded banana leaf and flower arrangements that are traditionally floated down the river with a  candle on it and some incense.  We voted on our favorites and then were handed our own and told to join in the precession to the river.  It was a crazy night at the wat near the river, with firecrackers and lights everywhere (though much more confined and not seemingly as dangerous as the same festival was a month earlier in Luang Prabang).  We were blessed by a monk and brought our krathongs to the riverside and let them go at the same time again, sealing our love again as the festival tradition goes.  It was an unexpectedly fun evening.

The fun in Bangkok was a great way to end our time in Southeast Asia, but we still had one more adventure to have on the way home, with a full day layover in Hong Kong!

Love,

Devon and Breen

Battambang – Sleepy City By the River

 After all the rushing around in Siem Reap and Angkor Wat we were both excited to laze about in the sleepy city of Battambang.  We decided to make a stop here on our way back to the Thai border because we heard it is the best place to get a sense of the actual state of a healing Cambodia and the changes and modernization that the people face across the country. While Pnom Phen is rapidly modernizing and being developed, it is a pocket of quickly changing culture in a country that is changing much more slowly, and Siem Reap has been vastly changed by endless tourism because of Angkor Wat, Battambang does not get many tourists and is developing at a sleepy pace comparatively.  And for those of you wondering, no, we were not Pnom Phen when the stampede occurred on the night of the Loy Krathong festival killing 360 people.  We were celebrating Loy Krathong in Bangkok by then.  We do know of a few fellow travelers that were planning to celebrate there and have already heard from one of them who is fine, but was only 100 meters from the chaos.  We have yet to hear from a few others, we are hoping they are ok.

Battambang was an interesting blend of old and new, with many restored old French colonial buildings, shanty town-style architecture with stapled corrugated iron patches, as well as a few very new-looking, modern buildings such as the new mall that has yet to open.  You can also see the blend of old and new in the daily rush of the people and visually see the divide between the haves and the have-nots. Some drive sparkly modern cars and wear modern clothes and some are on rickety old motorbikes or rusted, ancient trucks and wear dirty clothes with holes in them.  The majority of Cambodian people still live in the countryside and are peasant farmers.  It seems that many of these people come into the cities to sell their grains, fruits, veggies, meats and fish or handmade wares. Others seem to live in the main part of the city and work within the city infrastructure or in retail/wholesale, they are bankers or shop owners. We saw very few tourists compared to everywhere else we have been and enjoyed the slower pace of the pretty city.

We spent hours at a small second story café called Gecko Café.  They are focused on social equity and provide well-paid jobs to underprivileged youth.  This made the food a bit more expensive for us, but we were served by glowing, happy, eager to please, young people, who were clearly healthy and are treated well at work.  Also, rare in Cambodia, they actually make enough to piece together a comfortable living.

We walked around the city one day, we bought some sculptures from a shop where the shop owner was actually the artist as well. We were able to watch her carve part of a huge, gloriously intricate sculpture of a war scene of some sort with a backdrop of a swirling sea full of fish and dragons.  We walked by a small river flanked by trees and pretty walkways.  We walked around the big central market of Battambang, which is NOT a tourist market.  There were women hand stitching and selling intricate, brightly colored, sequined dresses and shirts that we guessed were for parties or ceremonies as we saw no one wearing this style of clothing in all of Cambodia.  There were also endless stalls of western-style clothes, but more from the 90’s than this decade.

The most interesting thing we did in Battambang was go to an art gallery and “Circus Show” at a French supported, children’s art school called Phare Ponleu Selpak (PPS).  It was an unexpectedly inspirational experience as PPS is a Cambodian NGO that uses art to answer children’s psycho social needs.  The school had expanded over the years to include a free school for holistic education and sees over 1400 children daily.  They also rescue and house children that have been sexually trafficked.  They house or help 70 children that have met this sad fate.  We started the evening wandering around their art gallery looking at the powerful art that the students had created and fell in love with a piece and bought it, thus supporting the child/young adult who created it and the school directly. Many of the students of PPS go on to have careers in visual or performing arts.  We discovered that the student who had painted the picture we purchased was a trafficked child rescued by the school at 12 and stayed until he was 18 and is now working as an artist and computer graphics designer in China!  After the gallery show we saw a performance art piece (the “circus”).  It was about the Kmer Rouge regime and was performed by 8 strong young male actors/acrobats.  It was gut wrenchingly beautiful and powerful, with no words spoken during the entire performance.  It was also a delightfully modern artistic endeavor.  We were both very impressed that this school is able to provide the world with Cambodian artists and performers who are unafraid to venture forth with their art despite the fact that just 20 years earlier, Cambodian artists lived in fear of the Kmer Rouge who killed artists and performers for fear of the dissident ideas they carry forth.  To us the school represents the promising future of Cambodia and the resilience of her amazing people.

We didn’t do much in Battambang and started to realize how tired we were from going going going for the past 7 weeks.  All that’s left is a second stint in Bangkok and a day in Hong Kong on our way home…

Love,

Devon and Breen