Encore, Angkor

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Angkor Wat is pretty darn cool. Lots of temples, all very old and very magnificent, AND you get to indulge all your Lara Croft fantasies when you visit (amazing the numbers of tourists sporting little shorts, crop tops and a bloody great gun strapped to the thigh. Not such a good look on a middle aged man with a belly…..). So magnificent is it, in fact, that it’s one of our designated “so-good-its-worth-going-back-to” round the world sites – I’ve been there before, 10 years ago or such. We were also a little cheeky, sneaking in a side trip to Angkor Wat from Bangkok, where we had to go to get our visas for Myanmar / Burma without actually visiting the rest of Cambodia. We did think about the Killing Fields, which is an incredible but devastating place to visit – but decided that maybe it’s not a place to go twice in a lifetime less the post trauma counseling fees get too costly…..

And as James has mentioned, even better, we managed to coincide the trip with the time my Mum and Dad were there, without even mangling the itinerary too much. Hurrah!!

For those who haven’t been to Angkor, the main thing to note is that it’s MASSIVE. The most well known temple of the complex, Angkor Wat, is apparently the largest religious building in existence – and it’s one of several hundred of the damn things dotted around several square miles of pristine jungle (well, now pristine – it went through a period of slightly less than pristineness post Khmer Rouge, when the whole area was landmined. Added a bit of adventure to the temple hopping). They sell 3 day tickets and you kind of need that to get your way around a half decent selection of the major sites.

The other thing to note is that it’s hot as hell, almost always above 30 Celsius. And that you go stomping up and down all these steep staircases (the temples are primarily built along the Hindu mountain-temple model, so they’re very tall) in said heat which gets quite quickly quite knackering. It’s surprisingly hard work for…well, a holiday. It calls for a strategy involving intense prioritization of the best temples, and plenty of time out for a decent lunch and a refreshing coconut or two.

With this in mind, we designed our campaign. Day 1, an onslaught of the slightly lesser known temples: Ta Prohm (actually quite well known this one – it’s the Tomb Raider temple, the one with all the trees growing round, through and out of it), a sneak by Pre Rup to check out the lions, whistle past the water temple of Neak Pean before spending some time at Preah Khan (amazing – an almost matrix like structure of interweaving corridors and halls, all near deserted and there to be explored) before heading to Angkor Wat itself for sundown. Day 2: visiting the 2 most spectacular sites of Angkor Wat (you’ll know it if you see it) and the Bagan (James’ favourite, a quite spooky temple covered with giant stone smiley Buddhas). Day 3: an hour’s tuk-tuk ride out into the countryside (which was brilliant! Rice paddies a go-go) to Banteay Srei, a tiny outlying temple famous for the delicacy of its carving (of which there is LOTS). Angkor Wat lay defeated before us.

Favourite day? For me, probably day 1. The lesser known temples are usually very quiet and there’s precious few restrictions on where you wander, so you get to go exploring through these amazing ancient sites at will. Makes you feel a bit like an old time archaeologist, discovering the place for the first time. Despite the fact that this wasn’t actually the first time. And hopefully, not the last.

In With the Outlaws

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Or rather, out with the in-laws. For last week I had my first family holiday with Lucy’s Mum and Dad. And very nice it was too!

This being Round the World With James & Lucy, and this being the Garrett family, we didn’t spend our first holiday together going somewhere nice and sensible. Oh no. Instead of, say, hiring a nice cottage in the countryside, or perhaps heading off to the beach somewhere, we arranged to … meet up in a rooftop bar in Cambodia and do the rounds of Angkor Wat together. Result!

It was a truly excellent four days. We soon settled into the holiday routine – up not too early for a good breakfast; hop two by two into our motorbike tuk tuk contraption driven by our trusty driver; off temple bashing until we wilted from the extraordinary humid heat; a long lazy lunch, rounded out by fresh spring rolls and fresh coconut juice; more temple bashing in the afternoon (or maybe a sneaky snooze); then glad rags on for a fortifying gin & tonic or two; and off for a delicious dinner in one of the best restaurants in town. It was tough, I tell you.

More on Angkor Wat / Siem Reap later – it isn’t known as one of the best temple sites in the world for nothing and we may have taken a picture or two. For now, picture us on a happy holiday, with not a sleeping-on-the-floor, a scary man with a machete or a pit toilet in sight!

Backgrounds – Mostly Japan

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We have recently been hit by an attack of Le Artistique. I blame the extraordinary colours of autumn in Japan … and the surrounding hordes of Chinese tour groups laden down with photographic equipment – we are still nothing if not competitive!

Yup, Kyoto actually looks like this in autumn. We also visited it one spring, when it was bright pink with cherry blossoms. Jason, book that ticket!

Qu’est ce que c’est, l’artistique? C’est L’art, mais avec du stique.

The Silver Temple. So called because the owner once intended to cover it in silver, but then didn’t. By this logic, I intend to rename myself Mr SixPack.

Taken at the top of a bloody steep hill, mostly to give me an excuse to catch my breath. Not bad, eh?

You have no idea how many similar photos to this we have. Let’s just say it was a rather wonderful few days driving through the mountains.

Fat bottomed men, they make the rocking world go round.

…although I probably wouldn’t say that to their faces. Or comment on their rather, erm, “flamboyant” aprons!

“What you lookin’ at?”

…and the “Almost Japan”. A final sunset shot of the mountains of Nepal. Pointy and intrepid, like us. Or something.

 

Being Bad in Bangkok

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Ahhh, Bangkok.

Famous for dodgy fake gear, drugs, sex shows and lady-boys. Quite the reputation to live up to but Bangkok always manages…. effortlessly. It’s hard to stumble more than a few yards without being offered finest quality Rolexes with maybe a free Louis Vuitton bag thrown in to carry your loot home in. All real, of course. The seedier offers don’t fall far behind either; I still recall visiting Bangkok as a teenager with my family. Wandering down Patpong market, the lovely ladies were trying to entice my poor father in to their establishments with offers of free drinks galore… plus some other stuff that I didn’t understand. Hoping to put them off a little, he pointed out that he was there with his wife and entire family – response: “No problem, they can come in too!”. Unbelievably, we didn’t take them up on their kind offer.

Of course the city also has a more pleasant side and a number of world class tourist attractions. The Emerald Buddha (really made of jade, which I think is cheating but he’s a cool little dude anyway so I guess fair’s fair. Though he really is little – can’t be more than 8 inches high) housed within his amazingly intricately decorative Palace. The Golden Buddha – better named this time, being very very big and very, very gold. And the famed floating market with thousands of hawkers all lined up in their canoes to sell their wares (usually bananas. There’s really a LOT of bananas in Bangkok. Let’s carefully avoid the obvious jokes here). It’s an amazing tourist destination and needs a fair few days just to take it all in.

Then there’s the clothes shops, and in particular the tailors – Bangkok is probably the finest place in Asia to get a little custom made something or other made up. It’s here that the famed “3 suits in 3 days” service started up, and they do stick to their word on this (although one should also note that the word doesn’t include anything about said suits needing to look good, or in fact to even fit….).

How to fit it all in?

Well, for us it was pretty easy. We did ASOLUTELY nothing. We lazed round the pool. We ate dinner in the hotel for heaven’s sake. The most activity we got up to was catching up with an old work friend for lunch (pretty exhausting stuff)…. at our hotel. All of which we’re excusing by the fact that I’d picked up a nasty coldy-fluey thing in Japan and basically slept for most of the time we were there.

Although to be really honest, it was just a really lovely hotel, and we were kind of excited to hang round the pool for a day or two.

Anyway, Bangkok is the city of vice. And if my vice happens to be sloth, who’s to argue?

The single solitary photograph we took in Bangkok. Ladies and gentlemen, half a cocktail!

The single solitary photograph we took in Bangkok. Ladies and gentlemen, half a cocktail!

Fish!

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Fish fish fish, fishy fishy fish!

FISH!

Tokyo baby, yeah!

Yup, it’s early morning and we are at Tsukiji fish market in Tokyo. A huge warren of stalls piled high with every conceivable kind of seafood, and a few others besides. Squat men in wellington boots stride around with single-bladed sashimi knives as tall as they are, committing astonishing acts of butchery on the vast swarms of equally vast tuna fish that flood through here every day. Cabinets full of wildly expensive sea urchin roe, banks and banks of humming aquariums, crab claws, crab sticks, live crabs by the dozen dozen. Red fish, silver fish, black fish, grey fish, white fish and their eggs besides. Whelks, clams, oysters, octopuses (-pi?) and squid of every size and colour. Seaweed, dried and fresh. If it comes out of the sea, it’s here. And it’s probably still alive.

And we’re hungry.

It’s our last morning in Japan. The coffee man (er, that’s me) went out to Starbucks for a seasonal gingerbread latte first thing, but otherwise we are empty (by the way, apparently having the whipped cream topping “on the side” is Against The Rules in Japan. But I needed to separate it from the hot coffee to stop it melting away before I could carry it up 24 floors to a snoozing Lucy. So I had to resort to sleight of hand, trickery (and, er, cup thievery) – result! Anyway, I digress.) We are looking for our favorite sushi restaurant, possibly in the world. And we found it. Of course we couldn’t remember the name, but we remembered the eel grilling station (complete with mini portable flamethrowers) from our last trip, and we found our seats with serious anticipation.

Breakfast. As much sushi as you can possibly eat (and we were trying very, very hard). Include multiple rounds of the most expensive top quality sea eel and the extraordinary fatty tuna. Also Uni (sea urchin) which is so expensive and hard to get right that we had previously thought we were only going to bother with it when we were physically in Hokkaido where the best stuff comes from. All this, plus the usual soups and salads and two big beers. We rolled out of there stuffed to the gills and walking on air. My god it was SO good.

And the damage? £30 a head.

Incidentally, the three tier sushi restaurant test I mentioned a while ago? Try the standard tuna (which is safe and not too expensive) and if it’s really good have the mackerel (which is harder to get right, is horrible when poor quality but when done well is extremely good) and if this is really good try the uni (which is expensive, almost impossible to find done well and frequently disgusting, but a real delicacy when good). So there you are. Happy eating!

The Ryokan Experience – A Few Haiku

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[JAMES]
Beautiful hotel
Surrounds fine sculpted garden
Feels like history.

[LUCY]
Strangely empty room;
Ascetic. But where’s my bed?
Fragrant tatami

Japanese ryokan:
Pay much more; sleep on the floor.
Must be high culture.

Public bath, at night
With a women’s football team
James is quite jealous

Tried to navigate
Steep stairs in slippy slippers.
Banged head on beam. Ouch.

I though, am right-sized
That’s less fun with grumpy James
Laughing does not help

Honoured guest; kind host.
Shown how to use my chopsticks.
Perhaps I look dumb?

Breakfast of poached eggs
Soft poached, eaten with chopsticks
I yearn for Starbucks

Fine Yukuta robe.
Worn at dinner after bath.
Dangling free – most strange.

I wear my robe wrong,
Kind hostess tells me (firmly)
“Like a corpse”. Stylish.

Metrics to Live Your Life By

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Classic Tom Jones in his pomp. Perhaps a touch random for this post, but a storming tune nonetheless

 

Everyone measures their lives differently. I have a friend who swears that highest form of human achievement is business; I have another friend who swears that highest form of human achievement is poetry. A question that has been on my mind recently is how to compare experiences and how to measure “success” when you are travelling. (jumping straight to the answer, I think the fact that Lucy and I are able to do it at all is already success enough for me, but let’s not allow that to get in the way of this post, eh?). In the meantime, how’s about this for some travel-appropriate metrics:

First, the classic Boston Consulting Bull*** two-by-two matrix, plotting those two well known orthogonals “Epic” and “Comfortable”.

This splits experiences down quite nicely:

  • Night buses? Long flights? Traipsing round dark towns looking for your hotel? Bottom right!
  • Camping in Tibet in double down sleeping bags? Eagle hunting on horseback in Kyrgyzstan? Cocktails under a huge animatronic singing frog in Las Vegas? Top left, yeah baby!
  • The classic James & Lucy blogtastic “it may have shortened my life by several months, but … holy crap it was amazing!”. Volcano trekking in Vanuatu, boat tripping on the Sepik – top right all the way!

To me, the art of enjoying travel involves balancing interesting and new experiences against the level of perceived discomfort involved. I think this is the reason Lucy and I are traveling reasonably quickly this time around, and why we end up at gentle odds with the gap year students we meet. After all, sleeping on floors palls pretty quickly once you are past 30, and we are familiar enough with the simple mechanics of travel to take the shine off, say, long train journeys. Perhaps we also now need a higher level of stimulation to make all the travel worthwhile – not for us the sitting on a beach for weeks at a time having a nice holiday and, like, finding ourselves man.

It was in contemplating the bottom left sector – the nice holiday – that I came up with the second travel metric: blog density. Now, we don’t live our lives for the blog, although we do greatly enjoy writing it (most of the time!). For the last couple of weeks we have been having a very nice time, but it has felt a little more like a holiday than the type of travel worth taking time out of life for. It has been the hardest, grittiest experiences that have stuck in our minds and ended up making their way onto the page. Recently, a lovely week in Nepal passed by in a single blog post; two active weeks in Japan has been condensed into half a dozen; whereas Papua New Guinea left us feeling pretty battered but with the urgent need to write down what we had witnessed every day and more.

Anyway, it’s a nice theory (even if meta blog posts have less pretty pictures than some of the others). To test it in practice, we have three days in Bangkok sorting out visas, a few days with Lucy’s Mum and Dad at Angkor Wat and after that it’s off to Burma. Stay tuned!

Box Ticking

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We have been to Japan before. A two week holiday a few years ago whetted our appetite for all things Japanese, hence our desire to shoehorn a return trip into the gap in our itinerary caused by the immovable blocks of Christmas and, er, the North Korean National day in September. We loved it last time, and we loved it this time. But we had some chores to complete.

Last time we were here we ranged all over the country, we skied in Hokkaido, we took the Japanese equivalent of the Orient Express (for which you have to win tickets in a lottery), we temple bashed in Nara, misery touristed in Hiroshima, monastery stayed in Koya-San, and Kabuki-ed in Tokyo. We ate everything we could get our hands on and stayed in a range of high and low class hotels the length of the country. But we missed out on a few things – seasonality, time constraints and mild case of culture shock prevented us from doing everything we wanted to. Hence the requirement for a little box ticking.

Well, you know your life isn’t too bad when your mandatory box ticking involves going to a Sumo tournament and tasting poisonous Fugu puffer fish. Life is tough, yet again.

Sumo. Well. It’s amazing. The bouts typically last less than ten seconds, but that misses the point. It’s the mandatory four minutes per bout of facing off, warming up, strutting and posturing that really make the occasion. Our American friends won’t know what the hell I am talking about at this point, but do you remember that time when the Scottish ladies’ curling team got a gold medal at the winter Olympics? For about three days everyone in the UK suddenly became world class curling experts, able to discuss at length the tactical implications of scrubbing vs polishing ice, stone positioning and the correct usage of the slippery and spiked shoes. It was bizarre, and it overtook us at the Sumo:

“Oh, look at that decisive foot stamp. He’s so aggressive. He’s definitely got the upper hand”

“What an effective ceremonial-salt-chucking there – the Yokozuna’s overhand salt toss. Punchy!”

“My lord, he leaned so far forward on his hands there in warm up! How can the opponent possibly respond?”

“Did you see the half-hearted honorific brow mopping there? His fighting spirit must be broken!”

(and, my personal favorite, from Lucy) “He’s wearing lovely green pants. I think he’s definitely going to win.”

Sumo is deeply bizarre, heavily tied up in ritual, almost perfectly opaque to outsiders, and definitely worth a visit if you happen to be in town when a match is on.

Eating Fugu on the other hand, is deeply bizarre, heavily tied up in ritual, almost perfectly opaque to outsiders and worth doing just once in your life for the sole reason that you can say you have done it. We journeyed to the spiritual home of Fugu in Shimonoseki (where even the manhole covers have cartoon blowfish on them) and tried a full “setto” of blowfish in a specialist blowfish restaurant. Our English friends won’t know what the hell I am talking about at this point, but … well … Meh. It was just chewy sashimi without any of the famed mouth numbness that signifies near-poisoning (interestingly the Japanese word for “sashimi” isn’t actually “sashimi” but “o-tsukuri” – who knew?).

Perhaps they don’t serve the good stuff to foreigners; perhaps we don’t know the Japanese for “hurt me, chef”; perhaps we had too much beer for lunch. Anyway – tick.

Short Runs in Strange Places – Kyboshed in Kyoto

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I find one of the more enjoyable aspects of growing older is getting to know yourself better. And for me as an engineer manqué, this covers not just how I react to situations but also getting a proper understanding of how I work. For example: how I learn best (I have to understand the underlying mechanics of anything, then it sticks for ever), how I respond to jet lag (badly – the free booze and music documentaries on the planes get me every time), how  much sleep I really, really need per night (below two I tend to hallucinate a little after lunchtime, more than four if I want to make sense without adrenaline, a regular six if I want to perform properly – so now you know!).

One thing I worked out when I was at university was a basic universal cure-all. Whenever I was feeling low or stressed out I prescribed myself the following: lots of water, some reasonably strenuous exercise, two pints of bitter, light comfort food, an early night and everything will be better in the morning. It worked surprisingly well, right up to the time I hit the City, at which point exercise and early nights went straight out the window. The basic cure-all was then replaced by a more complex structure suggested by a savvy girlfriend of mine involving fresh night air, brown bread and running up and down the street (she had been a junior doctor, and sleep deprivation was a common factor in both our lives).

So when we got to Kyoto I was feeling a little low. Kyoto is beautiful (if you have never been to Kyoto, go to Kyoto (hi Jason!)). But to be honest, nearly six months of travel had been taking their toll. There comes a point at which constantly trying to work out where you are, how you are going to get there, how to read the strange script on the menu, what to eat and how to order it in mime / pidgin English become a little dull. On one level these difficulties are an intrinsic part of the cultural experience of travel, but their enjoyment very much depends on your mood. Standing in front of a queue of Japanese commuters trying to work out why the ticket barrier is steadfastly refusing to let you through can be either an interesting challenge or a bit of a chore (the answer is to insert all of your tickets for your complete journey at once, even if they are issued by different train companies – the machine will riffle through them and spit back out the ones you still need. Dead easy once you know, but deeply counterintuitive anywhere other than Japan).

No matter, thought I – just break out the classic cure-all: drink lots of water, head off for a run round Kyoto, eat a nice seasonal Kaiseki dinner in a good restaurant and spend a long night in a Western bed in our hotel.

I also tend to play myself my all-time favourite tune. The Cinematic Orchestra at their very finest.

And the run was lovely: seven miles round Kyoto, through the imperial park, out to the Eastern suburbs where the wooded hills come right down to the city’s edge, meander down the ancient Philosophers’ Path along one of the charming streams that are a feature of Japanese towns, navigate around a few gorgeous temples fringed by bright autumn foliage then cut back across the river through the shopping district and home. Well, back to the hotel anyway.

Part one complete, we then went out to a modern Kaiseki restaurant for ten courses of exquisitely sculpted seasonal cuisine, an elegant sufficiency of sake and a cab ride home, being honorifically bowed out of the restaurant not only by our own personal waitress but by the receptionist as well. It was, I think, our best meal in Japan and as such I am slightly hesitant to attribute the next 24 hours’ experiences to crushingly overwhelming food poisoning.

It was terrible. I haven’t felt so bad since a bruising introduction to chicken a la banana a few years ago (hello mate!). I won’t go into the fine details, other than to say that Lucy was utterly lovely, looked after me extremely well and I don’t know what I would have done without her.

One other (minor) upside: Japanese toilets truly are world beaters. If you are ever in the situation where you are deciding between going to the loo; being violently, noisily sick; or passing out on the floor I can heartily recommend the self-deodorizing Toto model with the heated seat. That said I would counsel against the interesting water spray features, particularly if you are staying in a hotel with wildly superheated hot water. Ouch.

36 hours later (most of which I spent asleep) I was largely mended and we were on our way. Next stop sumo wrestling and blowfish

And Now for Something a Little Different….

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From Kathmandu to Kyoto (via Hong Kong), within the space of 3 days.

Kyoto is just a little more refined than Kathmandu. Views are aesthetic; traffic controlled; traders polite; and toilets heated.

Our brains nearly melted.

Japan was actually a late addition to our itinerary – we went there on holiday a few years ago and absolutely loved it, but at least in the first itineration decided against re-visiting (we’ve basically not gone anywhere on this trip that we have both been to before). However, when we changed the itinerary a bit to fit in with leaving later in the year than we had planned, we had to knock some time off some of our earlier countries just due to weather etc. considerations, so we ended up with a “spare” 10 days which we thought could be filled rather nicely with a trip to see the fall foliage in Japan. Now I’ve spent quite some time over the past few years in the States trying to go fall foliage viewing (or “leaf peeping” as it’s rather brilliantly known over there) and have had little to no success – picture the two of us, having driven five hours up into Vermont, standing by a sorry looking faintly pink turning maple tree and frantically trying to persuade ourselves that this is what we’re here to see. No matter though – we love Japan anyway, and in particular we LOVE the food here, so we were extremely excited about it all, and had spent many a happy evening in slightly less sophisticated parts of the world booking our ryokans and salivating at the thought of all that raw fish (or indeed any fish – we’d been landlocked for so long we’d started to forget that you can eat finny things).

Did we see any foliage? OHHHHHHH YES. Finally we got our payday and boy was it worth waiting for. This being Japan, rather than the great displays of thousands of maples in the forest that you get in North America, maples are displayed individually against a background of lesser trees, usually in a famed garden or temple. People come to admire the specific trees – there’s special viewing points and any number of folk taking close up photos of particularly pretty foliage. There’s probably at least a dozen haikus being composed any time you visit a decent maple spot this time of year. Fortunately, having been to Japan last time at the cherry blossom time of year, we know the trick to being able to enjoy all this – get up early, be at the more famous sites at opening time and leave before the tour buses arrive. That way you get your lovely Zen experience, have a happy witter about the ephemerality of all things and compose your haiku without being elbowed out of the way by frail looking Japanese grannies posing for photos (cue cheesy grin and peace sign – we’re not sure why this is the pose de rigeur, but trust me, it is). AND then you get to feel all smug over your lunch time soba.

We had a wonderful couple of days in Kyoto: day one was a rainy day so quietish with a nice stroll in the covered market; day 2 we made up for it, visiting Ginka-kuji (which was a favourite from last time and managed to perhaps be even nicer this time with a gorgeous maple display), then a wander down the Philosopher’s Path stopping at Honen-in (quiet and lovely), Eikan-do (MAPLES!!!!), Nanzen-ji (least favourite) – all before lunch! James then retired hurt (ok, I may have been a little over ambitious), leaving me to head to another few temples in the afternoon, before joining him for a spectacular kai-seki dinner.

Day three unfortunately, James got sick – not sure if this was a reaction to the kai-seki the night before, or a delayed reaction to Hong Kong festivities, but anyway, it kept us both out of action for the next 36 hours or so – and allowed our hotel to rape and pillage us by charging rack rate for an additional night (to add insult, the hotel we should have been at has a 100% payment same day cancellation policy. Ouch. Definitely a contender for our most expensive day on our trip to date). He’s absolutely fine now though and rather excited about the extreme weight loss that he may well have experienced!

All of which left me feeling a little sad….I love Kyoto and we did have a wonderful time there, but there’s definitely some regret at having left the town on a slightly sour note; and without having seen quite a few of the more spectacular sights at this (absolutely beautiful) time of year.

Perfect excuse to come back here again maybe?