My Trip to Southeast Asia 2010

Sunday, January 31, 2010




SAW THIS GUY DRIVING ON THE SIDE OF THE HIGHWAY....THERE'S A MAN DRIVING A SMALL MOTORCYCLE UNDER THERE! IMPRESSIVE BIKE SKILLS.

I had a really enjoyable day today. I decided to spend my last day in Siem Reap travelling 50 km north of the city into the jungle to see a temple called Banteay Srei and then a hike into Kbal Spen also known as the river of 1000 lingas. The temple, Bantaey Srei, it is a 10th century temple dedicated to the god Shriva and in remarkable state of preservation. It is all carved out of pink sandstone and considered one of the finest carvings of the world. Every square inch is covered in extremely detailed 3 dimensional carvings. This was uncovered in the early 1900's and restoration started in 1924...it was the first temple restored by the process called anastylosis..this is were they document where everything belongs, take it entirely apart, lay a proper cement foundation and the put it all back together like a jigsaw puzzle...They had pictures of it there in it's original state and it was a mess....what a job that must have been.

2000 YEAR OLD AMAZING CARVINGS

Next, I went to Kbal Spen...a spectacular carved river bed deep in the jungle northeast of Angkor. It is only reachable through a 1500 meter hike up a mountain. The hike was so beautiful! I was surrounded by thick jungle growth complete with vines, huge boulders and the occasional peak out to stunning views. This lead me to a beautiful river bed carved with 1000's of lingas! Just what a single girl needs. Ha....well there were other carvings as well...all really cool to see under the water and on the rocks poking out of the river. I followed the river down and the carvings continued all the way to a really pretty waterfall. I took my shoes off and dipped my feet in to cool off...had I brought a bathing suit and towel I would have dived right it. It was a great escape from the noise of the city.

A LITTLE TARZAN ACTION.

STUNNING JUNGLE VIEW HALF WAY UP

LINGA'S EVERYWHERE

REWARD AT THE TOP...IF YOU DON'T COUNT THE LINGAS.

On the way back to town I stopped in at the Landmine museum. Large parts of rural Cambodia are strictly off limits, I even had to be very careful not to step off the well beaten path on my hike in the jungle to Kbar Spen. The Cambodian Landmine Relief Center and Museum in on a rural road between Bantreay Srei temple and Siem Reap. It was established by a man named Aki Ra. He was forced to be a child soldier of the Khmer rouge after his parents were killed by them in the mid 70's when he was just 5 years old. His duties as a soldier were to lay landmines and he spent years of his life laying 1000's of landmines all over Cambodia until he defected to the Vietnamese army. Since the mid-90's he has been using his skills he learned as a child soldier in a quest to clear his country of land mines. Cambodia is the most heavily landmined countries on earth, after 3 decades of war, and still has 6-7million estimated landmines and UXO(unexploded ordinances) that continue to cause untold devastation. Landmines are extremely inhumane weapons of war designed to maim and not kill. They do, however, kill an estimated 35 people a month and there are over 40 000 amputees in Cambodia making it the highest per capita in the world...to put that in perspective that's 1 in every 275 people! The landmines don't only cause death and dismembership but there is a huge problem with poverty and starvation in Cambodia mostly due to large amounts of rural farmable land completely unusable anymore as it is littered with landmines. The country is so poor there is little support for the victims once they are injured. You frequently see landmine victims with their missing limbs and burned faces begging in the streets. They are often children. A single landmine costs a measly $1 to lay but costs as much as $1000 by removal agency's to safely destroy and clear...at the current rate of progress it will take at least 100 years to clear all of Cambodia's landmines. A treaty to ban landmines was signed by over 100 countries but to this day countries like the USA, China and Russia refuse to sign and are still big producers.

Saturday, January 30,2010


SMILING BUDDHA I FOUND POKING OUT BEHIND A TREE ROOT.

MAJESTIC SOUTH GATE OF ANGKOR THOM TEMPLE COMPLEX

JUNGLE GROWTH IN THE PREAH KHAN TEMPLE

SIGN I FOUND HANGING ABOUT THE TOILET IN A BATHROOM STALL

VIEWS FROM THE BACK OF MY TUK TUK

IN FRONT OF ANGKOR WAT

JUNGLE INFESTED TA PROHM

ROOTS INTERTWINED IN BETWEEN THE STONES

MOVE OVER LAURA CROFT.....


I went back into the jungle today to visit the rest of the temples. Ta Prohm was the coolest of the bunch. You'll recognise it as the backdrop from the movie Tomb Raider. This temple is interesting because unlike all the other temples that were cleared of most of the invading jungle growth in the preservation efforts this one was purposely left the way it was found, other than clearing out what was necessary to prevent further damage to the temple. It is a tangled mass of tree and stone intertwined...the jungles are in one way breaking apart the stones and toppling the temple but also the tendrils of the jungle are holding things up. It's been invaded by 200 year old Spog trees and strangler figs....these trees can grow on rock or on top of other trees. It's incredibly atmospheric and eerie. You can see things the way things must have looked for those early explorers that first came across these temples shrouded in jungle growth....the complete disrepair makes it really beautiful and fun to explore.

I had my weirdest "fellow tourist" experience here....as a single traveler you really depend on other people to take a few photos for you so you can be in them. No where I have ever been in my life has any one ever responded to my request for them to take quick photo of me with anything other than graciousness...today there was this really cool area of Ta Prohm where the roots fell over a wall like a waterfall and you could climb in and get a great shot so I wait for some one to come up that isn't in a large tour group. I asked him if he would mind taking a photo of me in the roots and he looks at me, glares and gives me the rudest NO I have ever heard and struts away to spend the next 10 minutes with his girlfriend right beside me taking the same shot of each other. I was so insulted I couldn't believe anyone would be so cruel and mean! I was obviously alone, how else can I get that photo of myself?! What's he doing that he can't spent 10 seconds taking a photo for someone??? What a horrible person...it's sat with me all day I was just so hurt by it. So I waited around for a bit hoping someone else would come and never did find someone to take the photo. I hope he gets malaria. I expect karma to take it's revenge. There. Vent over.

I had a lazy late afternoon reading and relaxing by the pool complete with papaya shake and really yummy chicken sandwich(I know... I was craving some American food) and now I am going to have a bubble bath on my patio before bed!! ha ha.... My favourite feature here.

Friday, January 29, 2010








I had a busy couple days traveling from Chiang Mai to Siem Reap. Wednesday I took a cooking course in Chiang Mai. It was a lot of fun. It was run by Nancy and her family at their house just outside of Chiang Mai. I was lucky that the class size was small (only 5 people) so lot's of individual attention and we made tons of great Thai food...I was SO full after 6 courses. After the cooking class I made a mad dash from the hotel to the post office before it closed at 430pm and shipped a box of stuff home....I did a little shopping and didn't want to carry it with me for the next 6 weeks. Then off to the train station for my night train to Bangkok. The Chaing Mai train station is really nice and the train was good. I have always loved sleeping on trains, I sleep so well with the rocking motion of the train. The train was 2 hours late into Bangkok so I had to make a mad dash for the airport to take my 1130am flight into Siem Reap, Cambodia.

Thursday, January 28,2010

WHEN THEY SAID TO ADD YOUR HOT PEPPERS I CHOSE THE SMALLEST MOST MINISCULE ON IN THE BOWL! NOT A SPICY FOOD LOVER!!

MY COOKING CLASSMATES

Tuesday, January 26,2010


Me and 6 month old baby Chang Yim



Today I spent an amazing day at the Elephant Nature Park. It's a 2000acre healing, rehabilitation and rescue sanctuary for Asian Elephants rescued from years of abuse in the streets begging, logging or tourist trekking to live out their days in freedom. It is about 60km north of Chiang Mai. I had such a fun day and it was so incredible to feed and bathe in the river with them and interact with the cute, playful 6 month old babies.

Me and Mae Perm She is over 80!

F

Feeding Lilly, an e-logging elephant. Drugged with amphetamines to the verge of death so she could work around the clock... she came to the park drug addicted.

Giving Jokia a bath! Jokia was a logging elephant. Forced to work up to the minute she gave birth she delivered her calf on the top of a hill. It rolled down and she was not allowed to go find it. It died and she refused to work after that. They stabbed her eyes out with slingshots and arrows to force her to work. She is completely blind. Mae Bern immediately adopted her when she arrived and stays by her side at all time to help her get around.

The Sanctuary's founder, Lek Chailert, is a truly inspirational woman. She has dedicated her life to saving Asian elephants and along with a staff of veterinarians and volunteers they treat the emotional and physical scars left on these poor abused animals. Her efforts have been recognised world wide and she is the recipient of many awards. She also runs a medical clinic that travels to remote villages and treats the working elephants and vaccinates the dogs for rabies in her project Jumbo Express. If that's not enough, she fiercely defends the rain forests that are quickly being destroyed by deforestation. Along with nearby monks they disperse into the forests and tie monk blessed cloth around the trees that prevent the villagers from cutting them down...lest they have a life of bad luck. You can see the orange cloth wrapped trees lining the roads out of the park. She is something of a celebrity in these parts but has also received many death threats and once had one of the baby elephants poisoned.

Take a few minute to go to the parks website and read some of the stories about the harsh lives of some of the park's rescued elephants. They are heart breaking.

In Thailand, it is estimated that 3800 of it's 5000 endangered Asian elephants are in private hands...mostly used in tourist camps forced to give trekking rides to tourists and forced to beg on the streets of the big cities where tourists pay to feed them and take a photo. They are considered livestock and have no rights. The penalty for mistreatment is pennies and not enforced. For a culture that reveres the elephant, worships it and considers it the national animal they do not treat them very well and the numbers are rapidly decreasing. At the beginning of the 20th century there were 100 000 elephants, 10 years ago there were 25000 and now less than 5000....

They are "trained" through torture and extreme abuse. Baby elephants are traumatically torn from their mother's as young as 4 and tortured mercilessly into submission. They are forced into a cage just big enough to hold them and bound by their feet as they scream. Then they are deprived of food, water, sleep and tortured by merciless beatings, being poked repeatedly with sharp metal hooks and shocked with electricity. This lasts for as much as 7 days until they feel it's spirit is broken. Elephants "off duty" are often chained up on short leashes, often in the hot sun, and forced to breed only to have their baby ripped from them to undergo the same torture. Every captive elephant in Asia endures this sadistic ritual and tourists don't realize that the spectacles they're participating is the product of severe animal abuse. The heavy wooded seats you see on their back for tourists to sit on are sitting on the weakest part of the elephants back, this causes pain and eventually debilitating back injuries.

Simply google "phajaan" to read the gory details. Search it on You Tube...if you dare. We watched a documentary at the sanctuary and the last 10 minutes show a young baby elephant going through this, it was extraordinarily disturbing.

NEVER PARTICIPATE IN ELEPHANT TREKKING OR RIDING, ELEPHANT TOURIST SHOWS THAT MAKE THEM PREFORM TRICKS OR GIVE MONEY TO THE MEN USING THEM AS BEGGARS ON THE CITY STREETS.

My day at the elephant nature park involved volunteering with the feeding, learning about the elephants/ hearing their stories and walking along with the elephants to the river to bathe with them...No riding, No tricks. The tourism dollar that comes to the park pays for food, medical care, and goes toward buying abused distressed elephants from their "owners" to live in the park... The sanctuary costs Lek over $250 000 a year to run and is run entirely on donations.

ELEPHANT TRIVIA

Elephants are known to be intelligent, emotional animals that have extremely strong social bonds between mother's and offspring and complex social bond with each other.

They are a lot like humans in that they live 70 years or more, reach puberty at 13 or 14, can have babies until age 50, have single calf's.

Elephant cry when they are sad...and can laugh and smile.

Elephants are extremely smart, putting them on par with other sophisticated animals like dolphins. Like primates, they play with objects found in their environment, use sticks to scratch themselves or shoo away flies and elephants have used large rocks to short circuit electrical fences.

When a member of the herd dies, the other elephants will gather around and touch the body with their trunks, they will watch over the body for days making mournful sounds with their trunks and only leave for food...they will show the same act of mourning for humans too. You've heard the line "elephants never forget"... it's true, elephants have an extraordinary memory. When migrating over hundreds of miles of grassland they will collectively pause over the spot where a family member died and even visit the graves regularly and make sounds of mourning. If there are bones they will all touch skull bone with their trunks. Most animals only show a passing interest in dead remains of their own species. Read this story about a death at the sanctuary.

They communicate both verbally and with body language, they can hear lower frequencies than humans and sense vibrations from miles away with their hypersensitive feet that they can send and receive messages with.

The strongest case for elephant intelligence is that they recognise themselves in the mirror indicating that they have a high sense of self awareness, an elephant with a smudge on it's face will try to wipe it off. Like humans, elephant brains are born at 35% of their adult weight and grow over 10 years giving them lots of time to acquire knowledge, they depend more on learned behaviour than instinctual behaviour for survival...making elephants and humans unique in the animal kingdom.

They live in tight family units run by an older female. The men leave the herd at age 14 or 15.

The 33 elephant herd at the sanctuary has split off into 5 different family groups. There are elephants that are best friends and spend all their time together, and adoptive mothers and aunties for the orphaned calf's.

Feeling charitable? Click HERE to donate to Lek's amazing rescue sanctuary. $10.00 buys food for one elephant for 1/2 a day, and $25.00 buys enough medicine to treat an abused or sick elephant for 2 visits.

Monday, January 25,2010




I'm having a lovely time in Chiang Mai. It's a great city! I'm staying in the old town which is in the center of the city surrounded by a wall and a really pretty moat! It's easily walkable with lots of Temples poking out above the houses, yummy food and some pretty good shopping.