North Korea may have Pyongyang, but South Korea's got Seoul

Considering that it’s home to 25 million people, it should come as no surprise that Seoul’s initial impression is, unequivocally, one of size.  Sheer, unabashed size and scale.  This isn’t a metropolis, it’s a megalopolis.  I never thought anything could make Shanghai feel small, but I think I’ve found it (I’ve never been to Tokyo, which people say has the same effect).  New York, Delhi, London, Beijing, LA, and Paris are all amateurs when it comes to size, apparently, and coming straight from comparatively tiny Phnom Penh further exacerbated Seoul’s megalopolisness.

I made the rookie mistake of falling asleep on the shuttle into the city after telling the driver t drop me off at the Ritz, where I was very much not staying but served as the closest stop to the Gangnam Artnouveau City Hotel.  I awoke with a start as we pulled up to some other luxury hotel whose name escapes me, the Buena Vista Social Club still playing on my shuffling iTunes, squinted out the window up at the canyon of gleaming skyscrapers that had materialized in my sleep, and hoped sincerely that we hadn’t already passed the Ritz (we hadn’t).  The overnight flight had not been the most restful, as I had drifted in and out of consciousness, struggling both to wake up and sleep, and felt worryingly warm the whole time—I run cold anyway, and aren’t flights supposed to be freezing?—which made me wonder if I hadn’t managed to get out of Southeast Asia without some sort of tropical illness.  So the plush shuttle, in all of its 90-minute air-conditioned glory, was the perfect place for a nap, but then I found myself and my backpack incongruously on the doorstep of the Ritz-Carlton having no real idea of how I’d gotten there.

Side note: let me tell you, it sounds dumb but there’s a definite embarrassment factor to having an impeccably turned out five-star doorman smile at you, take your filthy rucksack in his white-gloved hand, and ask, “Checking in, miss?” when you are in reality staying someplace else.  As I explained this to the three doormen and concierge who gathered around me, I tried my best to remain dignified in my baggy batik print pants and douchebag backpacker bracelets and give the impression that normally I didn’t dress like this or carry my things in this somewhat disgusting receptacle.  Luckily they took it in stride and packed me off into a taxi for an easy 15-minute ride to my real hotel, which, while not the Ritz, was no slouch either.

After washing my hair, brewing a few cups of barley tea, and fully waking up, I brought up Google maps and tried to get my bearings.  At this point, you may be wondering, Are you some kind of directionally-challenged idiot?  Did you run into doorways before you had a smartphone? but no, I’m not—you see, Seoul has very few actual street names, which complicates things a bit, and the idea of anything being on a grid here is laughable.  Instead of street names you have neighborhood names, and the bulk of the streets simply reflect in which neighborhood they happen to lie.  Gangnam, where I was staying (couldn’t resist), for example, is Gangnam-gu when referring to the neighborhood, while there are several streets called Gangnam-daero.  It can be very conducive to getting lost.

What I quickly realized, however, is that the phenomenal metro makes up for this in a big way.  It is Seoulian in scale of course, but so clearly laid out, with everyone written and announced in Korean, Chinese, and English, that getting pretty much anywhere, even north of the river and all the way across the city, pretty simple.  Throw in being cheap (less than $1.50 a trip), frequent, clean, and free of crazy people and you essentially have the anti-BART.  It was also weirdly uncrowded, even at rush hour, which struck me as pleasantly odd and remarkable in a city of 25 million.  My commute from Clapham Common to Victoria, by contrast, involved me waiting in a queue five deep just to squeeze my way onto a train that packed so tightly that the 25-minute ride was basically soft core porn.  It makes me wonder how Seoul pulls it off.

As part of my attempt to absorb a bit of culture in my flying visit, my destination was Gyeongbokgung, which is the oldest and largest of the dynastic palaces clustered in the city’s north and conveniently has its very own metro stop (the subway system isn’t idiot-proof, but I have to admit that getting from Gangnam to Gyeonbokgung comes pretty close).  Considering that it’s a major sight in the heart of the city, I was bracing myself for throngs of visitors, something on par with the hordes that descend upon Tiananmen Square, and getting ready to shield my face from the spokes of eye-level parasols that are the hallmark of Asian tourist attractions in sunny weather.  I was surprised to find that the walk to the metro’s palace exit was deserted and silent, so much so that I wondered if the whole thing was closed for August or something.  But no, I stepped blinking into the blazing sun and was greeted by all of three other tourists making their way through the gate, so I trekked across the main courtyard—a decent trek—and paid my way in.

There were a few tour groups, sure, but the sheer size of the palace grounds, along with the green bulk of Mt. Bukhansan rising up behind the north walls, lent it a kind of lazy, quiet peace that would seem impossible to come by in such a massive city.  Rather than the urban din of cars, sirens, music, or even voices, it was the cicadas who hummed away, and with the gracious clusters of tall, leafy trees stretching out awnings of shade over the lily ponds and footpaths, it was easy to imagine what it must have been like to be a Korean royal of yore in the summertime.  The living quarters, banquet hall, library, and temples were all cool and pleasantly dim inside, a respite from the fresh, robust heat, which, coupled with an army of servants, lavish furnishings, and unmatched wealth and power, must have made royal life very good indeed.

Hyangwonjeong, a lovely little island pavilion that exists in the middle of a ginormous city

I spent a solid couple of hours wandering around the complex, which really does just go on and on and on, and eventually, sun-bleached and still underslept, retreated back to the other universe that is Gangnam.  I opted to follow the locals and get myself an iced coffee to fortify myself so I could go shopping and get a manicure, the whole experience of which couldn’t have been more different from the serenity of the palace grounds.  Neon, flashing 50-foot billboards, k-pop blasting from unseen speakers, plastic surgery clinics every 15 feet, everything everywhere packed and buzzing with tens of thousands of fashionably-attired people worshiping at the altar of cool—that is Gangnam at night, and it is pretty great (maybe minus the plastic surgery clinics).  My little jaunt up to Gyeonbokgung had softened the city, humanized it someone, so that by the time I came back to Gangnam, I no longer felt turned around and dizzied amidst a forest of skyscrapers and nearly palpable capitalism.  It's nice knowing that, even in a megalopolis that plays host to more human beings than I can wrap my head around, it’s possible to stretch out on a bit of grass, look up at the sky, and feel like you’re in the same mountain town that Seoul has always been.

Plus, Incheon Airport is probably the best airport I have ever flown in and out of, so I would probably go back just for that.  Free wifi, movie screenings, and massage chairs?  Seoul, consider me officially won over.

Rielizations of wallet and of self

The currency situation here is somewhat unusual in that the country is 95% dollarized.  Most everything is quoted in dollars, not just the hotels and restaurants catering to tourists—everything from 600-acre plots of land to plates of curry are priced in USD.  The only things that really can’t be paid for in dollars are those that cost less than $1, in which case you’re looking at payment in riels.  To convolute things slightly further, the riel is still very much alive and in use in denominations up to 20,000 (the largest I’ve seen and the equivalent of $5), so it’s certainly possible to use it for amounts more than that; in the local marketplaces, some vendors even prefer seem to prefer riels.  Oh, and the cashpoints?  Most of them dispense USD, but the ANZ Bank ones will ask you which currency you’d like to withdraw.

It is entirely possible for tourists to spend their entire stay dealing in dollars, and I at least started out with a wallet full of American currency, which is definitely preferred for larger amounts like my 3-day pass to Angkor and horseback trek out to Wat Athvea.  Once I got into the heart of Siem Reap’s local marketplace, though, with its glistening sides of beef slapped on wooden tables down one side and rainbow of bagged spices down the other, it was riels all the way.  Same with the fruit vendors from whom I bought cut-up green mangos sprinkled with chili and lime, same with the kids using machetes to hack off the top of baby green coconuts and proffering straws, same with the little corner store where I bought a pack of tissues.  At the more local dining establishments, which tend to be my go-to, my change came half in dollars, half in riels, and at one point I became aware that my wallet had been substantially rielized.  By the time I got to Sihanoukville, I had enough to pay for my guesthouse completely in riels, though, to be fair, the bill came to 24,000, the equivalent of a whopping $6.

The evolution of my billfold has kind of mirrored the evolution of my entire trip, to be frank.  The place I stayed in Siem Reap was a luxury, a lush, calm, and quietly posh retreat, and having my own tuk-tuk driver for three days to show me around the ruins was a lovely convenience.  The private car to Phnom Penh, too, was a luxury, and my hotel in the city was also beautifully done and wouldn’t have looked out of place in Rome or Paris.

After Phnom Penh, though, there was a noticeable change, very much without my planning it that way.  The plan was to take a bus at 8am for the four-hour trip, which really isn’t that long, and I figured I would have more than enough of a time cushion to book my ticket at 1pm for a 2pm ferry out to the island of Koh Rong.  (I said I would do the long-distance bus thing again, didn’t I?)  The driver of said bus, unfortunately, seemed to have zero sense of urgency and was more concerned with taking frequent smoke breaks than getting us to Sihanoukville, so after leaving 20 minutes late we rolled into the station at 1.30.  I knew I was pushing it already, so when the first guy approached my backpack and me asking if I wanted to go somewhere, I said, “YES!  Koh Rong Dive Center, please.”  He pulled out a moto, which, given the weight and bulk of the pack, wouldn’t have been my first choice (a tuk-tuk seemed the more stable option), but whatever.  He hauled it up so it perched in front of him between the handlebars, swung aboard, and gave me a hand arranging myself on the back.  “Oh, and we need to go fast,” I told him.

Well, he took that to heart.  As we pelted down one of Sihanoukville’s many hills and whipped past cars and tuk-tuks, my inclination was that I would be much less likely to go flying off when we rounded the next corner if I grabbed the driver around the middle, like a chimpanzee, but I can only imagine how that would look to Cambodian onlookers and wasn’t particularly keen on embracing a stranger anyway.  Instead I gripped the side of the seat with one hand and steadied my handbag with the other, ensuring that at least my laptop wouldn’t make a flying exit (I did not fancy having to explain that to the company’s IT department).   I thought briefly of my smooth ride in the back of the car down to Phnom Penh, which, from the back of the mud-spattered moto, seemed a lifetime ago.

We skidded to a halt at the dive center at 1.45, where I relayed the story of my incompetent bus driver and made an impassioned plea to get on the 2pm boat to no avail.  “Do you know another place that runs ferries out, maybe later?” I asked my speed demon moto driver, who nodded, and we were back on the road.  After a loop of the Gold Lion traffic circle and a quick left turn, we were at another little travel shop, which, unfortunately, had also sent out its last ferry for the day.

An extremely tan and bony American woman came out to explain, “The waves are really high at this hour.  Like mountains.”  She widened her eyes and made mountain shapes with her hands as she said this.  She may or may not have been high.  “So the thing to do would be get the 8 o’ clock boat tomorrow morning.”  She gestured around at the basic but functional guesthouse behind her and shrugged.  “Just stay here for the night.  Do you want a beer?”

And I did stay, paying less than what I would for a trip on BART for a room of my own and cold running water.

(I declined the beer, though, in favor of a few pina coladas down on Otres Beach later that afternoon.  Another story for another time.)

From there, I’ve gone straight back down the dirty backpacker path.  I hopped an early ferry to Koh Rong, which makes the experience sound much quicker and easier than it actually was, as we were sailing straight into a morning storm (ah, rainy season rears its head).  The boat itself was functional and admittedly more comfortable than it looked, with its hard wooden benches on the bottom deck and its paint peeling off.  The top bit had plastic curtains that we were able to roll down to shield against the rain along with a mess of faded cushions on the floor, so I spent the ride supine, listening to music and rather enjoying the four-foot swells.  Luxurious, however, it was not.

Here on Koh Rong, I’m staying in a bungalow up in the trees, overlooking the village of Koh Tach and the wide crescent of white sand, just me, a mosquito net, a bucket shower, and electricity until 10pm (the entire island runs off a generator, which should give you some idea of how few people there are here).  If I look down I can see the jungle floor through the gaps in my floorboards and when I listen very carefully I can hear the footsteps of the geckos in the nooks of the palapa roof.  It is nothing more or less than I really need out here on this most storybook of islands.

Who needs maid service in a place like this?

In this way, I guess, I haven’t really changed that much since I was eighteen.  I’ve got my same backpack, which has made quite the tour with me at this point, same flip flops, same bikini even, and along with all that, my same fondness for unidentifiable street food and the rustic sort of lull that comes with traveling the developing world.  Sitting in the car from Siem Reap, I think that a small part of me was worried that I was getting too old to ever experience this, or rather, actually enjoy experiencing this, again.  But I’ve found myself here in my very unattractive but comfortable Indonesian fisherman pants, wandering the village barefoot without a stitch of makeup, hair tied up in an unkempt chignon and reasoning that a dip in the ocean is just as good as a shower.  Sure enough, I’ve accumulated the wristwear that seems to inevitably find its way onto your body when you backpack, in this case a lime-green woven bracelet from one of the incense women at Angkor (“long life,” remember) and a brown-checkered ropey thing that a little girl gave me when I bought a coconut from her family’s stand.

And so, as the dollars in my wallet have turned to riels, I’ve turned from a clean and somewhat respectable-looking traveler to the sort of bronzed but kind of grimy-looking douchebag backpacker that people don’t like standing next to in the airport.

Compared to a lot of the Westerners here, though, I’m not actually that grimy (I feel that this is important to point out), and I’ll confess that I booked the nicest resort in Sihanoukville for my last night in Cambodia (the five-star experiences comes pretty cheap here).  A hot shower, a massage, and a cup of coffee and I’ll look much less feral for my flight to Seoul.

Still, it’s nice to know that in this way, at least, I’m far from being “too old,” which is something that a lot of us twentysomethings seem to fear, probably irrationally.  I may not be able to throw back shots and stay out as late as I once did, and yes, I actually enjoy things like furniture shopping and Burgundian wine now, but I’ve got a few more years of chicken buses and bucket showers left yet.  Here’s to being a dirty backpacker.

For your viewing pleasure, see below for some photos of the dirty backpacking days of yore.

In Tunisia, instead of taking the bus from Douz to Djerba, we splurged and hired this guy and his car.

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The buds on a long-distance coach ride up the west coast of Ireland.  This was the trip where at one point we got so cold and hungry that the three of us devoured a roast chicken on a bench in about two minutes.

Harem pants?  Check.  Dirty cloth bag?  Check.  Clearly unwashed hair?  Check.  Enthusiastic but not entirely appropriate adoption of local culture?  Check.  (In my defense, the bindi was a gift.)     

   

Getting your kicks on National Route 6 (just avoid the livestock)

When it came time to make the trek across the country from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh, I had two options.  I could either get a tuk-tuk to the main bus station and sit through a cramped six hours of wailing infants and Khmer soap operas played on the little main screen at shattering volumes, or I could hire a driver.

This sounds decadent, I know, but I just found the idea of getting in a nicely maintained car, zipping down to the capital in a mere four hours, being able to stop and buy fruit or water at my leisure, and then getting deposited at my hotel in Phnom Penh a lot more appealing.  I’ve done the long-distance bus thing before, believe me, and I’ll do it again, just not this time. 

I offer you one such example: at age seventeen I found myself squeezed three people to a two-person seat on a glorified school bus run by a Tanzanian bus company with a record for killing at least two people a year, windows rolled down to get some kind of a breeze in there and red dust pouring in as a result.  The driver, when he stepped on board, looked to be about my age, with the added bonus of having extremely red eyes, and he went on to keep his hand to the horn for most of the next eight hours over what I can assure you is not the best-paved road on earth.  The bathroom on our first stop was a trough in a concrete box with no windows, the smell so exquisitely awful that to this day I can remember it in perfect detail, and the bathroom on our second stop was literally a ditch on the side of the road where Elizabeth, the mother of my host family, held up a kanga to shield me from the eyes of Tanzanians who were apparently curious to see what a white girl squatting in the dirt looked like.  I also spent most of the ride staring back at a tiny girl of about three who would not take her eyes off me, or off my pale skin and ridiculous-looking hair, while behind me, another slightly older child would reach out tentatively to brush the ends of my ponytail, no doubt imagining that he was being subtle.  There were animals strapped to the roof and hawkers shoving groundnuts and oranges at us through the windows every time we came to a stop and utter bedlam when we finally pulled into the station in Kariakoo, a neighborhood in Dar that is, shall we say, definitely not on the tourist radar.

So, yes, I am quite familiar with long-distance developing world bus travel, thanks.

Young, tough 'n dirty backpacking days.  Long-distance buses were definitely ridden.

But, given that I’m an adult and I’m on vacation and I wanted those two extra hours in Phnom Penh, I opted for the car.

It was definitely quieter and more comfortable than the bus; however, it become obvious very fast that my chauffeur was driving as if his pay were directly linked to how quickly he got me to the capital.  Our first very brief stop was just outside Siem Reap to fill up the car and buy water, where he bought three cans of the Cambodian equivalent of Red Bull, finishing the first in one fast, violent chug before stepping back behind the wheel.  I’m not sure if it was this or some other substance that had him twitching his head, sniffling, and blinking rapidly, but the guy was turned up.  Nice, of course, courteous, and very turned up.  For a while I watched through the windshield, admiring and fascinated by his lighting-quick reflexes and weaving manoeuvers, as we ducked in and out of our lane, skirting massive shipping trucks, fellow sedans, tuk-tuks, motos, bicycles, pedestrians, and herds of cows with every flick of the turn signal, and then settled into the backseat, assured that he knew what he was doing.

The thing about National Route 6 is that, while it may be the most important route in the country, running between Phnom Penh and Siem Reap and then on to the Thai border, it’s a stretch to even call it a two-lane road.  There is a ribbon of asphalt wide enough for two mid-sized cars, maybe two Range Rovers at a stretch, to drive next to each other, wide shoulders of red dirt, and nothing in the way of a dividing line down the middle.  There are also a lot of other things on National Route 6 apart from cars, i.e. the aforementioned tuk-tuks, motos, bicycles, pedestrians, and livestock, and of course there isn’t really space for them to be on the paved bit along with the cars.  Instead of dropping off to the right, onto the red dirt, they tend to stay put, leaving the passing up to the car or truck, while at the same time everyone in a car is trying to pass the slow drivers.  This turns the middle part of the asphalt into a free-for-all, an anarchic game of chicken.

When you look at a map, you see that National Route 6 runs through one or two towns and a handful of villages.  What the little black dots don’t show is that it literally runs right through the middle of each of them, and the central market is set up so that the stalls are maybe two feet from the edge of the road.  This was a source of frustration for my driver, who would gun the engine to 95 in the hopes of passing the sputtering tuk-tuk in front of us before we hit the oncoming cement truck and before we got to the village, realize at the last minute that the tuk-tuk wasn’t going to be able to pull off to the side, and slam on the brakes.

The other thing about National Route 6 is that it’s not entirely paved.  Most of it is, to be fair, and pleasantly pothole-free, but there were a few occasions on which I started bouncing around and looked outside to see that we were driving over dirt or gravel.  It’s probably worth mentioning that Cambodia doesn’t have any traffic signals, either.  Not in Phnom Penh, not in Siem Reap, not anywhere (even Tanzania has one or two).  Both of those—the lack of paving and the lack of stoplights—should give you an idea of where Cambodia is developmentally, glossy Siem Reap spas and all.  (Edit: I feel really stupid for this, but there are actually traffic signals in Phnom Penh.  I just didn't fully absorb it because no one pays any attention to them.  But they're there, at least.)

As for horn etiquette, Cambodia uses a different system than the West.  My driver preferred to use it for telling people to get out of the way, thanking them for getting out of the way, and scaring animals off the road.  Others appeared to use it as a turn signal.  So it is indeed different, but I’m not wholly sure of the actual rules.

By the time we pulled up to the Blue Lime hotel in Phnom Penh, I felt as though I had gotten an interesting (and comfortable) look into Cambodian long-distance driving.  When you’re in a bus, you don’t get that same driver’s-eye view, and you don’t get the adrenaline rush of watching an ongoing truck full of chickens approaching at full speed.  Plus  I had those two extra hours to enjoy the afternoon walking through the city’s leafy, genteel streets.  I thanked my driver, who smiled, sniffled, and waved at me before getting back into his car and gunning it to 60 miles an hour down the narrow alley.

Oh, no, Tarquin, I can't come shopping on the Kings Road today...yah, because I'm literally in Cambodia

I sincerely hope that the reference in the title is understood and appreciated, but for those in the dark, google "gap yah" and all will be clear.  Greetings from Siem Reap, Cambodia, about 150 miles from the capital Phnom Penh, 200 miles from Bangkok, and a billion sweet miles from San Francisco.  It took over 20 hours to get here, door to door, but it was worth it, because even before I took the general delight that is Cambodia into account, it hit me that this was the first time that I have really and fully been able to not think about work in God knows how long.  I still have my phone, which connects to wifi when it can (the little bastard is trying its hardest, it seems), and I’ll confess that I brought my work laptop instead of my Mac because it’s insured against things like theft and I presume sand, so I did open up one email that said something or other about one of our key investors worsening pricing in a fairly major way.  I can’t recall the details, though, and can’t bring myself to care all that much for now, so again—20+ hours well spent.  A 15-hour time difference (14 in the summer) and the languorous tropical wet season will have that effect.

Arriving here at around 11pm, it was pitch-dark upon landing and driving to my hotel.  Cambodia gets lumped in with Thailand a lot of the time, but Bangkok this is not.  The airport is little more than a large airstrip with a visa processing office, and outside of the hotels catering to Angkor tourists, there isn’t much in the way of electric lights blazing at that hour.  There are night markets, local restaurants open late, some tuk-tuks scooting around, a few bars that fill up with tourists buzzing for a drink after a full day at the temples, but at its heart, Siem Reap is still a provincial town that just happens to lie within spitting distance of one of the most spectacular ruined cities in the world.  Heading in from the airport, the air had the unchanging soft and heavy feeling characteristic of the tropics, and I could smell the wood-burning fires straight off the bat.  This, along with the red dirt road illuminated by the headlights, the breedless dogs darting around, the sprawling and dilapidated houses being slowly taken over by climbing vines and tall grass, and the humming of a million cicadas and frogs, all made for a very comforting late-night arrival.  I love the desert and the mountains and the cosmopolitan rush of a city like Shanghai, but the tropical countries are, in a word, my bag.

The draw here is, of course, Angkor, whose direct and utilitarian Khmer translation of “Capital City” reflects its status as the seat of the Khmer Empire from the 9^th to the 15^th centuries.  Most people know Angkor Wat and whatever else was used in Tomb Raider (I don’t know, because shockingly I didn’t see it), but it really is or was an entire city, with the government having cordoned off over 400 square kilometres of structures in varying states of restoration and decay.  Trying to see all of Angkor in three days would be something like trying to see all of Paris in three days, e.g. impossible.

From the top of Baphuon, which, believe me, is a decent climb when it's 95 degrees and 95% humidity outside.

“Cordoned off” is a rough approximation, though.  The entire city is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and teams from India and Japan are restoring a number of the structures, but it’s also home to any number of villages, some of which have actually been there since Angkor fell.  So Angkor is leading this weirdly layered existence—the cracking stones of the god-kings, relics of a time very much dead and gone; the villagers farming rice, selling cold drinks, and cutting hair in the shade of the banyan trees; and then, somewhere in between the two, the saffron-robed monks texting on their smartphones, the wizened old ladies by shrines set up in front of the remaining Buddha statues selling incense for a thousand riel and promising “long life,” and the children splashing and shrieking in the same moats that served as a defense against Ayutthaya thousands of years ago.  The result is to make Angkor feel simultaneously decaying and living.

To that effect, once you pay your entrance fee, you pretty much have your run of the ruins apart from a few blocked-off areas, and right now, with it being the rainy season, there just aren’t that many people.  It’s entirely possible to find yourself climbing up the side of a moss-covered ruin beneath a half-cleared thicket of trees and vines in complete isolation, save for a cackling bird or two.  On the more minor structures, there are no ropes or rails or stairs, so it’s a matter of hitching your bag over your shoulder, finding a handhold or two, and praying that your feet don’t slip on sandstone that’s endured a thousand years of extreme humidity.  Landmines also pose a legitimate risk once you really get off the beaten track.  For anyone who’s ever harbored a fantasy of stumbling across an overgrown lost city decaying, unbeknownst to the Western world, deep in the jungle, Angkor pushes all the buttons.  One can only imagine what it was like for the first French missionaries to come across it (Angkor, by the way, was never technically “lost”; even after the empire fell, the Khmers were always well aware of its existence and location and continued to worship at the temples) and see these massive structures rising out of the thick of the trees.

The ruins, apart from being expansive, are spectacular.  Rounding the corner of the moat and seeing the gates of Angkor for the first time is so exhilarating that it hardly seems real.  There are no truly great words for that first impact of the dense greens of the forest and the water, the towering palms and banyans, and the storm-grey stone that still exudes this extraordinary sense of power and size, all anchored firmly here long ago and holding court in this heavy air all through Cambodia’s dark ages, French colonialism, Japanese occupation, the civil war, and the Khmer Rouge.  The details on the walls, on every column, every terrace, every tower, still visible after a thousand years and the encroaching jungle and the damage from the war’s artillery, are incredible.  Only a self-proclaimed god-king could order up something like these temples, and indeed, Angkor Wat took about thirty years to complete (thirty years of what appears to be extremely painstaking labor...ugh).

Phinamakeas, one of my favorite temples not just because it's totally feral-looking and again, empty, but because it has an awesome name.

And then there are the little things, small things that pale next to the aged majesty of the city itself, things that I would describe as unexpectedly delightful, even though using the word “delightful” when I’m not being sarcastic makes me feel like somebody’s great aunt.  No one tells you, for instance, that Angkor is completely aflutter with dragonflies and butterflies the size of your palm, circling the towers bedecked the stone faces of long-dead kings and alighting on the moss-covered balustrades like tiny little courtesans.  They’re absolutely everywhere, not buzzing around your ears to be swatted away, not, of course, biting you, just there, a million unpaid street performers.

 No one tells you about the smell, either.  The temples, at least the ones on the main path, are all infused with this lovely fusion of the wet, earthy smell of the forest outside and the light perfume of incense quietly smoking away in front of the remaining Buddha statues.  Lest that bring to mind the cloying heaviness of incense burned inside a church or a stoner’s bedroom, it is the farthest thing from overpowering.  It is the kind of subtlety that I associate with saffron—quite unlike anything else, but delicate enough that it’s hard to put your finger on it exactly.

No one tells you how strongly you can feel that the temples are places of sanctuary, either.  Stepping inside the darkness of the grey stone halls and chambers, the powerful heat outside is quelled to something almost cool, and the noises of the forest, any footsteps, and any comments from other visitors are silenced.  For me, it brought on a rush of childhood memories of escaping the summer heat in Europe by ducking into cathedrals and churches.  Beyond the cool, dark and quiet, the temples are so still inside that you can’t help but settle into an involuntary calmness.  I’m not a spiritual person, but I won’t deny that the very atmosphere inside is something different.

So Angkor may be the stuff of photographers’ dreams, but the pictures will never have the same impact, no matter how beautiful the sunset or sunrise or if a flock of cranes is taking flight from the moat or whatever.  It’s the dragonflies and butterflies and incense-jungle smell and the feeling of momentarily cloistering yourself from the heat in the dark recesses of stone that really bring Angkor to life.

On Monday, I made what would probably rank as one of my best decisions to date and arranged to take a guide and a horse out to the far-flung and little visited ruins of Wat Atvea at about 7am in an attempt to beat the heat (jeans, close-toed shoes, and tropical heat do not mix well).  After much shortening of my stirrups to ensure that my heels actually made contact with the barrel of the tiny little Arab cross I was riding, we set off through the half-dirt half-mud roads of the countryside, ducking beneath jacaranda trees and picking our way around cows lying down for a snooze.  My guide Thon and I were the picture of diligence as we walked through the populated areas, keeping our horses to a docile walk and saying good morning to all of the shopkeepers and farmers and children, but once we hit the open road, it was full speed ahead.  Let’s just say that my horse, Coco, was very different from the tall, solid warmblood types I grew up riding, and had exactly the kind of short, fast stride you’d expect of a little fireball like him.  He was totally game for anything and did a brilliant job of weaving in and out of the angry water buffalo we ran across, hopping over the ditches where the path had crumbled away, and splashing his way through the little rivers created by the wet season.  Flying through the rice paddies on horseback, with the vivid green fields and palms swaying around me in the rising warmth of the early morning, is something I will never forget.  When we arrived at the temples, they were of course completely deserted, with only a few people harvesting rice and stringing up their clotheslines nearby who didn’t give me a second glance.

It’s hardly a surprise that the experience was so incredible.  Temple ruins, horses, and the tropics are three of my absolute favorite things, so combining them effectively blew my mind.

There are a lot of accounts of Angkor, though, and most of them are more interesting than those of some Californian girl with a degree in modern history taking two weeks off her job in banking (I mean, I’ve done my reading, but I’m well aware that the takeaway from the above is pretty much “wow, cool”).  One of the really interesting ones comes from Zhou Daguan, a Chinese diplomat who spent a year in the court of King Indravarman III in 1296, which still serves as one of the primary sources of knowledge for what life was like in Angkor’s heyday.  French explorer Henri Mahout also penned an account that, while wildly inaccurate in many ways and guilty of playing into the European supremacist leanings of the 19^th century, is interesting if you take it for what it’s worth.  So go read one of their things.

As for photos, my two underwhelming iPhone photos don’t do it justice…like, really don’t do it justice (the wifi here is also not great, so I’m working with what I have when it comes to uploading).  Again, there are many people out there with real cameras and real photographic knowledge who have done it better.  These are only meant to give a general impression, and I'll update upon returning to a place with more stable internet.

The town of Siem Reap itself is a bit of a world unto itself.  Cambodia as a country is still extremely poor, with GDP hovering just above that of Afghanistan.  In Siem Reap, however, a comparatively huge amount of money flows in from the Angkor tourism, so you have streets full of massive gleaming hotels and chic restaurants with prices on par with those in the West.  All of this is mixed up with structures haphazardly constructed of tarps, corrugated iron, and palm fronds; street vendors crowding each other as they sell unidentifiable things roasted on sticks; and half-paved streets and sidewalks full of potholes.  The Cambodians who live in Siem Reap live in buildings that run the gamut from the above sticks-and-tarps to brand-new neo-colonial villas with soaring ceilings and electric gates, and once you step outside the main urban grid, it’s straight to farm life, and the morning is full of rooster cries and the squeals of pigs.  The majority of people now have electricity, so glance down any given alley and you’ll see a family going about their business, drying spices, doing laundry, chopping vegetables for dinner, with the blare of a TV in the background.  For all the tuk-tuks and rusting bicycles, you’ll also see a surprising number of Range Rovers and Lexus SUVs, which I presume are the rides of choice for well to do Cambodians.  It’s the sort of bittersweet dichotomy characteristic of a world-famous tourist destination that happens to be located in what is still very much a developing country.

A few bits of miscellany:

-The humidity: oh, the humidity!  Yes, sometimes it stings when the sweat runs into my eyes, but this weather is so completely and totally up my alley.  Despite it being the rainy season, I have yet to be rained on and have indeed had mostly clear blue days.  One thing I love about the tropics is that a) the sweating serves as a perpetual detox and b) I can eat pretty much anything I want and it melts away.  Bonus points for hair and fingernails growing crazy fast. 

-Khmer: to put this in finance terms, if given the choice I would definitely short on my becoming fluent in Khmer in the next lifetime.  The alphabet is beautiful, but that’s all I really take away from it—it’s a lovely collection of elegant swoops and twists that happen to share the same line.  There’s also no proper Romanization of the language, so even speaking, when referring to a book, is an adventure, to put it mildly.  And while we’re on languages, I have yet to meet any Cambodians who prefer to use French over English.  After studying the history of Indochine and le Cambodge for years in my school French classes, I confess to being a tiny bit disappointed (also, my French is better than my Khmer).

-Driving: best described as the “ordered chaos” one sees in much of the developing world, perhaps slightly less so due to the fact that Cambodia simply doesn’t have that many cars (indeed, The World’s Most Dangerous Places, which was something of a bible to me at age sixteen, described Cambodia at one point as having so few cars that it “would be lucky” to have road accident statistics).  There are motopeds, tuk-tuks, bicycles, food carts attached to bicycles, pedestrians, and livestock all sharing the same space, and no one is afraid to pass each other, effectively turning the middle of the road into an anarchic no-man’s land.  I trust my tuk-tuk drivers, though, because this is what they do all day.  This isn’t their first rodeo.

-Fruit: heaven!  Between the longans, lychees, mangosteens, rambutans, and soursops, their rainbow of textures and colors all piled next to each other in the markets, I am completely spoilt for choice.  And the coconuts…well.  Well, well.  Let’s just say that if I had my way, every country would follow Cambodia’s example and have baby green coconuts for sale on every corner, just waiting to have their tops hacked off, straws at the ready.  For those who haven’t tried it, you will never want to pay three dollars for coconut water in a can ever again.

Resurfacing

You can judge me for eating
half-baked brownie goo more often than
medical professionals advise, though. 

It's been an embarrassingly long sabbatical, but I've cleared out the cobwebs and have flexed my writing muscles for something other than summarizing credit overlay matrices (which are a real thing; I didn't just make that up).  Like a duck that has held its breath and dug for grubs in the mud, or whatever it is that ducks to do get their food, I am now resurfacing.  Please do not judge the rest of this post by that truly awful simile.

In the Western world, there’s a very popular narrative that follows “conventionally successful” people.  It involves someone in a “conventionally prestigious career,” like law, medicine, finance, politics who has everything he or she is supposed to want but is lacking that life-affirming sense of satisfaction.  Said successful person takes a leap of faith and pursues that oft-cited road less travelled, changes his or her entire life, simplifies/streamlines/some variation of that verb, and finds that life-affirming sense of satisfaction.  Usually, this narrative involves a wealthy white person “finding him/herself” with the help of non-white people.  Eat, Pray, Love is probably what comes to mind (apparently the author was actually given an advance by her publishing house to finance her nine months of self-finding, if you’re curious).

This narrative doesn’t even have to involve the whole cultural shift.  Think of that guy you heard of who quit his job at Goldman Sachs to become a painter.  Think of the lawyer who was at his desk at 11pm, had an epiphany, quit his job, and moved his family out of the big nasty city and into a place where they might not be rich but where they could connect with nature and breathe fresh air.  God, think of that Nicolas Cage film The Family Man.  Weirdly enough, we’re taught to believe that all the things that are right to pursue are actually wrong and that breaking from convention! is where the true meaning of life lies.

(Just to fuck with you, though, you should still want all the things you should want.  I’m sure there’s a way to reconcile those two things, even though they’re mutually exclusive.  This is why there are so many Tibetan craft shops in places like Marin County.)

A year ago, I had a plan.  My plan was to get my TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) certificate and to teach English in China.  The end goal was to, after a year, have enough contacts that I could find a job in international trade or finance over there, which is a logical but definitely not a guaranteed outcome.  Everyone waxed poetic about how brave and exotic this plan was to the point that you would have thought I planned on becoming fluent in Lingala, hot air ballooning over the Congo River basin, and setting up a sculptors’ commune in the Ruwenzori Mountains.

I might have actually had somewhere to wear the multitude of traditional clothing I bought during my internship in Tanzania.  Pictured: me at 17, significantly less clued in to pretty much everything.

Needless to say, it was pretty flattering.  I felt terribly cool.

However!  To support myself while I got certified, I was writing and researching for one of my dad’s associates in the mortgage banking industry, which meant that I was working in not just in finance, but probably the most hated sector of finance (in case you somehow missed the ulcer-inducing collapse of the global economy back in 2008).  Saying that you work in mortgage banking is like the anti-free-spirit-breaking-from-convention.  As far as most people are concerned, you’re more interesting/more ethical/generally a better person in every way if you say that you’re a corporate lawyer…and people hate corporate lawyers.

The thing is, though, that I liked the writing.  I liked learning about the industry and watching and analyzing how the big-picture changes came into effect in response to government regulation or international economic movements or releases of consumer data.  I liked using my brain to wrap my head around the myriad moving parts and how they all affected one another.  No one in finance is supposed to find their job interesting—everyone is supposed to burn out, sell their soul to the devil, lose track of their true passion in their relentless pursuit of moneymoneymoney before falling, weeping, to their knees when they realize just how empty their life is, etc.—but here’s a dirty little secret: some people do.  I won’t say “a lot of people” in finance do, but rest assured that there are some.  I would know.  I’ve worked with them.

So last June, there I was, certified, ready to take my St Andrews degree to go teach English for $1500 a month.  I was up to my elbows in interviews, 95% of them with institutions that were clearly less than ethical in their dealings.  One recruiter told me that he wasn’t sure about actually getting me a job, but that I seemed like “a great girl” and had “a great smile” in my picture and that we should definitely meet up for a beer when I moved out there (oh, totally!).  Another offered me a job (which I accepted), wrote back two days later to say that it had actually been offered to someone else, and then repeated the process with two other positions.  Another told me I should fly to China on a tourist visa and that they would take care of getting me a work visa when I got there (nota bene: if there’s one thing you don’t want to fuck around with, it’s Chinese visas). 

The absolute last thing I wanted was to relocate across the Pacific at great expense and effort to find myself in trouble with the Chinese government with no support from my employee, shelling out insane money for a lawyer, and facing deportation.  If you go looking for horror stories of people that blindly accept teaching jobs overseas, you will find thousands in a matter of seconds—people getting deported, people getting unfairly fired, people signing contracts they can’t understand, people getting a quarter of the pay they’d been promised.  I was 22.  My parents had paid for eighteen years of private education (and a lot of other stuff).  I really, really didn’t want to call home broke and in tears and I really, really didn’t want to feel as though I’d spent another year dicking around before I was on a career path, which I saw as pretty key to becoming a real adult.

On top of that, as much as I loved Shanghai, early summer in the San Francisco Bay Area is seriously nice.  Waking up to yawning blue skies and warm sun day in and day out was glorious after having existed under British cloud cover for so long.  The taste of the drinking water, the ease of getting to the beach or Napa or Tahoe, the fresh produce, the unexpected enjoyment of having my family close by—these were all great.  The Bay Area might have been where I grew up, but deciding to stay here instead of going to Shanghai didn’t feel like a consolation prize (at all).  Not to mention the fact that, in terms of job hunting and laying down a career path, this is where the bulk of my contacts were.

I’m a bond trader now.  I spend a lot of time in Excel, have a calculator that I actually use on a daily basis, and discuss things like deliverables and ROI and risk management.  A typical day involves trading $35 million at a time to investors like JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo, tracking the Cyprus bailout plan, and discussing strategy with our hedging guys on the east coast.  There are expensed dinners with investors where lighthearted chat gives way to hardball negotiation and bluffing after a few bottles of wine are put away.  The office is a total boys’ club, and I get a lot of flak if I order a vodka cranberry instead of a neat scotch when we go out for happy hour (“imagine if you’d ordered some pink girly shit like that when you were out with a bunch of other traders on Wall Street; they’d never take you seriously again”).

Outside of work hours, I live in a new apartment with pool, jacuzzi, gym, deli, and dry cleaner on site right next to the bay, and it feels like my own personal oasis.  If it’s 3am and I’m six miles from home in a bad neighborhood, I can take a taxi and not stress over how much more it’s costing than the bus.  When I’ve had an exhausting day, I can opt for takeout instead of trekking to the grocery store and cooking.  My friends and family will confirm that the quality of their birthday and Christmas presents has taken a turn for the better.  I can pick up the tab when one of my friends has a special occasion, donate as an alum to my schools, and leave the kinds of tips that I like to think are actually a pleasure to receive, as opposed to the you-can-tell-how-much-I-resent-this-particular-social-custom kind of tips.

Oh, and I should actually be able to get into the housing market down the line so I’m not hemorrhaging money for rent every month for the rest of my life.  O-M-effing-G.

So, if I were to be considered successful, it would be successful in a very conventional way—and I don’t even hate what I do!  Another dirty secret—in fact, I really like what I do, and I like the people I do it with!  No one’s going to make a Hollywood epic about it, but I’m pretty okay with the Eat, Pray, Love devotees and other free spirits not thinking that I’m doing something “cool.”

Years ago, I remember my dad saying that after decades in the industry, he still woke up every day excited to close another deal.  If I could at some point have that in a job, I thought to myself, that would be awesome.  I believed that, if I had a job that made me feel that way by the time I was fifty, I would have arrived.  I have that right now at age 23 (well, almost 24…urgh).  I genuinely look forward to going to work in the morning, which I’m fairly certain that that translates to satisfaction.  I’m not walking around in a perpetual state of existential ennui wondering how life got to be filled with so many things but to be so devoid of real meaning.  I’m actually pretty fucking happy. 

As for the idea that I turned down a life-changing opportunity or took the “boring” or “sell-out” path, I can see how my choices might have come across that way.  Consider this, though: there’s a reason that rent in San Francisco is astronomical.  People want to live here, and that’s because it’s a fantastic and bizarre city and it's San Francisco to the core—in no way does it feel like a so-called “typical” developed world city.  For all the experiences I may be “missing out on” by not living in China, there are an equal number I am getting by living here (like taking BART through downtown Oakland at 10pm on a Thursday—when you’re sober it’s terrifying, but when you’re buzzed it’s hilarious!).  I’m also sure that there are Shanghainese 23-year-olds who are working in finance who considered taking that alternative path and moving the San Francisco but who are tremendously happy with what they did opt to do.  Kind of like Chinese mirror Cecis.

Maybe my sixteen-year-old self, if I could get in touch with her, would be rolling her eyes at how very boring I turned out to be.  Keep in mind, though, that my sixteen-year-old self was in many ways kind of an idiot…and didn’t appreciate the value of a really excellent 1997 Napa Valley cabarnet.

This is where I get to live my life as a, uh, soulless drone.