Naples: Rome and Milan's mildly psychotic younger brother

Naples gets a lot of bad press.  Almost everybody I spoke to prior to leaving had a profoundly negative opinion of the city, citing the usual complaints about “dirty,” “crowded,” “noisy,” “violent,” so on and so forth.  Having spent a fair amount of time in places that are actually dirty, crowded, noisy, and fairly violent, I was rather skeptical; besides, hearing everyone trash Naples (no pun intended) made me like the place right off the bat.  The fact that it’s the gateway to the major tourist magnets of Capri and the Amalfi Coast and yet has remained staunchly un-prettified appealed to my inner contrarianism, so I deliberately carved out time between returning on the hydrofoil and going to Pompeii to experience its dirty, crowded noise for myself (not so keen on the violence).

I had had this idea that, after I had landed from my transatlantic flight and gotten a decent night’s sleep, I would be able to roam the streets for a while before departing for Capri around noon; however, my aunt had very kindly arranged for a driver to not only pick me up from Capodichino and bring me to my bed and breakfast but to pick me up the next morning and take me to the port.  As he passed my bag off to the b&b owner, who was clearly rather disgruntled about having to wait up until 12.30am, my driver smiled and said he would see me at 8.30 the next morning so I could get to the island nice and early.  I negotiated this back to 9 because I was starting to get that “I’m so tired I feel like I’ve been clubbed in the head” sensation, and the idea of prying myself off a soft, warm, non-airline seat bed a mere eight hours down the line was not particularly appealing.

So 9 it was, and my aunt had called it—being picked up by the same smiley driver and having my luggage and dress carried straight onto the hydrofoil was infinitely more pleasant than arguing with a grizzled taxi driver and waiting in line with the hordes of day trippers.

There’s also a part of me that wonders if, given my history of ending up in foreign police stations and other situations that become funny once a few years have passed, she wanted to leave as little room as possible for me to end up squealing at gunpoint in some Neopolitan back alley and texting “can’t make the wedding, being held captive by local gang members lol.”  Not an un-valid concern, to tell the truth.  As such, I figured I would have to do my Naples exploring when I got back.

First off, it’s hard not to like a place with the stereotypical Mediterranean climate where the sun rises over a string of mountains and reflects off a picturesquely curving bay.  Around 7am, the air still has a slight crispness, which burns off as the day slips into the summer balminess that continues well into the evening and lets people take to the streets and piazzas for dining and drinking al fresco.  The weather here is pretty close to perfect, and even the summer thunderstorms, like the one I caught the night I landed, are very mild, and have the added benefit of clearing any lingering haze.  We were probably lucky, but it was perfectly, flawlessly clear while we were there, with not a trace of the oft-referenced pollution.  Maybe it’s vestigial from those years in the UK where a day over 70F was a rare, rare gift to be cherished and reveled in, but I can’t entirely hate any place where you can assume the sun will be out and it will be warm enough to wear open-toed shoes (I even feel this way about our office in the San Francisco suburb of Pleasanton, which depresses me in a lot of ways but regularly gets up to 90F in the summer).

Weather aside, I’m kind of shocked that no one mentions how stunning the city is architecturally.  Not only is it blessed with this amazing location on a wide gulf with a perfectly framed view of Mount Vesuvius, the multicolored buildings of central  Naples are so picturesque that walking down streets like Via Toledo feels like being in a 1920s film.  Yes, there’s a bit of peeling paint, a few shabby awnings, the occasional mess of weeds growing between roof tiles, and, if you find this kind of thing “dirty” and offensive, myriad clotheslines strung with drying laundry, but there is an undeniable elegance about the tall windows and ornate iron balustrades set against their backdrops of burnt sienna, ochre, terra cotta, and kelly green. 

One of many handsome facades

The lungomare, the promenade along the bay that stretches north of the port, is particularly distinguished-looking, consisting mostly of stately hotels fronted with cafes that look out onto the water, and even in the early morning, you will be joined on your stroll by at least a handful of other people doing the same.  There are also numerous piazzas, including the absolutely enormous Piazza del Plebiscito (named for the 1863 plebiscite that brought Naples under the Savoys’ rule as part of a shiny, happy, unified Italy), which resembles a slightly smaller, newer, dingier, and less gilded version of the Vatican courtyard.  Admittedly, the base of the central horse statue is squiggled with graffiti, as are some of the columns forming the half moon that flank the church of San Francesco di Paola behind it, but the space is vast enough that it in no way diminishes the effect.

You have to give Naples points for its very large castle.

Galeria Umberto, thing of splendor

I never said it wasn't a dense city...but look at that amazing weather!

While we’re on the topic, yes, there is a lot of graffiti in Naples.  It is definitely one of the features that one notices straight away; it would be hard to ignore the sheer volume (which, I imagine, also makes it hard to remove).  It’s rather striking, though, how much graffiti there is that simply says “ti amo” (I love you).  Kind of touching, right?  I personally would not choose to memorialize my love that way, but I guess the sentiment is there.  Quite a bit of it is political in nature as well.  The wall where I took the below photo (“se non cambierà, come in Grecia”; rough translation: if things don’t change we’ll turn into Greece) covered immigration, homophobia, corruption, and the role of the church, and it was less than a block long.

As for the noise, Neapolitans are famous for being loud (we have a Lucchese family friend who sniffs that they run around yelling like their heads are on fire and then does her “Neapolitan impression,” which consists of sticking her tongue out and waving her hands in the air), but I imagine that a person would have to be really, really uptight for it to be a genuine problem.  We were able to hold conversations over dinner without any problem and didn’t have to yell out the window at any boisterous youths to keep it down because respectable people were trying to sleep at this hour or anything.  In the evenings, the street is simply a place to talk or eat or smoke or gamble or whatever, and it lends the city a distinctly buoyant air that you simply won’t find in a place where the entertaining is done in someone’s sitting room.  Everyone seemed to be in a good mood, enjoying the warm summer night, and instead of being mugged, cursed, or pelted with rocks, I was offered several cheerful “buona sera”s.  Mmm, yes, truly dreadful. 

There’s a fairly constant and raucous symphony of horns going during the day, which is also quite easy to ignore and is a phenomenon hardly unique to Naples.  As in most of urban Italy, driving and crossing the street are both adrenaline sports, and all you really have to keep in mind is that no one is actually going to run you over so long as you aren’t a complete and total moron about it.  A few mopeds came unexpectedly close to flattening my toes, but once I stepped into the pedestrian crossings, the traffic had no qualms about slamming on the brakes to let me cross, the drivers transformed into docile Midwestern soccer moms for a few seconds before flooring the gas pedal once again and screeching off into the distance.  A Times article from a while back described driving in the Naples area as “the least relaxing activity on earth”; in the end, though, it all seems to work out.  

One of the first things that piqued my interest in Naples was the “camorra merda” scrawled on a concrete barrier to a construction site, which translates literally to “shitty Camorra” but is closer to saying “fuck the Camorra” in English.  I spied this with my nose pressed against the window of my black car on the way to get the hydrofoil and promised myself I’d photograph it on my return.  Unfortunately, I couldn’t remember exactly where it was; fortunately, I soon came across many more “camorra merda” graffiti.  This one is on the side of a bank.

The flyer on the left says something about a personal mantra for
inner tranquility; not sure if they're related.

As literally every reputable source will tell you, it is very, very unlikely that the Camorra will have anything to do with you as a tourist.  There are still regular murders and extortion remains an issue, but unless you use your vacation to start your own rival ring of organized crime, they will leave you well enough alone.  Contrary to popular belief, Naples no longer exists in the 90s, and even the much-maligned sanitation situation has improved.  I caught sight of both street cleaners and garbage trucks doing their jobs, and fairly efficiently at that.  There’s rubbish on the streets (a lot more than you’ll find in Positano or Capri, that’s for sure), and there are still issues with landfill capacity, as the Camorra has sold a bunch of the space for a fat and dirty profit, but I actually found Naples to be generally cleaner than San Francisco.  If you can’t move past this, I recommend just looking upwards the whole time, because again, the architecture is gorgeous.  There is also no stench of human urine emanating from the sidewalk nor any feces to worry about stepping in, which I liked.

Waste collection is still rife with problems, but I can personally
vouch that the streets get scrubbed on the regular.

Back to the Camorra, briefly, because I find them fascinating—nowadays you’ll actually see businesses with anti-pizzo stickers in their windows, pizzo being the money paid to mafiosi to not burn down the building, break people’s knees, etc.  The anti-pizzo movement kicked off in 1991, when Libero Grassi, a Palermo businessman, got royally fed up and wrote an open letter to the Giornale di Sicilia that opened with “Dear Extortionist.”  I think we can all agree that that takes some serious cojones.  Because this was really the first time that anyone had provided any kind of pushback, there was a huge public uproar, and, not entirely surprisingly, Grasso was offed nine months later.  Still, the letter got the ball rolling, and 2004 saw the formation of Addiopizzo, a grassroots movement led by a generation of Sicilians who had grown up with the Cosa Nostra murdering anti-Mafia judges, journalists, and businessmen as a matter of course.  Today Addiopizzo is still quite active throughout the South and Sicily, though I’m not sure if this speaks more to the shifting attitudes towards the Mafia or to the fact that the Camorra, ‘Ndrangheta, and Cosa Nostra are still a colossal problem.  Apparently pizzo is a €30bn per year industry; the organized crime groups in Italy are estimated to have a €90bn turnover annually, which comes out to roughly 7% of GDP.  Welp.

Anyway, Naples.  It is still extremely improbable that you will suffer any ill treatment at the hands of a mafia thug if you’re strolling around for a few days, and it is still a very attractive city.

So after my morning walking along the lungomare, down Via Toledo, through the Galeria Umberto, and across the Piazza di Plebiscito, I was really wondering why everyone said Naples was that terrible.  I mean, when I think of the terrible places I’ve personally experienced, I think of Guatemala City, a polluted, grey concrete hellhole with a staggering murder rate and absolutely nothing in the way of attractions, unless you count murder as an attraction (I arrived at 6am on a packed to the gills overnight bus from Petén and spent two hours in the station holding my bag, trying not to look like an easily muggable 19-year-old blonde girl while I waited for a connecting bus up to Lake Atitlán; mission accomplished, but my memories aren’t particularly fond).  A lot of people consider Delhi to be terrible, which, although I found it exciting and fun and full of delicious food, is much more understandable.  Few places on earth can rival Delhi’s noise, chaos, and open sewage ditches, and there is the added benefit of either sweltering heat or damp, smoky cold depending on the season.  Detroit, from what I am told, is also genuinely terrible.  But certainly not this ancient city full of outdoor cafes and Art Nouveau masterpieces basking in the Mediterranean sun between the mountains and the sea, right?  I really didn’t get it.  Sure, there are nasty parts of Naples, I reasoned, but even Marin County has its nasty parts.

Then I got on the train to Pompeii and got a better idea of why good old Naples has this reputation.  I literally had to stifle my laughter because oh my God, this train made everything I'd ridden in India look like the Oriental Express and Scotrail look like a bloody private jet.  While the metro is clean, frequent, and easy, the trains going to the outlying towns (including Sorrento) appear to be a 1980s hand-me-down from a particularly grim city, perhaps somewhere in Romania or the Baltic states, made all the less comfortable by the crush of humans who are all inevitably going to (you guessed it) your same destination.  There isn’t any air-conditioning (ha!), so the solution is to crack open the four-inch wide vents at the tops of the windows and hope (in vain) that some semblance of a breeze circulates its way between the sweaty torsos all pressed up against one another.  The train moves at a top speed of about 30mph, so putting any considerable distance between yourself and central Naples is quite the time commitment, and on the way, if there is room to turn your head and see out the window, you will be treated to a visual feast of graffiti ranging from hastily scrawled “ti amo”s to a 30-foot high portrait of Bob Marley complete with individually detailed dreads and highly realistic-looking smoke pouring out of his joint.   Should you be so lucky as to get a seat, you will find yourself peeling the backs of your legs off the hard orange plastic and shifting from side to side to mitigate the searing pain that will start to radiate through your tailbone, though I’ll admit I find sitting on hard surfaces more uncomfortable than most.  Needless to say, by the time we reached Pompeii and I crawled off the train, I was quite happy to breathe in the fresh air and not be touching a clammy stranger.

(Pompeii itself was great as well.  Saddest part was the mummified dog; it just looked so frightened. There are a lot of other people who have written things about Pompeii that are far more interesting than anything I could hope to produce, so I recommend looking one of them up.)

The ride back to Naples was less crowded, which improved the experience somewhat, and was quickly eclipsed by yet another fantastic meal of veal with porcini and insalata caprese, which confirmed for me that the city is pretty alright.  Had I not had an overnight ferry to board post-veal, I would have gladly spent another day there.  I mean, really, if we’re going to start judging cities based on their worst neighborhoods, they we might as well condemn New York, Paris, London, and San Francisco, all of which are positively fawned over by tourists, as shitholes too.  Go if you have the chance, and if you want to visit somewhere that’s actually dirty, crowded, noisy, and violent, I can supply you with a list that most definitely does not include Naples.

I’d also like to take a brief moment to discourage referring to it as “Napoli” when speaking English.  Until you start referring to Switzerland as “die Schwiez” or Bangkok as “Krung Thep,” it’s generally pretentious and irritating.  Public service announcement over.

"I had the most amazing time in Athína.  I mean, Athens.  Sorry, the locals call it
Athína and I just got used to calling it that too in the 72 hours I was there."

Well-fed in the Med

I’ve resigned myself to the fact that I only revive the blog when I’m on vacation.  The solution that comes to mind is to go on vacation more often.

From the informal survey I’ve been conducting for the last couple of decades, it’s very difficult not to enjoy a trip to Italy.  As far as leisure destinations go it’s basically idiot-proof.  I ran across one person who went to Milan and declared their trip negative, but I’m willing to disregard that particular person’s opinion.  So when I touched down at the Naples Capodichino airport a few of nights ago, even though it was midnight, even though I had been in transit for eighteen hours and could feel my contacts digging into my eyes, even though I was in Naples, it was like bounding back into the arms of an old friend.  An absurdly charming and somewhat inefficient friend with great weather.

I had the very lovely excuse of my cousin Sophie’s wedding to escape to the Mediterranean for a few weeks, as she was nice enough to pick the insanely gorgeous island of Capri as the location for the festivities (seriously, can you imagine anyone moaning, “Ugh, I can’t come that weekend, I have to go to this wedding on Capri”?).  From California, getting here is best described as a pain in the ass—think SFO to Munich to Naples airport (plane) to Naples bed and breakfast to Naples seaport the next morning (car) to Capri harbor (hydrofoil) to Anacapri (car)—but it really did all melt away when I woke up to the subsiding booms of a summer thunderstorm, the first shots of orange light glowing through the clouds, and the soft, salty smell of a port city.  It’s been ten months since I had a real vacation (one that puts at least eight time zones and an ocean between me and the office), and I’d been getting to the point where the slightest hint of traffic or Whole Foods being out of mango chips made me want to scream like a provoked bear.  My usual mellowing-out methods of intense workouts, long steam room sessions, acupuncture, and chardonnay kept my inner provoked bear at bay to some degree, but the relief was only temporary and I’d revert pretty much as soon as I encountered someone standing on the left side of the BART escalator or overheard an uptalker (“I went to this party last night?  And they had like, the best sweet potato chips?”).  I probably could have taken off to Fresno for three weeks and been thrilled, so I am positively ecstatic to be in Capri.

The first thought that crosses one’s mind when approaching this steep white rock rising out of the dark blue Mediterranean is that it is almost ridiculously beautiful.  Not even just photogenic, out and out gorgeous.  The island is covered in trees, wildflowers, and vineyards, along with clusters of picturesque pastel buildings, and is crisscrossed by hairpin turns that swing out over the sea hundreds of feet below.  The harbor and the town of Capri are buzzing with tourists—this is where the day-trippers throng—but still manages to look disarmingly idyllic, while the road that snakes up to the smaller, quieter perch of Anacapri alternates between lush and shaded, with flowering vines spilling onto the pavement, and tracing the edge of the cliffs in the open, blazing sun while offering supremely dramatic views of the Gulf of Naples.  Capri is blessed in the looks department, and it’s hard not to get a little bit high on such beautiful surroundings.

It’s also pretty inescapable that a lot of money flows through Capri—seeing as it lost its “undiscovered” status two millennia ago when the emperor Tiberius decided it made a nice place for a weekend getaway, it’s been the playground of the rich and/or famous and/or powerful for quite some time now, and everything is priced accordingly.  Greta Garbo and apparently a fan, as were Grace Kelly and Prince Ranier, and these days Mark Zuckerburg, Leonardo di Caprio, and Beyonce number amongst the numerous celebrity visitors (I could go on, but if you really want to know where celebrities are vacationing, I hear that US Weekly is quite good at that kind of thing).  The classic place to stay is the Quisisana, a giant peach-colored wedding cake, though I’m told that these days the Capri Palace up here in Anacapri is popular as well.  The latter is the only place on the island you can get your Michelin star fix (“Ugh, I’ve gone three days without a balsamic reduction”), so there’s that.

Anyway, the money that comes through here ensures that the island is kept utterly perfect-looking.  The narrow streets are shaded by the kind of bright, typically Italian facades that exude a sort of blissful insouciance that can only exist in such a hospitable climate, an effect amplified by the bougainvillea blooming in enormous clouds over the white stucco walls of private gardens and the heavy, luxurious floral scents wafting out of the artisanal parfumiers (of which, yes, there are quite a few here).  Dolce and Gabbana, Miu Miu, and La Perla are all housed in spaces that would be worthy of an Architectural Digest feature were they not surrounded by buildings that are equally or even more beautiful.  It is genuinely difficult to find ugly architecture here, which is both delightful and rather surreal.  The villas and even the more modest houses all employ the graceful and open shapes typical of the Mediterranean, and the way they cling to the hillsides only serves to enhance Capri’s aesthetic appeal.

To quote the great Classical playwright Aeschylus, this doesn't suck.

Of course, the Mediterranean itself is the major draw.  Provided that one does not have a deathly fear of heights or head-on collisions, driving between Capri and Anacapri (or anywhere on the island) is a fantastic experience in and of itself simply because of the amazing views it provides from atop the cliffs that fall hundreds of feet to the water below.  On the walk to the Marina Piccola on the north side, you can pay the princely sum of one euro to walk through the shady and verdant Augustus Gardens and find yourself at the edge of a rock face that plunges straight down to shimmering and intensely turquoise water, rewarded by a view of little white yachts dotting the navy blue sea at the foot of whitish-grey cliffs that are if anything even more dramatic.  Don’t come to Capri expecting white sand beaches—this is the order of the day, and it is rather spectacular.

But the thing that has really set my heart abuzz?  The food.  Cuisine.  Victuals.  Munchies, if you are so inclined.  Oh, sweet Jesus, every single thing I’ve eaten here has been fresh, lovingly crafted, and mind-blowingly delicious.  I was told that the food on Capri was amazing, but somehow I didn’t fully process that.  The last thing I ate before getting to the island was a Salat ‘Take-off’” in the Munich airport, which consisted of steak strips on a bed of spring greens and was unable to completely conceal its true airport food nature.  I rolled into Anacapri at about 11 the next morning, perfect timing for a dip in the pool over at the Capri Palace and, when the rainclouds meandered over from Naples, a casual lunch, where they took my order of verdure alla griglia with a side of grilled chicken without a hint of attitude and seemed perfectly fine with my damp bikini bottoms soaking through the white linen couch.  (I should mention that we all gathered around a low table and piled into wicker chairs and an L-shaped couch to eat, which, as someone with an aversion to hard seating and sitting up straight, I found sublime.)

Outside, the vestiges of the storm rolled past and dampened the air, punctuating the conversation with soft booms of thunder, while we caught up with various friends and family from London and Santa Barbara and figured out who everybody else was over Pellegrino.  I was luxuriating in this strange relaxed sensation that I’d only felt on a couple select occasions in the last two months when the waiter presented a plate of flawlessly roasted and seasoned zucchini, carrots, and asparagus and no less than four chicken breasts crisscrossed with picture-perfect grill marks.  Now, I don’t know what they did to this chicken, but I can only assume that the original birds lived on a diet of Evian, truffles, and fairy dust because I had to set down my fork after the first bite and take a moment.  If someone had told me at that point that there was a religion that exalted this chicken as its deity, I probably would have converted.  I deemed the first 12 hours of my vacation a roaring success and made my way through three of the breasts, which would have been the perfect amount of protein if my post-lunch plans had included bench pressing my own bodyweight for the remainder of the afternoon (they did not).

That’s great, you may be thinking, but it’s a Michelin-starred kitchen.  They should probably be able to cook a chicken.  It was that night’s dinner that really sealed the deal, though.  The restaurant in question is a narrow little place called L’Angolo di Gusto, and within a few minutes of sitting down, the waiter, who it later emerged was the owner and husband of the cook, had placed in front of me a diminutive white dish containing half a cherry tomato, a petite ball of mozzarella, and a single basil leaf drizzled with golden olive oil and a light sprinkling of black pepper.  It was a classic amuse-bouche, a small but perfectly formed Caprese salad.

A word on Caprese salad: I love Caprese salad.  I have many fond memories of tearing up basil leaves over thick-sliced heirloom tomatoes fresh from my dad’s garden and eating the finished product outside on mild summer evenings, which, as one might imagine, is an immensely pleasurable experience.  After contacting a really lovely intestinal disease called shigellosis in India and swearing that if I didn’t die I would never eat or drink again, the first thing I actually had an appetite for was Caprese salad.  Despite the fact that it was mid-April in the UK, which meant that the tomatoes and basil were flown in from Israel, the mozzarella was rubbery enough that if you dropped it on a tile floor it would probably bounce, and the weather was distinctly un-Mediterranean, it was a brilliant re-introduction to solid food.  There’s a long and joyous relationship there.

The thing is that I hadn’t eaten any dairy or any tomatoes for at least three months (not by choice; that’s a whole other story).  So that bite and a half of Caprese salad in its ancestral homeland was, in a word, transcendental.  The texture of the mozzarella alone would have floored me.  Obviously it was homemade (like, seriously, duh), and the slightly firm chewiness of the outer layer gave way to a center so creamy and tender that it could almost be described as liquid.  It was the very essence of la dolce vita in the form of soft cheese.

The game-changing amuse-bouche was followed by a sautéed zucchini dish that I could never hope to replicate and grilled octopus tentacles drizzled with balsamic vinegar on a bed of fresh fennel, which is pretty close to my ideal meal.  It  should go without saying that the octopus was fresh—I’ve eaten enough octopus to tell the difference between an octopus that was fresh and an octopus that was schlepped in from somewhere else, thank you very much—and I have no doubt that they’d gotten it from one of the markets down by the harbor that morning.  When you look at the sea surrounding Capri you can just imagine the myriad octopi* trolling the depths and wrapping themselves around rocks and thinking, This seems like a good place to hang out.  As animals, I really like octopi; I think they’re pretty cool and kind of cute in their own weird sea creature way.  Hearing about the American tourists that caught an exceedingly rare hexapus in Greece and then cooked it struck me as particularly tragic, and I don’t think I could ever go octopus hunting, as apparently it involves diving down with a crowbar and hitting them over the head until they let go of their rocks. However, I like the taste enough that I manage to block this out when presented with a plate of expertly charred purplish tentacles.  My connection here might be even more poignant than the one with insalata caprese—some people can say “I love you” in 17 languages; I can order octopus in 17 languages.

Since the Caprese amuse-bouche and octopus, I’ve cleaned the local greengrocer out of cherries (they were 7.90 a kilo and, after having spent $12 on a bag of cherries back in California the week before, I couldn’t not take the deal), dined on edible flowers and young greens in a dressing of olive oil and juice from the famous lemons, and, at my cousin’s wedding reception, approached something akin to culinary nirvana.  The seasoned buerre blanc, rosemary-lemon sorbet palate cleanser, and rolled leg of lamb with a grilled peach and pine nut compote that was accompanied by its own tiny dish of smoked sea salt were all masterpieces in and of themselves, but the beluga caviar that we started with was utter perfection.  It was also served on heart-shaped dishes with little heart-shaped caviar spoons, which is a very lovely way to enjoy one’s caviar (as opposed to eating it out of the jar in one’s sweatpants, I guess).

What remains of my kilo of cherries plus one rogue plum,
which I'm transporting in a Carthusia parfumier bag, e.g. the
chicest possible way to transport fruit.

I know that whenever I talk about how much I love
caviar I sound like a total jerk, but I can't help the way I feel.

In short, I’ll confirm that Kate Moss was a tasteless moron for her whole “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels” episode and that she really just needs to go away at this point.  If she’s been to Capri, and I'm sure that she has, she’s clearly done it wrong.

As an aside, my cousin’s wedding, which brought me to Italy in the first place, was easily the most beautiful I have ever seen in my life.  Between the ceremony taking place in the forest where Tiberius married Julia the Elder more than two millennia ago, watching the sun set over Ischia at the al fresco reception, the exquisite glass chandeliers flown in from Venice, and the flowers (oh my God, the flowers), it was the most gorgeous and amazing British-Californian-Arab-fusion wedding anyone could have dreamt up.  Many tears flowed.  With all this in mind, if I tried to shoehorn it into a blog entry that’s primarily about cheese and octopus, I’d feel like an ass.  Words wouldn’t do it justice anyway.

View through the trees of the forest.  It was pretty okay.

Imagine this carpeting the floor of a pine forest
and you'll get the idea.

Ischia sunset

Next on the itinerary are Naples and Pompeii; I’ve never been to the latter and couldn’t pass up the chance when I was so close.  Everyone talks about Naples being violent and a total shithole, which immediately made me feel sort of affectionate towards it.  On my brief stop en route to Capri, I spied some stunning architecture, some anti-Camorra graffiti, and quite a few bullet holes, which I’m guessing are Camorra-related, all of which I’m hoping to visit tomorrow.  Florence, it is not.

*I recently found out that “octopi” is not in fact the correct plural of octopus.  It’s “oct
opuses” or “octopodes,” but I can’t bring myself to say “octopodes” without feeling really, really pretentious, and “octopuses”?  Are you joking?  How stupid does that sound? 

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.