Brief Hiatus

Hello, you have reached www.probetheglobe.blogspot.com. I cannot come to the phone right now. I will be out of contact for the next 3 weeks as I attend a meditation retreat in northern Thailand. Please leave a message and I will get back to you as soon as I've attained enlightenment.

-Sean

Songkran: Super Soakers and World War III

*unfortunately the picture wouldn't post, so you'll just have to wait!

If I had just one phrase to dedicate to describing the sheer madness of Thai New Year, it would be this: Balls-to-the-Wall Water War. What needs to be emphasized about Songkran in Chiang Mai is sheer magnitude. It’s the fact that during this three day period, the entire city stops and engages in combat. It’s the fact that every man, woman, and child is armed with some kind of water displacing device. It’s the fact that you can’t take five paces outside of your guesthouse without getting drenched. There’s no exaggeration there. Whatever spiritual beginnings the festival might have once had, it has digressed into all-out mayhem.

At least in name, Songkran is an important religious festival for the Thai people. It reigns in the Thai New Year and marks a time to wash away the trials and tribulations of the past and prepare for what’s to come. Therein lays the origin of the water fights that have now enveloped the nation. They were once friendly gestures of cleansing (and certainly on a much more prudent scale). Neighbors would carry buckets of water with flower pedals and monks would carry their alms bowls, gently splashing the tiniest bits of water on passersby.

Today, the rituals of Songkran have been all but obscured in a non-stop, three day orgy of water. Chiang Mai’s layout really lends itself well to the modern incarcerations of the ancient festival. What would be the biggest hindrance in most places for city-wide water warfare? A reservoir of H20 large enough to quench the demands of an entire water gun-totting urban population. Chiang Mai’s 5m deep moat surrounds the crumbling gates of the Old City and provides just the aquatic storehouse that the festival merits.

Songkran is unique in that over its three day period, there is really no exact moment where everyone can burst out and say “Happy New Year!” America’s New Year is all about the big countdown. During Chinese New Year, fireworks go on for days in either direction, but firecrackers crescendo at midnight on New Year’s Eve. Thailand’s New Year is different. It's about drawing out the passion of that one moment evenly over the course of three days as if to say, ‘Why exhaust yourselves for 10 seconds when you can have a weekend-long orgasm.’

Cambodian Maritime Trouble: What We Hadn't Signed Up For

All the guidebooks about Cambodia rave about the boat trip from Siem Reap to Battambang, so Matt and I decided to give it a whirl. What we hadn't realized was that sometimes in dry season, the water levels are too low to complete the journey. Today was one of those days. We stopped at a village in the middle of nowhere and unloaded all of our bags. We weren’t anywhere remotely near Battambang. What then proceeded was the most uncomfortable travel experience I’ve ever had.

Throw out everything I’ve complained about relating to the quality of roads and comfort of transportation up until this point. We’ve hit a new low… and man was it low.

Our chariot that awaited us in the village was a lone Toyota truck. How many people do you think you could fit in the back of a pickup? Keep in mind that this had to include luggage as well. The correct answer, and I kid you not, was 23 people (26 including the three in the cabin). Once we fit everyone in the truck, on the truck, and around the truck, you were wedged in so much that movement of limbs was quite impossible. I had a Cambodian woman on my right that must have thought I was sprawling out, as she kept motioning for me to scoot over. If I had moved, it would have meant forcing someone overboard and flying into the jungle.

This is all to speak nothing of the condition of the roads. Being in the middle of B.F. Cambodia, there was little more infrastructure than haphazardly cleared paths leading us through the jungle. Let me clarify that it was the roads that were cleared. The route was laden with obstacles. Every few feet, we would get assaulted by thick branches and patches of brush. On passing over big bumps, it was only the tightly wedged formation of our bodies that kept us from flying off the back of the truck. It was also the peak of the day’s heat, in the midst of Cambodian summer.

To add a cherry on top, there was a box of dried fish wedged against my knees that gave off the worst stench you could ever imagine on a bumpy car trip. And it lasted hours.

Now that I've adequately complained about the truck rodeo, I should give credit to the boat trip. Although it prematurely came to an end, passing through floating villages where canoes outnumbered huts was pretty cool. Prospective passengers had to board the boat by paddling over from the docks of their water-borne dwellings and intercepting our course. Kids in tattered shirts waved jubilantly from homemade piers, clearly the only outside contact they would have the entire day. The boat wasn't the immaculate yacht pictured on our tickets, but it still made for a scenic journey through one of the world's most fertile freshwater fishing areas.

Aki Ra: Key Club, Shmey Club

Think you've done something charitable in your life? Well, check this out:

Just outside of the Angkor temple area, there lives a man named Aki Ra. He knows not his birthday, nor his exact age. He was orphaned by the purges of the Khmer Rouge and subsequently assimilated into their army.

By the time he was about 5 years old, Aki Ra was training to shoot automatic weapons and had planted his first land mines. Since then, he was conscripted twice more – once when the Vietnamese army took eastern Cambodia and once when the Cambodian Army had retaken jurisdiction – and tells tales of planting countless mines and killing many men, as it was the only way of life he knew after being brainwashed by the Khmer Rouge. Times were so bad that when no water was available, he had to urinate in a plastic bag to soften rice enough to eat it.

After the conflict ended, Aki Ra began to pay back his debt to society... in dividends. Using nothing more than a stick with a screw attached to the end, he dismantled land mines around the country. Think about that.

Today, in addition to founding and maintaining the Land Mine Museum to promote international awareness of civilian victims of land mines, Aki Ra employs fellow Cambodians (through donations to the museum) to detect and safely disarm land mines in their home villages.

If you think that wasn’t enough, Aki Ra has also founded an orphanage for victims of land mine blasts. There are about 20 kids at his facility with missing arms and legs that now have a home and are educated in brand new school facilities (also commissioned by the donations Ra has raised).

He even returned to the site of the first land mine that he planted and personally removed it and continues to disarm land mines to this day.

And to think, I feel pretty good about myself when I give a few bucks to charities here and there. Aki Ra has to be one of the most admirable people in the world.

Angkor Wat: Raiders of the Lost Ark

Before coming to Southeast Asia, I'd never heard the word Angkor independent from Wat. In Western schools, we all study about the Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians. In rare cases, we even learn a bit about the Persians, Mongolians, and Ottomans, but almost certainly never about the Khmers. The Angkorian empire (Khmer Kingdom) reigned for over 6 centuries and, at its peak, spanned the length of the Southeast Asian peninsula from Burma to Vietnam before it fell at the hands of the Thais. What is left for us to marvel at is the otherworldly architecture of temples and ruins of a long forgotten civilization.
What are now being called ‘The Temples of Angkor’ stretch for well over 100km in the area just north of Siem Reap. The name may be a bit of a misnomer since ancient buildings from the Angkor time period can be seen in other parts of Cambodia as well, but this is certainly the best preserved cloister of wats in such a close proximity.
The centerpiece of ‘The Temples of Angkor’ is, of course, Angkor Wat. No matter how you quantify its dimensions, Angkor Wat is the largest religious structure in the world. Its moat measures 1.5 km x 1.3 km, giving the complex a square area of almost 2 km. This makes the inner enclosure simply vast and awe-inspiring. Keeping in mind the scale of Angkor Wat, think about this: the sandstone that was needed for its completion was actually quarried 50km upstream and floated, block by block, down the Siem Reap river. These aren't legos, they're massive, heavy rocks that had to be moved and assembled entirely with 12th century technology. This is just one of many temples in the vicinity.
Exploring Angkor is an amazing experience that gives visitors a chance to get a glimpse into a culture that remains a mystery even to archaeologists. After climbing around apocalyptic Bang Mealea and watching nature take its revenge on the jungle temple of Ta Prohm, its easy to see why movie bigwigs chose the area for the filming of Tomb Raider.