Crossing Borders

Rickety old train

Wednesday was my last day in Thailand so I decided to make a day trip to Ayutthaya, the second capital of Thailand (during approximately the 1300s-1600s), and see all of the old temples and palaces there. It's only a 2-hour train ride from Bangkok and the fares are absurdly cheap, probably because the trains are so old and relatively slow. I paid only 15 baht to travel from Bangkok to Ayutthaya which is about equivalent to 50 cents. Considering that one ride on the Bangkok subway or Skytrain will run you anywhere from 20-40 baht, a 2-hour ride for 15 baht is a freaking steal. Of course, the Bangkok train systems are much newer and nicer; it's kind of awkward actually that Bangkok has essentially 3 different train systems: the MRT, which is an underground subway, the BTS, which is a train elevated above street level, and the Airport Express train. None of these systems are integrated so you have to buy different tickets when you transfer between systems. And none of that takes into account the State Railway trains to cities outside Bangkok. It's a weird public transit situation.

The view at lunch

Anyways. Tangent! So Ayutthaya was pretty awesome. It's on an island surrounded by 2 rivers on all sides, which used to serve as fortification back when it was the capital city. I had to take a ferry from near the train station across the river to the island itself. I also rented a bicycle for the day (for only 40 baht, which is like $1.33, for the whole day!!) since it's the easiest and cheapest way to get around to all the different temples under your own power and not constantly paying tuk-tuk or taxi drivers to lug you to and fro. I ate lunch at a local seafood restaurant in an area of the restaurant that is basically a wooden deck floating on the river and tethered to the shore with ropes. So I got to eat right on the water, gently bouncing up and down on the wakes of passing boats, before getting back on my bike and heading to my first temple, which also happened to be my favorite of the day. It was built in the Khmer (Cambodian) style rather than in the traditional Thai style, and it was just so beautiful and surprisingly well-preserved for being an ancient crumbling ruin. It got me even more excited for Angkor Wat, if that were possible, as it was just a little taste of the amazing architecture that I'll get to see there. Oh man, I am so glad that is going to cap off my trip.

Ayutthaya has a lot of missing heads.

I cycled around the island to see several other temples as well, before heading back to Bangkok on the late afternoon train. I had to switch hostels in order to stay near the train station, since the following morning was going to see me waking up at 5.30 AM in order to catch the train I needed to the Cambodian border at Aranya Prathet. Crossing the land border there reminded me a bit of going into Mexico near Tijuana, if only because I think it's the only other closed land border I've ever traveled through. In Europe, the land borders are totally open, and otherwise I've always flown between countries and done immigration in the airports. The closed land borders have that strange no-man's-land between one side and the other, where you walk between the two passport controls and you're not really in either country. I always found it odd going to Tijuana and I got the same sensation at the Thai-Cambodian border. There was definitely an immediate noticeable change going from one side to the other. It was clear that Cambodia is just not as well-developed as Thailand, starting with the fact that foreigners are basically forced onto a shuttle bus to the local "tourist station" where you are pushed into bus scams to your destinations. The bus scams are only scams in the sense that the bus prices are far more expensive than other methods of transportation relative to Cambodian prices, but frankly, the prices are still more than reasonable by Western standards, and it irritated me to hear Italian and Russian tourists bitching about how "we are getting cheated and ripped off already." Whatever dudes, it's still not that expensive, it's a 3-hour bus ride, just suck it up and pay your fare. Damn.

One of the nicest main intersections in Battambang.

I jumped on a 2-hour bus to Battambang, which is one of the four largest cities in Cambodia. This says a lot about the cities of Cambodia, because this city was pretty damn small. I mean, it was very charming in a lot of respects, but it definitely is underdeveloped for a city of over 100,000 people. I stopped at the Royal Hotel and showed up at the exact same time as a Swiss woman traveling solo. The front desk dude decided to show us both the most expensive room ($20 a night) and said he had two of these rooms left and they were the only rooms left in the hotel. Of course. So Swiss girl turns to me and says, "Ok, wanna share?" It was clear the dude was disappointed because he wasn't getting the full price he could have from us. (Later we heard him telling other guests there were plenty of $10 and $15 rooms still available.) But it was cool, as I ended up with a friend for the night!

Nadja and I took a tuk-tuk out to the outskirts of Battambang to ride the bamboo train, which has seriously been one of my favorite experiences of this entire trip. The trains in Cambodia are in nearly-total disuse so there are sections of track that just sit there, falling apart over the years. Some enterprising awesome Khmer man decided to start running wooden platforms on pairs of wheels that affix to the train tracks that run a length of 7 km through the countryside, all powered by a motor attached to the back of the platform. Nadja and I had our own bamboo train "car" and it was so much fun hurtling down the train tracks on this freaking thing. The sun was setting

so the landscape and surroundings were stunning, the sky was crystal-clear and blue, and the breeze was warm. It was amazing. At the end of the track, a local family has set up a little beverage station and Nadja and I spent 10 minutes talking to the 3 adorable kids there before heading back to the beginning of the track, our faces acting as windshields for the plethora of bugs that were now emerging in the dusky twilight. I was laughing my head off and had to try so hard not to open my mouth because bugs were flying at us from all directions.

Feast on the street

After heading back into the city, Nadja and I grabbed some dinner from a truly local street night market (no English spoken, just a lot of pointing) and then chatted over some cans of the local, and tasty, Angkor beer. She constantly apologized for not speaking English very well, to which I kept reassuring her that at least I could carry on a conversation with her, unlike any of my students back in Korea. How awesome that I may not even have met her if the hotel dude hadn't tried to scam us.







Here is a little video montage of our bamboo train experience:

The next day was the bus trip to Phnom Penh. But that is a hellish experience that I will detail at a later date as right now, my couch surfing host, Sam, and his flatmate are taking me out for a genuine Khmer dinner. Me=excited!