cambodia is calling

Angkor Wat is one of the few places in the world where real life looks like the movies and where even the highest expectations exist only to be exceeded.



Our late night arrival in Siem Reap definitely lived up to our expectations in that it was hot and tropical and the absolute opposite of where we'd spent the weekend before. (Freezing our toes off at an ice festival in Northern China.)



On an Angkor Wat visit you quickly discover that there is driving that needs to be done. In fact, the temples of "The" Angkor Wat are but one grouping in an area absolutely teeming with beautiful temples. The sites closest to the tourism-fattened city of Siem Reap are a twenty-minute drive away while temples devoured by jungle can take almost two hours to reach.



Travelers can reach these temples in a number of ways. Some rent bicycles on the cheap and spend their days in a dusty haze of fatiguing adventure. Still others take a dusty, and dirt cheap, ride on the back of a motorbike. Others spend a little more cash for a tuk-tuk and battle the dust with a handkerchief held to their mouths. Still others splurge on a car and driver and regret their choice only when it comes time to hazard unpaved roads (in a Toyota Camry) because the driver's worried that without taking a short-cut they won't make it to the next temple before sundown.

You can guess which option we chose.



It's safe to say that this trip to Cambodia really struck both of us as something incredibly special. The experience of seeing the temples - in their varying states of grandeur and decay - was beyond wonderful and belongs on anyone's Life List of Places to See. These structures are of a scale that is difficult to imagine without literally standing at their foundations and struggling to see it all with one set of eyes.



The stones - and therefore the temples themselves - are covered in finely carved illustrations. They seem too beautiful and too well-preserved to be real. Different temples have different stories to tell but the imagery throughout the sites is consistently gorgeous. And awe-inspiring. Leave me alone for a year with a piece of stone and a chisel and I still wouldn't have a clue how to take a material that is strong enough to build buildings and finesse it into the delicate wrists and ears of Angkor Wat's female forms, the apsaras.



Several of the temple groupings have been unceremoniously ravaged by nature and serpentine tree roots are now as much a part of the structures as the original stones. The effect is mesmerizing because most of us have only seen this sort of thing in the movies or imagined it in fictional fantasy worlds where ancient temples have been hidden from the rest of the world by misty jungles. But these places exist. They're not just in books and movies and on Disney's Jungle Cruise. They are in real jungles, in the very real country of Cambodia, and they will blow your mind.



So will the lives of the people here. If you visit the outlying temples and spend any time driving through the countryside you will share the roads with mopeds, and cows, and shoe-less children riding bicycles that are a head and a half taller than they are. You will see the simple thatched homes - on risers about 8 feet off the ground - under which naked children chase chickens while still other kids play alone in rice paddies and puddles.



These are poor people and they live in very poor conditions - but you'll notice that they still send their kids to school. And these kids make it home along the roads, riding their oversized bikes and balancing brothers and sisters, on their way back to lives that are very different from what most westerners are fortunate enough to consider normal.



This is the poorest place we have ever been and yet it is also one of the best. Truly, one of the best. The treasures of Cambodia, the treasures of these people, are such a bounty of man-made miracles that you can only hope one day they'll bring a modicum of prosperity to those who call this country home. But I'd imagine that as tourism increases, and the numbers of visitors continues to swell, things will have to change or the temples won't last.



When you visit these places now there's a freedom that's difficult to swallow. There are very few barriers or blockades, and the temples become giant three-dimensional mazes. On our visit to Beng Mealea our driver had us climbing over and through the ruins, squeezing into corridors and exploring spaces that seemed straight out of adventurer's tales. I'd be shocked if it stayed this way - this unrestricted - and from what our driver told us, the numbers of visitors are only increasing.



During your visit - depending on the hour of day and which temple you're visiting - you can sometimes find yourself with a few minutes alone in a quiet corridor or maybe catch a perfect photo sans other tourists wandering through. But turn up for sunset or sundown at one of the traditional places to watch the occasion, and you will find yourself surrounded by an international gaggle of surprising proportions.

Not that the gaggle doesn't come in handy. Especially when someone neglects to bring a flashlight for crossing Angkor Wat's moat at the pitch-black hour of 5:00am and still doesn't have a flashlight when it's time to locate the lotus pond from which to watch the sunrise. (Note to self: bring flashlight next time.)



Then as the sunrise comes and both Angkor Wat and the gaggle are illuminated, it's a toss-up over which of the unveilings is more awe-inspiring. Angkor Wat and it's very recognizable silhouette? Or the large number of people who will quietly huddle around a lotus pond before dawn just to see that silhouette?



Cambodian cuisine is also worth a try and might best be described as the sweeter, milder cousin of Thai food. Siem Reap is teeming with good restaurants although visiting the town market might give you pause in all matters food-related. Vendors sit foot-to-gill with tubs of squirming fish while sharpening their blood-caked cleavers. There are piles of parts better left unidentified, and vendors catch catnaps between bags of separated egg yolks and small walls of bok choy.



But this is Cambodia. Cambodia with its tuk-tuks and its temples in the trees. Cambodia where it's hot and sticky and there's always dragon fruit for breakfast. Where temples have giant faces and flights of stairs so steep and so thin that you need to prostrate yourself to climb them. Where there's dust and there's beauty and there are more stones than you can count.



This is Cambodia. And this is one of my favorite places in the world.

Harbin is cold and icy

At one point during our visit to Harbin, Stefano-shi turned to me and said exactly what I'd been thinking: "This is the coldest place we've ever been." We were standing on a frozen river at the time and the wind was driving past us in snow-tinged gusts. Horses pulled sleighs along the surface, confirming that the ice was indeed solid, and people used what can best be described as fireplace pokers to propel themselves around on metal chairs doubling as sleds, assuring us that frozen rivers are meant to be fun.

It's worth noting that world famous ice festivals don't exist without ice and frozen rivers notwithstanding, cold temperatures in Northern China are all relative. For this time of year - the MLK long weekend - we were actually experiencing a veritable heat wave as air temps didn't plunge below zero.



In considering the geographic hand the city was dealt, Harbin deserves credit for the sheer unadulterated grandeur of its thinking. This city has affectionately taken its biggest drawback and amplified it into a full throttle advantage. Go ahead and name several cities where ice won't melt between December and February. Excellent, now of those cities, how many have responded with multi-storied ice palaces and full-sized ice pirate ships?

Workers scrape ice off the highways with squares of plywood nailed to boards and if you spend any time indoors your boots will quickly be resting in a pool of melted black slurry. Historically, Harbin was a Russian railway stop and so this Chinese city also has an unmistakable Russian flair. Much of the architecture is distinctly European, wooden nesting dolls are the easiest souvenirs to find, and the frigid airport is filled with underdressed Russians transiting through after vacations in warm places. The chemically-red cherry on top of Harbin's scenic milieu was the unmistakable pair of nuclear cooling towers we noticed on our way out of town.



Nuclear cooling towers and sandal-wearing Russians aside, Harbin's ice festival is one of the wildest things I have ever seen. The sheer scale of the ice sculptures and the intricacy and quality of the work is absolutely mind-blowing. This is also the most fun I've had outdoors in wintertime. Ever shot down a four-story ice slide with only your winter coat between you and the cold, smooth ice? I have, and it was awesome. All four times.



The festival has three main sites around town, each worthy of as many hours as your frozen toes can take. The biggest park felt like a small town populated by the world's most famous cathedrals, temples, and palaces - all made entirely of ice. The open spaces and paths of a second park were lined with gigantic sculptures made of packed snow. And a third park smack in the center of town was sponsored by Disney and its ice creations all referenced Disney's internationally recognizable repertoire.



The scale of the structures at all three sites was magical and the experience of being in the middle of these ice and snow cities was worth every flight of ice stairs we had to climb. Yep, even the stairs were made of ice - apparently you can still do that sort of thing in China.



It's hard to get photos that really do justice to the experience, partly because your camera keeps freezing and partly because photos can never really show just how good a pair of toe warmers feels on a cold Harbin night. (Among other things I credit our toe warmers with allowing us to join a very long bunny-hop on the ice field under Milan's Duomo, and with letting us hang out with a little Chinese girl who kept asking us - in English - to go down the slide with her.)

We should have taken our new bilingual friend to dinner; she might have been able to save us from our enough-food-to-feed-a-small-village ordering technique. We think the wait staff may have been trying to warn us but our lack of shared language got in the way and we ended up with one very large fish in sauce, noodles, and tofu; a big bowl of chicken, mushrooms and noodles; and about five pounds of deliciously vinegary shredded potatoes. Oh, and beer that we drank out of saucers.



When people walked past our table they laughed. Good naturedly and with big smiles, but they definitely laughed. And at one point in the dinner show performance - this was a restaurant in which costumed performers belt out party songs at ear-crushing volume - the man on the microphone directed all attention in the room towards our table and then said something hilarious in Chinese. I say hilarious because everyone else was smiling, not because I have any idea of what he said.



And that's part of the fun of visiting China - it's one big experiment. You don't know what people are saying. You never really know what you're eating. And you sure don't know how they built all of that stuff out of ice.