Andaman Coast

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View from the Ko Phi Phi Viewpoint. Heavily populated Ton Sai Village between Ton Sai Bay and Loh Dalam Bay was struck from both directions and destroyed by the 2004 Tsunami

From our dive instructor's underwater camera: a juvenile emperor angelfish

"SUPER DRY!"

The Andaman Islands of Southern Thailand's west coast have the reputation as the ultimate tropical paradise destination in Southeast Asia.  Travelers drop phrases like "glimmering hedonistic nirvana," and "un-imaginable beauty," with a casualness that we'd reserve for conversations about our "afternoon nap."  But after a horrific tsunami and the years of intense development that followed, where do the islands now stand?

We returned to Bangkok for a little more than a day to see some old friends (food stalls) before flying south to Krabi on the Andaman Coast.  We skipped the region during our first trip through Thailand, the peninsula is on a different monsoon schedule from the Gulf of Thailand, and we wanted to avoid traveling through the deep south by land because it is prone to outbursts of separatist violence and government suppression (the southern provinces have a sizable, poltically marginalized Muslim population).  From Krabi Town we caught the morning ferry to Ko Phi Phi Don.

Beautiful as the island immediately appeared, we were just as soon struck by the inflated prices (standard items cost two to five times more than on Ko Chang, for example) of the over-crowded and westernized backpacker village at Ton Sai.  We only planned to stay on Phi Phi for two nights, so the money thing was a pill we had to swallow.  And the beach is free, so that was where we spent most of our time.  Except Ton Sai Bay (the bluer bay on the left as seen from Phi Phi Viewpoint) is used as the pier for major ferries and longtail water taxis, and is therefore not a good swimming beach.  Loh Dalam Bay (the attractive green bay opposite Ton Sai) is not much nicer - like much of the island it feels worked beyond its nature-intended capacity, the bay like a shared waste-deep bath of still water that is a few degrees too warm.

We were missing something essential from the Phi Phi experience.  We sensed our best bet was to escape the backpacker bubble at Ton Sai and try to connect with the natural beauty of the islands.  It was much too expensive to dive so we joined a small afternoon snorkeling expedition.  Christina and I and three kind Swisspersons left on a longtail boat for the small neighboring island of Ko Phi Phi Leh.  There we swam above a parade of blacktip reef sharks, with schools of squid, and even beside a hawksbill sea turtle surfacing for air.  Between dive sites we jumped off our boat and played in the green and blue bays shaped by the enormous karsts that shoot out from the ocean floor.  We briefly visited Ao Maya Bay, immortalized in Leonardo DiCaprio's The Beach, which now hosts some dozen nightly camping trips and all-you-can-stomach booze cruises.  We motored home while the late sun lit the island walls golden.  And finally we got it: Phi Phi Leh and Phi Phi Don are exquisite.  We only had to put ourselves in the right position to appreciate them.

We mistimed our ferry to Krabi the next morning and so we exercised our freedom of movement and changed course, if only because we could.  We caught the next boat to Ko Lanta, which we knew next to nothing about.  There, after several days of intense internetting, Christina applied and was accepted to a yoga teacher training course in the Indian Himalayas.  And before leaving Thailand for Pulau Langkawi in Malaysia, we had one final bruising and blissful Thai massage, one last green curry, and we dove Hin Muang and Hin Daeng, two well regarded Thai dive sites.  We unfortunately missed the "big ones" that patrol the area (whalesharks and manta rays that arrive to feed and be groomed), though the steep submerged walls, soft corals, wondrous diversity of fish, and excellent visibility made for an unrivaled underwater experience.  I return in my imagination.

Temples of Angkor

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Reclaimed by nature

In front of Angkor Wat

Angkor Wat from the second enclosure

Balusters in the stone windows

More face-towers of Bayon, which are said to resemble the face of their creator, Khmer King Jayavarman VII

I robbed the bank caravan while Christina harvested the organs

We flew from Hoi An to Ho Chi Minh City/ Saigon and then traveled through the Mekong Delta across the border into Cambodia. Exhausted by the mega-cities of Vietnam, we sought relaxation on the beaches of Sihanoukville in the Gulf of Thailand. There one unlikely and rotten event led to another during the most challenging and desperate stretch of the trip. Though night-diving alongside squid ("CALAMARI!" our Neapolitan instructor cried out), cuttlefish, shy crabs, and sleeping reef fish was an unforgettable thrill, it wasn't until we escaped to Phnom Penh a week later that we could emotionally move on (a visit to the Cheung Ek Killing Fields also lent us some needed perspective). From there it was a night bus to Siem Reap, launching point for Angkor Wat and the Khmer temples.

Between the 8th and 13th centuries the Khmer Kings created the magnificent stone temples of Angkor, which stand today as evidence of the greatness of the Khmer Civilization. What part does Angkor Wat play in Cambodian national identity and pride? Its iconic silhouette is on beer labels, the flag, t-shirts and hats, tattooed on the chest of the man sitting next to you. In 2003 a Cambodian newspaper falsely reported that a Thai actress had claimed Angkor Wat was in fact stolen from Thailand. Cambodian media picked up on the story and word spread, while Thai television programming was removed from the Cambodian airwaves. One day later, the Thai Embassy in Phnom Penh and a handful of Thai businesses were burnt to the ground by nationalistic rioters.

Built under alternately Hindu and Buddhist Khmer kings, the temples feature deities and images from both religions. In a sort of tug of war, many Buddhist icons were removed from temples by Hindu kings who came to power after their completion, and some were later partially restored by the Buddhist faithful. The temples were not actually places of meeting or worship, but were built as the palaces of gods who were there enshrined to bring good fortune to the Khmer kings. Angkor Wat is one example of a Khmer temple built as the Hindu universe in microcosm, with central towers as an image of Mount Meru, the center of the world, surrounded by the primordial ocean, in Angkor Wat's case a large moat.

In Siem Reap, which translates to Siem (Thailand) Defeated, by the way, we purchased a three day pass to the temples and got to work. Many sites are densely centered around Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom, though there are over 50 temples by my count, and Angkor Wat to the jungle surroundings of Banteay Srei, for example, is almost 25 miles each leg. With 95 degree heat, an oppressive sun, and dustbowl roads, we did not want to waste our limited endurance covering the distances between temples on bicycle. So we hired Mr. Choom, a young tuk tuk driver who picked us up before sunrise and brought us to whichever sites we desired, to fruit and beverage stops before we even knew we were dehydrated, and to the finest toilets available when emergency struck (and it did).

Our plan was to start small and work up to the sluggers: Angkor Wat, the Bayon, Angkor Thom, Ta Prohm.  The plan backfired when early morning on day two Christina badly sprained her ankle on the uneven stone footing of Banteay Kdei. Our lawsuit against the Cambodian Department of Tourism was thrown out when evidence surfaced that she was actually balancing on one foot attempting to copy the professional-grade moves of the royal dancers seen in the Kdei bas-reliefs. She went down hard, and suddenly we weren't sure if she'd see anything more of Angkor Wat than what was available from the road. Ice... Elevation... Advil... James Bond films... echoed the voice of Dr. Walton in my mind, and with a little treatment Lionheart Rosenthal was back out there, hobbling up rainforest paths and climbing the steep stone steps of the largest religious structure on earth.

For my reference, if nothing else, I recall visiting: Preah Khan, Ta Som, East Mebon, Pre Rup (sunset), Srah Srang (sunrise), Banteay Kdei, Ta Prohm, Angkor Wat (sunset and sunrise), Angkor Thom, the Elephant Terrace, Bayon, Ta Keo, Kbal Spean, and Banteay Srei.

Hoi An

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No cannonballs

(No pictures of Hoi An.  My camera was stolen in Sihanoukville, Cambodia, and I hadn't yet backed up or uploaded the photos.  I had many opportunities to do so, but I just didn't.  We also lost pictures of Saigon and the Mekong Delta, but Hoi An is the set that breaks my heart.  Hoi An was my favorite city in Vietnam and there I lucked into without question the best photos I will ever take.  Hard to be mad at anyone but myself, though.)

Hoi An is a former riverside trading port of Vietnamese and foreign merchants.  The city is celebrated for its historic town of immaculately preserved old houses featuring Japanese and Chinese architecture and the narrow, car-free streets they occupy.  We were in Hoi An for its monthly full moon festival, when the city turns off its power and the walking-streets and meeting houses are lit by colorful paper lanterns and floating candles on the river.  Strolling down the streets beside old Vietnamese men in silk pajamas intently watching a game of candlelit cờ quan (Mandarin chess) it felt as if we slipped back a couple of centuries.

But a town so packed with old world magic and romance can't be kept secret: at night there might be a thousand tourists packed into the streets of conservative little Hoi An.  One effect of this tourism boom is the local tailor scene, which is truly out of control.  There are hundreds of storefront tailors in the old town all competing for your business.  Bring them an idea, or a torn page from a magazine, and they can expertly copy it with materials of your choice and tailor it to you at discount store prices.  And so I buried my Superbowl sorrows like any self-respecting Tom Brady fan: under a weighty pile of silk couture.  Christina had six gorgeous dresses made, and I got a gray suit and a pair of loafers.  With so many garments pending we found ourselves returning to the tailors three or four times a day for a week and a half, trying something on, being re-fitted, having alterations made.  We came home at night and watched runway shows on the Fashion Network.  It was work.

Luckily we were sustained by the best food we tasted in Vietnam.  Could it even have been better than that of Bangkok and Chiang Mai?  The unique dishes of Hoi An (Cau Lao is the most famous: doughy yellow noodles - made only from the water in the town's preserved medieval well - mixed with croutons, greens, sprouts, fried rice paper, and pork slices or tofu in a savory broth) were out of this world delicious.  This was the Vietnamese food we dared to dream of.  For an extra five dollars at the wonderful and inexplicably cheap Cafe 43 we went back into the kitchen and cooked our order ourselves, with the much needed help of the owner-family's youngest chef.  Memories documented in our thighs and underarms.

Hue and the DMZ

Hue

Not enjoying my suggestion of  "pose like a concubine"

Long Hung Church

23m underground inside the Vinh Moc Tunnels

Sniffing ants

The Reunification Express

On the Perfume River in central Vietnam, Hue offers a small glimpse of the country pre-communism.  The Citadel and Imperial Tombs are now icons of Hue, although modern Vietnamese attitudes toward these remnants of the imperial institution have sometimes been chilly.  About 75km south of the 17th parallel, Hue hosted some of the bloodiest battles of the French and American wars.  The palace was looted by the French in 1895, and most of the Citadel was leveled by U.S.bombs when South Vietnamese and U.S. forces re-captured the city following the Tet Offensive.

The Citadel, which includes the Imperial Enclosure and the Forbidden Purple City, is so large that it is easy to find an isolated, ruined, and overgrown area to privately take in the atmosphere and history.  And the structures that have survived or have been restored feature beautiful and ornate Vietnamese architecture.  The imperial tennis court is one sign of the increasing western influence of the early 20th century and, set in the middle of the second enclosure, it is now fully operational and open for free play to the public.

The Imperial Tombs, most about a dozen kilometers farther down river, are perfectly preserved.  Each tomb is on its own enormous lot of land and, built during the emperors' lifetimes, they are awesome manifestations of the imperial ego.  With manicured lakes, elaborate stone temples, beautiful statues of unicorns, elephants, and mandarins (advisors to the emperor, not ethnic Chinese), and courtyards of frangipani trees, the tombs were favored hangout spots of the emperors.  Perfectly peaceful spaces to compose poetry or lounge about with one of the approximately 500 imperial wives (even the homosexual emperor Bao Dai had 12 wives).

Christina and I also took a moving tour of the Demilitarized Zone with a former South Vietnamese scout employed at Khe San.  We visited the "Horrible Highway," the Ben Hai River at the 17th parallel, the bullet-ridden Long Hung Church, the Vinh Moc Tunnels, and a VC cemetery of unmarked graves.  Quickly dismantled in 1973, the sites of former American forces bases are now just quiet fields of peppercorn and rubber trees.  In fact, there is little to actually see in the DMZ: our experience stood on the emotional stories of our guide.  Imprisoned in a Vietnamese re-education camp following the war, shot at by gunboats while attempting to flee the country (the thousands who left following the war are known as "boat people"), spied and reported on to the communist police by his neighbors, denied support by the U.S. military, shamed by his publicly educated daughter for fighting with Saigon, his story was heartbreaking, if probably typical of former South Vietnamese soldiers.  It was interesting to contrast his version of events with the party-line of the museums we visited, as well as to see where he departed from the historical narratives we accept today.  It was a profound experience which has already been diluted by time.