End of an era

Demons holding up the wall

About thirty minutes earlier than promised, our friendly doorman called our room, ensuring we appreciated the predawn night. Stumbling downstairs, we found a helmeted tuktuk driver waiting to drive his modified motorcycle 60km north through the darkness to our last temple, Banteay Chamar. This stereotypically southeast Asian form of transportation consists of a motorcycle with some type of carriage welded to the back of the frame - usually with different colorful decorations painted or pinned on for good measure. After wind burning our eyes during our moped excursion in Laos, we came prepared, donning sunglasses a full ninety minutes before sunrise. Fortunately, we decided at the last minute to wear long sleeve shirts despite the blistering daytime sun. Even with the added layer of protection, we still ended up huddled together in the backseat against the wind generated as our tuktuk's motor strained away at 55+ km/hr.

Tuktuk

The timing played out perfectly, with our transport bouncing over a rough dirt road as the sun crested the horizon. After waking a sleeping guard (apparently Thai soldiers had snuck over the border a decade ago, dynamited a section of wall carvings and driven it back to Thailand before being forced to return it), our driver stretched out in the backseat and promptly fell asleep. Despite essentially absent Cambodian, we got the message - "wake me up when you're done." 

After Siem Reap, our exploration struck an immediate high note - there were a total of two people in the temple complex, just me and Brooke. A dirt path wandered through the dried grass towards a collapsing perimeter wall, covered with various scenes of battles and the familiar naga tug of war symbolizing gods and demons churning an ocean of milk to generate their elixir of immortality. The town near Banteay Chamar had developed an excellent community based tourism industry, with a rotating cast of homestays distributing the benefits of the tourist economy throughout the town, and reportedly several trained local guides on hire to add depth to self guided tours. Unfortunately, we could not find anyone beyond the guard, much less a guide, when we first arrived, so much of the meaning of the scenes was lost to us. Stepping through a gap in this wall, we began to pass through buildings in various states of repair and disrepair. Clearly someone had been working to restore the site, but it was unclear if the activity was yesterday or a year ago, or if they were winning the battle against entropy. 

The center area

Regardless, the flow of the site pulled us deeper into the grounds, at times scrambling over toppled blocks, occasionally zigging around trees splitting a structure in half, and sometimes passing through stone tunneled hallways. We never got the sense that there was a true center of the ruins, but there was certainly a central area. At each corner, perhaps two hundred feet apart rose tiered structures about thirty feet tall, with human faces built into the wall much like the Bayon near Siem Reap. Some of their interiors had collapsed to the point of impassibility, but two of the structures offered easy access to their center and a network of attached hallways. 

Faces in the columns

Eventually, we worked our way through this central area into less impressive stone buildings, where i would occasionally stop in my tracks to lean against nearby supports, since my colon apparently still wanted to protest my continued culinary experimentation. Mildly alarmed by the close calls, and anticipating a sun drenched ride to Thailand in the afternoon, we decided to head back to our sleeping driver. On the way, we came across a small group of archaeologists painstakingly repairing a wall, with locals helping to lift large blocks back into place with a mechanical lift while a white (British?) woman cleaned a carving in the sandstone with a brush. They seemed intent on their work so we just watched for a few minutes then continued back to our happily sleeping driver.

Seems like a cool job

After an uneventful drive back to the hotel, we quickly packed up and began our last day on the bikes. Not knowing what the road had to offer we stopped within a few miles for delicious orange soda, rice and pork as the day grew progressively hotter. However, our ultimate destination was Bangkok, where we would take an overnight train back to Chiang Mai. Since we had used all of our extra time deviating through Vietnam (a trade both of us would make again), we did not have time to complete our loop by riding to Chiang Mai. In search of an arbitrary endpoint, we settled on crossing the Cambodian - Thai border as a suitable stopping point. Our plan involved catching the mid afternoon train to Bangkok, or else we would have to stay overnight in the border town of Aranyaprathet before catching the six am train. While staying in random towns frequently nets amazing unanticipated experiences, this would be our only time in Bangkok, and arriving tomorrow would put our arrival time questionably close to our departure time for the Chiang Mai night train. Better to get out of the shade, onto the bikes and beeline it to Thailand. Fortunately, the end of the journey fueled our legs through some fairly uninspiring terrain of overgrazed former floodplain, but blessed by a tailwind and nonchalant border guards, we rocketed across the Thai border with time to spare. I impressed some old Thai women selling snacks at the train station by ordering cold water accompanied by sliced green mango with salt / chili powder and chips, helped Brooke load the bikes, changed into street clothes in the bathroom (balancing on my shoes to avoid the slight film of urine coating the floor), then took my seat with about five minutes to spare.

End of the ride

As the train chugged out of the station, I think we both experienced a sense of finality and sadness that this journey had come to a close. Watching the significantly more verdant Thai rice fields roll by, shifting sides of the train to avoid direct sun, I couldn't help but wish we were still riding. Certainly for me, but I think also for Brooke, what we will miss most is the sense of limitless time that we had in the early part of the trip, where we felt like we could make any decision about direction or activity because there was always tomorrow - a tomorrow that would be the same as the day before it and the day after. Of course, getting a sense of a country by traveling at fourteen miles an hour (or getting to know Laos at eight miles an hour) yielded uncountable memories from tiny interactions with random people to stops at traditional tourist meccas. While I enjoyed each of the countries we traveled through, Laos will be the one that sticks in my mind as defining this trip. The hint that if we could just get a little better at Lao, meaningful communication lay just around the corner, as well as the friendly nature of the people, the delicious food, and the sense of adventure that came from exploring less traveled regions of the country epitomize what I love about travel.

However, our return is still a few weeks away, with plenty to keep us busy. Apart from some difficulty finding a hotel in Bangkok on our bikes, our train ride passed seamlessly. The next day was spent eating various curries, soups and shakes as we walked the streets surrounding Bangkok's China Town, with a crazy stop at the Royal Snake Farm where we saw (mostly) caged snakes from all over southeast Asia, including some very large king cobras that attempted to strike their gleeful handlers multiple times. Our ride on the night train zipped by, and although the AC was a little powerful, we didn't get bed bugs, and arrived refreshed in Chiang Mai around eight in the morning. As a fitting start to the next mini leg of this journey, we ran into Stu from the bike shop as we tried to navigate to his store from the train station. Dropping our bikes off at the shop, we had to quickly shift gears. In an effort to prevent excessive biking heading into race season, we decided to take a week off the bike by traveling to Hong Kong and Japan. Our tickets are already purchased (one of the reasons we had to make it to Bangkok on time), so all we have to do is make our flight.