Attack! An excerpt from our snorkel log in Bali, Indonesia

 

12-Oct-2012, Japanese Wreck, Aas, Amed, Bali

This site is about as far south as you go in the Amed area, on the east coast of Bali. We’re staying at the Good Karma Bungalows in Selang, also in the south part of the Amed area, about 2km north of Aas.  There are no taxis here nor any form of public transportation other than something called a Bemo (basically a minivan) that runs once at around 8AM.  So, to get to this Japanese Wreck snorkel site we’d read about, we rented a motorbike for the day.

That bit alone was an adventure, considering neither of us had ever ridden a motorcycle before (if you don’t count the one time I rode on the back of my grandfather’s motorcycle when I was about 10). Since I at least ride bikes somewhat regularly, and since I typically drive (between the two of us), I drove the scooter. It’s not as easy as it looks. It takes very fine control to get the throttle just right. If you don’t get it right, you can (theoretically) end up getting a sudden burst of speed and (potentially) go lurching up a bumpy driveway and (allegedly) almost scrape your partner’s foot along a stone wall because not only don’t you have that fine control over your speed that you’re used to, but the faster you go, the less sensitive the steering gets, so it’s hard to accelerate and simultaneously turn away from a (hypothetically) fast on-rushing wall. 

I also hate having the throttle be in the same place as my steering. Anyway, it wasn’t pretty, and it wasn’t exactly a smooth ride, but we got there (with no actual crashes and only minor close calls), and the motorbike was the only way to do it.  Ultimately, it wasn’t a bad dead.  It cost us $5 for the whole day, and we also used it after snorkeling to scout for our next hotel farther north in town, so we did at least take good advantage of it.

Anyway, when we got in the water at the wreck site, it wasn’t immediately clear where the wreck was.  None of it stuck out of the water, and there wasn’t a flag or anything.  There were some pretty decent corals, but nothing blow-your-mind by local standards. I finally decided to head to where some snorkel boats were parked, figuring that if that’s where they park when they bring in snorkelers, that’s probably near the boat. Yep. It was.

So… being the first underwater wreck we’d ever seen, it was definitely neat and interesting. It was pretty small, though. We explored around the surface of it, and I even made a couple free dives down to look under a couple things, which was neat. 

As a side note, I’ve actually been reading and teaching myself to free dive, and I’ve been getting pretty decent at it. I can now pretty consistently do about 45 seconds without too much trouble. That may not sound like a lot when you’re sitting at your desk, lounging on your couch, or laying on your bed. But when you’re kicking with fins to get down to 5 or 7 meters deep and then stay down (I’m not using weight or anything to help), you have to learn to not just hold your breath, but hold your breath while working out, and also trying to be as slow and relaxed as possible. Forty-five seconds is pretty good for me after just a week of figuring it out.

Anyway, with all that, we had pretty much seen what there was to see after about 15 minutes. We decided to head back out and just enjoy the rest of the corals in the area. I mentioned that they were nothing spectacular by local standards, but… to be fair… local standards around here are pretty damned spectacular compared to almost anywhere else. So, still VERY good shit… just nothing new to us by this point. We didn’t see any new fish.

We did have one incident though, that damned near gave us both a heart attack. We were attacked by a Titan Triggerfish.  Reaching up to 30 inches in length (75cm), the Titan Triggerfish is also called the Giant Triggerfish. That’s a HUGE bitch! And it has big teeth, which it uses to eat rocks (technically coral, but you see my point). We’ve seen one pick up and move a huge rock the size of a large watermelon with little to no effort.  These fuckers will take CHUNKS out of you if they bite. They could bite off entire fingers without blinking. Also, and here’s where it gets interesting… they get AGGRESSIVELY territorial when they are in nesting mode. The lovely part of that is… you never know when one is going to be in nesting season. I learned later that it’s not like there’s a big season for all of them. If there was, you could just stay the FUCK out of the water for a couple weeks or whatever. But no… they just go whenever they feel like it. Outside that season, they’re perfectly fine. We’d seen plenty swimming around before, and have seen plenty afterward. No other ones have ever had any problems (though, for a few days after the attack, you can bet that we hauled ass anytime one even looked at us funny). We found out later that when they’re not in nesting season, you can go right up to them and take their picture with no problem. They’re funny little fish. In nesting season, though… they’re gigantic, terrifying monsters.

So, we had read about their reputations before we ever got in the water. That’s the main reason we even knew what kind of fish they were. We’d always been keeping on eye on any we saw. The attack, of course, came from the one we DIDN’T see. That’s how it always happens, isn’t it? We were swimming along, blissfully happy, enjoying the sun and the tropical fish and the beautiful corals in the placidly calm water. All of the sudden, Jime does a whole sudden jolt, just like in all the Jaws movies. What the hell? “TRIGGER!! GO!!!” I look in the water, and I shit you not, my sphincter puckered instantly. A very LARGE Titan Trigger was hauling ASS right at me, like a damned missile. There’s no way in hell I had any chance of outrunning/outswimming it, but you can bet I tried!

I knew that the trick with these fuckers was to get out of their territorial “cone”, above their nesting site, that they decide is their private and inviolable space. A dive master later told me that because their space is cone-shaped, you might actually get out of their space faster by diving deep. That makes perfect sense… logically, if you’re already diving. But when you have a finger-chomping, rock-biting missile launching at you at blinding speeds, you don’t think logically, and diving deeper into the water was about the LAST thing I planned on doing (even if I had thought about it then).   Maybe that makes perfect sense for scuba divers, but for me snorkeling, that’s a definite no-go.

Trigger fish swim funny. Their main fins are these really long ones on top and bottom, covering roughly the back third of their body. Because of this, they swim with this silly little. .. sashay.  They wiggle. When they’re attacking you, though… it’s not so much a cute little wiggle as a high frequency, vibrating death machine. Suffice to say we hauled ass. Jime got ahead, which was good. I stayed on my back and kicked with all my might, keeping my mask in the water as much as I could, to keep my eyes on the fish, and keeping my fins between him and me. Oh, and for the record, calling it a he is not just animal equal male bias as the psychologists would call it. It is actually the males who are the territorial assholes of the Titan Trigger species. In any case… there I was, hauling ass and swimming away with all my might, and this fucker keeps coming at me, again and again, attack after attack. He rockets up at me at top speed, gets close enough for me to kick him (Jime thought I actually did kick him, but I never felt like I actually made contact). I can’t kick fast enough to make me happy… but at least I’m leaving. And then something straight out of a horror movie happens… my fin starts to come off.

I did everything I could to keep it on my foot without actually stopping, but there was nothing for it. A few strokes later and it actually popped off. I had a total flashback to a time when I lost my flip flop as I was running in terror from what I (and my mom) thought was a very close bear back when I was camping with my family when I was about 9 years old. The problem isn’t just that I lost a shoe/fin. The problem is the complete mental vapor lock that happens while you try to decide whether or not you go back and get it or keep moving as fast as you can with one foot. Well, in both cases, I decided that I needed the shoe. With my fin, I figured that if I didn’t get it now, it was lost forever, because I certainly wouldn’t be swimming INTENTIONALLY back into that asshole’s territory. So, I waited until he turned around after his last attack, and as soon as he did, I had about a two second window to reach back, grab the fin, and kick even harder with my other leg. Fortunately, my timing was perfect. I got my fin, and I got the hell away. He came after me about two more times after that. All told, he came at me about 5 or 6 times. He never bit me. He never even hurt my fin. He did, however, scare the ever-loving bejesus out of me, and made me paranoid to be in the water at all for about a week until I finally learned a little bit more about their behavior, and what signs to watch out for.

Honestly, while we may be a LITTLE bit less paranoid about the Titan Triggers now that some time has passed, it’s a good thing Jime was able to get some nice pictures of them earlier, before we knew they had devils living inside them.

I give you now, some of the pictures Jime did manage to get of the Evil Satanfish from Hell (none of which were currently possessed at the time).

(He’s… here… Ray.  He’s… LOOKING at me.)

(Here you can see the big fins on top and bottom.  You can also see the teeth, which are the size of Chiclets).

(This is a good pic for perspective, compared to a “normal” fish.  It’s also ALMOST what it looks like when it’s pointing at you)

(A picture of a Titan Trigger eating coral.  It’s also another good pic for perspective compared to other fish)

And finally, I’ll leave you with this… If you do a youtube search on the phrase “Titan Trigger Attack”, you will get MANY results.  I wanted to show you what it was like, to the best of my ability, so I watched a few, and picked one that I think best represents my experience.  The main difference between this video and my experience as that this fish attacked the camera directly, whereas mine seemed to be going for my feet.  I’m guessing that this video is as short as it is because after the first couple hits, he stopped filming and got the hell away.  The video is very nice, though, for showing you how fast these fuckers can come at you, and what it looks like when you’re looking right at them when they do.  Enjoy…

Stranded in Senggigi–Another Minipost from Indonesia

 

We got up at about 5AM this morning to make the trek from Tulamben, Bali, Indonesia to Mataram, Lombok, Indonesia (a neighboring island).  We got up, showered, ate a hurried breakfast and   got in our pre-arranged ride back to the ferry landing at Padang Bai.  1.5 hours later, we arrive in Padang Bai, buy our tickets for the next ferry (8 AM), bought and then returned tickets for a ride into town for after we landed (the ride needed us to wait for the 9am ferry, which was going to make us late... they suggested we just find a taxi on arrival instead).

The 8AM ferry finally departed, right on the dot... at 8:45.  We could have hired a speed boat for the crossing for a bit more money to make the crossing in 1/4 the time, but that speed comes at the price of essentially playing Russian Roulette with your chances of ever arriving.  The boats are known for their lack of appropriate seaworthiness and safety gear  (not a good combo).  4 hours and 15 minutes on the ferry later, we arrive in Lembar, Lombok (for those of you following along on Google Maps), only to discover there's not a single taxi in site.  It seems there's an agreement that  taxis are allowed in only to drop off, not to pick up.  After asking around, we manage to barter our way into a ride into Mataram (our intended destination) for about $10 (it's a 25km ride).

At 2pm, we FINALLY arrive at our destination, the Immigration Office, where we'd desperately been trying to arrive at BEFORE 2pm, since we thought that might be the cut-off time for what we needed to do there.  You see, our Visas expire in about 5 days, and we came all the way to this Immigration Office partly because it was kind of close to another place we wanted to go (the Gili Islands), and partly because we were told this was the office with the fastest processing times.  Fortunately, when we walked in the door, the office was still open!  Yay!

Alas.  The counter we needed to use for our Visas was closed.  They closed at 12 noon... TODAY ONLY.  It seems tomorrow is a huge Muslim holiday (the day of the local Haj pilgrimage to Mecca).  Tomorrow the office is closed entirely.  This particular office, miraculously, is also open on Saturdays, though.  Any luck there?  Nope.  Thank you random holiday we had no way of knowing about!  Come back on Monday.  Monday is Oct 29.  Our visas are officially expired on Oct 30.  Fortunately, the people who ARE still working in the office at this point are very nice, and assure us that coming in on Monday is not a problem . 

Still... that means we're stuck in Mataram, a town with nothing in it for tourists other than this office, and which we had only planned on spending one night.  4 days is not enough to go to a different island and come back, and at this point, no other office can help us but this one.  All other offices need you to come at least a week early, whereas this one does 3 day turn-around by default, and can do it same day for a small extra fee.  They can do that precisely BECAUSE there’s nothing for tourists to do here, so their queues are very short.

Since the lady helping us was so patient, kind and understanding, Jime asks her if she can help us by calling a cab.  No problem.  We grab our cab, and start heading to the little hotel in the middle of nowhere that we had picked out (it’s sole “features” were that it was cheap, relatively well-reviewed, and close to other hotels).  The cab driver turns out to speak very good English, and also was quite chatty.  We tell him our story.  We tell him how because of this holiday we didn’t know about, we missed our window by 2.5 hours, which now meant we were stuck in town for 4 days.  He  tells us we should absolutely get the hell out of this town and go to the beach in Senggigi. We wondered how far away that was, thinking that maybe we’d bite the bullet and arrange a ride there for tomorrow. 

Instead, he tells us he knows Senggigi very well.  It will only cost you around $5 to get there from here, and will take about 30 minutes.  In fact, if we had gone straight there from the Immigration Office, it would have been $4.  Jime and I look at each other… “Should we?”  “You know?  Fuck it.  Let’s do it!”  So off we went! Just for fun, he showed us the Mall (since we were right next to it at the time anyway) and lets us know we have now seen the main feature of the city.

And… here we are.  Not only was the cab driver spot on with his estimate of the cost (we were on the meter the whole time), but he even knew the town well enough to recommend hotels for us, based on the cost we wanted.  We are now at the Made Home Stay (pronounced, as if it were Spanish, as “MAH-deh”).  It’s $10/night for a double bed with a fan, private bath, WiFi, and breakfast included.  It’s right across the street from the beach.  Somewhere around here, there will be snorkeling. I also happen to know there’s even a place SOMEWHERE around here where I can finally try a cup of Kopi Luwak, something I will only get to do once in my life, and can’t easily do in any other place in the world than Indonesia (only 500-700kg total of beans are produced per year, for many reasons).

In the end, it may not have been the destination we had in mind, but we could do a hell of a lot worse.  If we are going to be stuck, we’re happy being stuck in Senggigi.

We got burned, A Mini-post

 

We've generally been very good with the sun protection while snorkeling.  We'd even gone as far as wearing shorts and T-shirts in the water, with SPF 80 on exposed areas that. But, over that time, we'd been getting good color.  Gradually, as we both got darker, we'd been reducing the amount of protection, until it was just the shirt and shorts for a few days.  No problem. 

The time had come, then, we reasoned, to get rid of the T-shirts, and see if we could get some color on our backs.  We only intended to be out for a short while that day.  We failed.  The fish were too much fun that day.  The corals were too fantastic (more than even earlier on the other part of this small bay).  Visibility was too good!  We could see 20m+, easy! 

After about an hour and a half, we started feeling the familiar warmth on the back that says you're getting to the limit.  But the water was cool.  Jime covered up a little bit, but I had no shirt that day, so there was nothing to do for it.  We started heading back, but we dawdled.  By the time we got out, it had been 2.5 hours, and my guess is the UV Index that day must have been spiked to the limit.  The sun was clear, without a cloud in the sky.  When we got out of the water, we knew we were burned, but, as these things go, there was no telling how bad yet. 

Sun burns don't hurt right away. We were actually quite FINE having a little sunburn.  It burns for a couple days, maybe it peels later, but eventually, it turns into color.  We scheduled our dive for the next day (this was last Tuesday, I guess).  By that evening, though, we knew the dive was at risk.  When morning came, I knew it wasn't gonna happen.  I walked over to the dive shop and postponed for a day.  Then evening came and I knew tomorrow wasn’t gonna happen either, so I postponed indefinitely.  We were fortunate enough that our little hotel had an aloe plant growing (sabila) in the garden, and they very kindly let us cut off a couple leaves.  There’s nothing better for minor burns than fresh aloe.  We also bought some regular skin lotion.  We used that stuff several times a day, and babied our backs as much as possible.

When all was said and done, we weren’t able to dive until Saturday (yesterday), and even then, it was touch and go.  I had to be very careful to keep my shirt on when I wasn’t wearing the wetsuit.

Burns get worse before they get better.  As you probably know, the definition of a 2nd degree burns is that blisters appear.  Jime’s had come and gone.  The day of the dive, I had a few small ones, but nothing major.  Today though, I look like a damned leper.  The skin over my triceps looks… textured.  Oddly, Jime learned an interesting and related fact today.  It turns out that leprosy has another name.  It’s also called “Hansen’s Disease”.  Great. Just what I need.  Anyway, I won’t show you a picture or anything.  You don’t need to be that traumatized.   I just wanted to share that I’d been stupid, and now I’m paying for it.  It’s mostly past the hurting stage, but it’s still in the “very unpleasant” stage.  You can rest assured, though, that neither of us will be pulling that kind of stunt again.  It’s shirts or SPF 80 from head to toe from here on out, or at least until I’m as dark as a local, and even then, we’ll still discuss it.

Angkor Wat, Cambodia – A Forest of Temples

Out of Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City, we took a bus straight up to Siem Reap, Cambodia. We decided to skip Phnom Penh this time. I’m sure it’s a fine city, but it really had nothing specific we wanted to see. The original plan had been to get a bus up to Phnom Penh, then take a speed boat up to Siem Reap. After digging into the details of it all, though, it turned out that a straight bus trip was basically a day faster (doing the boat would have meant staying overnight in Phnom Penh), and 1/3 the cost. So, bus it was. They told us the ride was going to be around 9 hours, but the reality was more like 13 (turns out it was 9 hours to Cambodia, so the travel agency must have just read the wrong line).
In any case, the bus ride was actually quite pretty. Along the way we saw endless rice fields, which may sound boring, but actually it’s not. It’s like… if you see pictures of South East Asia, often those pictures are of rice fields. And you think, “Wow… I’d love to see that some day!” Well, this was that some day! In fact, so much of the trip was rice fields that I dare say more than half the country must be underwater! You’ve probably seen pictures of this by now (ours if not anybody else’s), but rice fields are always flooded when they plant, and for the … beginning parts of the crop at least. I won’t pretend I know the whole cycle, but I at least know that when they plant rice, the fields are flooded, and they stay that way for… a while. Well, Cambodia is… “that way”… right now. I swear you could just about commute by boat across half the country.

Actually, the water turns out to be a significant feature in Cambodian history (according to an article we stumbled across while we were there). Historians believe that one of the things that gave the ancient Cambodians of Angkor such huge power in their time was their mastery of water. They knew how to control it like nobody else. They had canals to move it from rivers to fields, knew how to handle run-off from floods, and had many gigantic reservoirs to store it for droughts. It was that mastery of water that let their civilization get as big as it did. Sadly, it was also ultimately all that control over the water that likely lead to their eventual downfall.
Interestingly, along the way, we also saw a lot of duck farms. It seems like a strange thing to farm ducks, but it must be less strange here. I don’t know if they’re all for food, or if people eat duck eggs or what, but actually saw quite a few duck farms. They’re cute. Basically, people just have some sort of pond on their property, and part of that pond, they have fenced off, and in that fenced off area, they have ducks. Sometimes a fuckload of ducks.

(I know it’s blurry, but that black blob is about 1,000 ducks.  This picture was taken from a bouncing bus.)

So why did we go to Siem Reap? Because Siem Reap is the home of Angkor Wat! Actually, Angkor Wat is just one of MANY temples in an entire protected area called Angkor Archeological Park. There’s no way in hell you could see all of the temples in one day. To help with that, you can buy tickets for 1 day, 3 days or 1 week. We went for the 3-day pass, which works pretty neat. You can use it any 3 days within a week. In other words, when you go for 3 days, they don’t have to be all in a row. Spending a whole day touring through temples can be really amazing, but it’s also quite exhausting. It was nice to be able to take a day of rest in between our touring. Interestingly, in order to prevent ticket theft, or ticket fraud, they actually take your picture when you buy a multi-day pass, and print it right on the ticket. Considering that a 3-day ticket costs $40, I appreciate that they took that extra step to protect us.
In this city, we stayed at a hotel/guest house called “Hak’s House”. Hak is a local guy who runs the place with some of his family. He speaks nearly flawless English. The place itself is GORGEOUS, and has a really beautiful patio where you can sit outside and eat your meals. Like most places we stayed at in SouthEast Asia, breakfast was included in the room price. It’s nice to wake up and know that your first meal (and first cup of coffee) will be no hassle. The patio was surrounded by lovely plants, ferns, bamboo and even orchids. On one side, he had a couple large pots with some lovely water lilies that would open in the morning, and close up at night.
So, getting to the temples, it seems that the way you “do” the temples is to hire a driver for the day, and have him drive you to each temple you want to visit and wait outside while you tour through. Hak had a couple drivers on staff, so we paid them $12 for a day of touring. The temples are spread out so far that it would not be possible to walk them, and even biking would be impractical (especially in the impressive heat and humidity). The vehicle for these rides is a Tuk Tuk, which is an interesting variation on the Indian ones. Instead of being basically a motorcycle with a large back seat, these Tuk Tuks are basically just fancy trailers pulled behind the motorcycle. One nice thing about them is they have really nice, big air-filled wheels, so the ride is very smooth, and all the bouncing is nice and gentle.

Heading back home from the temples one day, we noticed a few amusing things about the town of Siem Reap. The first thing is that I noticed piles upon piles of dirt, sometimes growing up around tree trunks, and sometimes just out by themselves. At first I thought maybe it was leftover from road maintenance or something, but when I looked closer, it reminded me of pictures I’d seen in National Geographic and on the Discover Channel. They all looked like termite mounds! To be fair, I wasn’t certain if they were ant hills or termite mounds, but I suspected termites. Eventually we stopped and walked up closer to one near a temple, and sure enough, there they were.

These mounds were something like… every 2 or 3 meters along the road… on both sides. Each one was around 1.5m tall! So… I’m sayin… that’s a LOT of freakin termites. Each mound had its own chimneys and heat vents and all sorts of openings. They were quite complex structures. Especially after confirming that they were indeed termites, I was kind of flabbergasted; if there were THAT many termites… how could there be any trees left?? I have no answer for that. All I can guess is 2 things: 1) Perhaps not all the termite mountains are occupied. Perhaps we’re just seeing the leftovers of years of termite urban renewal. 2) Jungles grow fast, and they’re used to being attacked by things, and they just deal with it.
The last bit of road-side amusement was that every few blocks, we’d see a road-side stand selling bottles of brightly colored liquid: some yellow, some green. At first we dismissed them and drinks of some sort. They really looked like candy water. But then we saw a giant barrel with some of the same liquid inside it so we looked a little closer. It’s gas (petrol)! This is how they sell gas here (not exclusively, but all over the place in this town at least). Like Vietnam (though not quite as extreme), most folks around here commute by motor scooter. So, they don’t really need a lot of gas at once. Consequently, here come the street side vendors, selling you gas 1 liter at a time. And since we’re selling liters, why not recycle? A lot of the bottles we saw came in old Absolut Vodka bottles. Funny stuff!

Something we saw riding through town was when we stopped briefly to look for a cheap restaurant. We were walking down the street, looking here and there, and Jime looks across the road and sees a sign saying “Pura Vida”! She did a double take and then pointed it out to me. It seemed perfectly normal to see such a sign… until we realized we were in Cambodia, not Costa Rica. Pura Vida was the name of a massage parlor. Just out of curiosity, we walked across the street and asked where the name came from. It apparently came from the Russian boyfriend of the manager, so not even a direct connection to Costa Rica. We just assumed he must have visited and liked the place, and went on our merry way. It seems like a good fit anyway. The climate, and even the plants in Cambodia are VERY similar to home. Some of them are exactly the same. It felt good being there. Seeing Pura Vida on a sign was just a bit ridiculous though.

So, now to the main reason we were here… the Temples! Walking through the temples is like walking through the past. It feels like real exploring. You feel a little like Indiana Jones as you’re climbing up over boulders, jumping over holes, and walking through ancient doorway after ancient doorway, some of which seem like they’re just barely still standing, held up by crutches, and some of which seem like they could easily stand for 1,000 years. Large building stones litter all of the walkways, blocking some paths, and helping form others. The walls are often covered in beautifully-colored lichens and mosses in green, red, yellow, black… you name it. Since the temples have no electricity, you end up walking through a bunch of dark tunnels. Sometimes the tunnels and pathways will take you through a large tower building and you’ll look up… WAY up… to a hole letting in light from the very top.

Coming out of those tunnels, or sometimes just looking through an open window, you occasionally spot an open courtyard where the sun it brightly shining on one of those patches of multi-colored mosses, and it’s like the wall just glows. It can really catch your breath. Many of the temples have been at least partly restored. In some cases, that meant just a crutch or a brace here or there, but in other cases, they’ve taken entire sections of the temple apart, and rebuilt it block by block (presumably after fixing up some of the blocks).

All of the temples are raised up so you have to climb stairs to get to the top. Some of the stairs are so big as to be humbling. Getting up to the top, at times I was literally climbing hand over foot up stairs half a meter high each, yet sometimes maybe only around 15cm (6”) deep after all those years of being worn down by time (and feet). Coming back down at the end was a genuine adventure! Getting up on top of some of the temples though, it’s really incredible to look out over the jungle and just let your already vibrating imagination take over even further, and try to visualize the whole civilization that was here so long ago. Some of the temples let you get so high that you can see what weather is coming your way. On top of one, I saw a few really beautiful cloud fronts. They weren’t quite storms, but it’s still neat to look at them and think… “It’s raining over there, but here I’m dry. I wonder how much longer I have before that will change?” Also, it’s just pretty to look at. I’ve said it before, but I’m a sucker for good views.

Speaking of the rain, we got a really neat experience after seeing this one cloud system. Right after I climbed down from these MASSIVE stairs, and we started heading back out to the road to pick up our Tuk Tuk, it started raining. Only, it wasn’t the usual dark clouds rain. It was the kind of rain that seemingly comes from nowhere, because the sun is still shining bright, and it seems like the sky is wide open blue except for this one little piece. What you get, then, is this incredibly beautiful sunlight, streaming through the tiny rain drops, sparkling like little crystals all around you. It’s barely enough water to get you wet, and yet it’s enough that you can’t take your eyes off it. As if that wasn’t enough for us to enjoy, while that was going on, a herd of water buffalo was driven right up to us, and we got to see them splashing around in these large puddles of water left over from a real rain the night before. That right there added even more to what turned into a really magical little moment. Remember me saying that when you see pictures of SE Asia, you often see images of the rice fields? Well, the other thing you see is Water Buffalo. They are iconic. So, here we were then, in this tiny little freakish, sunny rain fall, already enjoying the moment, and here come all these water buffalo to basically kick the magic into turbo. When you travel, every day has a little bit of cool in it. Some days, though... when things work out just right, you also get little moments of magic. This is why you go. These are the moments that make up your memories.

(The rain started about 3 seconds after this picture, but you have to go to the full photo page to see the best ones)

By the way, the Indiana Jones reference was not an accident. It was here! For Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, they filmed right here at a temple called Bayon, which happened to be the very first temple we went into. It’s one of the bigger, more impressive of the temple sites here, and the thing that makes it especially unique is it is completely covered in faces! The temple is a series of dozens and dozens of towers, great and small, and each tower is covered in 4 faces (one facing each of the 4 cardinal directions (North-South-East-West). With all the towers, and all the other little designs around this temple, they say there are literally thousands of faces here… all of them staring at you like the Rubik’s Cube version of Easter Island.

There was another little terrace thing that also had a lot of faces. It wasn’t so much of a temple, I don’t think, as it was a… maze… kind of thing… where you just walked through from one end to the other (with lots of twists and turns but no way to actually go “wrong” like in a real maze). All along this walkway were a series of faces and relief sculptures with all kinds of different images on them. I have no idea what it was for, but it was definitely neat to walk through… sort of like an ancient art gallery.

Speaking of the 4 cardinal directions, it turns out that MOST of the temples in Angkor are aligned like that. In fact, in a lot of places, you have a whole series of doorways lined up in a row. In some temples, if you go all the way to the center, you can just about see out of the whole temple in any direction, through dozens of lined up doorways. Repeating patterns make pretty pictures. :)
Something else that makes pretty pictures is water. A lot of the temples (including the main one, Angkor Wat) had these really massive moats around them. It’s hard to say if they were for defense, art, or water storage. Either way, there was a LOT of water.

One of the temples had this crazy long walkway over a … a lake, basically. I’d say the walkway was something like… half a kilometer long, and once you start on it, there are no buildings on either side of it as far as you eye can see. So, it was a bit like walking on water through a mangrove forest. Contrary to our experience getting off the boat onto Monkey Island (in Ha Long Bay, Vietnam), this was one plank we were very happy to walk. To make it even better, this was finally a place where the endless touts (people aggressively trying to sell you trinkets) could not reach you. So, in more ways than one, the walk was peaceful and beautiful. Sadly, after all that, the temple at the end of the walkway was nothing particularly special (compared with the rest of the giants anyway), and you couldn’t even go up to it! It was all fenced off. Still the walk in and out of that one was one of our favorite paths.

I mentioned that one of the reasons why that water path was so nice was it gave us a break from the touts. The touts were ENDLESS! Many of them were kids… young kids who were not going to school because they were working selling trinkets. All of them were trying to sell the same basic things: postcards, artwork, bracelets, etc. They were everywhere: on the roads, at the entrances to temples, even INSIDE temples. We are also, by this point in our trip, virtually immune to touts. We don’t hate them and can’t begrudge them too much, but they’re still annoying, so we barely even break stride any more as we walk right on by them. We were doing exactly this, leaving a temple one day, ignoring a guy selling art, when the guy said something that stopped me in my tracks. It was like he had spoken some words of black magic, and his dark art had penetrated my wall of indifference. What he said was “You wanna see a spider?”
It’s like he saw into my soul, and knew the one thing that would make me hear him. Knowing full well that this was a gimmick, which he would charge me to see, I decided to look anyway. If he could impress me, of all people (I’ve been to Costa Rica, man… I am not easily impressed), it would be worth a couple dollars tip. You know what? He did. That was a big… fucking… spider. It was the same kind of Golden Orb Weaver you can see all over Costa Rica, especially in Puerto Viejo, but it was the biggest one I’d ever seen, by a LONG shot, and he said it was not especially big for around here. Yes, he had captured it and brought it into the temple on a branch. So yes, it was a gimmick. And no… I didn’t care, even a little. It was a cool spider! It was also cool, and a bit amusing, the fact of how thoroughly that dude had my number. We took a few pictures, gave him a couple dollars, and went back on our way.

(For perspective, I’m only about 1 foot behind the spider, which is about as big as my face is wide)

Since we did come here to see Angkor Wat, specifically, I should probably at least tell you about that one temple. Angkor Wat is among the biggest, and best-preserved of all the temples here. It is also, obviously, the one you hear the most about, and if you’ve ever seen pictures of the area, it’s always part of the photo set. Probably the most iconic image of the Angkor Wat temple is the 5 towers. The towers represent mountains, with the main tower representing a holy mountain comparable to Mt Olympus in Greek mythology. The best pictures of the place usually come at either sunrise or sunset. So you know what we did? We went to visit at both sunrise AND sunset (…aaaand now all my theater friends have a song stuck in their head. You’re welcome). We started off with the sunset visit, and caught some beautiful shots of the rising moon. We got to wander through the temple first, then headed out back so Jime could catch the temple getting backlit by the setting sun. Out back, hardly anybody was out there, so we almost had the place to ourselves. Sadly, we didn’t get any nice sunset colors, but she did get some really nice shots of the temple, sharply contrasted against the bright sky behind it.

For sunrise, another day, we got there right around 5:30AM. When we left our hotel, it was still pretty much black outside. By the time we got to the temple, 20 minutes later, there was just the barest, faintest hint of light. Perfect! We weren’t late! We were also not early; that is, we were nowhere NEAR the first to arrive. We were actually among the LAST. The place was a madhouse. I’ve never seen so many people get up so early to look at a building! I guess this is the thing to do. Still, we find ourselves a nice little spot in front of a large pond, which let Jime get some really incredible shots of the temple reflecting in the still water in front of us. Some of those reflection pictures are so nice, it’s almost like the reflected image is sharper than the real one! She also got some really nice ones with a planet (I have no idea which one) shining brightly in the last, blue darkness of the awakening sky.

Angkor Wat was definitely neat. It was not, however, our favorite temple there. In fact, it barely made the top 3. Our first runner up has to have been that Bayon temple, with all the faces. Our winner, though, was the one we went to on our last tour day in Angkor, right after the sunrise at Angkor Wat. That temple is Ta Prom. What makes Ta Prom so special is that it is one of the LEAST restored temples around (although they’re changing that right now, which is very sad, but I can understand it). Ta Prom is also set pretty far back into the forest, and this temple, more than any other in this area, seems like it’s been just about taken back by the forest (there’s supposedly another one far away that’s also overgrown like this, but it’s quite a long trek to get there, and we didn’t). When you’re dropped off at the entrance, the temple is set so far back you can’t even see it. You hike down this long path through the forest. On the morning we were there, since we were so early, hardly anybody else had come before us. Consequently, it seems like the wildlife hadn’t … left.. for the day yet. Walking down that path, once we got about half way, we started seeing hundreds of tiny little things jumping out of the way. When we looked closer, only then could we actually make out what they were. They weren’t bugs. They were frogs! Tiny, TINY little frogs, beautifully camouflaged against the ground. When they weren’t actually jumping, your eye had a hard time seeing them when they were right in front of you. Jime actually managed to catch one so we could show you. :)

At the end of the path though, when you first see the temple, you know right away that it’s something special. There are huge strangler figs and other vine-y, sinuous trees, all over the place. Right in front is a HUGE one that flows its roots out like the tree is melting onto the ground.

Walking into the temple (once you get past the construction zone), you are taken into another world unlike even any of the other temples around here. It is… alive. All the walls are covered with many colors of mosses and lichens in red, yellow, green. I know I mentioned that idea before in general, but here is THE one temple that exudes it.  Building stones littering the ground, or tumbled in large piles in a corner, all seem like they’re covered in a fine fur of soft, green moss. Relief carvings of deities and dancers are highlighted in red and yellow mosses as if they were painted.

Ferns grow out of walls in dimly lit corridors. In other places, entire trees grow right on top of walls. Because these are Strangler Figs (Matapalos), they reach out with their roots, like tentacles, and find every little nook and cranny and crevice. In some places it looks like trees are actively jumping a fence. In other places, an incredibly MASSIVE, unbelievably huge tree has wrapped up a whole courtyard like a giant octopus guarding some treasure.

In the center of the temple complex is another massive matapalo (strangler fig). It’s so big, you can see the walls being crushed under its gigantic weight. The trunk is an intricate lattice of interwoven roots. In the center of the mesh, it looks like you can just barely see the shriveled remains of whatever tree came before it, that the matapalo ate for lunch. The weave of roots on the outside are all blended and melted into each other like a liquid. They form this perfect little ladder that makes you feel like if nobody was looking, it would be the coolest thing ever to just climb right on up and say Hi to the chattering parrots at the top. It would be so easy!

It’s that whole juxtaposition of vibrant life growing among ancient ruins that really make this place magic. I know I said something like that before, when I was talking about walking through the Roman Forum. But this one is different. It’s the difference between a single flower in a field of rocks, and a thriving jungle, eating a temple. In Rome, the rocks are winning. Here in Cambodia, the jungle is definitely a few laps ahead, but the game is still going strong.
More than any other post I’ve done so far, while I think I’ve done a pretty decent job of describing the scene as best I can, it’s the pictures here that really tell the story.  I’ve only given you the barest hint of what Jime captured on this trip.  You REALLY don’t want to miss the full photo set.  You’ll find that here:

http://alexjimenartw.shutterfly.com/pictures/2329