Pretirement

We’ve now been home for almost exactly as long as we were away (which proves, beyond any doubt, that travel slows down time). I’m grateful to no longer be engaging in frequent long-distance bus travel, but it’s hard not to miss the adventures — good and bad — of our time on the road. Here are some favorites:

In which Catherine gets stuck in an Icelandic children’s waterslide.

In which we learn, while volunteering on a French dairy farm, that biodynamic agriculture involves a lot of cow poop.

Why you should never leave me alone in a cheese laboratory.

Our arrival in Lithuania at the beginning of a bike journey through the Baltic States — an inauspicious beginning, complete with lost luggage.

Biking through the rain to a former Latvian prison that now operates as a terror-themed hotel.

Forcing Peter to join me for an aqua aerobics class in Riga, Latvia.

Seeking out Rasputin’s pickled penis in St. Petersburg.

A night of heat, blood, and Russian mosquitoes.

The beginning of our journey on the Trans-Siberian Railroad.

A homestay with Mongolian nomads, part two of many.

Peter accidentally getting a perm in Beijing. This may be my favorite experience not just of the trip, but of my life.

Photos from Tibet.

“Beauty treatments” from a Nepalese yoga center. Alternative name: ayurvedic torture.

Our second worst night of the trip, in Bhaktapur, Nepal.

Peter’s Perm, Pt II: The Vietnamese update.

Eating deep fried tarantula in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

The road crossing between Cambodia and Thailand, via O Smach.

The temples of Angor Wat.

And, lastly, the elephant buffet (in Surin, Thailand).

I have a few more things I want to post about, but in the interest of catching up to real-time, here are some final thoughts before we board our plane home tomorrow.

I am currently in a hotel room in Bangkok, about to go to bed. Tomorrow, we head back to the airport for the final leg of this trip: a three-and-a-half hour flight to Taiwan, and then 14 ½ hours more to Newark. After nearly seven months on the road, we’re coming home.

I’m not sure how I feel about this. I’m very excited to see our families and friends, that’s for sure. Part of me is tired of sleeping in hotel rooms and living out of a suitcase – not to mention eager to have more than four pairs of underwear. And I’m looking forward to being back in a culture and place that truly feels like home.

But at the same time, I can’t help but feel a little sad. This trip – our big adventure – is coming to an end. Peter starts work on January 17^th.  I’ve already begun thinking about new pitches and story ideas. Sure, we’ve got the challenges of finding a place to live and settling into a new city to keep things interesting, but inevitably, a sense of routine is going to return, and with it will come the responsibilities of which we’ve been so blissfully free. Dealing with diabetes supplies. Getting car insurance. Selling story ideas. Paying the rent. This trip has been such an unusual, wonderful break.

I know that many people find travel stressful – which at times, it definitely can be – but I’ve been surprised to find that it’s also had the opposite effect: for much of the trip, I’ve felt bizarrely calm. Once you accept constant movement, you remove much of its potential stress. Since it would have been impossible to plan every step of the trip ahead of time, I was forced to take it step-by-step. We started seven months ago in Iceland and, moving day-by-day, have somehow ended up in Thailand. Everything worked out. There’s no reason to think that, if I continue to trust our abilities and accept what’s uncontrollable, it won’t continue to do so.

One of the other gifts of this trip is the sense of freedom it’s given me. Thanks in part to its length, I’ve spent much of the past seven months with a greater sense of excitement and possibility than I have experienced since graduating from college. Every day brought new options and opportunities, choices of what direction we wanted our lives to take in that particular moment. Did we want to bike sixty miles on an Estonian island? How about a dumpling-making workshop in Beijing? An overnight in a yak hair tent at the base of Mt. Everest? Every day brought an adventure – whether it was good or bad. (Fourteen hour bus rides would definitely qualify as the latter.)

I think the biggest thing this trip has taught me, though, is to have faith in our decisions. It was very difficult to decide to leave our lives in California, for Peter to quit a great job and for us to abandon our beautiful apartment and community of friends. I remember sitting in a cafe on the day I knew Peter was giving notice and, unable to concentrate, starting to cry. What were we doing? Was this the right choice? What if it was all a huge mistake? (Mom and Dad, you may recall receiving a phone call that afternoon.)

I still don’t know about Philadelphia – with no friends there and no place yet to live, the jury’s still out. But this trip wasn’t just the right choice; it has been one of the best experiences of my life. What makes me sad right now is feeling that this adventure – and perhaps most importantly, this opportunity to spend uninterrupted time with the person I love the most – is coming to an end.

But, of course, that’s one of the good things about having taken this trip when we did (not to mention, uh, being married): we can do it again. Perhaps we’ll never have quite as few responsibilities as we do right now – we could have kids and a mortgage; vacation time may be scarce; I could lose the rest of the cartilage in my knees – but the world will still be there to explore.  Even if we stay home, we’ll always be creating new experiences to share with one another.  And most important, if I may quote Peter, is this: we did it. We took this trip. And no matter what the future brings, we’ll never lose these memories.

We can’t wait to see you.

Love, Aunt Catherine & Uncle Peter

We arrived in Bangkok after the Surin Elephant Round-Up (and the most painful overnight train ride of this trip) just in time to witness our latest example of absurd human behavior: the Loi Krathong festival in Thailand.  It’s a celebration that was originally dedicated to the goddess of water and was considered a way for people to atone for their wrongdoings, including polluting the environment. Therein the absurdity: Thais celebrate the festival by releasing thousands of candlelit floats into rivers. Many of the floats are built on bread – which means they eventually dissolve. But a large number use styrofoam. The result? When we took a boat ride the day after the festival, hundreds of mangled krathongs languished near the river’s edge, their unbiodegradable bases bobbing in the current. At least people’s consciences were clean.

Just in case a flotilla of styrofoam atonements is not enough, their release is often complemented by a different Thai tradition: the launch into the air of thousands upon thousands of flame-propelled paper lanterns.  We first saw these during the elephant festival, and if you don’t think too much about what they actually are, they’re quite beautiful – the sky is filled with what looks like illuminated jellyfish floating gracefully into the night.

But here’s what they actually are: paper lanterns fitted with a flammable wax base. You light the base on fire, and eventually the flame produces enough hot air to carry the lantern into the air.

Peter and I both loved watching their gentle lift-offs. But not every launch is successful, and once you watch a few of these flame-filled paper lanterns topple sideways and begin to fall to the ground, the wax still spurting flame, you start wondering about the fire resistence of most Thai dwellings. We saw a few fire trucks hanging around the launch site but, given that the lanterns were being released into a breeze, that didn’t seem particularly useful. I would be interested in seeing incident reports from local fire stations on major Thai holidays. What I do know for sure, though, is that once the lanterns go up, they do indeed have to come down (once the wax runs out, the lanterns float back to earth) and over the next few days we saw dozens of smoke-blackened paper lanterns caught in bushes, or lying in grass on the side of the road. But hey. At least they’re pretty.

This post was originally published on National Geographic Traveler’s Intelligent Travel blog.

For most of the year, there are not many reasons to visit Surin, Thailand. More than seven hours northeast of Bangkok by train, it’s the capital of a province whose self-professed claims to fame are sweet radishes and fragrant rice.

But Surin has something else going for it, something so massive and awe-inspiring that each year, in the third weekend of November, thousands of visitors descend upon the city:

The Elephant Round-Up.

The people of Surin — and, in particular, the nearby village of Ban Ta Klang – have long been known for their prowess in training elephants, which Thais have historically used for everything from labor and transportation to battle. According to tradition, the trainers, known as mahouts,  care for the same elephant throughout its long lifetime (elephants can live more than 80 years), consider it a member of the family, and pass it onto their sons when they can no longer care for it themselves. But Thailand’s elephants and mahouts are suffering from an identity crisis: now that technology and a ban on logging have rendered their previous purposes obsolete, the elephants and mahouts are dependent on tourism to survive. Many elephants, heartbreakingly, end up on the streets of Bangkok, their owners hawking bags of sugar cane for tourists to feed to them.

Each November, however, the Elephant Round-Up gives Surin’s elephants and their mahouts a reason to come home. Held every year since 1960, it’s a celebration of the history and talents of the animals and their trainers – and is a festival so unusual that as soon as I heard of it, I knew I had to attend.  This year, 336 elephants were registered for the Round Up, including 14 babies, two of whom were identical twins.  How could I resist?

The Round Up’s main event, held on the festival’s last two days, is essentially a talent show that features everything from painting demonstrations to battle reenactments to a man v. elephant tug of war. I’ll admit, it was impressive to watch an elephant playing darts, and I was happy to see that most mahouts seemed genuinely committed to their animals. But certain issues – like the fact that doing tricks on two legs can put elephants at risk of injury, for example, or that many of Surin’s younger mahouts have a reputation for drinking problems — made it difficult to enjoy the circus-like atmosphere. So I was grateful that there was a different event, held the day before the big show, that was so outrageous, so joyfully absurd, that I had no moral qualms about having fun: the elephant buffet.

If you’d asked me in a different context to guess what was meant by the term “elephant buffet,” I might have thought it was a meal hosted by some wacko trying to market elephant steaks as a novelty meat (pachyderm patty: the new buffalo burger). I definitely would not have imagined that the city of Surin would close down an entire street, line it with folding tables, pile those tables with thousands of pounds of fruits and vegetables, and invite more than 300 elephants to an all-you-can-eat breakfast. But that’s exactly what it is.

When my husband and I arrived at the buffet several hours before its start, the tables were already weighed down by treats: a base of sugar cane topped with dozens each of small watermelons, jicama, cucumbers, bananas, pineapples and the occasional papaya, all carefully covered in green plastic mesh. Stretching table after table, the buffet was easily more than eight city blocks long.

It seemed impossible that so much food could be consumed by any creature. But then again, while they’re smaller than their African counterparts, Asian elephants can weigh over five tons — and even in captivity with a high-calorie diet, they often consume more than 150 pounds of food a day. (In the wild, it can be two or three times that much.)

By nine a.m., we’d been joined by hundreds of other people – some foreign, but mostly Thai. Boy scouts, school groups, families, they crowded behind the tables, cradling cucumbers and watermelons in their hands as they peered eagerly down the street. One woman began carefully snapping the spiky tops off of pineapples so that the elephants wouldn’t prick their tongues. (I later noticed that the elephants were able to do this on their own, stuffing entire pineapples into their mouths and gracefully spitting out the tops while simultaneously reaching for more food.)

I was trying to be patient, but anyone who saw the look in my eyes – not to mention my grip on my bananas – would know the truth. I wanted to feed elephants. Now. So I was frustrated that the first elephants to arrive, lumbering down the far end of the street with their mahouts perched on their necks, seemed to take their time. As my table leaned forward in collective anticipation, the elephants moved slowly, hand picking (trunk picking?) offerings as they walked toward us. I’d expected to see the elephant version of a pie-eating contest. This was more like a cocktail party.

But I needn’t have worried. As more elephants poured into the street, they began slowly leapfrogging past each other, working their way toward my table. When one finally reached where I was standing, bananas in hand, I realized I didn’t know exactly how to offer food to an elephant. Do you let it smell the fruit first? Place it directly in its mouth? Present it on a cocktail napkin? I decided to start by waggling my treats in front of its surprisingly small eye – how do you like these bananas? – and then moving the food within trunk distance. Sure enough, I saw its eye hone in on my offering; I stepped back as its enormous trunk swung toward me. The elephant took a few inquisitive sniffs before gently plucking the bananas from my hand and placing the entire bunch in its mouth. Without thinking, I reached out and patted its wrinkled skin.

While I found them intriguing, I’d never considered myself an elephant-lover. But now, surrounded by dozens of them plodding down the street, I began to feel the level of affection toward them that I usually reserve for golden retriever puppies. They were so massive, and yet so gentle and intelligent, graceful despite their clumsy appearance. I stood transfixed as my banana-eating friend walked off to the next table, swinging its black-bristled tail and contentedly flapping its ears. Then I snatched several pineapples off the display and waited for another elephant to approach.

At first there were only a few, each one attracting dozens of outstretched arms. But elephants can sneak up on you. I was so engrossed by passing out fruit that I didn’t notice their numbers were growing until, reaching to grab more food, I realized that the street was full of enormous gray animals. And whereas in America, you’d probably have to sign a liability waiver before even picking up a banana, here there were no barricades or cops making sure that little kids (or adults) didn’t, say, stand directly in the path of a 5-ton bull elephant hell bent on getting his next piece of sugar cane.

So that’s exactly what I did. As more and more elephants joined the crowd, I planted myself in front of the table, offering snacks to every one that passed. I assumed that they would prefer the sweetest foods on the table, but instead, many elephants seemed particularly excited by cucumbers, going so far as to place a few in the crooks of their trunk to save for later. One giant male preferred jicama; another had eyes for the occasional stray carrot. The fruitcake of the morning turned out, surprisingly, to be watermelon – the small globes were difficult for the elephants to hold on to, and I watched more than one slip to the ground as the elephant reached for something else.

By the time the buffet wound down, the tables were nearly empty, the remaining fruit snatched up by mahouts (who tucked it into baskets to keep for later) or locals who liked watermelon more than the elephants did. Even the sugarcane was mostly gone. In the end, nothing was left behind but ragged palm fronds, crushed fruit that had dropped to the ground and, for me at least, more than 300 huge reasons to return.

On the morning of our scheduled border crossing between Cambodia and Thailand, Peter and I woke up nervous. Why our anxiety? Well, first, we had a time limit: the next day marked the beginning of the 50^th annual Elephant Roundup in Surin, Thailand, which was the reason we were crossing the border to begin with. And second, here’s what our guidebook had to say about our intended route:

The remote, dirt poor province of Oddar Meanchey, created from parts of Siem Reap province that the government didn’t control for much of the 1980s and 1990s, produces very little apart from opportunities for aid organizations. . . .Only a trickle of foreign visitors uses the O Smach/Chong Jom border crossing, which is pretty remote on the Thai side and in the middle of nowhere on the Cambodian side. At the frontier, there is a zone of Thai-style modernity, with two big casino-hotels, a paved dual carriageway a few hundred meters long and a modern market. But from there south you’re in outback Cambodia. The road meanders between minefields and at one point you have the choice of paying 20 baht/2000 riel for a dodgy private toll bridge built of logs by enterprising locals, or driving through a river. All along the way, you pass motorbikes so overloaded with fruit, cheap household items, and petrol smuggled in from Thailand that they often topple over. . . To Samraong (40 km, ½ -2 hours), a moto costs 250 baht, a private taxi 1200 baht, and once you get to Samraong, where are you? Nowhere.

Right. We decided to get an early start, and met our driver at 7 in our hotel. The first thing I noticed was that his Toyota Camry* had the steering wheel on the right side, an unusual and questionable choice, since Cambodia drives American-style. Second, he had a faded tattoo melting into his chest (which was visible through the opening in his low-buttoned shirt) – the sort of tattoo one might imagine a child soldier getting in the mid-1970s as part of his allegiance with a murderous guerilla force. Combined with his mustache and aviator sunglasses, he didn’t project an image of my ideal chauffeur. And third, despite reconfirming our destination several times, he seemed to be driving on the wrong road.

The road to O Smach

In fact, he was definitely driving on the wrong road – there are two border crossings that could conceivably lead to Surin (unlike Rome, not too many roads go there) and O Smach is to the west. We wanted to go there because, unlike the other one, O Smach has a regular bus service on the Thai side of the border. But instead, we were barreling along toward the eastern border, passing everything from dogs to pigs to people on motorbikes carrying enormous sacks of rice. We began making contingency plans of how to get a ride back to the correct crossing.

But it turned out that our driver was smarter than we were – the road that we were on was paved, and the road leading to O Smach (with the aforementioned log bridge) was, presumably, not. A quick left turn close to the unwanted border crossing and we were zooming toward O Smach on what turned into a well-maintained dirt road, somehow managing to bypass the homemade bridge, the lake, and the smugglers along the way – though we did pass a hotel called “Porn Phun.” As for minefields, we saw several signs from international organizations claiming credit for their clearance – but we also saw several people on motorbikes holding crutches. I didn’t get out to pee.

"They should check their grammar," said our Cambodian guide.

There were indeed two  casinos in the no-man’s land between Cambodia and Thailand (which didn’t get too many foreign visitors, judging from the stares I got when I went in to use the bathroom). A casino at 10 a.m. is an inherently depressing sight, but instead of a smoke-filled room of quarter-pumping pensioners, the cavernous interior had no customers except for two women playing roulette. It was a sort of existential place – empty casino in the middle of no-man’s land at a border crossing in the middle of nowhere. I didn’t linger. Instead, we walked across the border, hopped into a minibus, and were off.

As our minibus hurtled down the road, I instinctively reached for my seatbelt, and felt a little sheepish when I looked up to find the rest of the passengers staring at me. What was this crazy American doing? I smiled back, self-conscious about being such a safety-conscious westerner in a land without infant carseats – and then noticed that other people were following my lead. One by one, the other passengers buckled up, occasionally glancing toward my seatbelt to see how I had done it. Exchanging a smile with an old man seated behind me (who was now more likely to stay there), I decided that, at in terms of road safety – or at least peer pressure — Thailand was ahead of its competition.

Our first stop, after checking into the hotel, was to try to get Peter some medication for a potential case of parasitic worms that he may have contracted in Nepal. (Word to our mothers: Dr. Kurth has been consulted and the situation is under control.) We were a little worried about the availability of Praziquantel in remote Thai cities – but the hospital ended up being more efficient than a drive-through window. Ten minutes after we got there we’d seen a doctor, been shepherded into the pharmacy to confirm medication and dosage, been given a bill, paid, and walked out the door. What’s more, on the way to the hospital I had my first run-in with an elephant, whose handler was selling 20 baht bags of sugar cane that you could feed it. So my day, begun on the Cambodian border, ended on a much more promising, if a bit disgusting note: with my hand in an elephant’s mouth.

* The Camry Question:

There are a ridiculous number of Toyotas – and, in particular, Toyota Camrys from the mid 1990s—on the road in Cambodia. As in, out of 45 cars we passed on the way back from the temples one afternoon, 38 of them were Toyotas. (During a later experiment, we got 19 out of 20.) The owner of our guesthouse claimed it was simply because people in Cambodia “really like Camrys,” but we’re both suspicious. Peter pointed out that Toyota sedans were among the most stolen in that time period, and we saw at least one dealer sticker from Rhode Island. I’m not sure how to research our hypothesis, but I have a feeling that petrol isn’t the only thing that’s been smuggled across the border.

A typical line-up.

Clipping Armpit Trap

Throughout our time in Vietnam, Peter and I continuously came back to one question — whether it was when we were examining a giant cave, used as a field hospital, that was completely indiscernible from air, or visiting the extensive Cu Chi tunnel network the North Vietnamese army built around Saigon, or even just staring into the dense jungle foliage that covers the country: what the hell were we doing there?

Forget the politics and morality of war. We just couldn’t believe that anyone who had set foot in the country and met the people could ever have believed we could win. Take, for example, these photographs of one of the entrances to the Cu Chi tunnels, proudly demonstrated to us by our guide:

Now you see it. . . .

. . . Now you don't.

We learned that when North Vietnamese troops needed to cross rivers, they’d poke breathing straws through clumps of floating plants and swim across under the surface of the water. When American troops sent out dogs to try to sniff out the entrances to these tunnels, the North Vietnamese started using American soap and sprinkling pepper on the ground (a native product, no less) to confuse their sense of smell. To sabotage troops walking through the jungle, they created camouflaged traps — such as the armpit clipper above — that used nothing more than sharpened bamboo sticks and the victims’ own body weight to kill or maim them.

Thanks for the illustrations.

As continues to be demonstrated today, the world’s most powerful army has nothing on determination, cleverness and local knowledge. (Not to mention the monsoons. Did no one know about those?)

On a lighter note, though, here is another unwise tactical move on the part of the Americans: on our second day in Hanoi, Peter decided to get a straight-edge razor shave from a guy on the street. (Thankfully, he used a new blade.) As I watched the barber hold a razor against my beloved husband’s neck in the middle of North Vietnam, one thought kept popping into mind: I’m glad he doesn’t hold a grudge.

Here’s something I have never craved for dinner:  spiders.  Too bad, then, that tonight we went to dinner at a place in Phnom Penh called Romdeng — a delicious place specializing in Khmer food and staffed by former street children. (The parent organization, Friends International, seems pretty great.) We’d heard that it served a traditional Khmer treat – deep fried tarantulas – and whereas I laughed this off as the sort of food one might gawk at in a night market but never think of actually eating (such as the scorpion kebabs on offer in Beijing), Peter insisted that he was going to try them. “You know how you feel a weird need to visit traumatic sites just to absorb their history?” he asked me (I was the driving force behind our visit to Tuol Sleng). “I feel a need to eat weird food.” I was going to challenge him on this until I remembered his unfortunate choice or ordering smoked pigs’ ears in Lithuania. Oh god. I can still see the hairs.

Sure enough, when we got to the restaurant, deep fried tarantulas were on the menu – a starter, should you be wondering – and Peter ordered them. As we waited, we discussed what we thought they might look like. Both of us were imagining that they had been dipped in some kind of batter, and would be presented as a sort of tarantula fritter, so coated in tempura that their true arachnid nature would be completely camouflaged, nothing more than a stomach-turning afterthought.

We were wrong.

Our smiling waitress approached our table with a white plate, garnished with artfully carved cucumber and a small dish of dipping sauce. Arranged around the greenery were three large tarantulas, each the size of my palm. There was nothing batter-y about them. They were still clearly black; even their hairs were visible. These were just straight-up tarantulas, dipped in oil and fried.

“It looked like they were alive,” says Peter, remembering the scene. “They really looked like they could crawl away.”

He later claimed that once he took the first bite, it became easier to swallow. In the moment, Peter didn’t seem particularly reassured after he first sampled a leg. In fact, his exact words were, “This is going to be much harder than I thought.” Then he spit out a small clump of something black.

But what are you supposed to do? You’re in a restaurant staffed by former street children who probably grew up struggling to find food, and here you are with three palm-sized spiders, artfully presented – they came with a garnish, for god’s sake. What kind of asshole doesn’t finish their tarantulas?

So Peter plowed on. After working his way through a leg, he gamely bit into an abdomen, a bulbous pouch of spider innards. “That didn’t taste so good,” he said. I pointed out the dipping sauce.

As I giggled and took photographs, he started in on what we later learned was the body and the head. According to wikipedia, they have “a delicate meat inside.”

“This part really isn’t so bad,” he said, chomping on another leg and trying to get me to take a bite of what we later learned was the thorax. “It’s really not so bad.”

He was clearly becoming delusional.

“No, seriously,” he said, gesturing toward me with a half-eaten tarantula body.

I looked more closely. I’d never considered the idea that spiders might have meat inside, but this one did. It was white and flaky and looked a bit like fish. Now, I would never have ordered the tarantulas on my own. But this was probably my once-in-a-lifetime chance to try one. I decided to take a tiny bite. By tiny, I mean less than a nibble. A nibblet. Basically as little as I could possibly eat and still claim to have tried it.

And you know what? It wasn’t that bad. It tasted meaty and fried, but that’s about it. Emboldened, I broke off a tiny piece of leg and popped it in my mouth. It left behind an unchewable crunchy material, sort of like a shrimp shell, that I spat out into my napkin. I decided not to eat any more tarantula.

My favorite part of this photograph is the leg pressing into my cheek.

Peter, on the other hand, kept going. By the time they cleared his plate, only an abdomen and several orphaned legs remained. What’s more, he had begun to insist that the cooks had cleaned out the spiders’ innards and replaced them with  stuffing. “See, they all have splits on their backs,” he said. “It tastes like tamarind.”

I was doubtful, and so we checked out the recipe for the tarantulas in the restaurant’s cookbook, the aptly titled “From Spiders to Water Lilies.” It begins as follows: Step 1 – Kill the spiders by pressing firmly on their backs. Step 2 – remove the fangs.”

It says nothing about tamarind fillings. Also, as we later noted, pressing firmly on their backs to kill them would likely cause the splits in their shells that Peter insisted was evidence of their being stuffed. According to Wikipedia, here is what Peter mistook for a tamarind filling: “a brown paste, consisting of organs, possibly eggs, and excrement.”   A good chef , the entry continues, will fry the spiders until the legs are almost completely stiff, by which time the contents of the abdomen are not so runny.

We later asked our waitress where the restaurant got the spiders – we both were envisioning a cage full of live tarantulas in the kitchen, similar to a tank of live shrimp. But she told us the spiders arrived dead, having been gathered from a nearby province.

“How do they raise the tarantulas?” I asked. “Are they farmed? You know, like fish?”

“No,” she said. “They use a flashlight to find them. They are in trees or in holes.”

That’s right, all you Alice Waters foodies out there: our tarantulas were free range.

When we left Vietnam yesterday for Cambodia, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. I kept thinking of the part in Elizabeth Gilbert’s book, Committed, in which she gets chased down the street by a horde of begging Cambodian children and holes herself up in her hotel room.  Or, for that matter, the stories I’ve heard from other travelers of what an emotionally difficult place it is to travel, due to its recent history with the brutal Khmer Rouge.

We haven’t yet met hordes of street children, but I could see how that second part could be true. This afternoon included a visit to the Tuol Sleng Genocide museum, a former high school that the Khmer Rouge used to detain and torture more than 17,000 people between 1975 and 1978, nearly all of whom were subsequently executed in the infamous Killing Fields. It is a terrifying place, more so because its setting – a high school, still with pull-up bars in its grassy courtyard – is so mundane. As Peter pointed out, one of the most disturbing aspects of the experience was noticing that the checkerboard-patterned tiled floor shown in the gruesome photographs of the murdered victims was the very same one that we were standing on. It’s one of those places that are important to visit, but deeply upsetting.

Tuol Sleng

As a result, we decided not to visit the Killing Fields themselves, much to the disappointment of the many tuk-tuk drivers we encountered around town. (Tuk tuks are two-person chariots pulled by motorbikes.) That was one of the most bizarre parts of walking around Phnom Penh. About every five minutes, you’re approached by a guy driving a motorized pedicab asking you – in a very cheerful voice — if you want a ride to the Killing Fields. It’s the same tone one might use to offer a trip to the Royal Palace, or maybe a romantic tour around town. “Hello, you want tuk-tuk? Maybe visit Killing Fields?” The only thing odder than their advances was the fact that the admission to the Killing Fields — $3 according to the latest Lonely Planet – is controlled by the Japanese company responsible for repairing the road that leads to it. I’m not sure whom, exactly, I think should be getting the money, but I don’t think that’s it.

Another legacy of the craziness of the Khmer Rouge – which, in addition to restarting the calendar at year zero, decided to abolish money – is that no one seems to want to use Cambodia’s official currency, the riel. Instead, they use US dollars. I don’t just mean that prices are quoted in dollars, as they often are in Vietnam with a poor exchange rate. I mean that the dollar is the de facto currency. You buy things in dollars; you get change in dollars; they’re even dispensed by ATMs. (People use riel in place of quarters, but that seems to be about it.) Locals deal with riel more often than tourists do, but they use dollars as well. Does anyone else find this weird, that an entire country can decide to use a different country’s currency? I feel like that’s somehow against the rules.  But the problem-solver in me thinks this might be an excellent way to combat our immense national debt: just get other countries to give up their currencies. Who needs the Euro? They can just buy a ton of dollars – thus sucking up some of our potential for inflation and making them more dependent on our success. I recognize there are large holes in this theory of global economics, but I’ve been walking around all day in 90-degree heat. At the moment, it seems to make a lot of sense.