Indiana Jones: Paul Mackie's Lookalike?

We fit in one last brief visit to Angkor Wat on Saturday morning before our flights from Siem Reap to Bangkok and Bangkok to Krabi, Thailand.

Ta Prohm was our first stop, the wat known as the setting of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. It's also known as the one with the massive trees whose roots coil all around the bases of the sprawling stone structures. This is a major wonder of early civilization and a testament to how strong people must have been back then. They were also knowledgeable. It was amazing that a dinosaur was drawn on at least one of the walls. How did they know about the dinosaurs?

We also visited Bayon, a massive temple, but by then the busloads of tourists were swarming the area and Jackson was ready for a nap via a few minutes of Baby Einstein (the portable DVD player has been a life-saver).

We left Angkor Wat by 10 a.m. (whether you have kids or not, be sure to get an early start at Angkor Wat, the heat of the day is almost unimaginable by U.S. standards) but not before spending a few quality minutes feeding a family of little baboon-like monkeys some bananas.

When we landed in Krabi, it was already dark. We went the opposite direction of all the beach-bound travelers. In pitch darkness, our driver Kwon took us into the mountains to Phenom, our eco-resort and home for the next two days. We had a dinner of pad thai, prawn fritters, fried rice balls, and beers with the resort's British owners Jules and Barbara.

We had no idea whether the place was nice, being nighttime, but it seemed a little sketchy as we feel asleep in a hot bungaloo with no sheets on the bed and covered only by a mosquito net.

Sunrise in Cambodia

We woke at 5 a.m. to ride with our trusty tuk-tuk driver, Savuth, to the temple complex and proceded to climb the tallest point there, a small mountain with steep steps called Phnom Bakheng (again with Rachel carrying Jackson in the papoose! What a woman!).

We then rode around to a variety of temples. Our usual character would be to rent bicycles. That would be awesome and I highly recommend it to Angkor visitors, but it just would have been too difficut and deliriously hot for parents of a nearly-two-year-old. We wanted to see the "Indiana Jones in the Temple of Doom" wat, but the prime minister of South Korea was visiting, so we're saving that for tomorrow. But some of the smaller wats we hit up instead had real Indiana-like looks. Prasat Kravan particularly went on and on, and it was great being there when hardly anyone else was, early in the morning ahead of the crowds.

The temples (built around 800 AD, by the way) were no doubt stunning. But perhaps the highlight of our stay in Cambodia (if not all of Southeat Asia) was our afternoon eco-adventures, starting wih lunch at Butterflies Garden Restaurant and a boat ride to "the floating village" on Tonle Sap, the biggest lake in all of Southeast Asia.

I finally got around to eating one of the most traditional Khymer dishes, fish Amok, which is a lot like a less-spicy peanut curry. It was delicious. Rachel also loved her tofu noodles as we played and ate within a netted butterfly community.

Roddy, a 19-year-old Cambodian high schooler, then took us out on his boat with two friends through a breathtaking 6,000-person village that lives entirely on the water just outside of Siem Reap. On the drive there, we marveled at how poor shacks on stilts in the floodlands (it seems like most of the area is flooded, and it's currently the dry season) were seperated only by the road from the much richer "mansions" on stilts on the other side. As we continued driving, the area became less populated and we eventually pulled up to the spot where we left the tuk-tuk to get into Roddy's schooner.

There were full grocery stores, fish farms, girls with pythons, and tons more on little boats cruising all around. And there were kids playing, bathing, and waving everywhere.

One of the great things about the community is the government's committment to keep the area environmentally clean and to keep disease at a minimum. There is a water-purification station right on the water and residents are instructed only to drink water from there, and not the lake. The water is free of charge to them.

We also stopped by a school. We gave the students some pencils and the nice male teacher some money to get his many students some food and school supplies. Jackson played jump-rope with some of the kids.

We ended our night with a shadow-puppet show at some cheesy tourist trap. Rachel and I took that one for the team, as the food basically sucked but Jackson was captivated during the hour-long show.

Anchoring Down in Angkor Wat

We left our hotel in Luang Prabang Thursday morning and embarked on our second excellent flight on lowly-regarded Lao Airlines. After a 15-minute pitstop landing in Savannakhet, we got to Siem Reap, which is the city in Cambodia that serves as the tourist hub of Angkor Wat.

Even though we arrived in the heat of the afternoon (and I mean H-E-A-T), we went straight to Angkor Wat, which is actually the name of only the biggest temple in a complex of hundreds of temples. The main temple is considered the largest religious structure ever built. Jackson competed for the attention of the throngs of late-afternoon tourists, as many asked us if they could take his photo. He said "cheese" easily 100 times.

We then went into town for the evening and ate Khmer cuisine at a delicious vegetarian restaurant. Siem Reap is much more upscale and urban than we had pictured after living a relatively rural life for the past week in Laos. There were many sights to behold, including a tremendously varied night market, people getting the dry skin bit off their feet by little fish in a big tank, and a musical serenade by a band of landmine victims. Jackson melted down at dinner after a merciless day of heat, so we wrapped the remainer of our curry and French bread with peanut sauce for our hotel room, the lovely Nida Villa, across the street from the decadent Grand Hotel. Rachel said the many hotels remind her of Vegas.

Only here, we have the added benefit of monkeys running in the streets.

Temples and More on Our Last Day in Laos

We started our final day in Luang Prabang, Laos Wednesday with a morning visit to Wat Xieng Thong, hailed as the city's "most magnificent temple" and one of only two wats in town to survive the 1887 Vietnamese sacking.

This was an impressive wat, and no doubt a great warmup for our flight in the morning to Siem Reap, Cambodia, for two days of buddist-temple mania at Angkor Wat.

Afterwards, we shopped and hit the vast night market, noted for its endless parade of red-roofed tents and lightbulbs illuminating merchants offering their silks, wooden carvings, Beerlao t-shirts and lots more. We finished the night at an OK Laos fusion restaurant down on the Nam Khan river to celebrate our last night with Chris, Tania and Jackson and to toast a beloved family member we all lost yesterday.

Exhausted now. Good night.

Waterfall Adventure South of Luang Prabang

Day 3 in Luang Prabang (Tuesday) began with the roosters crowing and the
monks passing our guest house to receive alms from about 5:30 to 7.

It was the beginning of another great day in this tropical paradise. The centerpiece event was when Chris, Tania, Theo, Jackson, Rachel and I boarded a small, 16-passenger longboat at noon to take an hour-long journey south on the Mekong. Then we hopped in the back of a pickup truck to complete the trip to Tat Kuang Si, a many-tiered waterfall tumbling down over limestone formations. Lonely Planet called the many swimming areas along the hike up to the falls "turquoise," but they were really just mud-colored, likely because of the heavy rains in the early morning. We climbed all the way to the top (Rachel with Jackson on her back in a papoose sack, I might add), something not attempted by most of the visitors there. Then we went swimming under a smaller set of falls, with Chris and Tania jumping from a ropeswing, something I wasn't interested in trying, probably because of memories of my famous "Library of Congress flagpole-swinging" incident.

The return boatride was two hours upriver and we arrived a little after dark, but our captain, The General, was a good sport about how long we had lingered at the falls.

Rachel, Jackson and I ate dinner at a French-Laos restaurant right next to our guesthouse that ended up being a great suprise. We had amazing pumpkin crouton soup, fried ginger cheeseball salad, and real-deal panang chicken casserole. We then met the rest of the gang around the corner for late-night drinks at a Belgian bar (late night not being that late night in Luang Prabang, where the town shuts into curfew mode at 11:30 each night).

Monk Rock City

Having moved into our new digs at Villa Champa (pictured), our second day in Luang Prabang (Monday) was a blast.

After eating in the town's best bakery, JoMa, we oriented ourselves by climbing the tall hill (with steps) in the middle if town, called Phu Si. It was filled with beautiful bronzed buddhas, and Jackson loved every one of them. After all, "buddha" is one of his many new regular vocabulary words.

Another of his favorite words is "monk," which he loudly blurts out every time he sees one of the orange and yellow-clad young monks walking around town, usually with an umbrella to block the sun. They always turn to him with a look of "OK, that would be wildly inappropriate normally but I'll permit it this time since you're so cute." You see, tourists are not even supposed to take photos of monks, but everyone does it, while usually trying to be respectful.

We finished the day with our first real fancy traditional Laos meal, consisting of lots of spicy appetizer sauces, Mekong River weeds with seame seeds, and omelets with spicy peanut sauce. That was at a place, called Tamarind, around the corner from our new guest house. Highly recommended.

TripAdvisor.com Misses the Boat on Luang Prabang, Laos

Pictured is the place we stayed last night (Sunday) upon our arrival to Luang Prabang, which is our homebase for the next four nights.

TripAdvisor.com called it the third-best guest house in town. But it was right on the main thoroughfare leading into the city center and anyone driving past could easily hear any of Jackson's louder sentences. Who knows what the other guests could hear. As for what Rachel and I could hear? How about motorbikes, drunk English-speaking people, and roosters.

This was all after a dramatic but zook-inducing minivan ride from Vang Vieng. The first five hours were scenic, and it was fascinating to see how the people's lifestyles and wealth levels changed as we got further away from the more urban south of the country. Jackson gave one of our Sesame Street books to a group of children and one kid flipped through a couple of pages before excitedly running away with it behind the road-side huts. But the last hour was extremely difficult on the stomach as we wound down precarious mountain roads back towards flatter lands.

The sickly end of the ride, combined with the sounds and fishy smells of Muonglao Guest House, made for a relatively unpleasant start to the highly-anticipated Luang Prabang. Luckily for me, I decided to check on the off-chance that American football might be live on the tube at 4 a.m. To my delight, there was a game being played in the snow between New England and Tennessee. I stayed up and watched the last three quarters, as the Pats won 59-0 and the voices of the CBS announcers merged with those of the Asia Sports Network ones. Pretty weird, but it was cool to get all the Fantasy Football updates as well!

Rachel and Jackson were pretty-much up this whole time also, and by 7 a.m. we could take no more and hailed the tuk-tuk driver sitting in front of the building (he no doubt knew there were often unhappy travelers who would want to move every morning) to take us to a great place we spotted earlier called Villa Champa, in a better part of town, with wi-fi, and only $40 per night.

How TripAdvisor.com ranked Muonglao the third-best guest house in Luang Prabang is amazing. There must be more than 100 guest houses here, and probably 90 are better!

Such a Happy Kid

Laos must be a great place to grow up.

The kids here are all so cute and happy. And they have beautiful scenery, mountains, rivers, and natural lives.

This is one of many photos I've taken of kids. Jackson bonded with this little girl at a quick shop near our lodgings in Vang Vieng. He also had a blast giving kids in a hill village south of Luang Prabang a Sesame Street book and repeating "hi kids" again and again to them.

Road Trippin' Through Laos

I started yesterday (Saturday) with a traditional Laos massage, in which I was contorted and twisted in ways never before seen in the Western world.

As my muscles both recovered from and relished in the aftermath of the massage, we headed out in a minivan with a hired driver from the flatlands surrounding Vientiane into the rough and mountainous road leading to the town of Vang Vieng. This was our pitstop on the way to Luang Prabang, further north in Laos. But it turned into more than a pitstop really. We stayed at a beautiful bungalow named Nam Song Resort along the Nam Song (Song River) with jagged, cone-shaped mountains surrounding us. We had delicious red curry, tom kai gai soup and other Thai-inflected dishes for dinner and woke up to a misty morning and our first bacon and eggs breakfast since we've been in Asia.

Laos Loves Jennifer Aniston and Friends

Tiny outpost Vang Viene, halfway between Vienchian and Luang Prabang, is a hotbed of Western pop culture, for no reason other than ... wait for it ...

Many of the 40 or so bars have episodes of the TV show Friends on a constant loop. Ex-pats lounge in these bars, which of course serve an abundance of large bottles of Beerlao. You can also usually find the soccer game you're looking for in these hotspots, also known as a hangout for many of the town's backpacking opium heads. We had a fun conversation with a couple of these drugged-out soccer hooligans. They were from Scotland and Wales and were nice enough, if a little unbalanced, as they regaled us with tales of their day floating in tubes down the Song River and bruising hemselves badly in inappropriate diving attempts.

Nobody seemed to know the origin of the town's Friends obsession, but apparently lots of visitors love to sit for hours (if not days) watching the show from the "axe cushions" while drinking shakes laced with pot, mushrooms, opium, and/or meth.

I wonder if Rachel, Ross and the others have been here?