general travel

How to Make the Most of Two Days in Sihanoukville, Cambodia

by Ekua on April 20, 2013 · 2 comments in Cambodia,d.i.y. travel

1. Arrive in Sihanoukville during a tropical rainstorm.  Ride it out in your guesthouse’s cafe. When the storm passes, take a walk to the beach and immediately see that your guidebook wasn’t fully honest when describing the scene in Sihanoukville. Beaches that were described as “sandy” and “happening” for lack of better euphemistic words should actually have been described as “seedy” and “brimming with tourists with questionable motives.”

2. Convene with your travel group in the evening. Discuss spending the following day at an island. There are two options to get to the islands, you can take a boat tour cruise or hire a simple boat to take you to an island and back. Unanimously agree to hire a boat for the day.

3. Return to your room and discover that a flying cockroach is occupying it. Join forces with your roommate to get it out. Dodge the cockroach as it flies toward your head, jump on beds and chairs, swing pillows at it. Watch the cockroach surrender and fly out the door whereupon you quickly slam it shut. Sigh and then collapse with laughter about how silly you both looked while terrified of a tiny animal.

4. The next morning, get picked up from your guesthouse by a few teenagers with a truck who will drive you to the beach. It will take just one minute to get there. For reasons unbeknownst to you, they have driven you to a beach just steps away from your guesthouse.

Loading a boat in Sihanoukville, Cambodia

5. Realize that the dinky no frills boat several feet away from the shore is your ride for the day. Assume the crew will pull it closer to the shore to load it, but they don’t. Watch the young men struggle to get coolers of food onto the boat while the waves crash against them. Hope that there are life jackets on board.

6. When it’s time for you to get on the boat, the tide suddenly rolls in. Throw your bag on board to avoid submerging your camera in saltwater. Get knocked over by waves a few times before you are finally able to climb on the boat, soaking wet.

7. After a choppy ride, successfully arrive at Bamboo Island despite your initial doubts. Rent a beach chair for $1. Soak in the sun and tranquility. Read a book. Relax.

Bamboo Island off the coast of Sihanoukville, Cambodia

Lunch on Bamboo Island, Cambodia

 8. When it’s time to eat, the boat crew will lay out a woven mat under the casuarina trees and hand you a simple meal of seasoned and grilled fresh fish, a baguette, and shredded salad. You don’t speak Khmer and they don’t speak English, so you communicate in smiles.

9. Return to your bamboo chair and take a dip in the ocean when it gets too hot. Relax, dip, repeat. Reluctantly leave when the boat crew signals that it’s time to go.

10. On the way back, the boat crew will take on an extra passenger, a scruffy 50- or 60-something sun-drenched farang man who seems like he’s been in the region for a long time. He lays out on the edge of the boat and gets even redder as he falls asleep in the sun while the rest of you take cover underneath the shade of the boat’s tarp. In your mind, create  various life scenarios for the new passenger. Maybe he was in the Vietnam War and never came home? Maybe he is running from the law? Whatever it is, he seems like a person who has quite a few stories to tell.

11. After a much smoother ride, arrive back on the mainland. Realize that even though Sihanoukville was not what you expected, the adventure of getting to Bamboo Island and the day of tranquility there turned out to be even better than your expectations.

SE Asia 256

12. Freshen up and return to the beach to watch the sunset. Chat with the cheeky kid vendors you met the day before who continue to playfully stick their tongues out at you. Have dinner at a charming restaurant in town with two of your favorite travel companions. Stay much longer than you planned on chatting and laughing and waiting for another huge storm to pass. Go to bed feeling that you’ve made the most of your short time on the Sihanoukville coast; you’re relaxed and ready to continue exploring Southeast Asia.

Note: I am not currently in Southeast Asia and I’m not planning on traveling in the region any time soon. I visited Southeast Asia in 2008 and recorded my stories from that trip on another site before I started blogging independently. I’m rewriting and sharing some of my stories here.

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Getting my Solo Traveling Feet Wet in Bangkok

by Ekua on March 20, 2013 · 1 comment in solo travel,Thailand

“To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world. You are surrounded by adventure. You have no idea of what is in store for you, but you will, if you are wise and know the art of travel, let yourself go on the stream of the unknown and accept whatever comes in the spirit in which the gods may offer it.”
– Freya Stark

Though I would eventually join a group, Bangkok is the first place I arrived completely alone. Looking back at that first day, being my myself wasn’t the focus, nor was the focus on the absence of anything or anyone I knew. Once I was there, my pre-trip jitters were entirely replaced with excitement about how much there was to see and how many people there were to meet.

Not long after I settled into my room, I headed to Khao San Road after getting directions from the hotel staff. I was disoriented almost as soon as I rounded the corner. I saw some foreigners who looked confident about where they were going and asked them for help. They were a couple from Sweden and they pointed me in the right direction, but as we began to chat, they invited me to visit a temple with them and then offered to take me to Khao San Road afterward. I took them up on this, and as they had spent some time in Southeast Asia, they had loads of great advice for me as we wandered the city together. I was amazed at how quickly a solitary afternoon had turned into a social one and how natural it felt to spend a few hours exploring with people I’d just met.

The following morning at the Grand Palace, a flamboyant young Filipino man saw me looking confused as I waited in line to rent a sarong, and he came over to explain the process to me. Once I was in the palace, I bumped into him again. He was an English teacher who’d been living in Thailand for four years. He introduced me to his female friend who was also a Filipino English in Thailand and a male friend from South Korea who they had just met while they were waiting in line to get into the palace. The Filipino guy had been to the palace a few times before, so he turned out to be an excellent guide for the day. We laughed a lot, had a great time, and as we left the palace, they invited me to continue hanging out with them. As much as I was enjoying their company, I had to decline because I had plans for the afternoon.

A few hours later, I was hanging out with a Bangkok local I’d made arrangements to meet up with through a travel networking site I was active on at the time. We took a boat to the other side of the Chao Praya River and visited a Buddhist temple that seemed so far away from the touristy areas I’d seen. We took our shoes off as we entered the temple filled praying worshipers. Outside, worshipers left offerings and rang bells for good luck. From there, we went to a shopping center that looked like a Westernized mall at first glance, but I noticed that the prices were not set. You could barter for anything. We ate an ice cream-like treat of shaved ice with sweetened condensed milk and strawberries and talked about travel and politics and everyday life in Bangkok. It felt simultaneously surreal and like no big deal to be spending a normal Bangkok day with a local about 28 hours or so after I arrived.

Later that night, I met my fantastic roommate, an Indian-Brit who was my age and a ton of fun. A solid friendship began as we shared our expertise on the process of overpacking  and compared the sizes of our backpacks. My first foray into solo travel officially ended when we joined our loosely guided tour group, but those first 30 or so hours alone were a key part of understanding that fully traveling solo was something I could do and wanted to do in the future. And central to that realization was experiencing how traveling solo doesn’t have to mean being alone, there are potential friends everywhere; for an afternoon, for a week, for a lifetime.

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When Human Rights Override Culture

by Ekua on March 8, 2013 · 6 comments in female travel,race/culture/identity

Culture as it pertains to travelers can be a touchy subject. Residual colonizer guilt is an enormous yet unspoken aspect of the way travelers from the so-called first world feel that they should approach the different cultures they visit. Adding to the guilt is an underlying sense of urgency about the way unique cultures seem to be rapidly fading into an increasingly homogenized world.

Out of these worries, the “good traveler” is born; the kind of traveler who goes to great lengths to be perfect on the road, the “I do as the locals do” types who never let an analytical remark about a place slip out of their mouths.

To a certain extent, it’s a noble cause. But the problem with the rules of being a “good traveler” is that they seem to be standardized for the whole big and varied world. This can easily lead to disregarding a culture’s serious issues under the guise of respecting the culture.

In particular, this mindset can be incredibly blind to women’s rights around the world. When it comes the institutionalized covering up of women (including cultures that don’t hold men accountable for their actions and insist that women are the ones responsible for their safety by dressing “appropriately”) and barring women from certain activities or going to certain places, it’s incomprehensible that so many people—including women who would never stand for that at home—enable it with the line, “It’s just their culture!”

But behind what we see and experience as travelers is likely a much worse scenario for the women who have to live with it every day of their lives and have no set date to leave. As travelers, we only see the outermost layers of institutionalized or accepted oppression and violence towards women, and we have the privilege of knowing we will eventually hop on a plane and leave.

Of course, I don’t recommend that you put yourself in harm’s way by disregarding local customs when you travel, and don’t think that you alone can show up change things. But rethink the way you talk about oppressive cultural norms in your discussions and your travel writing. Don’t be afraid to be honest and call oppression what it is. And think about who you’re really empowering when you say, “It’s just their culture!” Are you supporting the true heart of a culture or a patriarchal establishment that wishes to maintain its power?

Culture is not a stagnant thing that we should expect to infinitely continue as it is. Culture can be many beautiful things–art, music, food, a different way of interacting with people. It absolutely does not have to be oppressive. And as Desmond Tutu eloquently states in this video, traditions were created by humans, and they can always be changed by humans:

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