Thailand is beautiful, the food is great, prices are reasonable and Thais are a warm and wonderful people. The cities, and the countryside are clean for the most part. Thailand clearly has a solid middle class and is country moving up rapidly from being a developing nation.
Bali is wonderful in all respects, but not quite as clean and with less of an established middle class.
Cambodia is a little hard to read. We saw only one place, Siem Reap, where Angkor Wat is located. This is a developing nation with plenty of poverty and cleanup work to be done. Siem Reap is booming with man large hotels under construction due to the presence of Angkor Wat.
Three million people visit Angkor Wat a year now. The government is putting in a new international airport to accommodate flights from outside Asia (we flew in and out of the existing regional airport from Thailand).
So who controls access to Angkor Wat? Two private companies. If you look on the back of your entry pass (which contains your photo, taken as they issue the ticket), you see a passing reference to the companies. I asked our guide about it and he confirmed my theory. The Government lacks the money, so they have an arrangement with the two foreign companies to in effect operate Angkor Wat as a tourist attraction. The same is true of the existing airport and the planned new airport.
We talked with one of our guides in Cambodia about where he learned English. No, not in school (although that is a common way to learn it) and not by travel abroad. He learned to speak English through YouTube. There apparently are many language lessons on YouTube. New one on us.
The guide already speaks Japanese. He is working to learn Italian and Spanish to make himself more marketable as a tour guide. He is part of the up and coming Cambodian middle class.
Back to Thailand. It’s a mystery to me why, for no apparent engineering or construction reason, there are so many small (2”) step ups that will trip you up. The same is true of stairs, where the rise varies between steps, making stairs and the little step ups genuine hazards.
We used the SkyTrain in Bangkok, a relatively new above ground rail system. I wondered why the overhead straps for those standing were hitting me in the head. Simple. Thais are short people, and, as it should be, the system was designed for them, not for taller westerners (and as we all know, I’m not all that tall).
Group travel is a mixed blessing and an interesting experience. There were roughly 50 of us in Bali and 102 of us in Thailand and Cambodia.
With a group, you have to allow more time for everything, so we arrived at all airports an hour earlier than we would normally need to arrive. However, we were for the most part whisked through visa lines, immigration and check in. In Bangkok, the travel agency even paid the airline to have two check in lines just for us.
There is the matter of the tours. Some of the tours took us to great sites and permitted us to bypass lines. However, some of the tours were for the purpose of creating shopping opportunities that we would have passed on—and when we could, we did.
On two evening in Thailand, part of the evening’s events included releasing large paper balloons, as they call them, which really are specially designed paper bags with a light metal frame and a flaming burner (which burns itself out after the fuel is exhausted). When lit, the heat causes the bag/balloon to rise. Simple physics. As a group, we launched 50 of them one night and 20 another. They are spectacular in the sky. In theory they should burn out and fall harmlessly to earth without causing a fire on the ground. However, they are an obvious environmental hazard in general, but also, you can be sure that some of them hit the ground lit, lighting something on fire. Beautiful, but not a great idea.
Then there are the departure parties we referenced in earlier positing (except for last night’s, which Giules will reference in her last posting), one each from Bali, Cambodia and Thailand. Think hotel luaus in Hawaii, but put it on a world class ancient temple ruin (Cambodia) or a Hindu temple with 250 villagers turning out to perform (Bali), dancers, food, music. Extravaganza is the term that comes to mind.
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