a ride on the bamboo train

Once we arrived to Battambang and everybody was sent in different directions, I found myself with a small group staying at the Royal Hotel (pretty decent place: free wi-fi, cheap/clean rooms, hot water, and free scarves upon departure-the rooftop restaurant is way overrated though).

It seemed that most of the people on the boat were going to hang out around town, but after spending a dreadful hour eating shitty food at the market (while watching locals get served much more appetizing meals) and beggars continuously tapping our shoulders asking for money for the duration of our meal, the idea didn’t seem all that enticing.

It was about 4:30 pm and we decided to check out the (not so) famous Bamboo Train. Between six of us, we hired a tuk-tuk at a dollar each for a ride there and back. The tracks are just outside the town and it takes about 15 minutes to get there.

You‘ll have to agree on a price before setting off, and the more people, the better, for a couple of reasons.

They charged our group $10 for a trip on the Bamboo Train, and not having any sort of price gauge, this seemed pretty reasonable. At just over a dollar for the run, we were sold!

It’s a very simple ride, in every sense of the word. You sit on a 8’x12′ bamboo platform set on two axles with a small motor to power the contraption, and ride it for half an hour in one direction (although, this depends on how many people you run into along the way and how many times you have to get out of the way) and go back where you came from after a short break. And it’s so much fun.

We easily hit top speeds of 35mph on a badly maintained (if at all) railway which made for a bumpy ride. Every now and then you will run into oncoming traffic (other bamboo trains) and this is where loads come into play: the train carrying the heaviest load and/or the larger number of passengers stays put while the other one gets pulled apart to let the bigger load through. All in a matter of minutes.

Luckily for us we were on the train right around sunset and got in some great photos.

The Bamboo Train is something that is made possible due to the badly maintained railway system in Cambodia. The government is in the process of modernizing the railways throughout the country and, whether inadvertently or not, is going to put an end to one of Battambang’s most enjoyable experiences.

If the boat ride hadn’t been a good enough reason, the Bamboo Train would have made the trip to Battambang complete.

around the temples of angkor

We started our day off at 4:30 am. Early enough to have a light breakfast, coffee and pedal our way into the temples of Angkor for sunrise.

Eric gave us a very convincing outline for a one day bike tour through the temples: skip right over Angkor Wat, which is where everybody and their mother heads for sunrise and go straight to Phnom Bakheng, known as the sunset temple (the time when it is normally inundated by the crowds), which was completely abandoned when we got there. From then on we’d go in the opposite direction of the masses, more or less following the same pattern given in the Lonely Planet, through Angkor Thom and onto Ta Phrom and everything in between. Angkor Wat would be our final destination.

We missed sunrise by about 10 minutes but only because we climbed up the wrong temple (too steep of a climb that early in the morning) which didn’t even clear the top of the tree canopy.

Once atop Phnom Bekhong, there was nothing but us, the sky and the deep horizon. You could see for miles in each direction and it was absurdly quiet.

After a good half hour of peace and quiet, we headed into Angkor Thom toward Bayon but deviated from the customary path and carried our bikes to the top of Angkor Thom’s wall for a more scenic route.

Per Eric, it was about 3km worth of biking through vegetation, spider webs, a few statues and (very) small buildings. The detour left us on the East entrance to Angkor Thom, on a dirt road heading straight to the temple of Bayon. A very shady and pleasant ride into one of the most popular of the temples of Angkor.

Even with the extended route, we found the Temple of Bayon almost empty.

The place is incredible. Hundreds of faces adorn the site; they are supposedly the face of the king responsible for erecting the building, and they keep an eye on the temple visitors. The place is big enough to get lost, which I sort of did when I became separated from my biking mates.

As we were leaving, we caught the first wave of tourists making their way into the temple. Close call.

Bayon is in the center of an area known as Angkor Thom with several other smaller sites, shrines and temples distributed within its walls, with bunch of those immediately north of Bayon. The Royal Palace, The Terrace of Elephants and The Terrace of the Leper King are some of its most popular sites. We walked about these, decided to forgo climbing a few temples in the area and broke for a picnic at the Terrace of the Elephants.

Peanut butter and banana sandwiches for lunch.

After lunch, we hit Ta Nei. To reach this temple, we had to get off the main road (at the bend between Ta Keo & Ta Phrom) and onto a dirt road, parts of which was covered in water. I wouldn’t be surprised if we were the first (or only) people to visit this temple all day. It was small, covered in moss and being swallowed by the Cambodian jungle. It was great.

Above are the steep stairs of Ta Keo. I promise you that climbing up those steps is the closest you’ll ever come to being Spiderman. There is a nice (and flat) view from the top. The very narrow steps make the climb down a lot more treacherous but using the big, flat blocks framing the staircase can make your climb a whole lot easier, safer & 10X faster. (Surprisingly, I was the only one doing it.)

Next up was the famous Ta Phrom. Besides Angkor Wat, this was the only temple where we ran into a massive amount of tourists, but since it’s a lot more compact than Angkor Wat, it made it tougher to navigate. And because of its popularity, it will take (and took me) forever to take a decent shot, but it is all a slight nuisance relative to the stunning beauty of the place.

The temple is in the process of being taken over by giant trees and going through it feels like walking through a still shot of a battle between humankind and nature-with the building standing in nature’s war path.

The site got a lot of notice for its use in the movies Tomb Raider and Two Brothers, and one of the trees made the cover of the Cambodian edition of the Lonely Planet a few years back and now has its own platform, from where thousands of tourists get their picture taken.

The temple might be compact, but it is big. It’s big enough that once again, I split up with my crew, coming out on the East gate instead of the West (where we parked our bikes). I was lucky enough to get a free bus ride back.

By this time it was noon and we were exhausted. We found a bench area just outside Ta Phrom where we knocked out for an hour or so.

After our nap, we stopped at a couple of very small temples along the 6km ride to Angkor Wat.

Angkor Wat is massive. There are lots of tourists around and plenty of food vendors claiming that you can park your bikes in the area for free, if you buy their food. And after a full day of amazing temples, I had simply ran out of excitement. Not to say that Angkor Wat was not, but Bayon and Ta Phrom were far more impressive. Even its very prominent central towers were closed to the public due to maintenance (and overuse). As a plus, the green canvas covering part of the façade of the towers made for an awesome photo op.

I think Angkor Wat would have been better left for a single day on its own. Green canvas or not, I’m sure I would have had a more enjoyable visit without 9+ hours of walking and biking under my belt.

The highlight of Angkor Wat was our short convo (and pics!) with a couple of monks there. Buddhist monks have tended to be on the shy side for the most part (and these were too!), then again, there are all sorts of types of monks out there.

By the time we pedaled out of the temple area, we were exhausted, hungry, terribly sun burned and oh so ready for an ice cold beer and a shower.

chasing a dream

In an effort to fill the void in between spurts of ideas for our tuk-tuk’s paint job, I came up on this video oldie but goodie. It’s the video for Mayday’s Quicksand, their first and I believe, what got them signed to Southbeat Records, where they would eventually produce Groundhog Day and blow up all over the innertubes. Before Plex got all ZZ Top with his beard. Back when it was just him & Bernbiz.

Shot in all over Miami and still one of my favorite Mayday! joints.

tribute to a king

When news that Michael Jackson had suffered a heart attack hit the airwaves, I was sitting at a bus station in northern Peru waiting for what would be one of the worse 18 hour bus rides of my life. A seemingly delicious burger made my life miserable for 20 hours (the bus arrived to the station two hours late) and it took me out of commission for another 10 beyond that. This left me wide awake and at about 85% around 11pm the following night at my aunt’s place, just to find out the innerwebz was down. It would be another 4 hours before I was able to connect and noticed an inordinate amount of MJ videos popping up on facebook. It wasn’t hard to figure out what was going on.

It was a rare sense of disbelief that I felt then, coupled with a ton of other worries going through my mind, not to mention that I was physically debilitated, caused me not to give the news much thought. It sorta kept the reality of it at a distance. I happened to be in Peru at the time, which helped, and when I got back to the States, I chose to disconnect from the constant barrage of all that was Michael Jackson. (Up until Stevie Wonder’s tribute during MJ’s memorial.)

All this time, I really wished I’d thrown up a little something on the blog in remembrance of someone who’s music I grew up with. Luckily, I ran into this video of Mos Def performing a dope rendition of Billie Jean. I figured it would be a fitting, belated tribute.

collabo

It was hot (down right muggy), bright, mesmerizing and loud. The Collabo Show was overall a very satisfying experience even though they ran out of beer rather quick, something that didn’t go well with the sweltering ambiance of the locale.

My ears are still ringing from all the drumming/banging/crashing/whatever-you-wanna-call it is they were doing that was so overwhelming I couldn’t even look their way… although it could have been the bright strobe light, illuminating the inert, stuffed feline, lying belly-up on a table in their general direction.

I couldn’t help but become fixated on the jelly fish in the water tank under the blue light, as well as the hot air paper balloons that gloriously burned over the Little Haiti skies. (With the couple of exceptions where they burned either just prior or right after being released.)

Honestly, I don’t know what it all meant but it was a lot of fun and as torturous as some of the work looked (e.g.  putting together the live piece in the suffocating confines of their installation), it was the artists who seemed to be having the most fun.

Some links relating to the event:

LINK to my pics.

LINK to Jipsy’s pics via NBC 6

LINK to Miami, bro’s pics/post

LINK to Artlurker’s pics + review (great read)

last resort en vivo

This one is even better than the last one. Mayday! performing ‘Last Resort’ at their Technology EP (available online, for free) release party at Transit Lounge:

live from somwhere

This is probably the nicest live video footage of Mayday! I’ve seen. It’s but a sample of type of energy you get outta one of their shows. Watch Gianni (percussion) & L.T. (drums) tear it up at the end.

breathe

I wanted to post the full video for the song Breathe by Telepopmusik (featuring Angela McCluskey). There’s actually two versions of it, the one that plays in the Mitsubishi commercial (which is the one I’m posting) and the original version, found on Telepopmusik’s 2001 album “Genetic World.” The video for the version of that song is pretty rad itself and you can check that out HERE.

more about “Breathe“, posted with vodpod

There was some sort of fullness to the voice in that song in the woman parts trimmer commercial that I couldn’t get outta my head, so I went on a pre-easter egg hunt on the internets. It turns out that the voice belongs to Scottish singer Angela McCluskey.

After listening to her for a bit, I’d say she’s somewhere right between Nikka Costa and Macy Gray as far as vocal stylings are concerned. A sultrier version of Nikka and a crisper Macy Gray and right along the same neigborhood, musically speaking – the place where rock, soul and r&b meet.

She dropped her first solo “The Things We Do” back in 2004 and from the snippets it strikes me as a soulish rock album. She definitely has a rocky edge about her but I see her more as a soul/r&b singer set to downtempo beats, something along the lines of the track in the commercial, which btw, it seems like something for which it was exclusively created.

She is also much better known for her collaborations with the French group Telepopmusik. So much so, that chances are that you’ve heard her voice before.