Well, for those faithful readers - and I know we have many, I get emails from the more enthusiastic among you - we are back online, and you're eager for news of our travels out of Bhutan and down into the lowland tropics of northern Cambodia.
Sunday morning a hospital car arrived at 8 am to pick us up and take us from Thimphu to Paro. Of course Thinley had been there since before 7 that morning, eating breakfast with us and moping because we were leaving... I can't blame her moping, though, since she had spent the better part of most of the month with us, and had grown close to all of us, and if we had a seventh ticket for our travels home I think she would have sold everything of value to come along. We said goodbye to the Gadhos and Jamtsho, and all the dogs, and Thinley, and set off in an extended cab pickup with the name of the hospital on the side, and Evil Kenivel at the wheel. This trip we have been blessed with some very good drivers in Bhutan - which is a mercy, since the roads are terrifying even with good drivers at the wheel - but Tada, the hospital driver (aka "Leadfoot") was NOT one of them. Luckily Thompson didn't hurl his toast on the way there, and Tada pretended not to understand what "slower please" meant in English, but I felt like we were involved in a high-speed car chase with no one in pursuit, and I closed my eyes for a lot of the trip as the rice paddies and quaint houses and apple trees loaded with apples and snapping prayer flags all whipped by. I couldn't tell at what speed they whipped by, since Tada's speedometer was broken and said Zero no matter how fast we went.
In Paro, Tada took us to the Samden Choling Hotel for the night. It being the tourism off-season, I think we were the only guests, and we occupied two comfortable rooms each with a pair of twin beds, an adequate bathroom by Bhutan standards (i.e. a flushable toilet that sometimes flushed, a sink that drains into a flexible pipe that empties into a hole in the floor, and a shower that pours into the room with no shower stall and drains into another hole in the corner of the floor), and wide windows with no screens so we could have fresh air, or no mosquitoes, but not both conditions at the same time. We strolled into the downtown - everyone else was fine, but I (Tona) had a touch of the gastric and wasn't feeling much like doing or eating anything, and the day was punishingly hot and sunny. We found a restaurant for lunch, and afterwards strolled down by the Paro Chu where some kids were swimming naked in the shallows and our kids sailed rafts made out of trash down the small rapids. That evening we ate at the Samden Choling and turned in early, Don getting up in the night to swat mosquitoes that were whining in his ear, and me getting up in the night to run to the bathroom.
In the morning we had our second, and thankfully final, bad-driver experience in the short distance from the hotel to the airport. Two taxis were supposed to ferry us and all our luggage. Neither showed up, so two people with some connection to the hotel drove us instead, but in vehicles that barely started and stayed running, and with two drivers who had clearly never driven before. I was in one Maruti with one driver and the kids, and Don was in the other with our luggage, the other driver, and someone to tell the other driver how to shift gears. Both our vehicles went off the road, stalled out, or got lost several times in the 10-minute drive to the airport. I felt like even though we were on the only level roads in Bhutan, it was still a harrowing ride. Oh well.
Then after going to the trouble to arrive early, we were told on arrival to the airport that the 8 am Bangkok flight was going to be delayed 2.5 hours. Later we found out this was because the King was getting on the flight to Delhi and it was leaving around 8:30. We glued ourselves to the windows looking out onto the tarmac, watching the red carpet (literally) be rolled out, and a long line of Dashos, Lenpos, and Royal Advisors queue in their beautiful ghos and colored kabneys. Then a couple of black jeeps and a black Land Cruiser with tinted windows squealed up, and a group of men climbed out, with the King in front. He was dressed in a simple light gray gho, black socks, black shoes. Only because we've seen his distinguished face in every home and restaurant in photographs did we recognize him, and because the long line of advisors were bowing low as he came down the line. He climbed onto the airplane stairs, and then the plane closed up and taxied away and took off.
Our flight to Bangkok was smooth, with a landing in Kolkata to fuel and pick up passengers who had forgotten to shower that morning. We landed in Bangkok with less than 2 hours to make a connection to a different airline to take us to Cambodia. We were very concerned that our 6 checked bags - which were only tagged to arrive in Bangkok, not Cambodia, since Druk Air doesn't fly there - would get onto the connecting flight and we thought we'd have to go through customs and immigration and baggage claim and then do it again in reverse to check in to Bangkok Air. But the nice brightly dressed ladies at the Bangkok Air transfer desk assigned us blue stickers to wear on our clothes and sent us to the gate for the Siem Reap flight and assured us that our luggage would join us, even though they seemed convinced that we had come from Kathmandu and didn't seem to have heard of Druk Air.
When we checked in with the man at the Siem Reap counter downstairs in the Bangkok Air terminal and explained that our luggage had to make this quick connection without us personally locating it, and we asked if it would make it, the man looked at Don and asked, "Sir, do you know how to pray?"
Well, (I guess since we do), the luggage made it, and so did we, with a sheaf of documents in hand (4 or 5 for each person, x6 people) for visas, etc in Cambodia. Our Bangkok Air plane turned out to be a small propeller plane (!!) which the kids thought was neato and which I thought looked scary. But you know, it was a flight of less than an hour and extremely smooth, since the terrain is very flat from Bangkok to Cambodia. We landed in light rain at the small Siem Reap airport and had no trouble getting through the lines, finding our luggage, and being met by our driver.
We splurged on Cambodia, and bought a package tour through a company called Apsara (those are the heavenly dancers depicted in stone sculpture on Angkor Wat & other temples). It provides accomodations at a 5-star hotel, meals, an AC'd vehicle with an English-speaking guide. Frankly my expectations for how each of those items would translate in Cambodia was sort of low, given my limited knowledge of the country and our experience with the finest hotels Bhutan has to offer, which are primitive and usually don't have toilet paper. But as we have been discovering, as each jaw-dropping detail of the hotel revealed itself, 5-star means 5-star here. And as we got to know our excellent and funny guide, the young Mr. Wanna, and the driver of our white luxury bus, Mr. Sok ("Shock"), it has seemed like the Knight Bus in Harry Potter: showing up in the right place, at the right time, glistening clean and with tons of seats, and squeezing itself into tight spots with magical ease. Last night we were so tired from travelling that our kids nearly dropped their heads into the plates of the third course of a gourmet 4-course meal, and we went up to find our crisp white sheets had been expertly turned-down, and that soft white robes and slippers awaited. I'll have to write about the temples we saw today later, but Cambodia is truly amazing and we're having a blast. I thought that anything after Bhutan might be anticlimactic, but this leg is just as wonderful in its own way.
So, a long entry tonight on the hotel computer in the business lounge, but I wanted to capture the odd & strangely enjoyable day it turned out to be to hop from Paro Bhutan, to Kolkata India, to Bangkok Thailand and touch down in the utterly foreign and fascinating Siem Reap Cambodia.
