11-11-19 - Unexpected Water Festival
/Day 148. Kyle & Leanne joint blog. Siam Reap, Cambodia.
11/11
Travel day. It’s a day of what has become a now routine process of packing, hotel check-out, airport transfer, lines, check-ins, more lines, security, more lines, passport control, more lines and staid airport fast food.
Today we fly from Bagan to Mandalay to Bangkok to Siam Reap. That’s Myanmar to Cambodia via Thailand. Bangkok is like Southeast Asia’s version of the Atlanta hub. Everyone flies through there at some point and this is our third trip through Bangkok. It’s another day where we are only going a couple thousand miles but it will take all day with transport time and layovers.
The Bagan airport is so small and chill that when we check in our bags, instead of weighing them via scale, the luggage guy comes out from behind the counter picks up each of our bags, assesses its weight and says “hmmm, this one is good.” The human luggage weigher guy is a first for us. When we enter the gate area, there is an employee at a table with a printout of names and phone numbers. The check-in consists of her putting a check next to our name. We have been told by the locals that if aren’t there when boarding starts, the employee start calling people’s cell phones to ask if they need to hold the plane for them. It’s a special place for sure and we have loved the incredible hospitality shown to us here in Bagan. Top hotel chains need to send their trainees here to study service!
Even though we have three short flights today, they are on three different airlines and we have to collect our bags after each flight and check in for the next flight. We are hopeful our planes will all be on time or else a dominoes effect sets off. Lucky for us, they are. Although that doesn’t stop us from generating a couple amusing travel anecdotes.
At one security checkpoint, Ashlynn’s bag gets flagged and taken to a table. The agent tells her to take out the sharp pointy thing from her bag. Bewildered, Ashlynn tries to explain there is no sharp pointy thing. The agent remains unconvinced and starts opening pockets in search of a knife like item. After she has searched the whole backpack, she still remains unconvinced and starts taking every single item out of the bag. When you’ve been traveling for five months, a backpack can become quite the haven for miscellaneous odds and ends accumulated during traveling. 15 minutes later, there are three tubs full of stuff that have to go back through security along with the bag. The agent stands there watching the x-ray display waiting to pounce with an “I got you.” As the last tub passes through, the agent gets the crinkled eyebrow, deep in thought, perplexed look. She finally goes back to Ashlynn and tells her she can go obviously disappointed that she couldn’t tackle and cuff the knife wielding 14 year old Ashlynn. Once out of earshot, Kyle tells Ashlynn that she shouldn’t pack the phantom knife next time.
Justin has amassed quite a key chain collection from the trip resulting in a pouch with about 50 keychains. The collection is very cool except when you go through security. On most occasions, the pouch gets flagged and the agent has to dump out all the key chains and sort through them to make sure there is no weapon posing as a keychain in there. At the security checkpoint, the pouch gets flagged again. This time however; the agent starts looking through the key chain and his eyes light up. He pulls out one and yells to his fellow agent “look, look, it’s the Eiffel Tower.” Then he pulls out a Disneyland Paris one and shows his buddy. Then he pulls one out and asks Justin, “which one is this?” This goes on and on and after nearly 30 mins, the agent has identified every keychain while high-fiving his buddy when they find a particularly cool one.
As soon as we arrive in Siam Reap, Leanne has her “first 24” rule to test. A few countries ago, Leanne decided that something dramatic happens to us in the first 24 hours in every country with Vietnam taking the cake with the naked dude in the hotel hallway. So she’s on high alert monitoring for out of ordinary events. Fortunately she’s off-base for now. The hotel picked us up at the airport in their shuttle right on time and the driver Chetem even told us we hit the second night of one of their biggest festivals of the year, The Water Festival.
After a quick dinner, Leanne, Kyle and John head out to the nearby river to partake in the Water Festival. Upon arrival, we see hundreds of locals out enjoying street food, strolling the river and making flower offerings in the form of small floating lanterns on the river. Hundreds of these offerings slowly float down the river. There’s spotlights lighting up the sky and free concerts and beer gardens abound.
After finding a lively pavilion with live music, Kyle leads us up front towards the stage. The Cambodian female signer version of Taylor Swift finishes a song and the audience erupts in cheers and applause. The giant screen starts playing a commercial for a local beer, Leo Beer, featuring a Cheetah in sunglasses (Leo’s Mascot) and a guy who looks like Pitbull. Kyle and Leanne start dancing to the song “I Drink Leo” while John looks over horrified at his parent’s 1990s dance moves.
We can already tell John is trying to figure out how quickly can he eject us all from what he has now deemed as possibly unsafe situation. He’s one mature 17-year-old for sure. While we did stick out like a sore tourist thumb as we were the only non-Cambodians at the concert, it still was pretty early and looked fine from our perspective. However, we compromise with John and stay and dance for a few songs.
We retire for the evening having already fallen in love with Cambodia. And Leanne ended up finding her “something dramatic!” in the first 24 hours.
