Chasing the Sun

It's 10pm, and the sun is shining brightly. Really brightly.

I close the window shade and try to go to sleep but its hopeless. I can long for the naptimes of my youth, but unless I'm hungover, I can't sleep as long as the sun is shining. Some weird biological mishap I'm sure. So I decide to wait.

Midnight. I crack the shade and there it is, my tormentor, glowing happily away, providing me with heat and sleep-deprivation for the last 13 hours. Damn.

Two in the morning, and lifting the shade ever so slightly makes my eyes crinkle and my nose quiver (why the hell do we sneeze in bright sunlight by the way?).

My flight from Minneapolis left at 3pm on an overcast Wednesday afternoon. I knew that to avoid jetlag at my ultimate destination of Bangkok, I would need to stay awake most of the time, and then try to catch up on all that sleep in a day or two before I started working in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. But my body didn't like that idea, because at around 4am Norm time, it was actually something like 4pm Tokyo time and the sun just was having far too nice a time shining brightly to care about me and my near desperate need to get a little bit of sleep. It was no good, so I let my tensed up feet just pitter-pat out a staccato beat that must have driven the nice Japanese lady next to me out of her mind.

As I continued to chase the sun backwards around the world, neither of us stopping for respite, I thought about how strange my journey was. I was taking a flight that was exact opposite route of a flight that I had taken nearly a year ago. Though my ultimate destination was yet further on, I remembered a thought that I had had on that last flight from Tokyo to Minneapolis. I remembered thinking that after being on the road for the better part of a year, and with the prospect of law school looming before me like an awesome and terrible dinosaur (you thought I was going to say "wave" didn't you? but no gentle reader, I've used that metaphor once before, which is really once too many anyway), that I couldn't imagine when I would get to be out and about again. Yet here I was, exhaustedly yawning my way through a 12 hour flight, so that I could land just in time for another 7 hour flight. It made me glad that I could keep doing something that I love, and that I could combine it with something that I was learning to love. I felt grateful. I felt honored. I felt freakin' exhausted.

But that didn't matter, because the sun wasn't going away, and I wasn't going to sleep, so I did the only thing I could do: I sighed, picked up my headphones, plugged them into the armrest and sat back to watch "Charlottes Web"...again.

I arrived in Bangkok and found out that the easy and fast (and cheap) shuttle that runs from the airport to Khao San Road (the backpacker ghetto to end all backpacker ghettos) had just dispatched its last vehicle. Further complicating things was that the new Bangkok airport was significantly further out than the old one. 45 minutes of sweating, haggling, yelling, dragging and furious gesticulating later, I was in a "Meter-Taxi" blazing my way back into the sweltering bulk of Bangkok.

My superb relationships with monks continue. Fun note: I took this picture after he had taken a picture of me...with his cameraphone.



I paid the driver, yelled the only epithet that I knew in German, and struggled off to find the guesthouse that I liked the last few times around. Of course it was full. Fortunately, two doors down was another, which provided me a room no bigger than a closet and bedsheets full of questionable stains. No matter, extreme exhaustion is a wonderful cure for hygienic concerns.

I spent my next day preparing to get to Phnom Penh. This involved buying a Xeroxed copy of a Cambodia Lonely Planet (3 dollars), a great knock off pair of Ray-Bans (4 dollars) and some pad thai (22 cents). Then I went to see the reclining Buddha which is one of the main sights that I had missed the last time around.


First tuk-tuk ride back in the city. Sweet motorized hell-carts




As you can see, this is a friggin' ginormous golden deity. I took a video of myself walking end to end of the thing, and it lasted 45 seconds (as soon as I set up a youtube account that will be available).


For some reason I couldn't get these out of landscape format, turn your head to the side and imagine a giant golden head towering 50 feet above you....








"Sigh...it's good being an enormous Buddha."










As some of you know, I have very large feet, however my flip flops weren't quite up to the task here...






This looks strange in the wrong context....I'm getting my hair spiked out like that.



I ate some more food, I walked around, I visited an art gallery that I remembered having excellent air conditioning. But looming everpresent in my mind was the idea, the knowledge, that soon enough I would no longer be traveling, I would be working. Not just passing through, but trying to do something useful.

Next: Cambodia Redux; Genocide, Beer and an Unexpectedly Busy Social Calendar