Day 1 AM: Exploring the River Front

When we teach a class we usually try to set up the computer lab on Sunday. But the students are using their personal computers this week, which caused all kinds of technical difficulties during the week, but left us with a day to explore and get over jet lag.

Our hotel was about a mile from the river front, so we walked. There was a hill with a Wat (temple) at the end of the street. Then we worked our way along the river front that opened up into a river front park. This was nice, but the direct sun was oppressive, so we cut into town and ended up in a bustling market.

 
We eventually made it to the national history museum that was interesting with some pretty extensive exhibits of pre-historic civilization and art from the Ankor period, a very advanced civilization (of almost a million people [1]) that dominated the region from the 12th to the 14th century.

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[1] Much more on this later as I visited the actual site of this civilization over the weekend.

Day 1 PM: Hanging Out with Andy

In the afternoon, I got to meet my friend Andy for lunch. This turned out to be more challenging than it sounded. I caught at tuk tuk (a moped with a trailer). However, in a reprise of an experience I had in Bangkok, the driver only pretended to understand me, drove in the general direction I pointed to, and dropped me off about 20 blocks from where I wanted to go. There were no street labels so it took a while to realize just how lost I was, but a second tuk tuk and a dozen texts with Andy eventually got me there.

Andy was part of the campus ministry we are involved in and graduated a couple years ago. He is the finest young film maker I know.[1] We went to a film festival a couple years ago that included his stuff, and he walked away with around 50% of the distinctions awarded.

He is in Cambodia working with an organization that helps exploited children (using his film and photography skills but also just doing whatever needs to be done). We had noodles and spent a couple hours catching up, and then he took me to see the center he works at. It is a courageous ministry of practical love and seems to be growing and thriving.

One of the unexpected advantages to hanging out with Andy was getting to tool around with him on his moped. The moped-to-car ratio here is much higher than Bangkok (and likely responsible for much more manageable traffic). I had never gotten to experience an Asian city in this way and it was a blast…even when the monsoon rains started.
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[1] I guess this doesn’t say much, because I don’t know a lot of them. But I think he is really good.

Day 2: Monday – Two New Foods

Today I ate two new foods:

A snail

and a shrimp as big as my hand

Day 3: Tuesday – A Word on the Work

Today was the second day of class, so I thought I’d say just a little bit about why I am here. My buddy Cam and I are teaching a hydraulic modeling class with representatives of the 4 downstream countries with riparian stretches of the Mekong River: Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam.
The Mekong is one of the most interesting rivers in the world, hydrologically[1], ecologically and politically. It is either the second or third most biodiverse river in the world[2] with an enormous fishery.[3] Until recently, it was also one of the largest undammed rivers in the world. No longer.

There are approximately 130 dams in various stages of planning, construction or early use in the watershed. This will generate electricity for growing economies (e.g. Thailand) and revenue for poorer countries (e.g. Laos) but will impact the ecology and fisheries which are a resource downstream countries (e.g. Cambodia) are dependent upon. The Lower Mekong countries[4] have formed the Mekong River Commission (MRC) to help plan and negotiate management of this system at a regional level.

These are sovereign nations making difficult trans-boundary choices that will be driven by a range of social and technical considerations that are outside of my expertise. But they invited us here to help build capacity in hydraulic and sediment modeling. And I’m thrilled to be involved. But as most of my friends and family have a threshold of ‘sediment related content’ they are interested in, we’ll move on.
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[1] Even the watershed shape is unique, with a very thin upper watershed following a deep fault out of the Tibetan Plateau. The river basins of South East Asia tend to be idiosyncratic as they are driven by tectonic geology since the peninsula of South East Asia is essentially the part of the Asian content that squirted out when India collided with the shield. In undergrad I saw a film in which pre-collision Asia was modeled with jello and when India hit it, an appendage squirted out that approximated the size and shape of the South East Asian peninsula.

[2]Depending on how you measure (and estimate) biodiversity. This is actually a pretty interesting topic in its own right. “Diversity” is actually a pretty difficult thing to quantify because any metric of diversity embeds a system of values. But the other top three are (unsurprisingly) the Amazon and the Congo.
[3]More fish are caught in the river than the US eats in a year. And river nutrient subsidies also supports a marine fishery that many think is almost as large.
[4]Myanmar and China, the upstream countries, do not come to the table.

Day 4&5 – Four Thoughts on Cambodian Food

These days were the core of the class we are teaching. So life pretty much consisted of working eating and sleeping. The former and latter make bad blog fodder, so I am going to focus on the food. In fact, I think I’ll do four thoughts on Cambodian Food.

1. New Fruit![1] I’m a fan of fruit…but actually discovering new fruit, it is like learning that there were missing episodes of Firefly that had not previously been released.

2. Admirable use of Mushrooms. I had no idea that a) there were so many forms of edible mushrooms or b) that they were invariably delicious. I applauded SE Asia’s commitment to the mushroom.

3. Fish Culture: Between the Mekong and the Tonle Sap (more on that later), Cambodia has a long tradition in fishing and fish consumption…the latter of which being a tradition I observed during my time here.

4. Omnivory[2]: Here is a short list of foods I have eaten in Cambodia that are a little eccentric from western standards: snail, snake, crocodile, and frog.
 
Here’s some pics of a few meals:

Stuffed Calamari

Amok – the quintessential Cambodian dish…in discrete format.

 

 

This might have been my favorite meal.  My first day at Angkor Thom I got caught out in a monsoon.  There was a fun outdoor food tent at the by the tuk tuks.  I got a plate of hot spring rolls and they were awesome.

 

 

 

I got Cambodian BBQ one night and was surprisingly proficient at it…but only because I had seen the grill masterfully negotiated in my trip to Bangkok last month.
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[1] A few weeks after moving to California, Amanda and I watched the film KPAX in which Kevin Spacey plays an ambiguous, quasi-alien character. He eats a bunch of Bananas and says “the produce alone is worth the trip.” We began saying that about our new life as west coasters.
[2]In its strict ecological definition, omnivory isn’t eating plants and animals, it is eating species from multiple trophic levels…and that list includes at least three if not four trophic levels.

Day 6 – Cue the Friday Song

This was the last day of class. I gave a marathon sediment lecture for most of the morning then we offered to stick around after lunch to actually do some modeling if anyone had data. Two modelers took us up on the offer and a couple others stayed to watch. It was fun to cobble together a couple preliminary models of the Mekong in an afternoon.

The multi-national class has been a bit of a challenge. English was a pre-requisite, but an interpreter is always helpful, if only to give the students two shots to bridge the language gap. But because there are four languages represented, this wasn’t possible.[1] But on the whole I think it went pretty well.
After class we went to the ‘night market’ to buy gifts for our families. I think my wife would be good at this given her success at garage sales, where she doesn’t allow the low starting price to keep her from getting to the lower actual price. But I am pretty bad at the market scene.

I got dresses for Aletheia and a skirt and shirt for Charis.

After that we ate and got beers at the elephant bar, a room that presumably has 1000 elephants in the art, tapestries, and nick knacks.  Then Cam and Jeff caught a ride to the midnight flight to Incheaun. But I’m staying just a little longer. You see, northern Cambodia was home to one of the great civilizations of the ancient[2] world, and they left behind a city and temple complex so large, dramatic and tenacious that it is often listed as one of the wonders of the ancient world.[3] So I went to bed to get a little rest before I caught my flight the next morning to Siem Reap, which is the gateway to Angkor.
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[1] I have taught multi-country classes in South America, but the unifying language allows us to use an interpreter there, since even the Brazilians understand Spanish.
[2] Is it ‘ancient’ even if it corresponded with Europe’s medieval period? Not sure. I’m going to go with ancient.
[3] In the updated, non Euro-Centric lists that have more than one representative outside of Greek/Roman/Egyptian civilization and put a premium on…um…still existing.

Day 7 - Angkor Tom

Early Saturday Morning I caught an Air Cambodia flight from Phnom Pehn to the only other city with an airport in Cambodia, Siam Reap, which is only about 15 minutes from the Angkor Archeological Park. We flew over the Tonle Sap which many think is the reason that the Mekong (somewhere between the 8th and 15th largest river by various accountings) is the second or third most biodiverse river. In the rainy season the river connecting this huge inland lake to the Mekong flows backwards and the lake grows dramatically, flooding huge tracts of wetland and woods, providing a totally unique, enormous, annual terrestrial nutrient subsidy to the Mekong. .

I had booked a $19 hotel that got good ratings on Trip Advisor…but still, a $19 hotel in Cambodia when neighboring hotels were going for $200 had me a little nervous. But the Angkor Pearl was great. No frills, but nothing disconcerting. I’d say it was about 80% of the value for 10% of the price.

 One of the best parts was that they sent a tuk tuk to pick me up at the airport, and then the driver offered his services for the weekend. You see, there are iconic images of Angkor Wat that could make it seem like an isolated attraction. But the ‘ruins’ and not-so-ruins are spread over the countryside, with the shortest circuit clocking in around 17 km. So you have to hire a tuk tuk or car and having an airport pick up was kind of like an ‘interview’ where I could get comfortable with Theon’s driving and English to the point that I was satisfied that we would be able communicate and was happy to hire him (which came in at $40 for 2 days).

I got in around noon and we went to Angkor Thom, saving the iconic Angkor Wat for sunrise the next day. Angkor Tom was the capital city during what seems to be the golden age. According to one of my guide books the city had a million people at a time when Paris had 25,000.[1] Angkor Thom featured the basement ruins of a palace (that covered acres and must have been mind blowingly enormous) and a couple impressive temples.

But by far my favorite structure was the Baylon temple, which featured 54 towers with faces of the Buddha projecting in the four cardinal dimensions, creating the unsettling sensation of a matrix of attention. Everywhere you looked, the look was returned…repeatedly. It was simply the most unique ancient structure I have encountered. While I was there the monsoons rolled in and the rain pouring into the temple and rattling the surrounding rain forest created an atmosphere that was a totally original experience.
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[1] One of the temples in Angkor had three times that many people working in it