The Travel Lunatic: A Floating Village, a Bad Embassy, and My Literally Being Eaten Alive!

Introducing a new column.

For the audio version of this article, read by the author, go here.

Welcome to a new feature here on Brent and Michael Are Going Places.

The Travel Lunatic, a regular column written by me, is going to be a little less formal than our usual content — a little more, shall we say, chatty.

And weird. Which, if you follow me on social media, can’t be a surprise.

It’s a place for stories, pictures, and observations that don’t fit in anywhere else.

Why The Travel Lunatic?

Because I’m crazy about travel. Or maybe just crazy — it depends who you ask.

From the back, you can’t see my crazy eyes.

For example, ask Brent. Once, in Keszthely, Hungary, my poor husband was so frustrated by how often I was out photographing the swans of Lake Balaton that he made me tally up how many pictures I’d taken of them.

I lied and said 400, but that was only the edited photos. In truth, I took around 4000.

Maybe it’s time for an intervention.

How else am I a travel lunatic?

I make a habit of talking to complete strangers — and then going with them when they invite me to visit their remote Macedonian village.

In Bangkok, I didn’t let the 41 C/106 F degree, record-breaking heat keep me from spending day after day touristing around the city.

And I got smashed at a Serbian winery during a wine-tasting with generous pours — if not quite this drunk.

In short, I’m up for most anything.

So those are my Travel Lunatic credentials.

Except, by the end of this column, I plan to convince you that the way I travel isn’t really so crazy at all.

Crazy Stupid Thing That Happened!

During our recent two month stay in Bangkok, Brent and I ran out of passport pages — which is kind of a fun thing to be able to say. Anyway, we had to get new passports. Once we got them, we were going to extend our existing 60-day Thailand visas for another thirty days.

To extend a visa in a cancelled passport, Thailand requires a letter from that country’s embassy linking the old passport to the new one. But the U.S. Embassy flatly refused to give us one, even though we explained our sixty-day visa was almost up and that without that letter, we were going to have to leave of Thailand in a matter of days.

Too bad, so sad, was the Embassy’s response.

Which is how we wound up in Siem Reap, Cambodia, for ten days.

We were seriously baffled by the U.S. Embassy’s position in refusing to give Thai Immigration the documentation they required. When I pressed them on the issue, they told me via email that by asking for the letter, Thailand was creating a “colossal waste of time and money, and also burden[ing] our citizens.”

Umm, isn’t it for Thailand to decide what documentation Thailand needs?

When I asked the Embassy how they would react if the Thai government suddenly refused to provide documentation required by the U.S. government, they wrote back, “Sorry, we’re not going to go into an extended explanation beyond what we already said.”

That’s the diplomatic equivalent of flipping you the bird. Which I am flipping right back, thank you very much.

I can tell you that in this case the only one “burdening” anyone was the U.S. Embassy. So thanks for nothing, America.

The U.S. doesn’t let you take pictures of their embassy, so here is a cat that also thinks it’s better than everyone else. Photo by Jennifer Uppendahl on Unsplash

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Crazy Crack of Dawn Thing I Did!

One of the reasons Brent — and to be fair, many, many others — think I’m a five-star travel lunatic is because of how often I get up at the crack of dawn to go take pictures of the sunrise wherever we happen to be living.

Like these places, for instance.

Sunrise in Prague, Czechia; Boulder, Colorado; and Athens, Greece. It was soooo cold in Prague!

And one of the most famous sunrise spots in the entire world is at Angkor Wat. The sun rises right behind those lotus flower-shaped temples — perfectly lined up, if you’re lucky enough to be at the Western gate on an equinox.

Now you can see my crazy eyes!

I didn’t mind getting up at 4 AM — Travel Lunatic, remember? But I was vaguely ambivalent about going. The rainy season had started, so there was no guarantee clouds wouldn’t completely hide the sunrise. Plus, what would another Angkor Wat sunrise pic add to the one zillion already on Instagram?

Had this been the high season, there would have been between five and ten thousand other people crammed together where I’m standing in the above photo.

Hard pass, thank you very much.

But it was low season, and I’d been told there should only be a few hundred folks there. And it was Angkor freakin’ Wat. I figured if I didn’t go, I’d regret it.

So I hired a tuk tuk driver, got up at four, whizzed out there in the dark, made the twenty minute walk to the best viewing spot, and waited.

The result?

Was I crazy to get up at 4 AM to take this picture?

I’m happy with it. And it was pretty cool being there in person, watching the sun come up behind the temple.

In fact, I’d like to take this opportunity to thank the U.S Embassy in Bangkok for being such obnoxious twits we had no choice but to come to Cambodia. If they hadn’t, we would’ve missed out on some incredible experiences.

P.S. Don’t tell Brent, but now I want to come back on an equinox!

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Crazy Interesting Place We Visited!

During our ten days in Siem Reap, we wanted to see more than just Angkor Wat.

Which is how Brent and I decided to go to the floating village of Kampong Phluk. I mean, an entire village that floats? How could I pass that up?

So off we went one scorching hot afternoon. After a pretty long drive, we finally came to the village itself at the end of a very red, very dusty dirt road.

It was also a completely dry road. The only thing floating at that point was my eyeballs because I needed to pee so badly.

After I’d relieved myself, our wonderful guide, Sophea Ting, explained why the village wasn’t floating.

May is the end of the dry season, and the level of Tonlé Sap Lake drops every year — so much that most of the lake was now a ten-minute boat ride away, through a narrow muddy channel. During the wet season, he explained, the lake grows to five times its size, from 2,5000 square kilometers up to 15,000 or more.

But the village was still fascinating, especially since the buildings were all built on stilts. This area wasn’t really a “floating” village at all, not even in the wet season. It’s more of a standing-on-stilts-in-really-deep-water village.

We walked around, browsing makeshift shops that will be underwater once the water rises, and visiting with the locals who were roasting tiny mussels, smoking fish, or just sitting and chatting in the shade of their houses.

Because they are not travel lunatics. They are sane people who know to stay out of the searing Cambodian sun in the middle of the day.

I was fascinated by such a completely different way of living. What would it be like watching the water rise and fall during the year? Or going to school by boat? Or stepping out into a boat, only to realize the lake fell last week, and there is no boat?

Okay, that would probably only happen to me.

At the far end of the village, skinny wooden boats waited to take us out onto the lake itself. When the water is higher, the surrounding forest becomes a huge mangrove swamp.

Unfortunately, climate change is having an enormous — and dire — impact here. There was a drought from 2019 to 2021 which kept the lake from rising to its normal level. That in turn has greatly reduced the number of fish and freshwater fauna on which the 3,500 villagers rely.

Entering the village via that red, dusty dirt road, we’d been charged $20 USD — and yes, Cambodians much prefer actual U.S. currency, because their own, the riel, has been incredibly unstable for decades.

But even before the drought, folks here had an extremely low standard of living. With the developed world making things even worse for these people with climate change, I was happy to pony up some cash.

Out on the lake, many of the buildings really are floating — no stilts here! — and tied to enormous wooden anchors that keep them in place during storms that sweep in off the lake. Many of these buildings are restaurants, but they weren’t open during the low season.

I probably won’t ever get to see Kampong Phluk during the rainy season, which would be pretty freakin’ amazing.

If anyone has visited during the rainy season and has a picture, let me know and I’ll pop it into my next column.

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Crazy Sobering Thing I learned!

On the way back from Kampong Phluk, we visited a family that makes a living supplying their surrounding neighborhood with freshly made rice noodles. The family consisted of Oun — who is the matriarch of the family — as well as her husband, their son Srouch, his wife, and their brand new baby.

Us with Oun and her daughter-in-law. Oun was a delight, laughing and asking us questions about where we were from.

Srouch and his father work under the blazing sun in the rice paddies raising the rice that eventually become the noodles. Oun has been making the noodles almost her entire life and lately has begun teaching her daughter-in-law how to run her small business.

Here is how two people make 100 pounds of rice noodles by hand in eight hours:

• Soak the rice in water for two hours.

• Grind the rice into paste, using a hand-powered grinder — which is strenuous work. Two hours.

• Use another hand-powered machine to squeeze out the excess rice milk — also strenuous work — then shape the paste into chunks. One hour.

• Force the boiled paste through a wooden block drilled with dozens of narrow holes — more strenuous work. The noodles fall directly into boiling water where they’re cooked for a few minutes. Two hours.

• Place the noodles in a cold-water bath to keep them from sticking together, then portion them out for selling. One hour.

We watched the whole process, and it’s a LOT of work.

And the end product? Delicious!

It doesn’t get fresher than this!

But what really got me about this visit was when seventeen-year-old Srouch told us (with Sophea translating) how much he regretted dropping out of school long before graduating. Only when tourists started visiting their farm did he realize that with more education, including learning English, he could have gotten a better job — something much easier and better-paying than working in a rice paddy all day.

He also said he was determined that his child was absolutely going to get an education — and have a better, less difficult life.

This was a common theme during our time with Sophea, who believes tourism is having a huge, positive impact on Cambodia.

After we’d left Oun and her family, he told us another story of how tourism is changing locals’ attitudes about education.

“I brought a Western family to that floating village,” said Sophea, “and while the tourists were chatting with the locals, one of the villagers was shocked to learn the tourist’s family had one place where they cooked their food, one place where they ate it, and a different area where they slept. These villagers have such small dwellings that they all cook, eat, and sleep in the same spot. Learning how other people live has opened their minds, and made them realize that education will give their children more options than just fishing or working in rice paddies.”

Photo by Camille on Unsplash

The impact of tourism is complicated and not always positive. But currently only 25% of Cambodian children finish high school — and only 15% go on to university — so I was encouraged that, at least in this place in this one country, tourism truly seems to be making things better.

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Crazy Disgusting Thing I Did!

I’ve always been curious about “fish pedicures,” so in Siem Reap, we gave it a shot.

What did I think?

I HATED IT! YUCK! EWW! GROSS!

The photo on the far right is not an exaggeration.

The disgusting sensation of those fish nibbling on my feet sent non-stop shivers up and down my spine — I mean, they were eating me!

I know there are very good reasons not to get a fish pedicure beyond my being grossed out — eating dead skin isn’t what the fish are meant to eat, and they’re kept hungry so they’ll always eagerly nibble away at customers’ feet.

That said — and I don’t mean to minimize the suffering of the fish — Cambodia is an extremely poor country, and tourism has still not recovered from Covid. Every dollar spent here has a big impact, so Brent and I made a point to patronize as many local businesses as possible, including this one.

Even so, next time I’ll just buy an extra mango shake.

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Crazy Awful Thing I Read

An expat friend living in Siem Reap recommended I read Never Fall Down by Patricia McCormick. This is a young adult book that tells the true story of how one young boy survived the rule of the Khmer Rouge, which controlled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979.

Led by Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge was a xenophobic, anti-intellectual regime that declared the common man — mostly uneducated agricultural workers — to be the only “real” Cambodians. Meanwhile, anyone who spoke any English, had had contact with foreigners, was educated, or worked in any kind of white collar job to be enemies of the state.

The Khmer Rouge forced almost everyone out of the cities in order to work in rice paddies. This led to mass starvation throughout the country. Meanwhile, the regime also swiftly began executing anyone of whom they were suspicious. The final death toll from the famines and genocide was up to two million Cambodians — 25% of the total population.

Never Fall Down is a novelization based on extensive interviews McCormick did with Arn Chorn-Pond, who was nine years old when the Khmer Rouge seized his village, separating Arn’s family by sending them to different locations around Cambodia to work in the rice fields.

Arn wound up in a temple complex surrounded by fields being worked by people with little experience raising rice. The complex was later turned into a prison, and a nearby mangrove swamp became one of Cambodia’s infamous killing fields. During almost four years there, Arn saw thousands of his countrymen murdered by the Khmer Rouge, while thousands more died of disease, starvation, or simply being worked to death.

Arn’s story is absolutely brutal, and McCormick chooses short sentences that fly off the page, landing like punches. They also make it seem like Arn was desperate to tell his story, to unburden himself of the horrors he experienced.

It’s been a while since a book made me cry, but this one did.

It’s a quick read, and I highly recommend it.

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All right, that’s it for the first installment of the Travel Lunatic. Feel free to share your thoughts, comments, or suggestions.

And if you know of anyone else who is a travel lunatic, please send them a link to this article or to Brent and Michael Are Going Places.

At the start of the column, I said I’d convince you that maybe I’m not so crazy after all. Did I?

If so, how about we all head off and be travel lunatics together?

Heading off for our next lunatic adventure!

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Michael Jensen is a novelist and editor. For more about Michael, visit him at MichaelJensen.com.