March 18
Moving day again. Today, we are off to Chiang Mai in Northern Thailand after a connection in Bangkok. On the way to the airport, Sarnak shows us where the government is pulling up all the brown grass on the median strips and laying new sod for the upcoming Cambodian New Years celebration on Apr 13. We are a little confused as this is nowhere near either the solar or lunar New Year. It turns out that the Cambodians (and Thais) start their New Year when the sun enters the constellation of Aries to coincide with the end of the rice harvest and before the rainy season starts. So, this is a solar year, but they count from Buddha's death so the new year will be 2568. It is also the year of the snake, just as it is in the Chinese calendar.
The old Siem Riep airport was very close to the city center, but it led to air pollution and degradation of Angkor Wat (which is why most people come here) so they built a new airport about 50 km (30 miles) outside the city. The airport opened last year and was built by a Chinese company, likely as part of China's Belt & Road initiative. It is the largest airport in Cambodia and when fully developed, will be able to accommodate as many as 7 million passengers per year. The Chinese company promised development of a new city around the airport, but so far, we see a lot of rice paddies, and very few new buildings. Those new buildings we see don't appear to be occupied.
Inside the airport, we see this:
Nice! Getting through customs and security is much faster than in Vietnam. Unlike all of our other flights on this trip, we've got a propeller plane with a capacity of about 75 instead of a jet. Once on board, the stewardess asks us whether we had ordered a bland meal (doesn't sound very appetizing). We guess that this is something the travel agents did to protect us from spicy food, but I wish we had said no. The bland meal turned out to be a grape juice box, a banana, a box of soy milk and some sort of coconut cake. Everyone else had something that looked like a flat egg roll. Bummer!
We end up with a long wait in the Bangkok airport due to a combination of having a long layover and an additional 1 hr delay of our flight to Chiang Mai. So if we are going to have dinner, this is where it is going to be. The food choices are decidedly Western - MacDonalds, Burger King, Subway, Dean & DeLuca, Gloria Jean's Coffee and KFC. We decided to go for...Asian Corner. I have Pad Thai and Beth has a stir fried spicy mushroom dish with enough heat to make her happy.
When we board our connecting flight, we find another bland meal waiting for us. This one is a chicken, pumpkin & carrot congee (rice porridge) with about the consistency of wallpaper paste and just about as tasty. But on this flight, I somehow got the bland meal, but Beth did not. She had a shrimp and pasta dish (which also was not spicy at all)!
We had already cleared customs in Bangkok so getting out of the airport was pretty easy except that they had all of the international baggage stored in a separate arrival hall. Outside, we met Mr. Moon, who will be our guide for the next 4 days. Unlike Siem Riep, Chiang Mai is quite close to the city. Our hotel is in the old section of town inside a square moat system that is about 1.6 km on a side. The hotel looks like it was designed to look old with a huge tamarind tree in the middle of the courtyard:
When we get into our room, we find flowers on the bed and several scented candles burning. What is going on? Then we find this message from the "Chief of the Village":
LOL! They only missed it by almost 42 years! Our only thought is that the tour company booked a package that they would normally sell to honeymooners?? Anyway, it made us laugh!
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