Travel advice: Don't go there

I went to NOLA for four days last year and gained five pounds.

 

Food or alcohol weight?

 

Yes.

 

You can eat well in almost any city. Not all have good enough food that I'm going to specially make a trip there.

 

Airport is nice though. Very small, but probably the most comfortable chairs in any airport.

 

Siem Reap, Cambodia.

Lord. Bad times had by all.

Some of it wasn't Siem Reap's fault. My wife and I came directly from a magical trip to Thailand, and anything would've suffered by comparison. The 12-hour, van/SUV/min-van/rickshaw trip from Ko Samet didn't help. Neither did the spots of dried blood on the sheets in the hotel room at the end of that day.

I lived in Asia. I've been to a good chunk of countries in Asia. Love, love, love Asia.

Cambodia, though, is how I think most people who have no desire to visit Asia actually envision Asia. It's a legitimately scary place, in my opinion. I was scared for my safety, more than once, and I'm not easily frightened by travel. The heat was insurmountable. The locals are so desperately poor that you have to be aggressively mean to small children at times if you want to escape a little mob. Essentially, you're a tourist in people's exceedingly difficult lives.

Here's how I would sum it up.

When we first got to town, at the end of that long trip, we were taken by minivan to a dirt field, probably a half-acre or so. The minivan was far removed from the start of our trip - about four vehicles and four drivers removed from the original, shitty tour company we'd finagled back in Thailand. The drive hadn't spoken to us once on the three hour drive from the Thailand/Cambodia border, where we'd been pointed to his vehicle.

He pulls into the dirt field. It's dark, probably 10 p.m. There are several hundred men - some on bikes, it appears - ringing the field.

"Where are we?" my wife asks. "Just get out, don't worry," the driver says.

We try to get out, but the men - all of them, all 500 - crowd the van, and the ones in front stick their heads in. They're all yelling.

Shit.

We'd been told to expect to negotiate aggressively with rickshaw drivers, but nobody we knew had arrived by land. But that, it turns out, is what this was. Five hundred or so guys waiting in a field at 10 p.m. on a Sunday night, hoping to snag some tourists and drive them around Angkor Wat for a few days. We'd also been told to expect to pay about $20 total for three days of this service - and that's about what we negotiated. Nobody wants to get ripped off.

Come to find out, these drivers, if they're lucky, get one group to peddle around for a few days. More likely, they get no group. So our $20 was our guy's income for the week, if not the month. Once we figured this out, we of course tipped him well. And while there's something to be said for the idea that our tourist dollars at least bring in some money - there's no way to leave without the idea that you're a tourist in a place where tourists shouldn't be a thing.

 

I LOVED Cambodia. Better than Thailand, though I say that not having been to the beach part of Thailand. Bangkok -- blah.

Of course, I have a different perspective. I don't see anything unusual about your experience whatsoever. Lived through it several times in different countries.

When I went, it was on the way home from my Peace Corps service. Where else can you go as an unemployed volunteer and still be able to afford it? It's one of the poorest countries in the world. GDP is something like $1,000. Giggity, had you not realized that?

I'd arranged to stay with some other PCV there; I had these vague instructions on how to get there. Took local transport (van full of about 20 people, but par for the course for my Peace Corps experience, sexual harassment included) but got off at the wrong "stop." After much ado and a phone call to the PCV, I wound up taking a motorcycle taxi 30 minutes around 10 p.m.; I'd taken the wrong bus and gotten off at the wrong end of the county, so to speak. It was fabulously fun and terrifying.

Spend about two weeks in the country overall. I remember "Will Bill Hickok," my motorcycle guide, stopping short and jumping off the bike because he saw a poisonous snake in some city. He left me to my own devices. Stayed with the PCV in her town, at her host family's, which was quite an experience. Got the best massage I've ever had in another city, and to this day, the Killing Fields museum remains one of the most moving things I've ever seen.

Angkor Wat is pretty incredible, but there are other temples that are better. I'll probably visit again while I'm still on this part of the world.

 

Is that ever open to civilians? I was born at Maxwell, back when dad "flew a typewriter" at Air University Library.

 

dixiehack,

I am checking into this for you. From what I have learned so far, Maxwell is generally closed to the public. There is a museum there, however, and I believe that the public can make arrangements to visit the museum through the base visitor center. I am also checking for research reasons, because I am very sure they have info that I am looking for that is not in the National Archives.

 

Pretty sure you can get on any military installation by stopping at the visitor's center and getting a pass, which has become drastically harder in recent months, I understand.

 

The three worst cities in America I've been to, in descending order:

3) Rochester, NY. Rust belt fallout zone with a depressing downtown, ugly suburbs, terrible food (Garbage Plates - Rochester Wiki ) and locals convinced that they constitute some sort of urban creative renaissance, as if the ROC were a trendy, forward-thinking NYC neighborhood or something. Nope. I used to work for a company that sent me up there to company HQ a couple times a year—including an annual meeting in *January!!!*—and the last time I was there some Rochester co-workers took me out to PF Chang's, because "I bet you can't get Chinese food like this where you live."

2) Columbia, SC. It smells like athlete's foot, the roads needed repair 20 years ago, the last time I stayed there halfway to the beach on I-20, my hotel turned out to be the place to get hookers and blow and my room door wouldn't shut the whole way...and this wasn't even in the bad part of town. They've cleaned up Williams-Brice quite a bit (it used to sit right in the middle of what had to be a nuclear waste disposal area), but it still looks like a dead cockroach and "Sandstorm" is stupid. It's got a river running through the middle of it that could be used for good but might as well be where the local Confederate Veterans group holds their, uh, friendly "rallies."

1) Jacksonville, FL. Home of Limp Bizkit and the biggest little-man syndrome in the United States, Jacksonville gobbled up unused swampland throughout its home county just so it could call itself the "biggest city in the lower 48." Nevermind the fact that half of the city has a population of 0. The football team is, well...we all know. EverBank Stadium's only purpose is to host the World's Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party, but let's be clear here—Florida fans stay in Gainesville until a few hours before the game, and Georgia fans always end up staying on the barrier islands north of JAX. No one would dare actually willingly hang out in Jacksonville unless forced to at gunpoint. And even then, it'd be up for debate. I'm a Georgia fan and even the years I've been there when we won were miserable.

 

Little-known Jacksonville fact: Fred Durst's mom leads a Weight Watchers group there.