Holidays aren't what they used to be.
You could get the impression from the increasing number of early-morning activities. I don't know how many times I have to get up before six o'clock because either the train, the bus, the tuk-tuk or some other urgency demands it.
However, you get used to it, and above all, I knew it, there are so many memories of past experiences of this kind (Mandalay, Santiago de Cuba, Morocco, Pak Beng ... and many others).
Memories of Varanasi
The early morning trip in Varanasi (formerly called Benares) is particularly memorable. Imagine a grey, hardly transparent morning, a light fog in the air. The driver of the bycicle-rickshaw, a wiry man not quite in his best years (which in India probably means between thirty and forty) is pedalling with all his might.
Our still sleep-drunken look - after all it is shortly after five - roams around and recognizes countless shadowy creatures in the fields off the road, some upright, but most of them crouched down, and all of them are following their morning needs, or in other words, they shit. Well, in the absence of suitable sanitary facilities there are probably no other possibilities ...
Later on, on the Ganges, other memorable circumstances that would be worth a chapter by themselves (the smell of the burning corpses for instance, cremated on the banks of the Ganges, gives the memories the necessary sensory aspects).
Speedboat
Today it is the departure of the speedboat that gets me out of bed in the middle of the night and is supposed to take me in no time to Siem Reap, the last stop on my journey and the seat of the world-famous temples of Angkor Wat.
For a change, there is once again a commotion about my ticket (this is also a repeating experience), and this time, too, everything disappears into thin air. The boat looks very sleek, with narrow body, pointed bow, white-painted roof, on which a number of passengers have already made themselves comfortable.
Muffled roaring of the Outboard Engines
At departure time the engine roars up, the boat slowly moves away from the shore, then, with a muffled sound like from the throat of a primeval monster, the noise increases and we move. Light as a feather, so it seems, but faster and faster we glide over the water of the Tonle Sap River, but not until the middle of the river, when it is finally possible to drive without any obstacles, the captain accelerates.
Whoa! I don't have the slightest idea how fast the thing is racing, but the shore rushes by at such a pace that you have the impression of flying. It's exactly 231 kilometers as the crow flies, so with all the meanders of the river it might be a few more. The boat needs about five and a half hours for this distance, which corresponds to an average speed of between 40 and 50 kilometers per hour. Not too bad!
Tonle Sap Lake
Despite all the diversions - after all, we are driving on the Mekong again in the meantime - you get a bit sleepy with time, the shoreline becomes diffuse until your head tilts forward and you catch up on half an hour's sleep ... But just on time when reaching the huge Tonle Sap Lake, the largest freshwater reservoir in Southeast Asia, you wake up again.
Surprisingly, the lake is not blue, but of a dark brown, just like the sky, which is just as little blue but has a brownish-grey tinge, which gives the picture an unreal touch. If there were water and a lake on Mars, it might look something like this ...
So we dive into the brownish soup, every clue on land has disappeared, we are alone, lost in no man's land, forever on the way to the underworld of Hades ...
But wait, that's pathetic nonsense, of course, the captain, a gaunt man in his forties, drills his eye into the seemingly endless expanse, orientates himself on meter-high buoys nailed together from wooden poles, which are visible from afar ... and finally brings us back to civilization, to the dock, where we are expected by an estimated ten thousand tuk-tuks.
Land Ho!
After about five hours the surroundings change. The lake narrows and becomes a river again. At the shore the first boats appear, also huts, swimming on the water. They do not make a stable impression.
"Welcome Landolt"
Then it's definitely time – on the shore we are welcomed by rows of huts, stalls, parasols and numerous vehicles with their accompanying personal. It seems that the destination is not too far away anymore.
One of the guys carries a board with big letters on it: Welcome Landolt!
P.S. Matching Song: Meat Puppets - Lake of Fire
And here the journey continues ...
