Christmas in Cambodia

Angkor Wat Temple
Siem Reap, Cambodia

The temple lies within a moat that is 200 yards wide. Inside the moat, an outer wall 15 feet high surrounds the temple. The wall is  2.2 miles in length.

The complex was begun by  Suryavarman II (ruled 1113 – c. 1150). Our guide refers to him as King S2. In 1177, about 27 years after the death of S2, Angkor was sacked by the Chams. After that a new king, Jayavarman VII, who established a new capital. Our guide calls him J7.

Our guide says that the sandstone to build the temple was brought in by raft from a quarry 25 miles away. He says that 40,000 elephants, 70,000 rafts and 8,000 engineers were used in the construction.

Within the walls, the temple rises in three different levels. At the center a single funeral jar was found. This is perhaps the most eneregy ever expended to dispose of a corpse.

There are some bullet holes in the outer walls. The Khmer Rouge occupied the temple as a military base for a time. Our guide says that he lived here when he was three. He is a funny guy. He tells lots of jokes and laughs hysterically at them.

The walls are covered witl delicate carvings. The labor involved in carving hundreds of thousands of sqaure feet of sanstone is almost unimaginable.

Angkor Wat is the largest religious structure in the world, but it is only the southernmost of a whole complex of historically important structures.

The temple was abandoned to the jungle for 400 years and rediscovered by a French explorer in 1860. He wandered the jungle for seven years before stumbling upon the complex.

This is one of the library buildings inside the outer walls and outside the temple itself.

I lost ny glasses taking the library picture. Mrs. Phred forced me to leave the tour and retrace my steps to look for them. They were laying in the path only about a half mile from were we started to search.

The Words of Douglas Adams

 Mrs. Phred and I have seen some fine and violent movies over the holidays and we're reading a series of slasher books based on a Miami psycho killer named Dexter.

“There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.
There is another theory which states that this has already happened.”

One movie was Jack Reacher starring the improbably diminutive Tom Cruise. He did a good job for his size.

 “If there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now.”

We also saw Django Unchained by Quentin Tarrantino, who is always an over the top hoot and weird combination of humor and gore.

 “It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.”

 

“All you really need to know for the moment is that the universe is a lot more complicated than you might think, even if you start from a position of thinking it's pretty damn complicated in the first place.”

“Ford!" he said, "there's an infinite number of monkeys outside who want to talk to us about this script for Hamlet they've worked out.”

 “This is rather as if you imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in — an interesting hole I find myself in — fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for.”

“If life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.”

"The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.”

Boiling Eggs at 9,000 Feet

Black Canyon of the Gunnison

 The last time we were here the snow was 10 feet deep and the Park Rangers said we could go to the overlooks if we had snow shoes. We went back to Gunnison and priced snow shoes and decided to wait for some summer day in the far future.

 I try to hard boil some eggs using my usual method for perfect hard boiled eggs and the centers are gooshy. I also ruin some wild rice trying to cook it for 45 minutes in my normal fashion.

 The problem, of course, is that water boils at 190F at 9,000 feet as compared to 212F at sea level. So the eggs and rice cook very differently at altitude. I seem to remember the Armstrong limit which finds that blood, tears, saliva and other bodily fluids boil at about 63,000 feet, and altitude above which unpressurised humans cannot survive more than a minute or two.

 The canyon is one of the steepest and deepest in the world. Parts of the canyon recieve only 33 minutes of sunlight a day.

 The Gunnison river drops 34 feet per mile on average compared with seven feet a mile in the Grand Canyon. The rock is extremely hard so that the fast flowing river gouges out only about an inch every hundred years. Geologists believe that the 2,000 foot deep black canyon has taken 2 million years to develop.

 We've been  crisscrossing  the Rocky Mountains for several days. Our highest altitude in the RV so far is 11,400 feet. This is the limit of the Complete Compensatory Stage of hypoxia, (5,000 - 11,400 ft). Visual sensitivity at night is decreased by 30 percent at 10,000 feet. Performance of new tasks may be impaired due to memory issues.When I was flying c-124s we had to go on oxygen at 10,000 feet.

 A diversion tunnel was completed bringing water to the Montrose Area. 26 men were killed during the 4 year undertaking. The tunnel was finally completed in 1909, stretching a distance of 5.8 miles and costing nearly 3 million dollars. At the time, the Gunnison Tunnel held the honor of being the world's longest irrigation tunnel. On September 23, President William Howard Taft dedicated the tunnel in Montrose.

To get 2,000 feet down to the Gunnison, you follow the East Portal Road, which has slopes up to 16 degrees and a vehicles length limit of 22 feet.

At the beginning of the 20th Century, the Gunnison canyon was thought to be impenetrable.  However, two men navigated the canyon in eleven days on a rubber air mattress to survey the canyon in preparation for building the diversion dam and tunnel.

 Porcupines gnaw chunks out of the ancient Pinion trees. They seldom completely encircle the trees and kill them.

 This Pinion tree is about 800 years old. The Pinion Jay hides the Pinion nuts far and wide and can remember about 80 percent of where these were located. The other 20 percent are well situated to become new trees.

 Mr. and Mrs. Phred at the end of a long hike up and down hills at 9,000 feet...Notice my new "Mothers of Invention...Freak Out!" T-shirt....uber cool...

In case you didn't believe me about the altitude, Mrs. Phred took this picture.

The Gunnison diversion dam/tunnel is accessible via East Portal Road which is on the South Rim of the canyon. Although the tunnel itself is not visible, the diversion dam can be seen from the campground. The tunnel is ten feet high, eight feet wide and 5.8 miles long. Rafting or tubing below the campground is highly not recommended for amateurs.

Meat Cove

Off the Cabot Trail, Nova Scotia

Meat Cove is on the northern tip of the Cape Breton Island/Peninsula. It has a population of about 100 and is the most northern community in Nova Scotia.



This is probably about as far north as we get on this trip which began, as always, on April 1st. It's the turning point, tipping point...the end of the line. Mrs. Phred and I drove yesterday from our campground in Cheticamp, up into the Cape Breton Highlands National Park of Canada and took a short hike. We decided to disconnect the Toyota for the drive here today because of the steep upgrades and downgrades. The RV could handle most of the 18 degree downgrades in 1st gear without hitting the brakes unless there was a hairpin turn.

Meat Cove is accessed by a long dirt road with spectacular views of the rugged coastline. We saw a few whales off the road. The place got its name from fishermen who landed to hunt moose and replenish their larders. An alternative story is that fishermen could smell meat cooking as they rounded the cape.

We have a kayak trip lined up in the morning and whale watching on a Zodiac in the afternoon.



The campground (Hideaway in South Harbor)is very nice, with good Wi-Fi, electric, water and sewer. They sell lobster and oysters in the campground office and have a book exchange. We didn't like the Cheticamp campground so much. It seemed overcrowded and cramped. Many Canadian campgrounds are mostly full of local residents who park their trailers for the summer season (like we do in the winter in Sarasota).


Hideaway is the only campground on the tip of the peninsula that can accommodate large RVs, but they have everything here including tent camping and it's nicely wooded and uncrowded.

I listened to a Canadian Official on the radio today who said that Canada makes more of its GDP from tourism than the next three sources combined (fishing, agriculture and oil). They're putting 1/2 billion into upgrading the ferry service from Nova Scotia to Newfoundland.

John Cabot possibly landed near Meat Cove on June 24, 1497. Cabot's birthplace and name are both controversial, he was most probably born in Italy. In Italy he is known today as Giovanni Caboto, in Spain as Juan Caboto and in England as John Cabot. Only one set of documents has been found bearing his signature. These are Venetian testamentary documents of 1484, on which he signed himself as "Zuan Chabotto", Zuan being a form of John typical to Venice. Apparently he got a commission from the City of Bristol and sailed to either Maine, Nova Scotia or Newfoundland in 1497. I was disappointed to learn that Cabot was not English. Apparently Phred Firecloud is the only great American Navigator and Billy Bligh is the only Englishman (other than Cook) worthy of the Navigator greatness appellation.

We're heading next to North Sydney where Mrs. Phred has lined up five days worth of activities. The ferry routes to Newfoundland (five or fifteen hours) depart from there. We're currently undecided about riding these further northeast.

We've had a few more electrical problems in addition to the broken rear-facing RV video camera. The automatic satellite dish seems to have gone on the fritz and and the taillight signals from the RV to the tow vehicle have stopped working. I have a spare satellite dish that I can aim myself as a workaround, but the problem with the taillights is a blown fuse buried somewhere deep within the bowels of the RV. We'll restrict our night driving until we can find a repair place.

Roy's on Route 66

Needles, California - January 14, 2007

We spend all day cruising north and east on back roads though the Mojave desert. The roads we choose have no gas stations or services.

At 29 Palms Mrs. Phred says turn right. I think straight ahead is the right decision. After five miles, we top a hill and the road suddenly ends and turns right. I brake hard and skid the RV and Toyota to a stop 20 feet into the desert. We both remember the first National Lampoon "Vacation" movie with Clark Griswald and family. We back out and turn right twice find Mrs Phred's road.

We finally hit Amboy. It's in the middle of a huge dry salt lake basin. Amboy is on the old Route 66. It became a ghost town when Interstate 40 was built 40 miles to the north.


There is a 6,000 year old volcano just outside town. The "Amboy Crater" is a National Landmark. A ranger runs a visitor center. Lonely duty.




Perhaps more interesting is the closed Roy's Motel, gas station and cafe. It has a 1950s look and is now owned by a preservationist. He also owns the first MacDonalds opened in San Diego, which he runs as a museum. You could have blown though here in 1957 in a a black Chrysler with tail fins and a big hemi V-8. Nostalgia.



We drive into Needles on the border for the night. London bridge is nearby. We buy green chili marmalade and a bottle of merlot at the camp store.