Summer 2012 - Part 2 of 2.

To clear my muddled mind, I'm going to try to itemize some of the best and worst parts - mostly best - of my summer sojourn that spanned seven countries, six American states and five Canadian provinces.  
45 hours flown and somewhere around 5000 kilometers driven, and this is some of what I found:

• Best Restaurant Food - American chains Potbelly and Chipotle.  You can't beat the sandwiches at Potbelly or the burritos at Chipotle.  And soul food with some of my boys from Korea.  D.C.'s where the food's at.

• Best view - Has to be from a tent door overlooking sea cliffs with seals and herring weirs below in the surf.  Spent three days on Grand Manan in the Bay of Fundy and I'd go back this second if I could.

• Best home cooked food - Coming home after 8 months away from my family for lobster, scallops, shrimp and mussels.  Can't get much better than that.

• Best drink – Ice cold beer at my friend’s place in Manila, and finding other friend’s are having a baby!

• Best Strange Food – A street vendor in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, offering heaping bowls of fried cricket, snake and frog.  I could only manage the fried frog whole, while a gun-ho German managed to stuff down the crickets.

• Most expensive weekend - Definitely a wedding in D.C.  Tux, hotel, drinks and more -  but totally worth it!

• Best Day of Travel - Istanbul, but then again, it's not really fair - On the weekend, I wake up in Asia, cross the Bosphorous to Europe, and come back to Asia for dinner.

• Best Museum - D.C.'s Air and Space museum; a building full of old airplanes, space ships, 
rockets, astronaut suits, missiles, I mean c'mon, a space station. 

• North Carolina BBQ – In its own category.


• Best Wildlife - Whales in the Bay of Fundy!


And…

• Worst airport - Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport held me captive for ten hours and took all my rubles in exchange for a beets and borscht.

• Worst Luck - When I found my car's locks picked and its shit riffled through.  Both doors slightly ajar, a wet mildew smell pervading the car and most of our clothes thrown on the ground for an unplanned washing by the rain and mud.  Here's the best part: the fools only got a computer speaker, and they forgot the cords!

• Worst (and best?) Rented Room - a hotel room with two double beds and a couch that was jammed full of 7 or 9 people at any given time.  I think it's important to know that said hotel room was frequent by delinquents and working girls, an atmospheric ad on they failed to mention in the ad.

• Worst Feeling – Driving home from Montreal with a stinky and broken into car, only to be struck by food poisoning.  On my birthday no less. 

Manila Traffic

Battambang, Cambodia

           After navigating the licentious lechery of the Aranyaprathet / Poipet border, I found myself in an open air bus station a few kilometres away from the city. Potholed streets and a vacant station with exorbitant prices charged in US dollars greeted me.  There, I unsuccessfully tried to find fellow travellers to split a taxi – a much quicker option – towards Battambang, but received only curious looks.  It seemed everyone was heading towards Siem Reap, the tourist destination central where temples of splendour and wonder abound.  If they weren`t going to Siem Reap, then they were going to Phnom Penh, a gruelling traverse of central Cambodia by bus that lasted 8 hours. 

            When I was asked why I was going to Battambang, I would reply that I was meeting a friend in Phnom Penh the following day – then, why not head straight through on the bus to Phnom Penh?  I didn’t have a good answer, except: why not?

These last few pictures were taken the day after my night in Battambang, during the aforementioned gruelling trip to Phnom Penh.  A shot of the road I took from one of the stops.

Here is a shot of the outside of the cook’s family’s lodging behind a roadside open air restaurant in the middle of nowhere, Cambodia. As you can guess, the area was a bit rough but it was a welcome stop to buy a drink after roasting in the old, dilapidated bus.  The food on offer was sitting in big metal bowls in 30 c + weather; I’ve learned sometimes it’s better to go hungry.

Lastly, it’s the roasting bus I just spoke of.  Every two hours or so we would stop, the vents would be opened, and buckets of water poured on the engine.  My only guess is to stop any overheating in the scorching heat.