I am very, very good at figuring out how to get things done. I may not be the person you want setting the course, but if you tell me what you want done I’ll figure out the most efficient, least painful way to do it. Dorothy thinks it’s my superpower, and sometimes refers to me as Order Of Operations Lad. But only after we’ve negotiated my safeword.

To a great extent, I built what passes for my career on this ability, along with writing. Those were the two things I did well enough to warrant a paycheck. I’ve been planning and organizing for so long it seems like part of my nature. And there’s a small part of our lives, managing the logistics of our travel, that still calls for that skill. Planes, trains, automobiles, and Airbnb.

But except for those occasional travel-related bursts, our days serve as an active rebuke to the entire notion of planning ahead. We pretty much wake up and decide what to do each day. We cannot recommend it highly enough.

For the past eight months, as we’ve been Stateside, I have been thrown headfirst back into the world of multivariate critical path management. Which has been almost exactly as much fun as that description makes it sound. It turns out that when I’m not engaged in planning and management as the daily wallpaper of my job and life, I find it kind of unpleasant. Being good at it doesn’t really reduce the sting.

The first six of our Stateside months were spent preparing our new apartment in Chicago. If we’re going to use that as a safe harbor and break from travel, it’s important that it be done when we next come back. It won’t be much of a rest if we return to more move-in projects.

Plumbing, electric, tile work, demolition, repair… Figuring out when tradesmen could execute their piece, how we needed to order their work, planning when we could slide in the pieces we were tackling ourselves, coordinating with the building. I was basically the general contractor on a small construction project.

We had about a month at the end of the process where we could just chill, which was nice. We got to enjoy Chicago a little bit, and we feel really good about the choice. There’s more than enough going on to keep us entertained during our annual summer US sabbatical, and when we’re all done traveling it’s a city well set up for oldsters.

For the last five weeks we’ve been in Temecula with Dorothy’s parents. They’re 92 and 88, and have finally admitted that their massive house is more than they can manage. They’re moving to Tucson to be near Dorothy’s sister, and their house needed to be cleaned and staged for sale. They’re flipping their expensive California property for a smaller, cheaper Tucson property and banking the difference, which they need. They haven’t done a great job managing their finances.

They’ve been in their current home for 24 years, and they’ve accumulated as much stuff as you’d expect, or more, all of which seems to hold some sentimental value for them. Prying them off of every tool, every stick of furniture, every Christmas decoration they’ve ever owned has been a grueling, unrewarding series of arguments. 20 boxes of holiday ornaments, most of which haven’t been put up in years. It was demoralizing.

But all of this was going on while we’re trying to strip the place down so it didn’t look like a Grandmacore stage set and cleaning it so it didn’t look like no one had ever cleaned it. And managing the various vendors and tradesmen who were doing the heavy lifting that we couldn’t. Figuring out what order to execute, when it’s safe to put new curtains up, making sure the outside windows and screens don’t get washed until the landscaping is done…

It’s a lot, made worse by the effort required to help people who don’t want to be helped, and who fought us every step of the way. I think the worst of it is that Dorothy and I pride ourselves on not wasting experience. When bad things happen, we’re dead set on figuring out what possibly useful thing we can extract from the episode. Even the arguably worst thing that has happened to us, the collapse of our successful business when we were in our 20s, served up useful perspectives on, if nothing else, how to avoid getting fucked like that in the future. There’s almost always some positive you can take away from even the worst situation.

But very rarely, every so often, you walk outside your front door and a meteor hits you. It came from nowhere, you didn’t do anything to cause it, and there’s nothing meaningful to take away from the experience. It was just a bad thing, and all you can do is rub some dirt in it and walk it off.

I could relate all of the arguments and stupidity and self-sabotage, but it wouldn’t mean anything. There’s nothing to be learned from it. Except, at best, the limits of filial piety. So we’re rubbing some dirt in it and walking it off, leaving a clean house and taking away a few bruises as souvenirs.

Our job was to prep it for sale and then skedaddle, and we’ve done both. There’s still the nightmare of actually moving that Dorothy’s sister is going to have to manage, but we got the elders as far as we could. Our hands may be tied, but they’re clean.

Which, thankfully, brings us to the first stop of our third year of travel: Cambodia. We arrive slightly beaten up, ready to relax and explore, and delighted that no more complex logistical challenges await us. Now we can just live day to day, as we’ve intended all along.

Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.

Since out first stop is Cambodia, it made more sense to leave from LAX than go back east to leave from Chicago. So pretty much the moment the photographer left we headed to LA. Our dear friend Bob Rossoff lives in LA, and he graciously drove down to Temecula to rescue us.

Photography was on a Monday and our flight was Wednesday evening, so we arranged two nights in the lovely Royal Pagoda Motel in Chinatown.

Which, whatever its kitsch exterior suggests, was actually fine.

Bob docented us through our brief LA stay. We took a walk in Griffith Park, we went to Sherman Oaks, where I grew up, for pastrami and chopped liver sandwiches, and Bob showed us an art installation he’d done beside the LA River. We also walked around Chinatown, which was weirdly silent. Bob explained that many of the businesses had failed to make it past lockdown, but the whole effect was of a Chinese Potemkin Village. Somehow it was charming, in a way I’m sure native Chinese abhor, ridiculous, as the entire Chinatown esthetic was created by two white architects who had never been to China, and disturbing, as the desolation made it feel like a post-apocalyptic hellscape where only the architecture had survived.

Choo Choo! Next Stop Singapore…

But not before fucking up the LAX airport experience. Remember how I started with how great I am at planning and organizing? Apparently that skill needs to be used more often if I expect to still apply it at a high level.

I’ve fucked up calendar timing for a flight before by being sloppy about time zone shifts, so I’m now super careful to doublecheck that time zones are correct for both arrival and departure locations. Not so careful, apparently, about checking the actual times. My calendar entry said that our flight left LAX at 5:00 PM, whereas the actual time was 10:05. Not entirely sure how that cog slipped, but I’ll add Check Your Fucking Tickets to my Paranoid Departure List. Which also now includes Make Sure Your Airline Hasn’t Gone Bankrupt.

But, of course, we didn’t arrive at the airport at 5:00. Bob dropped us off at 2:00, leaving us eight hours to kill at LAX. Which is a lovely airport, but it lacks about seven of the eight hours of entertainment we needed to fill. Especially since, given the lateness of the departure, Singapore Air’s ticket counters didn’t even open until 4:00. So the first two hours were spent in the modestly appointed public area of the airport.

We walked a lot. All the way to Singapore, it seemed.

Which was our transfer point to Cambodia. After about 18 hours in the air we were looking forward to a six hour layover at Singapore. Genuinely looking forward to it, as Changi Airport in Singapore is world renowned as the Disneyland of airports. Maybe looking forward to it a little less, after having to cool our heels at LAX for eight hours, but still. A treat.

And it only modesty disappointed. It turns out that some of the most amazing features are outside the security perimeter in the public parts of the airport. And while we technically had time to leave and reenter, it would also mean clearing immigration for Singapore, which we hadn’t planned for. No clue what the paperwork and bureaucracy requirements were. Better, even with six hours between flights, to not tempt fate.

Which still left plenty to do.

The first thing you notice about Changi is its sheer scale. It’s the third busiest airport in the world by passenger volume, handling almost 70 million passengers a year. Plus us.

The next thing you notice is how very, very green it is. There is an absurd amount of plantings. And water. And art. There’s pretty much an absurd amount of everything.

There’s also a large, impressive two story butterfly garden. Because of course there is.

I know nothing at all about butterflies, other than that they’re pretty, so there’s nothing clever or insightful about this. It’s just pretty pictures of pretty things. Shallow.

However, I did just finish the ninth book in the Veronica Speedwell series by Deanna Raybourn, about a Victorian lepidopterist who solves crimes with her swashbuckling beau. Which books are an order of magnitude better than that description makes them sound. Highly recommended high quality, lo-cal reading.

There’s a fair amount of video-based art, most of which was impressive in both conception and execution. Here’s a multistory installation that I think is part of one of the duty-free stores, even though we watched it for awhile and didn’t catch any branding.

Here’s Dreamscape, an installation that pulls it all together: plantings, water you can walk on, koi, and a digital sky.

And finally, our white whale: The Wonderfall. A four story digital waterfall that was outside the secured area. We never even saw it from a train. We are suffused with regret.

But all things must pass, even Changi airport, so we finally board our flight to Siem Reap. Where for one last time we get to truly enjoy the hostess uniforms for Singapore Air.

This is not a great photo, but as I was positioning myself for another attempt, Dorothy helpfully pointed out that taking multiple pictures of Singapore’s airport security infrastructure wasn’t my best idea.

Khmer, You

For accuracy’s sake, I should point out that that’s a visual pun. They pronounce it k-my. For decency’s sake I should delete it. Obviously. I’ll get right on that.

While we’re correcting pronunciation, we say kam-bo’-dee-ya, but they say kam-bo-djee’-ya. Pretty close to Kampuchea, as they were affectionately known during the Pol Pot years.

This leg is all Southeast Asia: Cambodia, Vietnam, and Indonesia. With the exception of Hanoi, we’re staying away from capital cities on this tour. So no Phnom Penh, or Ho Chi Minh City, or Jakarta. The big capital cities rarely seem to represent the best a country has to offer.

With a fresh One Million riel in hand I went home to pass out, too. Knowing that I’d have to wake up to nasty exchange rate math. Up until this point we’d been mostly lucky on exchange rates. 10:1, 100:1, 20:1… those are all pretty easy to do in your head. But the riel was 4,000:1. One million riel was only $250. You can figure it out, but it takes some effort.

It turns out that almost everything here is denominated in USD. I have no idea why. It’s kind of weird. Anyplace that takes credit cards not only prices in USD but charges in USD. Cash transactions can be priced in riel or dollars, but they’ll take both. I still have to do math, since all of the bills in my pocket are riels, but it’s mighty convenient to have things priced in USD. You do the math once at the end, and not every time you’re trying to figure out what something costs. It is a little disorienting, though, to pay for something in riels and get change mixed between riels and USD, depending on what they have in available cash.

After we’d been here for a few days our hostess offered me one of their scooters, which seemed like an obviously bad idea. The traffic here, a mosh pit of cars, trucks, scooters, bikes, and tuktuks, reminds me of nothing so much as Mumbai, in the sense that it seems to be governed by the laws of physics rather than the rules of the road. Is there space for your vehicle? It’s clearly meant just for you.

The confounding thing is that while it looks random it clearly isn’t, or there would be pileups everywhere. Which means that there are implicit rules governing traffic that everyone has agreed to follow, but for the life of me I can’t decode them. I’ve watched every merge in every tuktuk we’ve been in, searching for the cues used to let you know it’s safe to insinuate yourself into traffic, and nothing. They are communicating, somehow, but I’ll be damned if I can figure out how.

No scooter for me. I would be a danger to myself and others.

Our apartment is charming. We’ve had apartments in Morocco that were more ridiculously over the top, but this one has a generous layout, gracious amounts of storage, and lovely furnishings. We need a few things for the kitchen, but nothing serious. The host is responsive and the onsite staff is superb (the day after getting my scooter ride to the bank I walked literally a quarter block to the corner minimart to get water and ice, and when I turned to come back she was right behind me. She’d followed me to carry my bags back. I suspect she thinks I’m not safe alone). We’ve had a lot of accommodations that were just fine, but this one is actively good.

We’re a little outside the city center this time, so we’re not smack in the hurly-burly. We stayed three months in the Medina in Marrakech, and one takeaway is that we don’t need to be at ground zero for Action. The Medina was a little jangly.

We’re about a 45 minute walk to the heart of Siem Reap, but only about ten minutes by tuktuk, at less than $2. Grab is fast and convenient, and transportation is ubiquitous, so we’re fine with someplace a little quieter.

The weather has been surprising. Yes, it’s in the 90s every day, but there always seems to be a breeze that takes it down a notch, and the evenings have been lovely. It’s a little like the climate in Chetumal, only less clammy. We’ve been warned about the weather here, and it may well get bad, but we’ve been pleasantly surprised so far.

Rub Some Dirt In It And Get Carted Off

We wake up to our first full day ready to conquer Cambodia. We’re flush with cash, the morning is leavened with a cool breeze, and we’re a 25 minute walk to the grocery store. What’s not to love?

We stopped for breakfast on the way, our first local meal. The setting was delightful and the food was delicious. We felt relaxed for the first time in months, and talked about how ready we were to slide back into what has become our preferred rhythm for daily living. I definitely feel most at home now when we’re not at home.

Down the back stairs we go, ready to grab the day by the throat, but the day had other plans for us. About 3-4 steps from the bottom, Dorothy’s foot slid off the side of her sandal, twisting her ankle and tumbling her down the stone stairs to land face first in the dirt. This was like her stumble coming off the train in Tunisia, but obviously, at first glance, much, much worse. I was behind her on the steps and watched the whole thing, helpless to do anything.

We drew a crowd, including our waitress, who said she was calling her boss. Someone else said they were calling for help. We lost about ten minutes until I figured out no one had called for transportation to the hospital yet, so I dialed up Grab to get a car to the nearest hospital.

Meanwhile, we’d managed to get Dorothy turned face up. She was obviously in a lot of pain (I recognize the sound, sadly), but I also knew how terrified she was about her replaced knee. That’s what had caused the stress in Tunisia, worrying that she had damaged the artificial joint and convinced the next step would be medevac back to the US. There’s not a lot of soothing you can do to alleviate a fear like that. We’d just have to get her to the hospital where they could check her knee and address the gash on her shin.

The other thing that happened while all this was going on was that the restaurant’s owner showed up, a lovely woman who took charge, communicating with staff and translating for us.

When we were all done she drove us to a pharmacy to get a cane and then took us back to our Airbnb, where our kind scooter hostess helped manhandle Dorothy up the stairs.

I’d like to report that, like our other hospital experiences on our travels (Mexico and Tunisia), Cambodia’s system was clean, efficient, and cheap. I can vouch for clean and efficient, but I have no idea what it cost, as the restaurant’s owner paid for everything and refused to let me reimburse her. While we were driving around to find a cane she shared her life story, which included the information that her husband was a very successful manager at Dow, and that she only ran her restaurants and hotels to provide jobs and education for her employees. I think she was trying to let us know that paying for our ER visit wasn’t a financial burden.

I’m sure that at least some part of her response was fear-based. An American Karen had fallen and hurt herself at her restaurant, which must be terrifying. We didn’t present in any way as troublesome, reassuring her that the blame was on Dorothy’s sandal and not her stairs. And she seemed genuinely kind and concerned. But there had to be at least a soupçon of let’s-just-keep-this-from-getting-out-of-hand.

It’s hard to overstate the level of kindness and care we received from strangers, from our waitress to her boss to the bystanders. Not exactly how I wanted our first day back in the saddle to go, but affirming nonetheless.

I’d reached out to our host while at the hospital asking if we could be moved closer to the ground floor so Dorothy didn’t have to manage getting up to the fourth. Our scooter hostess had prepared an apartment on the second floor, and when we got back helped move our things down. Thankfully, we hadn’t been there long enough to move in, so we just threw everything that had been strewn about back into suitcases, and she carried most of them down for us. Young and strong.

The new apartment is a tad smaller, but that’s fine. The other one seemed kind of pointlessly large. But we are missing the washing machine that our first apartment sported. There’s a laundry service a scarce half block away that returned beautifully folded laundry same day for $1/kilo. A week’s worth of laundry was $3. Why would we do our own laundry?

The barber is also just around the corner.

So many choices, and no one to help, as Dorothy was fast asleep at home. I was overwhelmed, like Borat with cheese. I soldiered on manfully and was even able to buy fruit for breakfast, but I totally failed at veggies. Other than onions all the vegetables looked alike to me. But not in a racist way.

The Local Mercado

Everywhere has something like the Mexican mercado, sometimes open air, sometimes covered. The place where the locals buy fruits, vegetables, meats, spices, housewares, and lunch. It took us a minute to locate the Old Market, around the corner from the night markets downtown, but it didn’t disappoint. It’s an entire square block, with everything you could want. I think shopping for fresh groceries in the mercados may be our favorite activity when we travel.

I went a couple times on my own before Dorothy was stable enough to manage the narrow aisles and tight quarters. I spent a lot of time texting her photos of produce so I could bring her what she wanted.

Streetscape

There’s always interesting things to see just walking and driving around wherever we happen to be.

The Royal Independence Gardens are known for the colony of bats that live in its trees. Bats being nocturnal and all, we expected to see them sleeping during the day, but they were super active. And screechy.

The Royal Independence Gardens are basically the front yard of the Royal Residence. Which is every bit as ornate as you’d expect.

Follow Up Care

The ER we went to for Dorothy’s extravaganza had been strong on right now but weak on later, so we thought a follow up visit to check the wound would be prudent. Her ankle and knee were both healing nicely, and she was even starting to get some side-to-side action on the knee. But that wound was troublesome, and we needed to know if it was healing OK, and how long we should keep it bandaged and moist before letting it have air exposure.

Our host provided the name of the nearest local doctor/hospital: The Golden Queen. That sounds about right. They specialized in women’s issues, but they also handled the normal range of injuries and such. We were in and out in half an hour, which included the cleaning and dressing of the wound, a detailed and thorough consultation about caring for it while it healed, and a bonus Tetanus shot for good measure.

Oh, and a bill for $22.

But we live in the greatest country in the world. And don’t you ever forget it.

We now have a path forward on all of Dorothy’s various recoveries. It’s probably going to be at least another week before she’s ready for any serious sightseeing, but we’re arranging some car sightseeing for a few days from now.

And we’re here for four weeks. While that’s a short visit for us, we have plenty of time to see what needs to be seen, and no reason to begrudge the healing time. We have ordered our lives to have nothing but time, so when something like this happens we’re not derailed.

Just slowed down.