The Short Version (Cambodia)

I took the bus a week ago from Bangkok to Siem Reap. The border between Thailand and Cambodia was an experience in and of itself just in terms of negotiating various legal checkpoints amidst touts and beggars galore. The road on the Cambodian side was insanely rough - just a bit of red dirt through lime green rice paddies against blue grey sky. As driving goes, sides of the road are irrelevant - as they are all over the country although there seems to be a technical slight favoring of the right - each driver just charts his own course, avoiding obstacles, and utilizing the horn as the most vital component of the car in order to clear a path. Right of way goes to whichever vehicle seems most capable of crushing the one in the way. Potholes come in every shape and size and some on the way to Siem Reap could have swallowed up a smaller car. We did in fact pass a bus of Japanese tourists so recently half-overturned that passengers were still climbing out the windows. I took a picture so quite obviously I'm going straight to hell. Anyway, I made friends in the very cozy minibus - a nice English couple traveling around the world and another English guy on his way to live in Australia - and we spent the next 3 days touring the Temples of Angkor together. Angkor Wat is inexplicably amazing and not even necessarily the most impressive temple. The Cambodian children sell postcards and wooden flutes all over the grounds and their favorite trick is to recite country capitals to guilt you into buying things so they can go to school. We did indeed buy postcards and playing with the kids was actually probably the best part of visiting the temples. The kids are beautiful and I understand now why Angelina took one home. In fact, one woman offered to sell me some water, then a scarf, then t-shirt, and when I declined all of the above, she offered her baby. Then everyone within earshot laughed. I never got a price.
From Siem Reap, I went south and east to Kampot and hired a guide to take me up to Bokor National Park on the back of his piece of crap motorbike from like 1980 with tires as wide as the ones on the pink bike I rode when I was 10. To say the road was bad is the understatement of the 21st century and within the first 10 minutes I was pretty damn sure that if I could even stay on the bike, which was unlikely, my spine was likely shatter into a trillion pieces. The trip up took 2 and a half hours and I escaped with only one disgusting massive burn on my calf from the tailpipe and an extremely sore ass. The top of the mountain was shrouded in fog and clouds. There is an erie abandoned town - a casino, a hotel, and a church, that were all destroyed in the war - and not much else. We visited a monastery and some young monks taught me a bit of Cambodian while a pet monkey ran about. I walked to a waterfall a few kilometers away, but a woman living with the monks insisted that my guide pick me up at the falls on the motorbike because she didn't think it was safe for me to walk back at dusk due the presence of tigers. I don't know about you, but I've never been anywhere before that I had to check over my shoulder to make sure I wasn't being stalked by a TIGER. Later, over dinner by candle light in the monastery kitchen the same woman applied toothpaste to my burn. A nice minty gel with a bit of grit to really get your teeth clean. To sleep we went over the ranger station across the road and in the pitch blackness, my guide, who by the way was super annoying, hit a log and tipped the bike over ripping the skin off my burn with the footpeg. It hurt and I swore a lot and an American biologist appeared from the heavens. WildAid was doing a ranger training about tiger poaching so lucky for me, I got iodine and a bandage instead of more toothpaste. Hopefully I won't die of a weird burn infection in Cambodia.
From Kampot I came up to the capitol of Phenom Penh where I sit typing. Just when I'd sworn off the motorbike for life, I realized it is essentially the sole form of transportation in this city and I got to ride around on one all day today visiting the Killing Fields and the museum about the genocide of the Khmer Rouge. It was tragic and painful and tomorrow I head north en route to Laos. Cambodia has been incredible. Hot and beautiful and colorful and resourceful and persistent and dusty and poor and quick to smile. I tried to post photos, but this computer is from approximately 1921 and it won't work - I'll try again next major city - whenever that is...
Love to all.