Well, the unlikely has happened. I have found the fastest machine in South East Asia, in its poorest country. Okay, I doubt either of those is true, but this machine is bearable, so I’m taking care of a little bit of photo uploading, a lengthy process but necessary, beholden unto ye:

Photos of beautiful Angkor and its surrounds.

Someone was filming this temple from a balloon.

“Penis river” is perhaps the least appropriate name for this place, and so it shall be named.

A temple in Siem Riep (I’ve gotta be mis-spelling that, but what else is new eh?)

Cliched?

Mass graves at the killing fields.

A Stupa in memory of the people killed by the Khmer Rouge - 20,000 or so, in this cluster of mass graves alone, murdered by the brainwashed children working in prisons like S21 which we visited earlier that day. A very different Christmas experience.

Hundreds and hundreds of skulls, sorted by sex and approximate age.

One last parting shot from Cambodia?

My bag didn’t come off the plane when we landed in Laos. Nope. The baggage carrousel stopped with a clunk and about ten miserable looking people, and one Felix, were left scratching their heads.

We went over to the baggage service desk and started asking questions. One guy turned around and explained to the rest of us that apparently our bags never made it on to the plane in the first place! APPARENTLY, the bags were left off because the plane was full! OHHH, that makes sense then!

Unfortunately, the fault lies with Vietnam Airlines, which meant that the irrate among the group found noone in the airport to express their grievances to.

I was given a number to call “in the morning” when they would know what was happening. So I did, and was told to go to the airport tonight at 5:00 when the bags would arrive on the same flight as yesterday.

We saw a couple who were also missing a bag in the street today and we’ve arrange to meet them and split the cost of getting there and back between us. I doubt we will find any sympathy from Vietnam Airlines.. people in this part of the world dont seem to care about their public image so much, and situations like this are your own problem. Oh well. I dont really mind. So long as my shit DOES make it here from Cambodia tonight. Else there’ll be hell to pay.

Well, we’re on our last day in Cambodia.. in about three and a half hours we fly north to Laos to relax. That’s the plan as far as I’m concerned.

Having seen a bit more of Cambodia, I’m left with mixed impressions and odd feelings about the place.

All my observations of the previous post remain more or less true, though as we moved away from the big city, the wealth disparity grew less and less, and the people seemed a tiny bit more easy going. However, while people tend to have an aggressive, distrustful air about them, in my experience, that appears to be mostly a defensive front.. people, to a greater or lesser degree depending on the individual DO drop that front once you engage them in a bit of broken conversation and ask as to how they’re doing and stuff.

Once again, the human spirit shines through. My overall imression is that Cambodian people are, as a people, traumatised and impoverished.. but they are no more or less friendly than the people of most nations, once you actually connect with them on a personal level.

The countryside is beautiful. It seems mostly flat, from what I’ve seen.. savana-like grassy plains studded with tall, lone palm trees.

The cities are chaotic. Traffic is slightly more hair raising here than in the major cities of Vietnam. There are still lots of bikes, but also a decent percentage of cars, and in particular, 4WDs. If there are speed limits, they dont seem to necessarily be enforced, unlike in Vietnam where people in the cities do seem to adhere to the (I think) 30km limit. I’d say most of the vehicles are unregistered, which conjours up images of the middle east in my mind, and combined with the dusty rubbish strewn roads and lazy stares from youths sitting around out the front of shops really lends to the place a feeling of an untamed “wild west” town. This is what I imagine Columbia feels like.

The temples are amazing. Really breathtaking constructions. Most amazing is that, like the Pyramids USED to be, you can more or less climb around and explore them to your heart’s content, so long as you aren’t entering a restoration work area or whatever. Each of the individual temple sites we saw (on a total of four trips to the Angkor Wat area) had a distinct personality of its own, and if the weather was cooler we probably would have spent even more time exploring them. There was even a place (some 36kms from the main area) known to westerners as “the River of a Thousand Linga” where you hike up into the foothills of a mountain, past a waterfall, and in the creek at the top of the fall there are hundreds of Linga (penis worship!) and images of Vishnu carved into the rocky creek bed. Really amazing, when you think about how old this stuff is, and it’s survived time, errosion and assholes stealing bits of it.

I think I would return to Cambodia, when the time is right. I think the place deserves a longer stay and a greater immersion. I would stay away from PP though and enjoy the slower pace and more easy going nature of the people in Siem Riep and (presumably, though we didnt visit it) Battambang.

We must away now. I’ve got a load of photos to upload when the time is right (ie. when I’m not running to catch a plane) but unfortunately not a lot that captures the nature of the cities and stuff.. gross oversight and I’ll try to do better in Laos.