My Attempt to Understand Cambodia

We fairly spontaneously decided to come to Cambodia. I didn't know too much about Cambodia, I really just wanted to see Angkor Wat.

I still don't know that much about Cambodia as it's history is quite complex. But it's fascinating as well as horrific. We bought a pirate copy of The Killing Fields, but it was a dud so we had to use Wikipedia and You Tube for our research.

We watched an interesting (although Nic fell asleep) film about S21 (a bit like the Khmer Rouge Gestapo). It was in Cambodian and it was quite hard to follow, and some bits were very disturbing.

We've also seen a short You Tube documentary (although Nic fell asleep through this too) about how Angkor Wat was built. That was very interesting - it's sort of floating on the flood plane.

I'm very fond of the bit of Cambodia I've seen. The people really seem very happy and laid back. They seem to have made their peace with the flood of farangi's in Seap Reap and are using the tourists well.

There are a lot of amputees here. It is a constant reminder of Cambodia's past and the fact that there are still shed loads of land mines out there.

You get a lot of amputees and little kids asking you to buy over priced postcards or books on the Khmer Rouge. I'm not very good at this (this is one of the reasons we didn't go to India). I can't handle all the cute kids and lovely old amputees who just want a dollar and we have lots of dollars. It makes me sad and guilty and outraged that no one in power is doing much to help these people.

Bikes - good for our economy

Having said that, we've realised recently that we don't have lots of dollars any more. We seem to have overspent a tad and now need to make some cut backs. So far this has meant that we've skipped breakfast once, we've deliberately not got a helicopter tour around Angkor Wat, and we rented bicycles to go around the temples instead of taking a tuk tuk.

In other news, Nic has started wearing a headband. I think it looks very nice, here it is...