Cambodia,

I keep thinking that the only reason I'm here is because of that damn Dead Kennedys song, which has been in my head ever since I crossed the border. This place is kinda like Laos, but with a slightly more desperate tinge to it in the tourist centers. Once off the main drag of any city, the young people turn rediculously friendly, almost to a fault.

The kids here are particularly nuts. We rented motorbikes and headed 15k to go see some freshwater dolphins, which are particular only to the Mekong. The dolphins were pretty cool, but nothing compared to the drive up. Every few seconds for all of 40 minutes, children were literally running out of their tiny houses, both arms flailing in the air, shouting "HELLO!!!!" or "GOOODBYYEEEE!!," neither of which they knew the meaning of. I mean, literally for 40 minutes straight we were accosted by kids, sometimes in packs of 5 to 10, running out to see the foreigners riding on their motorbikes. Luckily my friend ("opium girl") was riding on the back of the bike so she was the designated waver-backer, leaving me to concentrate on holding onto the handlebars and shouting things in English that I knew they didn't understand. We saw the dolphins from a boat, then got back on the bikes and headed another 20k further upriver. The kids from this point on were even worse. If they don't get many foreigners on the road to the dolphins, they hardly knew what to make of us further up.

So we see a big temple and stop to take some pictures. Within 2 minutes, all the kids from the local school come out (maybe 30 total) and we play some haphazard volleyball and try playing this game with a bamboo thatch ball that's basically like kicking around an oversize hackey sack. The pictures will be sent soon.

But there's definately the feeling that some real shit went down 25 years ago. Everybody over 40 has the look of genocide to them, and from just hearing three days worth of stories so far, it sounds like each of them was either in front of, or behind a gun. The Khmer Rouge imposed three years of absolute terror on the country (beginning with ordering all the cities totally evacuated), but they somehow managed to stick around the borders of the country until about 10 years ago. The kids I saw under 15 have this look of absolute joy to them, as if their parents imparted all their optimism to this future generation, while the parents themselves look old and broken.

Now I'm in Siam Reap, the town right next to Ankor Wat. I get to wake up at 5AM to go see the sunrise from the top of supposedly one of the most spectacular temple ruins in the world. The temples here, though I haven't seen them yet, are supposed to be the only reason most people go to Cambodia. That's why they charge 20 fucking US dollars to get in per day (to no benefit of the temples, either). Dicks.

Oh yeah, I got to spend three days in another (completely different) absolute paradise in Laos before I left. I had no idea that a country I had known only as "somewhere in asia" five months earlier could be so peaceful and beautiful. I guess I'm just American. Anyway, it's this place near the Cambodian border where the Mekong river fans out that's called the Four Thousand Islands and no, I didn't count them. Basically, you can only get there by boat, everything is candle power after 11PM, and there's absolutely nothing to do but swim, bike, read, smoke pot, canoe, and walk around all day with your jaw dropped wide open at how cool everything looks. The island we were staying at was big enough a tiny village of locals, but for every Laotian you saw, there must have been 5 chickens, 3 pigs, and maybe another ten water buffalos walking through the rice fields. Oh yeah, and I saw one monkey on the island, chained to a tree, with his tiny little pecker fully erect, looking at me with a really sick little monkey smile. Reiss, I really wish I had a picture of it for you.



Oh yeah, and I haven't seen a single squirrel here... maybe that's the curse of the landmines.


-andrew