A few years back, I heard that the best part about Cambodia is leaving Cambodia. While I don't exactly disagree, he failed to mention the method of departure, but more on this later...

After seeing the kids running out of bungalows, dolphins on solitary rivers, and the sun setting over a dirt red sky, I spent the rest of my time in Cambodia doing the tourist business. Angkor Wat, though it cost $20 to get in, was definatley the coolest 1100 year old gigantic ancient Cambodian temple devoted to the four stages of human evolution and the Hundu god Vishnu that I've ever seen. It's really, really, really big. I left my guest house at 5AM, got there with the stars still out, left my friends behind and explored whole parts of its moonlit Tomb Raider tunnels. All I could tell were that there were four big concentric square cloisters defined by a series of tunnels arranged with shrines at each of the four corners. I couldn't see anything else. Each next square is a good 200 foot climb with almost vertical stairs. After seeing a gorgous sunrise over the thick cambodian jungle, I came back through the tunnels to find the places where I felt like Indiana Jones in the dark were actually covered in bas-releif carvings of everything from hindu monkey gods to buddhas to depictions of wars. Then the tourists came in hordes and made the place look like disneyland...

After a full day, we headed to the city that nobody can pronounce, Phnom Penh. 30 years ago when the Khmer Rouge took over, they evacuated this city of 3 million people, killed all the educated people, and brought everybody else to work in the rice fields. I got to see the killing fields, essentially their concentration camp, which was a field of mass graves with bones and clothes sticking out of the ground. They arranged thousands of skulls, all with bullet holes or bludgeon marks, by age and sex, in a giant glass shrine devoted to them. To truly relive the experience, my driver took me to an illegal shooting range, which was disturbingly close to the mass graves. So out here, it costs $200 to fire a rocket, plus $500 if you want to buy a cow to blow up. I'll have to hold out until I can get the package deal for much cheaper, but instead I got to fire an AK-47, the same gun they used to kill the women and children at the killing fields next door, for $15. And no, I didn't realize this coincidence until much later.

But this brings me to the idea of Freedom that's been on my mind ever since Laos. We're supposed to be living in the land of the free, and we're spending billions of dollars and thousands of lives defending Freedom worldwide. When put up next to Cambodia, however, the US looks definatively more like a police state than a land of "Freedom." Out here it's total anarchy. You can do anything and everything (so far as it doesn't directly harm another), and the only cops out are there to line their own pockets, not to enforce any concept of "public safety." For example, there are almost no traffic lights or signs in Phnom Penh (3-5 million people), and you have Broadway-style intersections anyway. And still, people don't get hurt (except with landmines). You can also blow up a cow with a rocket, throw a grenade in the water for fish, do any kind of drugs anywhere you want, drive as fast and crazy as you can handle (on a motorbike while holding a beer in one hand and a joint in the other), and basically fuck anything you want for less than $10 (and no, i didn't, but I did to the motorbike thing). Back home, it's not only that you can't drink in the street, have to obey every single traffic rule, go to prison for harming only yourself with drugs, can't drink before you're 21, can't enter a public park after dark, can't loiter, can't smoke in public, get your phones tapped,
and get taxed on EVERYTHING, but there is always an abundance of hard-nosed police officers out to enforce it all, each of whom would love to add to their CV by putting you away for as long as possible. It only recently stuck me how rediculous it was that it's illegal to sleep on the street, or in the parks, or on the beach in America. The land of Freedom. I'd rather be completely repressed by a regime that does absolutely nothing.

Sorry, I had to get that off my chest. On with the boring stuff:

Basically, everything in cambodia once I got onto the tourist trail was shit. The people were shit, the sights were shit, the prices were shit (i was genuinely pissed off to have to pay $3 for a room). And everywhere, I mean everywhere, were guys on motorcycles trying desperately to be your driver for the day. There's absolutely no work for these people, and they'd be extatic to take you for a full day tour for $10. Gas, by the way, is still $4 per gallon. That makes the 125cc motorbikes in Thailand look like gas guzzling SUVs, since most of them out there were anywhere from 90cc down to 50cc, and 20 years old to boot.

So instead of taking the cheap bus directly to Saigon, I booked a four day tour around the mekong river delta in South Vietnam for about $40. The brochure really looked great, and I was pretty excited. Of course they never came to pick me up from my guesthouse in the morning, so an hour later I walked with my backpack all the way to the travel agent, who put me on a motorbike, who put me on a minivan, who took me to catch up with the tour bus. We crossed the border with everything alright, spent a day boating through a floating village, and borded another bus to take us to the next stop. These villages, by the way, make most of those huge fish you see in restaurant aquariums back home. They live in houseboats, under which they keep a giant cage to grow up to 100,000 fish in the natural river waters. Twice a year, they sell them off to make 10-15 thousand US dollars, a fuckton of money out here.

Anyway, we get off the bus at the next stop to find... absolutely nothing. No tour company, no guide, no representative, just a bus stop with absolutely no English speakers. There we were, 9 of us, stranded. After almost 2 hours of playing tweed-ball hackey sack with the locals, we all decided to fuck the tour and buy a ticket straight to Saigon, so here we are. The Vientamese, by the way, have no problem pointing their finger directly at you and laughing at how different you are. I personally have no problem with this, since I find the situation equally hilarous and laugh right back at them (sometimes even with them), but it almost drove this one guy to tears. That was funny. I can see why Matt likes this place.

That's it for now. I'm off to see the American war crimes museum that has been recently renamed the "War Remnants Museum." Sorry for the Agent Orange, guys, it was to defend your Freedom.