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Published: September 11th 2006
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So After a fun and luxurious time in Thailand, Jordina and I head for the well inticipated Cambodia. We both have been wanting to come here for a long time, Jordan ,because Angelina Jolie comes here, and myself, because I heard that the people here who cool, and the jungle is vast! And We would not be let down at all.
At the Cambodian/Thai border, we get hastled by all the children trying to pickpocket the white peoiple, and headed for the currency exchange. We had taken an 18 hours boat/bus trip to get this far , so we were exhausted. We got a horrible exchange there, and didn't realize it until later. We were probally giped 60,000 reil each, which is a lot of cash here, and then we found out that the country was based on the American dollar, so we lost even more money trying to exchange the reil into Dollars.
We headed down this bumpy road....not the like dirt roads in Canada though, these roads had pits, cavern mudslided and gigantic bolders in the middle of the road. We drove through heaps of little jungle villages with houses made of straw and palm leave that
were on stilts, very beautiful, but it makes you see how poor the people are. Kids walk around with no shoes and no pants, and they are as dirty as fuck. Every begs for money. But they don't presure you for anything, and their smiles are sooo peacful and full of joy...even if all their teeth are rotten and brown.
We arrived in Siem Reep, which is where the Teples of Angkor are. Those are the temples in the tomb raider movie I am told, but I've only seen pictures of the teples in National Geographic of in friends pictures. The town was more modern than all that we had seen, but it still had dirt roads and shoeless people.....although, I love walking around without shoes, so maybe the Khmer people are like that too??
Unfortunatly, after the money exchange experience, iI couldn't afford the 20$ fee to go into the jungle grounds, I could only go into the first temple area called Angkor Wat, Jordan went in without me...... But, when I went into the entrace area, I bumped into a friend from Edinburgh named Izan, we chatted for a while, I heard throught the traveling grapevine
that he found work as a fire dancer somewhere in Cambodia.
So we spent a few days in Siem Reep, getting to know some of the local took-took drivers, and seeing the other temples in town. I spent the rest of my money on 5 days in Siem Reep, leaving me with 1.50$ after buying a bus ticket to the Capital, Phnom Phen.
Due to the lack of Cash, we were looking for volunteer work in the city. Right away we found a few posters asking for workers, one of which was a real job posting willing to pay 2 willing workers 10 bucks a day....which is amazing money in Cambodia, most people make 30 bucks a month. So we got a job working for 2 Isrealie guys in a photo printing shop. The shop donated a bunch of money to the local kid program called "Kids of the Lake Creations" and did a lot of work with the local orphanedge called the JEC. So Jordan and I worked in the shop for 6 hours, separatly, and n our free time, we worked with the kids, teaching english, disipline, and how to have fun. A big part of
it was to keep teh kids off the streets for most of the day.
The best part of it all was to see the poor, mal-nutritioned kids have so much fun, and be sooooo happy, just because a white man wants to chat with them. And they wanted to chat with all of us. I had a big conversation with a bunch of little boys about snow. They have never seen it, some have never heard of it, and I grew up surounded by it. Most have heard of snowboarding through magazines they find in the bin, but it was really hard to explain snow, but the kids continued to question me about it, and then about cananda, and hten about my familly, 8 year old boys were more curious about me than I was about them, and I traveled around hte world to see their culture................ it was just an un real experience for me.
We worked for a few weeks, and hten decided to see more of the country. We had met up with a cool Safra named Barry who decided to adventure with us. There were also a spanish couple who we had met at
Chakra Visons
This is where we worked in the shop our guest house(same same but different) who we met up with in Kratie. That was a cool city. Phnom Phen was allways filled with Motos and tooktooks, and when we got to Kratie, the streets were empty, no one harrased us to stay with them, and people were walking. Kratie was the first city taken by the Khmer Rouge, so it was quite decrepid, and I could tell a lot of suffering had gone on there. We didn' spend any time in the city, we went out to thelittle villages around the town. We seen floating villages, we played with glasshoppers and kids, rode buffaos down the dirt roads, said preyrs in a Pagoda....it was amazing. At one point, a man had taking me to a village with uot roads, it was just walking paths and farm animals...I think that some of those people had never seen blonde hair before, they all came up and touched my blonde dreadlocks........... i ended up getting lice, maybe this is where I got it .........
After that we headed to Sen Monorom in hte Mondorakiri provence.It was a mission and a half to get there. The roads were nothing but mud. our
Pagoda
Just one of the many temples all over SE Asia pick up got stuck half way there, and we tryed to push it up the hill for hours before the CAmbodian millitary picked up up and drove us 5 more hours into the town. It was a 15 hour journet.... and 150 km..... Once there we hooked up with a guide who took us up to a hill tribe. These people didn't speak Khmer, they had their own lingo. We went on a 3 day hike through the jungle to water falls and what not. We seen monkeys, HUGE beetles, and butterflies beyond my imagination.
Then we went to Sianonookvile, which is on the southern coast. It rained MOnsoon style for 3 days, and on the day we left it was a georgous sunny day. Our first night there, we stayed at a place that had "free Accomidation" but after smoking a huge opium joint, and going into the bar they had, we realized it was a whore House, and the free accomidation was for the people who brought the dancing whore upstairs...... ti was fucking gross, and if you know me, I am a dirty man, and it was too much for me..... ot maybe it was just
Same Same But Different
This was the little boat to eat dinner on at hte back of out guest house the opium?? The boat ride back to Thailand was four hours for heavey heaving...... Yes, I mean Puking, the whole boat was barfing as a local man was handing out plastic bags to do it into..... definatly the worst ride I have ever been on......
After getting back to Thailand, I spent a day at a place called Ayuttya, which was the old capital of Siam before Bangkok. It was beautiful, but after cambodia, it was too busy and mainstream for me...
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