I was at a public concert in the middle of nowhere. The lot was flooded with teenage Khmers on motorscooters. On the stage, a half-dozen Khmer beauty queens danced in front of AIDS awareness banners while a young singer crooned over a classical music band. Mobs of teen boys and their little brothers followed me wherever I went. I got closer to the front and saw that the tiara-sporting beauties where really a pack of well-done-up lady boys. A balloon bounced off my head. No, it was one of the free condoms the AIDS activists were giving out--blown up and tied [View Full Entry]

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Waking on the hard floor of the temple at 4:30am, I quickly bathed myself with a pan of water at the monks' water basin, threw on a light long-sleeve shirt, a pair of cargo shorts, and some comfortable hiking shoes. By 5:00am I was waiting patiently outside the gates of Wat Damnak. I watched the sky lighten and the sun begin to rise, but my tuk-tuk driver never showed. As fate would have it, I didn't end up seeing the temples of Angkor that day. Instead, I joined my host--a monk named Somnieng--and saw something far more important. Wat Damnak I'd [View Full Entry]

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Visiting Angkor Wat at dawn is something like a religious pilgrimage. Hundreds (if not thousands) of people from all over the world come to the place just after 5:00am each morning, piling in to see the sun rise behind the most incredible temple of the ancient world. I was one of them. My Day I'd left the monastery at 4:30am so I could get into the temples by opening time. I had a rented bicycle and a map. The temples and other ruins here are the remains of the ancient capitol of the Angkor empire. The Khmer people once ruled almost [View Full Entry]

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I've been reading a book lately called, "Off The Rails in Phnom Penh: Into the Dark Heart of Guns, Girls, and Ganja." I picked this one up on the street from a kid selling all sorts of bootlegged, photocopied titles about Cambodia. It's by an Israeli-born American called Amit Gilboa, and it looked to be a lot more fun to read than any of the other offerings (mostly about Pol Pot). Then and Now Although the book is an older one--covering a period exactly ten years before now--I was surprised to see how little of Cambodia's capitol city has changed. The [View Full Entry]

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Holiday in Cambodia About ten years ago, when I was a freshman in high school, I took an English class that required us to do a poetry reading. My reading ended up being the lyrics to a song by the Dead Kennedys called, "Holiday in Cambodia." The lyrics to "Holiday in Cambodia" embody the rage of a sarcastic punk rocker in the late 70s, levelled squarely at the era's up-and-coming California yuppies who had no conception of the real suffering and struggle going on in their own world. The song is a fantasy that sends the sheltered sons of the Western [View Full Entry]

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Counting Days I woke up more than a little stressed out. I'd been awake half the night counting the days left until my return to Thailand. I wasn't quite sure what today's date was. I also didn't know exactly how many days I'd spent in Koh Kong, just that they were too many. I really wasn't sure about my travel plans or timing for the rest of the trip. I was convinced I had to leave for Phnom Penh today. I walked out to the Cool Banana bar to grab some breakfast and I told Craig about my worries. He didn't [View Full Entry]

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If you really want to find freedom and adventure and sexiness and that kind of thing, you can get it in all in one place with the ultimate ticket to cool: a motorcycle. (I guess what we had was a motor scooter, but that still counts, right?) I had the keys to magic in Sihanoukville. I also had some of the lyrics to Seppenwolf's "Born To Be Wild" stuck in my head. It was these ones: "Get your motor runnin' Head out on the highway Lookin' for adventure And whatever comes our way Yeah Darlin' go make it happen Take the [View Full Entry]

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Every time I sit in one place for more than a day, my mind gets turning and I get to ranting. I spent 5 nights and 4 days in Koh Kong, so there were bound to be some rants generated. Since there was no reliable or inexpensive internet in the area, I put most of these down in my journal. Here is a sampling of brief synopses. Martial Arts Movies In America, we've got action movies, sports movies, crime movies, gang movies, fight movies, war movies, historical epics, comedies, etc, etc. In Asia, a martial arts film can be all of [View Full Entry]

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The Cambodian Frontier I came to the Thai/Cambodian border at Hat Lek around 6pm on the 22nd. My visa was due to expire in a few hours, but the border was supposedly open until 8pm, giving me plenty of time. Rain was pouring down like I hadn't seen since the end of the monsoon, and everyone on the Thai side was huddling under shelters as if the drops of precipitation were gonna kill them. But Nic Nakis is from the rain, and sending him into a storm would be just like sending him home. I went across the border solo, which [View Full Entry]

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When I came into Thailand on October 1st, I didn't have a clue about anything. I got misled and jerked-around and lost and ripped-off and all of it. Then I came into Bangkok and a girl named Gemma told me to pick up the "backpacker's bible": a highly-regarded travel guide to Southeast Asia that's thicker than a real Bible. And I still got misled and jerked-around and lost and ripped-off. Mike and I used the guide as we travelled through northern Thailand, and we found it quite useful. It was a crutch actually, saving us from any headaches by telling us [View Full Entry]

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