floating

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greetings from cambodia.

on thursday we made the short journey from don det to the border (where i nearly left my guitar in laos) and then a longish journey to a small town called kratie for the night. the next day we travelled to the town of siem reap. the main attraction here is an area to the north of the town called angkor. it used to be the capital of the old khmer empire centuries ago, it's 400 square miles in area with loads of indiana jones type ancient temples dotted around it. it looks really cool and the several hundred photos i took won't do justice to the place. at the moment troops from thailand are occupying a disputed temple a few hundred miles away on the border between thailand and cambodia, not quite sure how serious this is.

we also visited the floating village just outside the town. the lake is the largest in asia and the water level changes dramatically during the year. the fishing community that lives on the lake has to move with the water level. to do this they live on floating houses. they have a floating basketball court, floating pool hall, and they even have a floating catholic church (some of the vietnamese fishermen are catholic apparently). the community is very poor and our guide suggested that we could buy copy books and pens for schoolchildren and deliver them to the floating school. the boys all went for the wrestling copy books, the girls went for the disney ones.

the next day we visited a landmine museum set up by a former child soldier for the khmer rouge who now spends his time deactivating mines around the country. they estimate that there are still around 10 million land mines scattered around the country. loads of people are still killed or injured every year. tomorrow we are off to phnom penh and the killing fields to depress ourselves even more

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Photos

we fed them bananas
and then one tried to attack me cos I was wearing yellow