week 2- Cambodia

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Hi everyone
havnt done a blog in a while so this one should be long.
well I got to the border of thailand and combodia with no problems, getting a cambodian visa was very easy. As soon as a crossed the border into poipet i noticed a drastic change, much more poverty than in thailand, dirtyer, and for some reason it seemed to be hotter.
A man came up to me and offered to give me a ride in his pickup to siem reap, he said it would take 3 and a half hours."dont be just another tourist takeing the bus" ride like the real khmer people, he said. I had to take him up on his offer, so he shoved me onto a tiny motorbike with 2 other grown men and set off for the truck.

We got to the truck and i saw that there was about 25 cambodians in the back and at least 7 in the cab, how they manage to fit that many people into a tiny toyota pickup truck amazes me. so off i weent with over 30 other people down one of southeast asias worst roads, unpaved, bumpy and dusty. after 51/2 hours i had had enough, so i jumped out of the truck in a small village and tried to flag down a passing taxi, But no taxis would stop, and it was getting dark, FAST!! and here i am standing with my fancy backpack, shiney watch and expensive sunglass will i am surrounded by 100 poverty stricken cambodians looking at me like im an alien. I was getting worried to say the least. But finally a taxi stopped and i piled in with 8 other people. I spent the next day just chilling on my guesthouses rooftop terrace, which was a great chill out spot.

The next 2 days i went to angkor wat, It was pretty amazing, but to be honest after the first day i had enough, there is only soo many temples you can see in one day. And Angkor wat is completly overrun by rude japanese and korean tourists, that is the part i hated the most.

Ive meet up with some of the coolest people on the planet, they are just so chill about everything, so nice and i dunno just awesome, we all share the same ideas.
I also went to the landmine muesum which was pretty shocking. there are piles and piles of mines and rockets that have been pulled out of the countryside, all done by one man named aki rai, who once was a child soldier for the khmer rouge, he is now removing mines that he was once forced to lay.

yesterday i took the but down to phnom pehn, which is where i am now. The guesthouse i am staying at is really cool, lots of awesome people,a nd it is on stilys over this lake. The sunsets from the deck are beautiful, the best I have ever seen.

This morning i went to the Killing fields outside phnom pehn, it was pretty disturbing. There are thousands of skulles all stacked up in a pagoda, you can even see where people had there heads smashed in with shovels to save bullets.

I then went to a shooting range and shot of an ak-47(sorry mom) they had all kinds of guns that you could shoot off. m-16s, anti aircraft guns, even a rocket launcher. but they were a bit out of my price range, so i just stuck to the ak-47. It shot of 30 rounds in about 4 seconds, pretty intense.

After the shooting range i went to the tuel soung genocide muesion, nicknamed s-21. It was highschool before 1975, but when the khmer rouge invaded phnom pehn, they turned it into a torture prison. thousands and thousands of innocent cambodians were held there and brutally tortured before being sent to the kiling feilds to be shot or bludgend to death. It was really depressing. There were hundreds of pictures of peope on the wall who had been kept there and died. Women, childern, babies, nobody was spared.

anyway on a lighter note i will probably head to sihannokville in a couple days, I am in need for some serious beach time. Im going to meet up with a south african i met a few days ago.
hope all is well, i miss all of you

John

p.s ive got lots of pics so dont forget to click the link at the bottom of the page

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Photos

orphan
orphan kid not doing a great job on the hair