Thailand and Cambodia: Crimebusters of the sea

---

After Jakarta I flew to Kuala Lumpur airport, at the airport I found a cheap flight to Phnom Penh in Cambodia. After bumming around Malaysia for 2 days I fly to Phnom Penh. In my 5 days there I visited Tuol Seng (Pol Pots execution chambers), The Killings Fields, and read 2 books about Khymer Rouge so it was all quite depressing. The history is so recent and its strange to walk down the street knowing that anyone over 35 has lived through starvation and auto genocide. The most amazing place I went to was a rubbish dump. Its on the outskirts of Phnom Penh in a suburb called Stung Meanchey. Every day hundreds of people spend hours and hours sifting through the rotting waste to look for something of interest. Its not like a scrap heap because its every kind of waste imaginable and people are chuffed just to get a few nails. About half the people there are children and they must constantly be ill because its the most polluted place in the world. I felt bad going there just to watch the poverty but it was too fascinating to miss. Cambodia was very interesting but I would be lying if I said it was fun. The place has an edge, its like in every corner you can't see there is a murder going on, or worse.

After the capital Phnom Penh I took a bus to the universally revered temples of Ankor Wat which are the biggest religious structure in the world. Unfortunately as soon as I got to the temples I developed a full case of the squits accompanied by a madmans fever. For 6 hours I could only think in rhyme and had one feverish night dreaming of nothing but the Khymer Rouge. I went to a doctor who stole my blood and poo and swapped it for some medicine. He told me it was Gastro Enteritis and this wasn't malaria so I was happy. I bought a ticket for 3 days at Angkor but only stayed 1 which like totally kinda sucked. I got better after a couple of days so could have been worse.

Since then Ive been in Bangkok. Not much to say about here except it is lame. I have spent the last 5 days in massage school and now im a pro. The shopping here is cheap and not knowing how much your paying means its like shopping with monopoly money. i have bought a depressingly large amount of crap but i will only feel the full pain of my extravagence when i get home and check my bank account. The people here are sort of nice but way less than Indonesia. There are constant traffic jams, no parks, massive pollution. Like Singapore people live to shop and are willing to give up their entire old way of life to get a shot at money. Its depressing because it seems like once this mentality had penetrated the young there will be no turning back, and once the full consequences of this new lifestyle are felt the old ways will have been lost.

The trip has been qualitatively different from what I expected. Not better, not worse, just different. Organisation and all that stuff has been way easier than I thought but going for 3 months alone can sometimes be tough. Travelling is like life condensed into a few months. You have frustrations, boredom, beauty, making friends and leaving them, moving to different places. You could say that travel is like a teardrop in the eye of infinity. One of the most fruitful parts is finding out exactly what you like and don't like about the world. One thing I know is that if I come back to Asia I will go straight for the jungles of Kalimantan or Papua New Guinnea to find an uncorrupted way of life, though ironically I will be corrupting it in the process. Sadly though in a few years its hard to say if any of it will still be left.

So thats it. Blog over. Holiday over. Scram, beat it, go on get out of here!!!!

---