Pan-Asian Gallivanting

I just added more photos of Angkor Wat and its surrounding temples to my smugmug.com account. I would post them here but I’m in a rush to catch a bus which is leaving very soon. Please click on the link to the right to view more of my photos. Once there navigate to the Angkor Wat subcategory…which is located in the Cambodia category…which is within the Travel master category. Enjoy!

(these are not all of the Angkor photos….check smugmug for more)

you meet some interesting characters while on the road…

Enough said….enjoy!

More to come….

I was here for one and a half days. On my full day I hired a moto driver to take me to the attractions around the city. The first stop was a killing cave where Pol Pot’s regime killed thousands of Cambodians and then threw them in the caves like trash. Today the bones of those victims have been collect and a series of temples and Buddhist statues mark the site allowing for the soles of the dead to reach heaven.

After the cave we went to a prasat (ancient Khmer temple). While there I stumbled upon the shooting of a music video. Apparently the artist is very popular with the tweens because there were many there following his every move.

I wanted to see the real side of Cambodia so I decided to stop off in this rural riverside village. There’s not to much to comment about here besides the fact that there was a charming floating village on the riverbank. The pictures say it all….

Cambodia is poor. Cambodia is corrupt. Cambodia is littered with land mines.

Cambodia is friendly. Cambodia is resilient. Cambodia is beautiful!

My first experience of Cambodia was the bustling capital of Phnom Penh. Before I go into detail on the sites that I visited I think it’s important for you to know a little about the genocide that occurred in Cambodia during the 1970s at the hands of Cambodia’s communist leader Pol Pot.

No religion. No education. No freedom of speach. No food. No money. These are just a few of the circumstances that developed during Pol Pot’s regime. During the beginning of his campaign he ordered the evacuation of all cities, moving educated and prosperous members of society into the countryside to work the rice fields. Anyone who wore glasses, spoke another language besides Khmer, or showed any opposition to the government were jailed and most likely murdered. By the end of Pol Pot’s regime 1/4, 1/3 by some estimates, of the Cambodian population was killed; roughly three million people. Yet no one really knows about this genocide…including myself. Maybe it was because the Vietnam War was preoccupying everyone during the time.

One of the sites where Pol Pot’s regime interrogated, tortured, and murdered their prisoners was at Tuol Sleng Prison in Phnom Penh. A former school, the cluster of buildings forming Tuol Sleng Prison house the pictures of those murdered as well as prison cells in their original state. To be honest it was quite erie and moving walking the grounds and into numerous cells knowing that thousands upon thousands of innocent Cambodians were brutally tortured and murdered exactly where I stood. Even though it was quite disturbing, I’m glad that I did see it. This trip is not only about experiences and seeing new places, but it’s also a sort of education. Cambodia….now I know.