In the morning Dan and I found a minibus - a nice crowded one - to Kratie. The ordeal took most of the day, so we found a guesthouse (Star II) and enjoyed a dinner of noodle soup and puon tia con (more duck fetus!) by the riverfront before going to sleep.

Kratie (pronounced “crotch-eh”) is a nice little town, but so far the most unexpectedly touristy place outside of Siam Reap. The main attraction is the rare Irawaddy river dolphins that live on a stretch of the Mekong river just outside of Kratie, which is the reason we came. We shopped around and got two moto drivers to take us around to several spots for part of the day for 9500 riel each.

We went to get on a boat and see the dolphins first. Being river dolphins, they aren’t as active and exciting as their ocean-dwelling counterparts, but we did see at least a dozen of them on our hour-long ride. With my camera they were near impossible to photograph as they usually only surface for a second to breathe and then disappear into the murky mekong. From there we rode the motos up to the top of hill near town to see the sunset and some nice views of the Cambodian countryside.

That evening we started investigating the possibility of traveling back to Phnom Penh (and then into Vietnam) by boat on the Mekong. Everyone so far had been telling us that it’s impossible but we weren’t ready to give up so easily. We asked a ton of people about it and got some interesting but not too helpful answers. Our options included building our own simple boat and drifting down the river for about a month to reach Phnom Penh (we actually considered this one for a while), paying someone about $100 to take us on a longtail (it would cost nearly that much in gas alone to do it on one of those things), or buying a small boat for $1000+ and selling it in Phnom Penh. We had to give in to the less exciting reality of another minibus trip for the next day, but agreed to seek out the cheapest route possible for the sake of adventure.

Dan and I went back to Phnom Penh (got a room at the same guesthouse as before - Narin) to pick up our Vietnamese visas the next morning. When we signed up for them, we were told that we had to specify a border crossing and entry date which was not flexible. Upon picking them up, though, we learned that none of that mattered at all. Our visas are good at any Cambodia/Vietnam border for any time within 30 days. So we changed plans and decided to leave for Kratie the next morning. After that, it was dinner by the riverfront and an early bedtime.

The main reason for our visit to Kampot was a day-trip into the park to trek around Bokor so we woke early to join a tour run by our guesthouse. It takes about an hour and a half to drive fully into the park, much of it on a one-lane road through dense jungle; I was with most of the group bouncing around in the bed of a pickup truck for the ride. The first few hours of the trip included visits to the black palace (a former vacation-home of the king) and an old abandoned catholic church (which served as a strategic hideout for the Khmer Rouge while fighting the invading Vietnamese).

We stopped for a simple lunch of vegetable curry near the derelict Bokor Palace building. What used to be a busy, luxurious hotel and casino before the war is now riddled with bullet holes, slowly being reclaimed by the jungle. The paint has rotted away and the bare concrete structure is covered in a bright orange moss; through the fog it looks like some sort of ancient ghost-palace…

We waited out a short downpour before moving onto the cathedral and then to the starting point of the hike through the jungle. The three-hour walk took us by a waterfall and along narrow overgrown trails. The people at the front were constantly removing leeches but I was lucky enough to avoid them. No one spotted any “real” wildlife except for some monstrous spiders and a dog carcass, but the park is still home to wild elephants, leopards and tigers (which are now finally protected from poachers by the government). After losing the trail for about 30 minutes, we emerged from the jungle, found the truck and headed back towards Kampot. 15 minutes into the ride, the truck’s brakes failed so we rolled all to town in low gear. Very slowly.

On the way I talked with our guide (who spoke english with an australian accent - not because he was taught that way but because he “wanted to be australian”) about Cambodian food. He told me about a few dishes I need to try, including some cooked with dog meat. I got excited and kept asking about it, so he said he could take me to a restaurant outside of town that serves a good dog curry. When we finally got back to the guesthouse I found Anja and Dan and we all took a taxi to the place.

The restaurant serves only dog meat. Fried, curried, boiled - however you want it, but thats all they’ve got. And they only have it when theres a dead street dog to cook up - they don’t do the expensive farm-raised stuff. We ordered two bowls of dog curry and some beers and dug in. The meat was really good: tender, not too fatty and with a texture close to beef. It was served on the bone and with some skin intact so eating it took some work but it was well worth it. I was a little weirded-out by the pet dogs they had running around, especially when they started begging for our food. No, I didn’t feed them any you sicko. I did pet them while stirring my curry, though.

Then we headed back to town. Our guide friend took us to a good Khmer desert stall, then we watched the kids from the local arts school perform some traditional Khmer music and dance. After a while we wandered the streets looking for a place to buy Anja a farewell drink (she had to leave in the morning) when we were pulled into a raging Cambodian birthday party and danced to loud horrible music while dozens of people smeared cake all over us. They wouldn’t let us stop drinking or dancing - eventually we had to say we were feeling sick in order to exit gracefully. Even then they insisted we take some food and beer… What a day!

After only a couple hours of sleep we all woke early to see Anja off with a sad farewell. With any luck, the three of us will meet up again in either London or Germany this summer.

Anja, Dan and I left Phnom Penh in the morning for Kampot and arrived in the early afternoon. Kapmot is a small townt that serves most tourists as a jumping off spot for visiting the Bokor national park in the mountains above.

We picked a guesthouse (Mealy Chenda) and moved into a $5 room before walking to town to check out the local market. It was full of unfamiliar and unrecognizable sights and smells - we bought a large durian and cracked it open. Durian is nasty. Inside its hard spiky skin are two sections of gooey, soft, rotten-fish-smelling flesh which taste sort of OK if you can get past the smell. I would have tried to eat enough to get used to the flavor but I had a minor allergic reaction to it. Too bad. After scouring the market for more goodies we headed home with a case of warm crown beer and bellies full of mystery noodles.

Later on for dinner we found a small restaurant and enjoyed a great meal of fried fish and tom yum soup with the help of a Cambodian translator from Tracy, CA.

I woke up feeling much better than the day before and was actually able to eat a proper breakfast, so it was time for some more adventure. Dan and I each grabbed a moto and rode out to the killing fields of Choeng Ek a few km outside of town.

Choeng Ek is the site of several dozen mass-graves, each the resting place of hundreds of “enemies” of the Khmer Rouge. The enemies included teachers, scientists, doctors, students or anyone else unwilling to be “re-educated” and become a part the new agrarian cooperative vision for Cambodia. Today, all that’s left is a dusty trail that goes around a bunch of muddy craters and a memorial pagoda. The pagoda is filled to the top with human skulls - its easy to tell that almost of all of the victims were bludgeoned to death. The team of executioners that handled the killing at Choeng Ek (most of them under the age of 15) received a steady stream of prisoners from S-21 and were under orders to conserve bullets. As time went on, they grew more creative and resourceful - killing small children and babies by swinging them against a tree, beheading some and torturing others to death.

After we took in enough of the fields our moto drivers really wanted to take us to a shooting range so we went to see what it was all about. We were presented with a “menu” of various weapons to choose from, including an AK-47, M-16, a selection of other assault rifles, handguns, hand grenades, shotguns and even a rocket launcher for the crazies. The prices were unexpectedly high - most guns cost about $1 / bullet to shoot - but still I couldn’t pass up the likely once-in-a-lifetime chance to fire an AK-47 so Dan and I split a magazine of 25 bullets. We were escorted into a brick corridor, handed some earmuffs and a loaded rifle, and then told to go for it. I don’t think I hit the target much but I wasn’t really going for accuracy… After we shot we posed with a bunch of the guns and then headed home. It was a weird day.

We left Kampong Cham early in the morning on a well-haggled-for local minibus headed for the capital, Phnom Penh. Much of Cambodia’s bloody recent history took place around Phnom Penh. The most notorious of the Khmer Rouge prisons, S-21, is there and the Choeung Ek killing fields are just a few km outside of town. The country is, of course, still recovering from the genocide that killed more than a million Khmer people.

Asking for directions in Phnom Penh is hilarious. Everyone and their mother has a tuk-tuk or gives moto rides so its generally not in their interest to point someone who insists on walking in the right direction. We were dropped off near the central market and managed to walk to the russian market and find a guesthouse, ignoring the “help” from the army of hungry tuk-tuk drivers. While we were eating dinner at the guesthouse we made friends with some Irish travelers and went out for drink with them. We ended up dancing the night away at a club called Heart of Darkness…

I was feeling pretty sick the next day - a little hung over but something else was keeping my stomach very displeased all day. I went with Anja and Dan to the Tuol Sleng museum (S-21) that afternoon but had to leave soon after - walking through a museum about the slow and painful deaths of thousands of people was more than I could take at the moment.

Instead of going straight through to Phnom Penh from Siam Reap, we decided to stop for two nights in a small town about 100km northeast of the capital called Kampong Cham. As per our usual routine we sought out the absolute cheapest place to stay upon arriving and settled into a grimy love-hotel for 5000 riel (about $1.25 / night). It even featured a balcony with a lovely view and a nearly unlimited supply of slimy green typhoid sludge instead of running water in the bathroom! We had a decent meal at a food-stall of “weird-shit-and-rice” (a Cambodian staple) then got to sleep early.

On the way to the orphanage in the morning we stocked up on gifts for the children: a big rubber ball, bubbles, crayons and paper. When we arrived, though, we found the facilities to be far better than we had been expecting. The place is home to about 60 kids of all ages - they live in groups of 10 with “mothers” who cook meals and look after them. They all go to school in town and at the orphanage they can study music and painting. We kicked the ball around with the boys for a while and then bought some of the kids’ paintings, which were surprisingly good.

Followed by: more wandering about town, another fine meal of weird-shit-and-rice and a martini on the veranda. We visited the famous “man / woman” temples up on the hill overlooking the town to see the sunset as well.

Abbreviated post: Aki Ra’s landmine museum, a massage by a blind masseuse at Seeing Hands Massage, a free movie at Beatocello’s children’s hospital, and then I ate a fried cockroach. I posted a bunch of photos, finally. More later!

I said goodbye to Jeff and Sarah, then departed Bangkok yesterday morning and am now in Siam Reap, Cambodia. Just before I left, I dumped about 12 kilos of my extra crap (laptop, suits, souvenirs, cement blocks) into a box at the post office and let it be swept off into the void of the Thai postal system. It is scheduled to arrive in LA in no less than 3 months. Pray for me. I will upload some of my photos soon, perhaps from Phnom Penh when I get there.

From Bangkok I took a 4-hour minibus ride to Aranyapathet and walked across the border to Poipet, getting a 30-day Cambodian visa on the way. The contrast between Cambodia and Thailand is overwhelming - It feels a lot like crossing into Mexico from the United States, only Cambodia is dismally poor. Even though the country has been experiencing a steady rise in tourism for the past decade it still sees only a small piece of the millions that flock to South East Asia each year. Siam Reap is Cambodia’s number one tourist city because it is so close to Angkor, and its the first stop on most peoples’ journey into the country from Thailand. I made friends with another traveler (Anja from Germany) on my way across the border, and we managed to get ourselves bus tickets (on the “dusty bus”) to Siam Reap for $5 after some hardcore bargaining.

The road from Poipet to Siam Reap is notoriously bad. Hilariously bad. I’ve never seen a worse road. The Cambodians love to use the (very cute) expression “dancing road” to describe the janky dirt roads, but one Cambodian guy on the bus kept calling it a “fuck-ing road”. We were told that the bus would arrive at 8pm, but we weren’t at all surprised when we pulled into town around midnight. The ride itself wasn’t so bad at all, mostly because I shared it with a bunch of other really good people. At times it sounded like the bus was going to shatter into a million pieces and the poor souls in the back hit the ceiling a couple times but we all had a good laugh about it and the 8-hour ride flew by. Anja and I joined up with another new friend on the bus, Dan from England, and found a decently cheap hostel for the night ($3 each).

We all woke at 6:30am and set out together to visit the major temples around Angkor, including Angkor Wat. While we were eating breakfast we found a nice tuk-tuk driver who agreed to take us around to a bunch of temples all day for 8000 riel each (US$2). Nearly every business in and surrounding the city of Siam Reap takes US dollars, Thai baht and Cambodian riel - you can even pay for one bill with a mix of all 3 currencies (it gets very confusing).

We went to Angkor Wat first, the largest religious building in the world and Cambodia’s national symbol. The massive temple is dedicated to the god Vishnu and was built during the height of the Khmer empire in the 12th century. It is quite a sight to see, although walking through it in the blazing hot sun sucks the energy from you. Afterwards we visited Bayon, Ta Keo, Ta Prohm and two other temples whose names I have already forgotten… We played with some little Cambodian kids in a temple (one of them gave me a painfully cute drawing - for good luck!)… I will go into more detail when the photos are posted. In short, it was absolutely amazing.

After our “tour” we were treated by our tuk-tuk driver to some free drinks and a cheap dinner (about $0.50) and Dan and I sampled our first genuinely weird-meat in southeast asia: the Cambodian delicacy of puon tia con.

The same dish is also popular in the Philippines, where it is called Balut. “Puon tia con” translates directly to “Egg duck child” - it is the partially developed fetus of a duck enjoyed right out of the freshly boiled shell. In Cambodia it is served with a plate of fresh herbs and a tasty salty/spicy/sour garlic sauce. I was told that my delicious unborn duck baby was 18 days old today, thus perfectly ripe. Remembering the proper technique for eating balut from weirdmeat.com, I cracked open the piping hot shell with my spoon and sipped the juices first. The taste was excellent, which I focused on deeply trying to avoid looking too hard at the wet feathers on the underdeveloped duck wing poking out of the egg. Then I dipped the tip of my spoon into the spicy garlic sauce and dug into the shell for a proper bite and… it wasn’t pretty but to my surprise it was really good! I shortly finished the whole thing - no bones, no beak, no unpleasant texture at all. Just pure, smooth duck fetus through and through. Feeling good about this first weird-meat experience today, Dan and I will each eat a giant fried grasshopper tomorrow.

Stay Tuned.

Last night we decided to go out for a sing song. We hailed a cab, hopped in and asked the driver to take us to a karaoke joint. Knowing full-well that most “karaoke” places in Bangkok are go-go bars with “karaoke rooms” upstairs (if-you-know-what-i-mean), we tried to explain to the driver that we just wanted to sing. Of course we ended up at one such bar, but we succeeded in simply renting one of the rooms for an hour and a half to just sing and have fun. They had only a handful of terrible songs in english so we just made up our own most of the time.

In other news, Sarah and Jeff have decided against traveling through Cambodia with me and will instead go north towards Laos. I’ll be leaving for Cambodia day after tomorrow, solo again. We may end up reconnecting somewhere along the circuit as they could be visiting some of the same places as I but moving in the opposite direction.