Day by day, city by city, country by country, we realise how large and complex the world is. We realise how ridiculous it is to try and traverse more than half of it in a meagre six months. We realise that the car is a very small place to spend that time. We realise that we’ve got a long journey ahead of us.
Never again will I chuckle about how “it’s a small world…†It really isn’t. Read the rest of this entry »
The world made a promise after the enormity of the Holocaust was revealed at the end of WWII. We promised it would not happen again. But it did. We failed.
Visiting Phnom Penh is a charming but also chlling experience. Whilst soaking up the French influenced ambience, it is simply impossible to ignore the all too recent horrors of the Khmer Rouge. The Killing Fields and the S21 Tuol Sleng Torture Museum are compelling places to visit. The Killing Fields Memorial is an eight storey high stupa filled with skulls encased in glass. Mass graves dot the fields, disconcertingly close to ordinary local farms. Likewise, the old high school used as a torture centre by Pol Pot and his ghouls is slap bang in the middle of the suburbs, blocks of flats abutting. The neighours MUST have known what was happening, where as many as 20 000 people were tortured and killed as the Khmer rouge purged the nation of a generation of intellectuals, professionals, free thinkers - anyone they thought may be a threat to their regime.
But Cambodia is a lot more than just a gruesome horror show. Welcoming, friendly and fun, it is also home to zillions of NGOs, organisations trying to help Cambodia get things back in order. We visited two - a refuge for trafficked women run by HAGARÂ and Tonle, a guesthouse in Stueng Treng where local kids are trained in tourism. Both do wonderful work with not enough money and depend on overseas [mainly Swiss] donations.
Now we have crossed the Mekong River in Laos and head for the mountains.
From Singapore, to Malaysia, through Thailand and now to Cambodia. An unseemly rush. We are trying to make up the time lost through ships and ferries not being there when I imagined they would be. Why is everything so complicated? And why are things not so easy in real life as in my imagination?
Indonesia is behind us. So is Singapore and Malaysia and tomorrow Thailand will be a memory. After a five glorious weeks in the Indonesian Archipalego that were nothing short of life-changing we have fallen behind our mythical itinerary. Sadly, we had to sprint through Malaysia’s rainforests and Southern Thailand’s beaches to get to Bangkok (to eat ourselves stupid). Something had to give. Travel is always a frustrating compromise within yourself and on this occasion the stomach won. Bangkok is a mesmerisingly chaotic jumble that demands visitors peek around that next corner, walk into that market place and eat that smoking, juicy satay sitting on banana leaf next to an open-barbecue. The tangle of freeways and monorail-lines that cloud the city give us mere humans walking beneath the sense of constantly being cooped up and surrounded. The sun beats down through the smog making me regret my recent lack of exercise. Â
Tomorrow we are off to Cambodia. Dad’s computer is broken so we have very limited (and expensive!) internet access. Watch this space…