we are in cambodia. although price fluctuation has stabilized somewhat in the thirteen months since i was last here, internet is still expensive, the lack of any domestic ISP requiring satellite connection.

the violent road took six hours to cross from the border last January 2001, a miserable painful experience piled with fruits and vegetables in the back of a pick up-truck with no room to sit. more craters, potholes and deep ruts delineating road, the steel-nerved drivers launching off the road into dry rice patties to avoid the truly non-navigable sections. hurtling through western cambodia at a speed far exceeding anything sane, it was deemed necessary at the time due to remaining khmer rouge resorting to banditry along the road. perched on the side of the truck bed, feet pinned under a pack tenuously anchoring the rest of my body. moments like these you cease struggling and accept the real possibility, sometimes even the likelihood of death. in places of the world not impressively professional, it can be difficult to relinquish control and trust in your Driver/Pilot/Captain/Guide/Guard/etc.

although that trip was protracted exercise in suffering, it was also high-ranking adventure. though not paved, the road has since been regraded, leveled, and flattened enough that autos and minibuses can now make the trip in three hours. passing through cambodian villages reset to Year Zero with more medieval rustic authenticity than Disney could ever re-imagineer. although Pol Pot was largely a scapegoat for the actions of numerous men, the site of these amazing villages and smiling faces causes one to pause and consider that perhaps there was something to their entire "agrarian paradise" kick.

In the West we love to baste in the sweet curry of our self-certain rhetoric. People line up fists to the sky and scream "Never Again!" to death of holocaustic proportions, but seem subjectively uncertain of when this "never" is set to begin. [note: we are bored by moral distinctions ourselves - more interested in highlighting the self-deceit that goes collectively ignored. and that means you] Why then did it take big-bad Vietnam to put an end to it? Where was our "War on Terror" or even a less ambiguous "War on Mass-Murder?" But such questions are tired and redundant and rhetorical in of themselves…shit, after all they were just a bunch of gooks.

once part of their colonial Indochina, the French ejected from here as well when Phnom Penh fell to the Khmer Rouge. Although many (most?) of the older educated Khmer from that era were "redeemed" (read: dead), the French have returned in a big way, especially when the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) oversaw the stabilization of the country in the mid-90's after the withdrawal of the Vietnamese in 1989. (the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia and ousted the KR from power in 1979) It is still considered a UN "success story." Cambodia is one of those strange places, as we found Pakistan to be, where there is a surprising array of unexpected products and services. Shiny western petrol stations with small convenience markets selling Pringles, Chips Ahoy, imported meats and French cheese. No Khmer patronize these places, they are designed to service the occupying forces of the UN, various NGO's, and foreign investors. The transition since 1998 to the present from servicing a salaried foreign demographic to the budget international traveler is still in progress, the economy is still Dollarized and goods more expensive than the neighboring three countries of Thailand, Vietnam, and Laos. Many places only take US dollars or Thai baht, reserving the local riel for the purposes of making change. Buying a pack of cigarettes for 100 baht returns one dollar and 500 riel change. The many brothels operating in Siem Reap and Phnom Penh are lifeless, dozens of girls lined up on red-lit chairs wondering what happened to all the soldiers.

Our main objective: the innumerable stone temples of the Angkor kingdom, Cambodia's greatest treasure - just look on the flag. To keep afloat, Hun Sen's government (the "strongman of Cambodia" he's been around forever) has made many long-term concessions for short-term cash flow to keep the government afloat. They have leased the Angkor rights to a Vietnamese company, the lucrative river-ferries to the Malaysians, and are complicit in the illegal clearing and selling of their jungle/forests. Things have been relatively stable however and perhaps the sour bite of long-term consequences will not exact their toll. [Right!] They held their first public elections in almost a decade just two weeks ago, and as only half the number of beatings and assassinations of voters and candidates occurred it was declared a success.

But back to Angkor.

These are the temples of a variably Buddhist/Hindu civilization that dominated the region in it's day and contained over a million people in it's capital city. The only structures they allowed cut from stone were temples to the gods and other religious structures. To get out of the jungle and heat into the huge cool stone temples as a monk must have been a priviliged life. While the wood of the residences, fortresses, and even the King's Palace succumbed to the moist heat and jungle, the stone endured - much of it surprisingly intact. Once an enormous sprawling city, now a sprawling collection of stone temples mostly overrun by jungle and in various stages of restoration. They have experienced/endured several generations of restoration since the French "discovered" Angkor in 1901 and began reconstruction.

Over time, the competing philosophies and techniques of Restoration vs. Conservation have shifted more towards the latter. Is it better to try to recapture the original look or freeze-frame their current natural states of decomposition?

Once to Siem Reap, we planned a three-day itinerary based around a beat up photocopied book purchased from a Cambodian child a year prior.

This is the stuff of pulp adventure fiction. The Temple of Doom comparisons are unavoidable. Lara Croft made her wretched cinematic debut here. Climbing over fallen stone towers into dark bat-infested stone corridors, one is psychologically prepared for and expecting the spike-trap, the head-cleaving sawblade, the shifting stones, or the old shooting darts to be tripped at any moment. We will post some of the photos, but not a single one of them will do it any justice, you cannot capture it in bi-dimensional media. You really should just come here yourself and see it. Take your pitiable one-week of vacation and do something better than creating a new valance for your windows or going to Orlando. Buy a ticket to Bangkok or Saigon, and then fly (definitely go overland if you have a couple days to spare) to Siem Reap. Buy the Lonely Planet guide and let mad adventure ensue. Besides, it will be cheaper than Orlando.

many of our stories begin either by bus, truck, auto, boat, or train. this chapter began at the Hualomphong train terminal in south-western Bangkok

and early. starting out at 04:30 adamn had about an hours sleep until midnight or so when he had begun his first of many rounds of Singha beer. tod had a good two hours mostly due to a long conversation with a euro regarding astro-archaelogy and the lost continents (atlantis shit), a confused bio-clock and seriously annoying bug bites. his feet are quite popular among the parisitic insect population of SEA. randy was best off of all, sleeping like a dead man for a solid six or so.

urban bangkok fell away quickly for a solid six hours of rice paddies on second-class wood benches. a six hour trip to the last village on the line, Aranyaprathet. 48 thai baht (~$1.05) each

once to aranyaprathet we loaded into a bloated oversized tuk-tuk for the 4 kilometre trip to the border frontier. at 50 baht, more then the price of a single train ticket, but nothing to complain about

looking out to the frontier from the Thai side, Randy surveys his first third world land border

after enough of them, all land borders appear the same collection of hustlers, money-changers, casinos, brothels, mules, and child-labor

the girls of cambodia - always seen working hard while the men are usually found in sleeping in shade protected hammocks. i guess better that then going gonzo with their other national pastime of Genocide.

i read in one guidebook or another (okay, it was lonely planet) an adage that if you are ever dissapointed with the lack of professionalism, to remember that they killed all the professionals. a would have expected some more "common sense" however, at least so far as fundamental mechanical things were concerned. our driver had real issues with his trunk not latching, and a group of ~10 cambodian men gathered around to offer various absurd theories to resolve the problem. they all seemed to consist of "slam it harder." My offers to tie it shut with my rope using the obvious tie points were rebuffed until i managed to make one of them think it was -his- idea. later we stopped at a roadside "mechanic" who proceeded to bang on the latch with his wrench. i am admittedly not an overtly mechanically inclined person beyond the basics, so i found it strange to be providing instructions to the alleged mechanic on how to adjust the lower portion of the latch back into a serviceable range. c'est la vie.

randy and adam took the opportunity to soak up the air con and watch the show

our driver was a pretty kool guy though, so i rewarded him with one of my prized Chips Ahoy!&tm;

we stopped in sisophoun about an hour out from Poipet. our driver handed over the air filter to another 'mechanic' who proceeded to blow it out with compressed air. nice. the shy cambodian vendor beckoned for me to join randy for The Pause the Refreshes&tm;.

a series of small explosions around the corner led me to the scene of some chinese new year happenings (how long do they draw it out for?)

complete with dragon. not as de-luxe as the multi-media street event we saw in chinatown in bangkok (with Fire-breathing dragon!) but the red masked character is pretty nightmarish. I'm sure he's auspicious-happy-good-fortune man or something. Soon we were on the move again, and a few hours later arrived at my friend Sokha's "Siem Reap Angkor Guest House," chilling in his "Chill-Out Room" (he's as proud of his chill-out room as the Pakistani hotels are of "combined prayer facility")