Tag Archives: cambodia
Eating Local
You may have noticed from my last post on eating my way around South East Asia that I quite enjoyed the food. Most wonderful delicacies and delicious things graced my palate and I ate and drank to my heart’s content, but I couldn’t help but notice a few curious things that began to happen as […]
Monday Moment: Do you think it will rain?
I think I got used to the fact that it might rain more than I got used to the rain itself. I mean, how can one truly say they can be used to a torrential downpour while they’re trying to ferry their luggage across no-man’s land between the Thai and Cambodian border? How can one […]
Security Office 21: Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum
Warning: This is a long post with some fairly graphic reflections. It was hard to see and harder to reflect on, with my further comments on the difficulty of this at the end. All the same, I still wanted to communicate the nature and the history of a place that affected me in such a […]
Monday Moment: Landmines in Cambodia
Of the sixteen on tour of Cambodia, only five of us jammed our booties into the back of a tuk tuk to make our way to the Cambodia Landmine Museum within the Angkor Complex in Siem Reap. Unbeknownst to us, the wonderful American gentleman guiding a tour around the museum was actually hired as a […]
Eat your heart out
I make no excuses: I travel to eat. I love the flavours of Asian cuisine, the unique blending of salty, sweet and sour, and the way that new ingredients all seem to come together in a way that somehow seems cleaner and leaner than anything we might encounter in Europe, even when it’s deep fried. […]
Coming home
When I came back post-summer vacation to Dubai from England, and even from Australia, I felt that this place was cramped; that my apartment was too small and that the city was truly stifling. I came from the homes of family and friends, from the life of sprawling supermarkets and full size highways and returned […]
Awesome and not-awesome things about my travels
So, after seven weeks traversing the landscapes of South East Asia, I am back in the sandpit of Dubai. As you may have noticed, I got about five posts into my Cambodia leg before internet went haywire. There are controls from the government in Vietnam that restrict access to some personal blogs, and generally I […]
Spare change will not save the life of a child
A woman wearing a large sun hat pulled her small speed boat up to the side of the longboat we were on. She stared at me, pointed at her child, and out with monotony, “one dollar.” Her words were echoed with the same monotony by her two children in the boat, a moaning, almost crying […]
The Temples of Angkor
Teachers often make the worst students – we have limited tolerance and short attention spans when people present information. We work hard to constantly share information in creative and innovative ways so that, when it comes to us receiving information, we expect the same. So, if someone talks constantly for hours on end, we tend […]
The concept of beauty
The girl in this photo is apparently nowhere near as beautiful as the women we might see in the North of Cambodia, or in cities like Phnom Penh. She is from a village in the South of Cambodia, in a tiny ecotourism village called Chambok, and the melanin that creates the smooth dark sun protection […]
How to make silk
I guess I lived in ignorant bliss when it came to buying and enjoying silk. I never thought for one second that the worms that spun their cocoons might lose their lives in the process. Indeed, after twenty four days of solid, whole-hearted eating, and a further few weeks of cocoon-spinning, every single silk worm […]
Give a child a camera…
There’s an ecotourism village called Chambok about three hours by bus from Phnom Penh. You can tell I am traveling with an organized Intrepid tour because I don’t know which direction it is from Phnom Penh. It is, all the same, an incredible endeavour to save the environment, support the local community and build a […]
