Ever since I killed that dog in March, I’ve been terrified of motorbikes.

I miss tuk-tuks, I really do.

A fixture of my life for almost six months, I’m surprised it took me so long to notice that there aren’t any in Vietnam.

You can pay through the balls for a taxi, if you can find one and if the driver decides your journey is suitably lengthy to justify his time, or you can take your chances on the back of one of the dozens of motos that loiter like rusty dollar-hookers on every street corner.

In Hoi An, I quickly discovered, if you get on the back of a moto, you become the driver’s bitch. You unwittingly sign a contract to be his family’s primary source of income for the duration of your stay.

Ask to go to the beach and you’ll get taken to the beach restaurant his sister runs, or the one that gives him the best kickback or something.

Yesterday, I had this crazy bitch chasing me down the beach as soon as I arrived.

“Hey, you eat here!”

“No thanks, I’m just here for a walk.”

“No, you come back here and eat here!”

Hours later, I tried to get a moto back to town from a different cafe, where there were three or four moto guys hanging around, but she had spotted me from a few hundred metres away and came rushing into the shack, demanding that she phone the same guy who had brought me there to take me back.

None of the other moto guys wanted to argue with her – some kind of honour-among-twats system I imagine – so I had to wait for ten minutes, until I must have started looking impatient.

The crazy bitch then insisted I get on the back of her moto, which I certainly did not want to do. But since nobody else would take my fare, I ended up with her.

Unlike the other Asian countries I’ve been to, wearing a helmet is the law here. The moto guys and gals all carry two, one for their passenger.

But the helmets are all designed for tiny Asian heads, not bulbous mutant Caucasian bonces like mine. I’ve never found a hat that fit me, even in the West, so it came as no surprise to discover that Vietnamese motorcycle helmets simply rest on top of my massive heed like some kind of oversized cyberpunk Papal skullcap.

I look like Tron.

On the odd occasion I actually manage to get the chin-strap fastened, around my throat, it cuts off my ability to speak or draw breath through my mouth and feels like it has declared its intention to gradually decapitate me through attrition over the space of several months.

The helmets are no protection whatsoever, in other words, and I usually end up clinging on to the speeding bike with the strap hanging impotently at my shoulder.

I’m a fearful passenger at the best of times. I don’t even like riding in cars, especially if there’s a woman driving (I can’t rationalise or justify this sexist instinct, and I’m aware statistics don’t support it, it simply is what it is).

But with motos, I was even, at first, a fearful pedestrian.

In cities like Phnom Penh or Ho Chi Minh City, the traffic is relentless, six to ten lanes of 95% motorbikes. There are no WALK lights, no little green men to guide you across.

Jaywalking is the norm. You simply step off the curb and keep walking in a straight line until you reach the other side. The onus is on the motorbike riders not to hit you.

At first, until I became accustomed to this method, I’d simply find a little old Vietnamese or Cambodian lady who was trying to cross, and cross behind her.

Anyway.

I expect you want to hear about the dog now, right?

Okay.

CUT TO: Hampi, India, in March, night.

Hampi and its environs are pretty underdeveloped.

The only way to cross the narrow river, which runs through town, unless you fancy wading, is in a single tiny motorboat, operated by a fascist ten-year-old boy.

But he stops working at about 6pm.

When I was leaving Hampi for Bangalore, I found myself on the wrong side of the river at 9pm.

A tuk-tuk to Hospet, the nearest town, where my bus was departing, is supposed to cost about 80 rupees and take about 10 minutes.

From my side of the river, I discovered, the trip necessitated a detour to the nearest bridge, which was hell and gone from here, and it was going to cost me 600 rupees, or about $15, and take about an hour.

I didn’t have 600 rupees (ATM nearby? Hah!) and I had less than an hour to get to the bus stop.

The tuk-tuk guys, insensitive to my plight, could not be bargained with, but a guy on a motorbike offered to take me there for 200 rupees.

Five minutes later I found myself sitting behind him, with my massive backpack on my lap, laptop bag slung over my shoulders, holding on as if my life depended on it (because it did) as the moto guy hauled ass along narrow, unlit, potholed country lanes, bitching at length and volume about the “fucking road taxes” he had to pay for these “shit roads”.

No helmets for either of us. Grit and kamikaze mosquitoes peppered my squinting eyes, sending streaks of grimy tears down my face. How he navigated, I have no idea.

Every so often we’d pass through a small village, each of which was punctuated by two or three speed-bumps in the road.

Somebody, my guess is the local moto guys, had carved narrow channels in each of these these speed-bumps. Useless for cars, but handy for a motorbike that doesn’t want to slow down, like my guy, to zip through unimpeded.

He knew the road pretty well. The first dozen or so bumps, he found the channel as if instinctively.

The next bump, we weren’t so lucky. We hit it at fifty, and left the road, vertically.

Roger’s Profanisaurus has a pretty good swearword for this kind of situation:

“Fuckshitfuckshitfuckshit.”

We landed on a dog.

It had probably wandered into the street to investigate the new light, as they do.

It yelped all too briefly.

The was a moment of silence, while I established that I somehow hadn’t come off the bike and was still alive and uninjured, and that we were still moving at a pretty rapid clip, then I started screaming.

“What the fuck! What the fuck!”

“It’s not my fault!” the driver was crying out, genuinely distressed. “Not my fault!”

Pretty soon, we hit a proper, sealed, two-lane road. No lights except the twin headlights of oncoming flatbed trucks heading down the other lane.

Or, as happened every three minutes or so, the four imminent headlights of an overtaking flatbed and the flatbed that steadfastly refused to be overtaken, neither of which seemed particularly concerned about the oncoming moto.

We’d leave the road, dropping into a drainage ditch sunk about a foot lower, barely slowing down, and carry on until it was safe to get back on the road proper.

This crap went on for an hour. I had blisters from clinging on so tight.

I caught the bus, which was predictably late anyway, and the moto guy got a tip, for not killing me.

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Dammit, my soap was gone again!

I’ve been diligently collecting miniature soap bars from every hotel I’ve stayed in that supplies them gratis for months.

Soap is important, particularly in crummy guesthouses like the $5 lakeside floating shithole I’m staying in right now – no bog roll, no bum gun, not even a wash basin.

When you have to wash your arse with your hand after every dump, you need your soap.

And that was my second to last piece, dammit!

Five bars gone, in five days!

Where the hell were they going?

This morning, as I laid cable and, annoyed, pulled my last hoarded bar from my bathroom bag, I hypothesised that perhaps, because I’d been leaving the soap on the floor – the only available surface, after all – that a drip from the shower was lubricating the soap sufficiently that it slowly slid right across the room and down the drain in the corner, over the course of the day.

It seemed like a reasonable hypothesis.

The only other explanation I could come up with was that somebody was coming into my room every day, stealing my soap, but ignoring my laptop and cameras. Absurd.

I put the wet soap on the floor, and watched to see if it slid.

After a couple of minutes, it still had not moved, not so much as a millimetre.

Hmm, I thought, so much for that theory.

Then a big fucking black rat walked in through the open bathroom door, ignored me, picked up my last bar of soap in its teeth, and departed, nonchalantly, through a hole in the wall.

 ::  Read on

Just don’t laugh at the dead kids, alright?

Smoking is permitted at the Tuol Sleng genocide museum, but laughing is not.

That’s certainly what’s suggested by the signs. There’s nothing on the walls forbidding smoking, drinking, dogs, littering, drug use, the wearing of shoes, skateboarding or heavy petting.

At first, I took the single warning sign – a man’s head, smiling, mouth wide open, inside a red circle with a line through it – as a prohibition of talking. Silence in the museum.

But Peter, the unlikely-named Khmer tuk-tuk guy who had taken it upon himself to be my tour guide for the afternoon, told me it was a warning for tourists not to laugh.

They need a sign for that?

It’s a genocide museum.

“But it’s okay,” Peter said, in his excellent English. “You can laugh if you want.”

It was such an absurd thing to say that I actually did laugh out loud, once and involuntarily, and immediately felt like the world’s biggest tool.

I’d selected Peter from the gang of tuk-tuk guys offering their services outside my Phnom Penh guesthouse because he looked the oldest of the pack.

Crowsfeet on his otherwise youthfully Asian face, and flecks of gray in his hair. Probably in his mid-forties. He’d be old enough to remember Pol Pot’s regime from maybe his early teens.

Since the main reason I decided to subject myself to Phnom Penh was to learn a little more about Cambodia’s most recent society-defining horrors, I figured somebody who was around to remember it first-hand might be my best bet for a driver.

I was not wrong.

Peter insisted on going above and beyond his tuk-tuk-driving duties, following me around the museum, explaining the story behind anything and everything I saw. Normally I would smell scam, or at the very least somebody trying to pump the tip, but Peter seemed genuinely enthusiastic about his chosen role.

Peter also always seemed terribly surprised and impressed when I understood what he was talking about perfectly. I guess many of his passengers also have English as a second language.

When I was umming and ahhing about whether to go to the shooting range, he told me point blank he’d only take me there BEFORE seeing any of the genocide stuff, despite that being the least convenient route.

“And I tell truth and warn you, it’s forty dollars US for AK-47 with 30 bullets,” he added. “A lot of foreigners say that is, what you say, bullshit? You understand ‘bullshit’, yes?”

“Oh, yeah, I think so.”

I guess the cow lives, for today.

Peter told me his doctor dad had been killed by Pol Pot, and that he’d been forced to work the rice paddies, gratis, as a ten-year-old. Chain gangs, more or less, judging from the photos. The only food he was allowed to eat were meagre portions of “porridge” and scavenged banana and papaya roots.

He showed me some scars on his belly he said were from diarrhoea, a scar above his eye he said was from taking a beating with a bamboo cane, and some cracks on his tongue he said was from some other form of abuse I didn’t quite understand.

Frankly, he could have been making any or all of that shit up. I have no idea. I didn’t think diarrhoea did that to a person. If it did, I expect most of the surface area of my body would be a single patch of luminous pink scar tissue, the last few months I’ve had.

Building A at Tuol Sleng contains the interrogation chambers. Thousands of people were tortured horribly there in the late 1970s, before being carted off to Killing Fields to be beaten to death.

There’s a metal bed in the centre of each room. On each bed, some manacles, and a metal ammunition case that the torture victims had to use as a toilet.

Each room also has a single blown-up monochrome photograph of the room’s final occupant, chained to the bed, in whatever condition they were found when the facility was liberated.

That is: dead, and fucked up beyond recognition.

“The stains on the floor, you’re standing on,” Peter said, “are blood.”

I almost called bullshit – it’s been 30 years, for crying out loud – but the faded brownish smears on the tiles seemed to match closely the patterns of those in the photographs.

In one room, on the bed was the rusted blade of a small garden shovel.

“What was that for?” I asked.

“Look at the photo, and tell me,” Peter said.

The photo was low-quality, black-and-white, angled wrong and blurred slightly by the blow-up, but I could tell there was something terribly wrong with the man’s head.

“They used it to cut off his face,” Peter said. “He was Australian journalist. You understand ‘journalist’, yes?”

“Yeah.”

Building B is filled with mugshots of the guards and prisoners. A lot of them are children – on both sides. Guards and prisoners significantly under the age of majority.

At the Killing Fields of Choeung Ek, a little south of town, I learned that the younger kids were mostly killed by swinging them against a tree. The adults were either beheaded, stabbed, or beaten to death with big bamboo. Often, the women and kids were raped first – their bodies were almost all exhumed naked.

A handful of the photos at the museum showed some of the results of the tortures and killings. People with all or part of their faces or heads beaten to jelly, or with bits sliced off.

Choeung Ek also has a massive, yet perversely rather tasteful, yellow-grey stupa, set amid disturbingly serene grounds, which is filled to the brim with the skulls of many of the thousands of local victims

It’s rather macabre. I asked Peter why the bones had not been reburied, or burned, or subjected to whatever passed for a funeral rite in this culture. It seemed wrong, given that this all happened in my lifetime. Some of these skulls will have living relatives.

“So nobody forget,” was all Peter would say.

Building D at Tuol Sleng has more photographs, and some artistic representations of the various tortures carried out at this former primary school building.

One of the paintings depicts waterboarding. The original wooden waterboard itself, resembling a tilted medieval rack, is right there in the middle of the room.

I listened, bemused, while Peter explained in detail how it was used.

“You do realise,” I said, when he had finished, “that they’re doing this exact same thing right now to unconvicted terrorist suspects in America?”

He shook his head.

“No, no, no,” he said. “You don’t understand. This is from Pol Pot time. Not now. Not any more.”

“Peter, mate, trust me,” I said. “They really are still doing this shit in America.”

He looked at me like I was smoking crack.

2 comments  ::  Read on

It’s been a while since I dwelt upon the intersection of ancient religion and cocks, but a visit to Angkor Wat a couple weeks back gave me cause to revisit the topic.

If you’re British, and enjoy a good knob gag, you can see phallic imagery, ripe for puns and innuendo, in just about anything.

Show us a picture of anything and we’ll be able to make a cock joke out of it.

Anything, I tell you!

Show me a vagina, and I’ll show you something phallic in it.

(Geddit?)

But the ancient Hindus were so brazen, their legacy doesn’t even give me a chance to get my creative juices flowing.

(Geddit? He might mean semen!)

The temples of Angkor Wat, for example…

(Wanker what? What did he say?)

…turns out was a Hindu site, originally, before the Buddhists penetrated its defences.

(Pfnar!)

So a couple of the temples there have Shiva Linga – which is literally God’s cock, you may remember from my previous sarcastic textual abuses of eastern tradition – as their centrepieces.

(Hah! He said “cock”! And he said “piece”. And “abuse”, which could mean “self-abuse”! And “textual” sounds a bit like “sexual”, so that would be “sexual abuse”, which is hilarious!)

And one of the more impressive reliefs…

(Relief! Like in masturbatory relief!)

…in Angkor Wat proper…

(Wanker! I thought he said “wanker”! In Pig Latin, it would definitely be “wanker”!)

is the depiction of the Churning Of The Sea Of Milk.

(?)

The Churning Of The Sea Of Milk relief runs along a long corridor. It depicts a couple hundred guys holding onto a massive snake, which is attached to a mountain that sits within a sea of milk.

(Too… Much… Input…)

Tradition has it that as the demons pull on their collective snake, the mountain turns, churning the sea of milk into the delicious life-giving cream of creation.

(Too… Much… Input… Must… Reboot… Must… Reboot…)

And Thus was the Universe Created.

Great big daisy-chain.

1 comment  ::  Read on

I took a wrong turn, looking for breakfast at 7am. Wound up walking through a Phnom Penh market.

Only a block or so from the pricey waterfront hotels, but this was none of your souvenir, tourist, antique, Same Same T-shirt nonsense.

Proper, full-on, bustling, squawking-chicken Cambodian market.

Trays of snails. Flattened chicken. Unidentifiable, hairy fruit. Leathery fish. Grilled grasshoppers. Flies circling huge hanging hewn hunks of bleeding meat.

One old woman was sitting on the kerb, idly dismembering living skinned frogs with her hands while she chatted to a young girl.

She had a transparent plastic bag full of them, by her side.

Quite a lot of them were still alive, trying to climb out of the bag, pink and skinless.

Their limbs came away as easily as pulling flesh from a chicken leg.

Once dismembered, she tossed their twitching remains into a tray.

Put me in mind of something out of a Giger painting, or a Clive Barker novel.

I ended up skipping breakfast.

2 comments  ::  Read on

“Hello,” said the dog, walking into the beach bar.

I was the only customer in there.

“Oh, hi,” I said, absently. I reached down to pat its flank.

The dog backed away cautiously.

“You’re not going to hurt me are you?” it said, only a little fear in his voice.

“No, of course not,” I said.

“Good,” it said, wagging its tail. “You must be a tourist. I like tourists.”

I took a quick gander between its legs. His legs.

“You looking at my cock?” he said.

“Sorry,” I laughed. “Just checking. Now I know to call you a ‘good boy’, see?”

The dog wagged his tail.

“I like it when people call me that,” he said, smiling.

I patted his head.

“You speak pretty good English,” I said. “For Cambodia.”

The dog cocked his head.

“And, presumably, for a dog,” he said.

“That too.”

“I don’t suppose you have any steak, do you?” the dog said, sniffing at my trouser legs.

“No, sorry.”

“Oh, okay,” the dog said sadly.

Then he sniffed my leg again.

“You smell good,” he said. “Have you been eating bacon?”

“No,” I said. “I was with somebody who was eating bacon, but that was hours ago.”

“Oh… I have a pretty good sense of smell, you know,” the dog said. “I can even smell cancer! Did you know that?”

“I had heard that, yes.” I said. “I don’t suppose…?”

“Don’t worry, not yet,” he said.

Then, almost shyly, he added: “Did you keep any of your friend’s bacon, by any chance? Maybe you stole a bit and slipped it into your pocket to eat later?”

“Fraid not.”

“Just curious,” the dog said. “No particular reason.”

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Don’t have one,” the dog sniffed. “Nobody looks after me.”

“Shame,” I said. “Perhaps I could give you a name.”

The dog thought about it for a moment.

“Sadly, I fail to see what that would achieve,” he said eventually.

“I have a couple of left-over onion rings,” I said, changing the subject. “You could have those if you like.”

“Really?! That would be great!” the dog said, wagging his tail.

I tossed him an onion ring. He caught it in his mouth, then peered down his snout at it for a few moments, as if unsure what to do with it. Then, it was gone, swallowed in one gulp.

“How was that?”

“Okay, bit cold. Can I have the other?”

“Sure,” I tossed him the last ring, and it was gone before it hit the floor.

“You know what would go really well with these?” he said, enthusiastically licking his jowls. “Some steak!”

“I’m very sorry, but as I already told you, I don’t have any steak,” I said.

“Oh, right, yeah,” said the dog. “My memory isn’t as good as my sense of smell.”

“And besides,” I said. “I’m vegetarian. I haven’t eaten steak in seventeen years.”

The dog frowned.

“You’re lucky,” he said, as he started to lick his balls. “At least you’ve had some steak. I’m three, and I’ve never had any. My own bollocks are the closest I get.”

“The bartender’s got a plate of barbecued cockroaches she’s been nibbling on,” I suggested. “I’m sure you could have a few if you begged politely.”

“Come off it, pal,” said the dog, chewing happily on his own scrotal sack. “I may be a dog, but I have to draw the line somewhere.”

“Good boy,” I said. “Good boy.”

 ::  Read on

The first thing I saw was a dead woman.

Dead, or dying.

“You might not want your son to see this,” I said to the woman sitting in front of me on the bus, and, after a glance out the window, she held her kid’s head tightly into her chest.

A middle-aged Khmer woman was lying motionless, on her back, in the road, in the middle of traffic, a few people standing around, vehicles creeping around her perimeter.

She’d come off her bike.

Her face was covered in blood, and her helmet was lying a few feet away.

A man was pressing hard on her chest, and blood was bubbling out of her mouth by the litre.

It seemed unlikely that an ambulance, assuming they have such things, would have been able to make it through the traffic in time.

This city is, apparently, notorious for this kind of thing.

 ::  Read on

In backpacker neighbourhoods, in low season, in Cambodia and some places in Thailand, there are only usually two or three bars open late.

Often, the most popular one is the one that has the most “Ladies”.

Personally, if I’m alone, I go to hang out in the one with the best pool tables.

Sometimes, that’s the same thing.

In Siem Reap, the prostitutes have turned that fact into a minor scam.

There’s a bar there called The Temple. It’s a pretty good bar, though the Angkor What? across the street is far, far nicer.

The Temple has three pool tables. Next to each is a sign saying something along the lines of:

POOL TABLE

WRITE YOUR NAME
ON THE BOARD
WAIT WHEN IT IS YOUR TURN
THEN YOU CAN PLAY
THE WINNER

Basically, explaining the normal Winner Stays On rule common to most civilised American bars.

In The Temple bar, each of the three pool tables has three or four Ladies playing it.

These tables belong to these chicks.

Not because they’re good, although they’re usually pretty good. Each Lady puts her or his name, or pseudonym, or just random scribbles, on the whiteboard, in Khmer, three or four times each, in various combinations, designed to confuse westerners who want to play pool.

If you want a game, you have to either put your name up and then wait around for fifteen games, or just hang out near the tables until one of the Ladies adopts you as their doubles partner.

That takes about three minutes.

These girls seemingly use pool as a way to acquire Johns.

It is impossible to have a game, unless you’re willing to play doubles with a hooker, another hooker, and another clueless whiteboy.

I’ve never seen people leaving with them, so I don’t know if it works. But I expect it does, otherwise the sex workers wouldn’t hang out there in the first place.

You just have to endure the sales pitches, while you’re playing.

“Yay! Good shot! Double-combo into the corner! You want massage?”

“No, thanks, I just want to play pool.”

“Okay! Pool is good! You play pool good! You want massage later?”

The Pool God surely does not smile upon these women.

Sometimes, very late, in these kind of bars, the whiteboard is sufficiently empty that I feel confident enough to be a little bit mischievous.

I can beat these girls one-handed, I think.

Sometimes, I try.

Sometimes, I succeed.

I sometimes turn to the nearest English-speaking person. There’s usually one nearby.

“I’m beating a ladyboy,” I say. “At one-handed pool.”

“You’re playing one-handed pool with a lady-boy?” they say. “What are you trying to say?”

It should be a euphemism.

But it isn’t.

 ::  Read on

Don’t give money to beggars, is what they say.

It only encourages begging.

Elsewhere, I generally agree with that sentiment.

In Cambodia, I have cause to question it.

Why, I ask, is it bad to encourage begging, here?

With kids, whether they’re begging or touting crappy string necklaces, the argument is clear.

These kids generally earn more per day than the average Cambodian, which almost certainly discourages them from attending school, and could discourage their parents from finding work.

I agree with this argument.

Sure, the kids learn a lot working the beaches. Their English is not bad, and they have a better command of geography than the average American or British kid.

Overheard:

“You buy necklace from me?”

“No thanks.”

“Where you from?”

“Norway.”

“Oslo?”

These skills are arguably transferable, but I’d still feel happier if they were learned in school.

So I don’t give money to kids who are touting on the beach on a school day.

But what about the landmine victim? The dude shuffling down the beach on his arse because both his legs have been blown off below the knee?

He might have an okay time in Europe or the US, where prosthetics would be available, there are access laws, there’s education, and opportunities for a potentially lucrative desk-based career.

But he’s kinda fucked here in Cambodia.

Admittedly, education to 16 is free here now, if you can afford the uniform and your parents let you attend, but a forty-year-old Khmer guy certainly wasn’t lucky enough to benefit from it, and employment options outside service industries seem limited, at least here in Snooky.

And what about this little old lady I’ve seen stumbling down Serendipity beach every day, carrying her diminutive husband around on her back – carrying her husband on her back, for fuck’s sake – begging for change?

She’s 60 if she’s a day. A warped and wrinkled Mother Theresa clone. Her husband, who looks like he’s about two or three hours away from death, weighs about 70 pounds soaking wet and is wracked by either extreme old age, some kind of degenerative nerve disease or cancer.

What are her options?

School’s out.

What are her options in a tourist town like Sihanoukville?

She’s lived through war and genocide. She’s well past retirement age and, as far as I know, there’s no significant social safety net to speak of in Cambodia.

If I give her a dollar, she’s not going to go spend it on alcohol or drugs. She’s going to use it to feed herself and her dying husband.

There’s always the Big Picture argument, I suppose.

Guidebooks like the Lonely Planet are sometimes quite fond of that.

Beggars almost certainly bring down the tone of a place, perhaps discouraging the lifeblood of tourism that a community relies upon.

(I doubt that applies here. The persistent rumour here is that the Russian Mafia is about five minutes away from requisitioning this entire beach for the development of mid-range resorts and casinos. They’re apparently already doing it up at the nearest Snooky beach, to the northwest of here)

Plus, giving to beggars might encourage people who perhaps could work to instead beg.

Maybe the money would be better given to a charity, which can benefit an entire community and buy vital supplies with economies of scale not available to individuals, they suggest.

Could be true.

But I’m always a little bit sceptical about charities.

The overheads for some charities can be quite astounding. You could wind up paying fifty cents on the dollar (or something similarly ludicrous) to the charity’s staff and expenses.

And you don’t know what other agendas they have.

The only charity I regularly donate to, Children International, at children.org, has a fairly reasonably low overhead. I checked out their accounts before I started my own direct debit a few years back.

But they also seem to have some kind of surreptitious milky-milky Christian agenda that I find disturbing.

(Why do they keep asking me to send my Calcuttan sponsor child, Raunak, an Easter gift? The only reasons I can think of is that either they assume I’m an American Christian, or that the charity is quietly indoctrinating her and her peers with absurd belief systems.)

Suggesting somebody seek out and donate to a local charity is also pretty lousy advice to give to the average tourist.

How many westerners are going to go to the beach, be accosted by a bunch of people as desperate as those described above, and then go make the effort to locate and visit a local charity to make a donation?

Not many, is my guess.

I didn’t.

But if a dollar keeps an amputee fed for a day, why the hell not give it to him? It’s a rounding error where I come from, but rather a lot of Cambodians earn that amount or less per day.

(Khmer bartenders serving rich tourists on the beach in Sihanoukville can earn as little as $4 for an eight to 12 hour shift)

I’m quite happy to give the little old lady that dollar.

And if that means the next tourist to arrive is going to be bugged for change while he’s working on his tan, then so be it.

3 comments  ::  Read on

Sihanoukville is a nice enough beach town.

Cambodia’s only real beach tourist resort, currently, I’m told.

I Like It.

I’ve been here five nights.

The beaches are nice, but I can’t think of anything interesting or amusing to say about them.

I had some friends here for a while, but now I don’t, and I’m all on my lonesome again for the first time in six weeks, and I can’t think of anything interesting or amusing to say about that.

Almost all of the local businesses here are owned by foreigners, but I can’t think of anything interesting or amusing to say about that.

I almost took a bartender job, but I didn’t, and I can’t think of anything interesting or amusing to say about that.

There are lots of beggars on the beaches, most of them landmine victims, but I can’t think of anything interesting or amusing to say about that.

The weather hasn’t been so good – it’s rainy season here, like everywhere else I’ve been recently – but I can’t think of anything interesting or amusing to say about that.

I seem to have acquired some very strange sleep patterns, but I can’t think of anything interesting or amusing to say about that.

I seem to have some kind of problem with my right eye, but I can’t think of anything interesting or amusing to say about that.

My bed was on fire for about ten minutes last night, but I can’t think of anything interesting or amusing to say about that either.

Rather than stick around, trying to have interesting or amusing experiences, I’m going to travel to Phnom Penh tomorrow, which I am certain I will hate.

Just for you.

Because I love you.

 ::  Read on