Footprints in Cambodia: Siem Reap

Siem Reap was a better experience. It varies from city to city i suppose, and the people one meets. Angkor Wat was really pretty but the ugly sight of tourists unloading themselves from the buses was irksome. There were two ponds where one awaits to photograph that infamous reflected picture of the temple. Stood at the wrong sides for the mornings that i visited it. so be it. i took a morning tour of the insides and came out finally on the right side only to find the pond in a deplorable state of erosion. tourism is a bane. people come here with the money and all their pre-loaded assumptions of who they are and how they judge people. it was a disgusting side of human endeavour. capitalism is not all that a pretty picture and it will be an on-going thesis in pro-NGO conference papers.

A return to the romanticised past of the khmer kings.

Nita. Melts you with her character.
















Sir, you have candy?

It's rude i feel to have one's picture taken just like that and one can understand why they reach up instinctively to cover their face and ask for a dollar for a picture taken. It's equivalent to someone walking along orchard road, point a camera at you and snapping, thinking that he/she has captured a face of their exotic travels. how offensive can that be? i tried to stop myself at imitating a capture of the world with the distorted lens of the foreign eye. im not taking any NGC inspired shot okay?

Footprints in Cambodia: Phnom Penh

Cambodia was an eye-opener. The harsh reality of begging and touting in the streets are the irks of tourists and one cannot deny that the tourists were at one level an indirect cause of it all. The stark reality was laid in front of our eyes in the most explicit sense when a kid of 11 or 12 came up to us farangs seated at a road side eatery with a condom in his mouth. It didn't take a genius to figure out his point of sales. That aside, we met people with hearts of gold who labored for the day.

Look what i found. They have balut here too. Very filling.
Pong tea khon as they call it in Phnom Penh.


Norodom Sihamoni


Pate Bread and ice milk coffee.


Toul Sleng. Old secondary school turned prison turned museum. Torture classrooms and prisoner cells all rolled into one. You really wouldnt wanna go there. Mugshots of prisoners, paintings of torture methods. exhibits of torture instruments. Pol Pot regime it is, the man an equivalent of Hitler.


Spooky photo. Beats me where the reflection comes from. this is a wooden cell. 3 is the cell number and we're looking through the little window of the cell door.




Self-explanatory.





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Footprints in Vietnam: Ho Chih Minh City

Operation Indochine Phase 1. It's amazing what one can find in one's own backyard, and calling it backyard is an understatement. It's not exactly the best of worlds where ive been to but I have fallen deeply in love with it, and within a couple of days, what are the chances? I fault myself for not yet appreciating travels into Europe or otherwise but i cannot comprehend why one choose to see some far off place without first experiencing for oneself what's in the immediate region? I wonder if anyone has ever pondered it before but we are politically segregated to the point that we fail to see that we're not as much different as the other. Take for example Malaysians and Singaporeans. A third party can't tell us apart unless you are one of us. We know our differences yet we're more similar than we actually choose to admit. Take another example, last year end I was a Thai-Chinese who was refused entry into the seedy gogo-bars of Bangkok; this year i changed my ethnicity to Vietnamese only to realise that i jolly-well could have been Cambodian by birth. Im sure the etymological discussion of such abstract themes in cultural identity have been debated in some undergrad paper or dramatised in some local plays about urban alienation.

I told Comrade Shah i really need to see it for myself in a couple of years time and im gonna put my foot down on it, call it a soul-searching phase or whatever one wants but it's gonna happen.

Daily Level 4 debrief at Xuan Moi


V-C Yang airing his armpits.


Pho noodles.




Tumultuous road to independence.


The Russians gave us some weapons.


Photographers and journalists who went missing during the Viet Nam War.
I'd die to have my face here if I were in the war.


They didn't make the camera bullet-proof.


Im not fat. The hole is really very small.


Tunnel Rats. The Americans had it tough with their large built, coupled with their SBOs. That's how the little Asians won the war.


Local guide visibly amused by the Singaporean soldier.
Time to re-think your sissy SAF training.


Told you they had Vodka help.


More tunnelling. The second tunnels had little fruit bats.
I couldnt turn back for save of the male ego. >.<
Tapioca.


AK-47. Too much recoil.




Kopitiam brewery. They freaking brewed their own beer can?


That's what they do. Sleep in the streets, busy traffic notwithstanding.