Had a looooong busride to Siam Reap... The bus was full of babies, who took turns in crying every single minute of the 7 hour long trip! I have a thing about children crying... My heart seems to break for each one of them, bur seeing how the loving mothers, sisters, fathers,grandmothers etc. having no luck in getting their child to stop crying! Maybe the clapping of hands, singing in loud voices, soft but insistent slapping in the bottom and yelling is not the most appropiate technique for soothing babies? When I finally Arrived in Siam Reap, I was good and ready to throw the lot out of the bus windows!
Had the good fortune (?) to sit alongside a very young (20yrs) Danish girl, who also was travelling solo... And had been for 6 months... Chapeau! But her ignorance was of encyclopedic proportions.. and it made me wonder if this Global village stuff is all that great after all? If people, who actually take the time and money to go to the other side of the world, just as well could have been busing around Greater Manchester ship canal... (It rains there too... All year round, mind you!)- Okay, you can't get a B&B for 3USD, but the knowledge (or rather lack of it) of what is happening around you is the same... She didn't have a clue to who, where and what! But she had conscientiously taken the antibiotics for 2 months (?) that her country doc had given her as Malaria medicine....! But I let her be, reading her book about a foreign journalist's escapades in the Phnom Penh's 3usd brothels, under age prostitutes, drugs and shoot outs in the 1990' es - apparently he had a blast! So did the Norwegian girl and her two Dutch friends I met in Sihanukville... They had tried out Ak-47, grenades and Bazookas with some Cambodian Military guys out in the jungle... They had used live ducks, as they taste better than chickens(!) to shoot... All of them being pretty bad shots, it took them several rounds of ammo, before they finished them of!- Luckily they had it all, proudly on tape!
I don't know which is the worst here, the ex-military guys profitting on 30 years of civil war or the turists, who are enabling them to do so?
The new road to Siam Reap was uneventful.... Passing the scenery of wooden/palm houses on stilts, rice paddies, poor small villages filled up with garbage and filth and humans in all shapes and forms... Saw a lot of schools on the way and the amount of Ngo's that is everywhere in the country! I passed some of time, chatting to a young monk, travelling with his granddad and immensely proud of his rather limited English!
Arrived in this really nice place, I think... A bit touristy,of cause.. Being so near to one of the official seven wonders of the world!....
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