unexpected update

I got jumped by three guys last night. Coming home from a bar. In Phnom Penh. I'm okay, except for some scrapes and bruises and bloody knuckles from fighting them off. They made off with my camera and my passport (how annoying is that). Ironically they didn't get any money or cards. But.

But.

But, they also got away with my notebook, on which all of my (hopefully) entertaining entries have been based. That really sucks the most. The fuckers.

Well, anyway, I'm now stuck in this god-forsaken place for a few weeks while I sort out a new passport, which is more an irritation than actually difficult. Drop me an email to tell me you love me in these frustrating times.

Here is the entry I was working on before this all happened. My most recent notes have obviously been lost, so, yeah, it's vaguely incomplete.

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Cambodia is interesting, though mostly in the sense of the [supposedly] Chinese (the true origin is actually undetermined) curse, "May you live in interesting times."

For example, Khmer (the vast majority of people in Cambodia are ethnically Khmer, to the point of synonymy) traffic is barely contained chaos. There are no obvious rules of engagement. It seems to be a moment to moment negotiation between the dozen obstacles nearest you, which are often moving in two dozen different directions at wildly varying velocities. Admittedly, in most of the region, it is acceptable to drive the wrong direction on the wrong side of the road (is that a double negative? whatever, you know what I mean), but Cambodia is insane. Like when the bad guy in the high-speed Hollywood car chase gets trapped on the wrong side of the divided highway and is forced to charge headfirst (or should that be hood-ornament-first?) into oncoming traffic. Except it's not just the one guy over there going the wrong way; it's him, his entire extended family, his barber, the guy who sold him that buffalo that one time, all the people from the next village over, etc, you get the picture. And in all that empty air between all those cars swerving everywhere, add approximately one gazillion motorbikes carrying anywhere between one and five people with optional livestock (I've seen multiple live pigs on a single bike). Finally, attempt to navigate in that mechanical death soup on a bicycle (this stuff should be on X-Games). It can be exhilarating or horrifying, depending on how in control you are of your fight-or-flight response.

Wise or unwise, I hired [The Crappiest] bicycle [In The World] to brave Khmer traffic and explore the Temples of Angkor on human power, clocking fifty-something miles over three days. No permanent injuries, and I had a frickin' blast playing chicken with tour buses (I did not win often). Angkor Wat, though worth seeing for bragging rights, was underwhelming. I expected it to be bigger, grander, more, but that might be a result of over hyping. Or perhaps it was the suffocating crowds of tourists (I'm talking Times Square levels here). There were other, far more engaging ruined temples, many with no other people around at all.

Quiet, reflective, ancient. I best liked wandering around and exploring the ruins with winding, maze-like passageways and chambers that I could explore in silence and solitude. I was astounded by the sense of peace that some of these massive, millenia-old ruins instilled in me. Overall, there's a zen Indiana Jones feeling to the whole place: you're in the middle of the jungle with (hopefully) no one else about, climbing (literally) the steep, broken steps of giant stone ruins, peering down zig-zagging halls that dance with light and shadow, slipping through narrow openings into dead-end rooms only to find the way forward is a hole in the ceiling one hundred feet up. The huge, chunky, rough-hewn stone blocks, with which all these ruins are built, also lend to the adventurous feel, offering up small handholds and footholds, enticing you to scale those walls and venture deeper.

In addition to fantastic ruins, Cambodia also has an extremely well developed sense of food poisoning, more advanced than I have yet encountered on my travels. In the span of about two weeks, I was seriously ill twice (fever, chills, the works), perhaps a result of my tendency to constantly order the weirdest possible thing on the menu (kangaroo tastes like venison). (It might also be because there's a different standard of hygiene here.) I did wuss out on the big fat hairy spiders on the snack stand at that bus stop, but I had just recovered from a two day bout of digestive apocalypse that morning, and my go-go-adventure-meter was still pretty low (I know, lame excuse, blah blah). I bet my insides are collecting a nice variety of parasites.