-
Tin-Tin And The Khmer Rouge
If you’re lucky enough to travel, meeting people from entirely different cultures, with entirely different lives, is one of the many privileges. It broadens the mind, is stimulating, educational and humbling, and puts our own lives into a different perspective. Here we begin a short series of posts telling the stories of some of the people we met on our recent tour of South East Asia. When we first meet Tin-Tin he is busily cleaning his tuk-tuk, clearing dust from its wheel arches and drying off the recently wiped passenger seats, sharing jokes with a guy who is cooling off in the shadow of the trees. He greets us with…
-
From Province To Capital: Phnom Penh
Preamble: We thought long and hard about this post. It contains some horrific detail but also contains some light hearted humour. Can we really put those two things in the same post? We reached a decision. Please read on, we will warn you before you reach the more brutal words… It was on our first night in Battambang, just as we were drifting off to sleep, when we first heard it, and we both laughed out loud. Something outside, some strange, semi-mechanical disembodied voice seemed to shout “f*ck it” five times, in a kind of rhythmic chant. Surely we don’t have a neighbour who has taught his parrot to swear in English?…
-
Caves, Carts & A Cartoon Character: Our Time In Battambang
Considering its status as Cambodia’s third largest city, Battambang is a modest and quiet place, feeling more like a provincial town than how a bustling Asian city normally feels. The Sangker River flows lazily between its steep banks, in dry season anyway, while the traffic moves slowly through its docile streets which are noticeably free of beggars and hawkers, tuk-tuk drivers wait to be stirred rather than tout for business, and incredibly a car will sometimes even stop at a red traffic light. Battambang’s modest collection of restaurants is dotted around the city rather than centred on one area, there is nothing to compare to Siem Reap’s Pub Street here,…
-
Into Cambodia: Siem Reap & Angkor Wat
Words. One of our airbnb hosts in Vietnam has left a review of us on the website, as they do. When Michaela runs the Vietnamese text through Google translate, the review consists of just three words: “clean tidy happy”. Well, it’s hardly an extended character reference but “clean tidy happy” is a description which we’ll readily accept as a compliment. And on the subject of words, I picked up a T-shirt in Hanoi which carries a slogan which just about sums up my entire life philosophy just now. It reads…”think global, drink local”. Yep, that just about says it all. As the end of our time in Vietnam approaches, we…
