Changing plans...

I do actually have a few very good and interesting stories, but they shall have to wait for now.

I've run out of money and am going home.

I think the word 'gutted' feels appropriate, by which I mean that it feels as though someone has ripped my insides out.

All drinks and company heartily welcomed upon my return.

Hmm.

Carlsberg don't do overpriced beach towns that have the potential to be amazing but are instead full of old western men looking for 'love' with young Thai prostitutes, a total lack of night life and not really all that much else. But if they did, they would probably be just like Hua Hin.

Tim and I are doing a run out of here as fast as our little legs can carry us.

The finer points in life

One of the things I love about travelling is how much you can lower your standards and get excited about the most mundane things.

The guest house we're in at the moment has a loo that flushes, its own toilet paper, hooks in the bathroom, almost hot water and a sink you can wash your hands in without simultaneously wetting your feet. There's even soap and a helpful little shelf to put things like your toothpaste and toothbrush above the sink.

The bed has no bed bugs, and they gave me my own towel. And the linen looks almost clean.

I've only seen one cockroach.

I swear I'm in heaven.

Unexpected ego boosts

Siem Reap is a lovely place, but there's a rather disturbing number of ladyboys and prostitutes. Most of the time you can just ignore them, but I'm always game for a bit of banter. So when one girl (? possibly...) came over and started chatting to us, we had quite the conversation.

Imagine my surprise when she then offered ME money ($100, no less!) to partake in unspecified sexual acts.

That wasn't even the weirdest part of what she did that evening, but I'm still recovering from the scars of the second part.

Har har

I like bad jokes. I'd love to be one of those people who's all sophisticated with their sense of humour, but alas! It's not to be. Bad puns and long stories with a disappointing end are some of my favourites, though I'm also rather keen on a bit of gore and/or bad taste. This seems to have it all:

A man was waiting for his wife to give birth. The doctor came and informed the dad that his son was born without a torso, arms, or legs. The son was just a head!

But the dad loved his son and raised him as well as he could. Eighteen years later, the son was old enough for his first drink. The dad took him to a bar, tearfully told him he was proud of him, and ordered the biggest, strongest drink for his boy. With all the bar patrons looking on curiously, the boy took his first sip of alcohol.


Swoooop! A torso popped out!

The bar was dead silent, then burst into a whoop of joy. The father, shocked, begged his son to drink again. The patrons chanted, "Take another drink! Take another drink!" The bartender shook his head in dismay.

Swoooop! Two arms popped out!

The bar went wild. The father, crying and wailing, begged his son to drink again. The patrons chanted, "Take another drink! Take another drink!" But the bartender ignored the whole affair.
By this time, the boy was getting tipsy. With his new hands, he reached down, grabbed the drink, and guzzled the last of it.


Swoooop! Two legs popped out.

The bar was in chaos. The father wept with joy. The boy stood up on his new legs. He stumbled to the left. He stumbled to the right. Then he stumbled through the front door and into the street, where a truck ran him over.

The bar fell silent. The father moaned with grief. The bartender merely sighed and said, "He should have quit while he was a head."

A bit of a long one (but worth it!)

Siem Reap is a weirdly lovely town. It's got a fantastic night life, the people are all super friendly and we've been staying in the nicest hostel we've been in for a while. After my last post, I was feeling pretty positive about the world in general. Yes, it can be a horrible place where people do nasty things to one another, but I think that there's inherent good in everyone, even if you have to search extremely hard to find it. Buoyed by all the positive thinking (and always up for a party), we tested out the main bar street and acquired some new friends, who we took back to our hostel for a slightly more low key evening. It was a really good night - the sort where you all share deep secrets about yourself that you never knew before and will probably forget afterwards, though the people who you shared them with will remember them long after you lose touch. As is the way when you reach the small hours of the morning, most suggestions seem like a good idea at the time, which is why at about 2 a.m. three of us trooped out to the supermarket to buy snacks and cigarettes (not for me, Mum, promise!). On the way, Maggie warned us that there would probably be children outside asking for you to buy them some food, or some formula for the babies they sometimes had with them. Unfortunately, this is a long-standing scam here, where the formula actually gets sold on rather than being used for the children you think you've bought it for, so the only option really is to buy crackers or similar and open the bag yourself before giving it to them.

Despite bracing myself for the worst, I wasn't quite prepared for what happened next. There weren't very many children at all, though one girl of about 8 or 9 was holding a tiny baby boy who could only have been a few weeks old. This was pretty heart wrenching in itself - obviously there were parents around somewhere, but it was the children who were carrying babies up and down the street early in the morning in order to make a few dollars. Maggie bought some food to give to them and started trying to hand it out. The young girl was quite savvy, and had obviously clocked that I had a bit of a weakness for her and the newborn she was carrying. She turned down Maggie's offers of food, and instead clung onto my dress with one hand and demanded some formula. I had absolutely nothing on me - no bag or money or anything so I wouldn't have been able to buy some formula for her even if I'd wanted to. I did my best to make her let go of me but she persisted, and in the slight scuffle the little boy woke up and began to cry. Without much time to think, I took the baby from her, figuring that if she was going to cling onto me it was much better for me to carry the boy in both my arms than in her one free one. I'm definitely not the sort to get broody - I'd rather have a dog than a child at this point in my life, but nevertheless I rocked him gently to sleep and almost melted. My attention was solely focused on him, though after he nodded off I realised that the girl had let go of my dress and was instead just watching me. It was definitely time to leave. I went to pass the boy back to her, but she turned her back on me. I tried again and the same happened. Desperate, I attempted to hand the boy back to some of the other children and was met with the same reaction. I did this over and over, and still none of them would take him from me. I thought that if I started to walk away they'd follow and take him from me, but they didn't.

It's a bizarre night when it gets to about four in the morning and you're left holding a tiny baby in the middle of a foreign country that nobody will take back from you. It pretty much broke my heart. I can't quite convey just how tiny he was, and I seriously began to consider what I could do with him if they actually didn't take him back at all. There are orphanages here, but I didn't think I could leave him. I honestly thought that if it came to it, I'd have to adopt him and work out a plan somehow. It breaks me to think that there didn't seem to be anyone in the world who loved him, and he was instead just being paraded up and down a street late at night in order to make some money. It's just not something that should happen in the world. When I told another friend this story, she said that once when she was travelling she visited a place so devastated by poverty that the mothers there offered to give their babies away in exchange for almost anything. I know now that it was probably a naive view, but before I always kind of thought that you were at least guaranteed love from your mother, and if she couldn't love you she'd still at least have the humanity to make sure you had a decent shot at life. My 'inherent goodness' view is mostly held together by the thought that everyone is able to love and show kindness to someone in their life, be it their child, parent, lover or someone else. Even Hitler had a family and he was a right old bastard. I still have that view, but it's been shaken a lot because of what happened.

Eventually by chance, some of the people who work at my hostel were out riding around on motorbikes, and they managed to fix the situation by shouting a lot in Khmer and handing over a modest amount of money to the children. The boy was unceremoniously taken from me and given back to the children, and I hopped on the back of a bike and got a ride home where I had a bit of a cry. I think we all did. The morning after I wanted nothing more than to leave Siem Reap and head straight to the beaches in Thailand where I could put it all out of my mind. We booked a bus that left the next morning and had a chilled day visiting an off-the-beaten-track temple, then went out for a rather delicious Mexican meal in the evening. I'm yet to go anywhere here without meeting millions of people and chatting away to them, and last night was no exception. I bumped into someone who's volunteering at an orphanage here for three weeks. After chatting to him for a bit and swapping contact details, we sauntered home to bed for our 7:30 a.m. set off to Bangkok in the morning.

Which is why it's now almost 1:30 in the afternoon, and I'm sitting in an internet cafe in Siem Reap waiting for him to email me back so I can go and volunteer at the orphanage for a few days. I've very little money to spare and no refund on my unused ticket, but when I woke up this morning it just felt like the right thing to do. Here's hoping it doesn't leave me as traumatised as the other night!

Life's a funny old thing.

Thinkings...

As I travel, I continue to ponder what happiness is and how to obtain it, and what obtaining it really means.

The past few days have been heavy going. We're in Cambodia now, and whilst in Phnom Penh we sort of had to do the not-so-nice historical bits, like the Killing Fields and S21. These two places left me a little bit lost for words, and all Steph and I could do was to walk around with our arms linked despite the heat and keep very very quiet. It's difficult to describe what happened without it losing some of the meaning - words can convey a lot, but at the end of the day they're still words. I'm always amazed how people can read the newspaper on the tube or over breakfast or anywhere, and gloss over figures like ''27 people killed in blast'' without balking at it. I know I'm probably over-sensitive, but when I read that I imagine my old class at school being entirely wiped out, or 27 family members. I've not had very many people I've known die - perhaps only 4 or 5 - but each one has shook me a little, and reminded me of my own mortality and the fragility of life. To say that there were thousands of people killed, or 450 all put into one grave the size of a room is something that breaks me, especially when I think that all of those deaths were unnecessary.

That's all a bit morbid, but really I came to share something happy. I've been mulling all of this over since Phnom Penh and wondering how a nation can even begin to recover from something like that, even though nations somehow do it all the time, over and over. Vietnam and Cambodia have both touched me in that, despite their histories, the people are amazingly positive, and always have a smile at the ready. Smiles count for a lot in my world. Last night I was chatting to a very lovely local girl I'd met here about some of this and she said that no matter what had happened in the past or anything, she had her friends and that counted for more than any money or anything at all. I questioned this - everyone needs a basic standard of living and that's not really possible with no money at all. She laughed at me and said, ''When I'm sad, I call my friends and we go for a walk together. If I need money, we'll go to the riverside. One of my friends will bring a bottle of wine, and we'll all sit down together and make a plan. If something's wrong in my family, I can talk with them. I can tell them anything and they'll share it as if it were their own problem." She said that Cambodia works so well because people all look after each other, whether they know them or not.

It's something we've seen a little of whilst here - in the streets people will stop and chat to you, just to see how you are and where you've come from. At first I was wary, thinking that everyone was trying to sell me something or distract me while a friend sneakily nicked my stuff, but I've been wrong more often than not. It's heartening that in the places where I've witnessed the scars from the darker sides of the human psyche, I've also been shown how much more people have to offer without expecting anything in return.

Boating on

So, we've spent the last couple of days doing a tour through the Mekong Delta at an impressive speed. Not only have we managed to visit the huuuge floating market, many temples & pagodas and various small businesses to see how they run (mostly involving rice and coconuts, apparently), but we've also managed to find a whole host of animals.

Whilst the crocodiles were about as friendly as a handbag, the kittens and piglets were much, much more so. Happiness comes in kitten and piglet sized packages. But not in the 'future Gucci product' sort of way.

Still plodding!

I've almost posted a lot of times, but then I haven't.

There are three in the bag though. Wait for me.

We're in Saigon today (after arriving at 4:30 this morning on quite possibly the most horrendous bus I've ever been on) and there are motorbikes EVERYWHERE. That's not that different to the rest of Vietnam, but it's like the rest of Vietnam all squished into one city.

On the plus side, I absolutely looooove bikes. Not when they hit me or when I try to cross the road, but when I do a day's riding around some of the most beautiful mountains on an awesome 'easy rider' tour. Even if every time I see them/think about them/etc it makes me start singing 'Baby Driver'.