image from Let it burn

Let it burn

July 19, 2011
The gym attached to the school I attended as a boy burned down a couple of weeks ago and the site is still pretty much untouched. Looks as dark as the near Greek future. Also quite similar to what my Aussie bank account looks like all too often. I wanted to know what it costs to travel for more than a year and had a look at the transactions for the past 14 months.
image from Sunrise

Sunrise

July 17, 2011
Here’s to the land of the rising sun. Well done, 日本. Birdie Beach, NSW Birdie Beach, NSW Birdie Beach, NSW Birdie Beach, NSW Cape Tribulation, QLD Yass, NSW Chumphon, Thailand
image from Break Time

Break Time

July 8, 2011
It’s so nice to get a break. I don’t have to worry about where I’m going to sleep or eat. I don’t have to worry about somebody stealing stuff from my room and nobody is trying to rip me off. Well actually that’s not completely true. 35 bucks for a piece of plastic that says ‘driver’s license’ isn’t exactly a bargain. Applying for a new license and ID card was quite fun though.
image from Back in Town

Back in Town

July 5, 2011
After three times in Bangkok all my visits have been quite unique. This time it was mostly the life after sunset that made the streets very interesting. The wild mix of families with kids, hookers, touts, pimps, merchants, food stalls, moto drivers and Muslim tourists with women dressed up like tents. Here’s a video of the small lane where my guest house was. I spent my last day walking around, sitting down every now and then and just watching the show.
image from Bangkok again

Bangkok again

July 3, 2011
On the 4th I’m booked on a flight towards Germany, so it was time to say goodbye to Cambodia and return to Bangkok. I didn’t wanted to come here in the last minute, you never know what’ll go wrong. I really liked my time in Cambodia even though often the things I saw weren’t exactly cheerful. Never before have I seen such a level of poverty and thinking of People in Germany who claim to be poor because they can’t afford a car or TV is just ridiculous.
image from Recent Cambodian History

Recent Cambodian History

July 1, 2011
Before I came to Asia I didn’t know much about Cambodia and would have had trouble pointing it out on a map. All I knew was that it’s somewhere in Asia, has some massive temples and some kind of war going on. Well the later isn’t true any more, that was just a fact I picked up as a teenager and kept in memory. The western world had its fair share of genocide with Hitler and the catholic church being some of the major players in the league of slaughtering countless innocent people.
image from Sightseeing

Sightseeing

June 30, 2011
Yesterday I hired a tuk-tuk to have a look at same places near Battambang. I went with an ‘independent’ driver who was recommended to me by the French expats. Independent means that he’s working in the streets like you would expect it and doesn’t hang out in front of the tourist hotels hoping for big money. From what the guy told me he used to run into trouble with the ‘hotel drivers’ as they followed him and beat him up after he ‘stole’ one of their customers.
image from Battambang

Battambang

June 28, 2011
My guest house organized a bus ticket to Battambang for me and with the usual slight delay I was picked up and transported to the main bus station this morning. The place is basically a big hall with a couple of buses and merchants trying to sell fruit, bread and other stuff. Quite similar to Thailand just the signs are in Khmer instead of Thai script. Our driver made extensive use of the horn, getting everything on two wheels to take flight on the street shoulders.
image from Siem Reap Impressions

Siem Reap Impressions

June 27, 2011
Being a curious person I always try to get a first-hand impression of things. The internet, various books and fellow travellers are good sources of information but making experiences myself is still the best input. Thus today I once again made myself a subject of science and went to compare Thai and Khmer massage. The area around the old market seemed like a good spot for that with heaps of massage places around.
image from Temple Finale

Temple Finale

June 26, 2011

Angkor Wat, described as the mother of all temples and probably the largest religious building in the world. I saved it for the last day of my temple tour and was excited to get there. After splurging with tuk-tuk rides the last two days it was time to be a backpacker again and get onto a bicycle.

Visiting the temples by bicycle has the added benefit of seeing more along the way and being able to stop everywhere. I made a first stop at the moat that surrounds Angkor Wat. It’s a massive 190m wide, that should beat every European castle easily.

Next to where I was standing a Cambodian woman in modest clothes was fiddling around with her mobile. When I was about to leave she asked if I could spare a minute and help her with her phone. I expected something like ‘how do I change this setting’ but instead she told me she just uploaded some photos of Angkor to flickr and couldn’t edit the description. I did not expect that.

Not ten minutes later I got in touch with even more people (apart from the ever-present dealers). I was watching the entrance of Angkor Wat when an old guy started to talk to me in French. I didn’t have a clue of what he wanted but my ‘pardon, je ne comprend pas’ earned me a friendly laugh and a ‘merci beaucoup’. He continued to smoke cigarettes with a monk as old as him.

Walking over the causeway towards the entrance gives you a good idea of how large that 190m wide moat is. Inside the temple area I almost stumbled over a wild monkey