Khmer opera has everything I’ve always wanted in a performance: Comedy, drama, acrobatics, costumes and good kung fu. The play started with ornate shadow puppetry about two monkey brothers quarreling. When the action got very intense, the monkey brothers were replaced with live acrobats who had a fast and funny monkey style knife fight. The [...]

Many days we’d just hang out with the family who owns Sunday Guest House, mostly with Gech, the oldest daughter. Gech is really sharp, loves her job, dresses Japanese and practices origami. Her younger brother is 13, goes to Khmer, Chinese, Japanese and English school and is the best student in each. The father just [...]

We woke up early the day before to catch the sunrise at Angkor Wat and stayed up drinking with some Japanese kids. Sleep deprived, we got up before dawn, again, to catch a ride down lake and river from Siem Reap to Phenom Penh. I realized that I had food poisoning about the same time [...]

A thousand years ago the Khmer ruled Southeast Asia and Angkor was the seat of their empire. They spent their time feeding the Vietnamese to the crocodiles, stomping on the Siamese and constructing colossal temples filled with beautiful dancers. Things change. The Mongols and then French invaded, the American/Vietnamese war obliterated what little infrastructure there [...]

The transition from Thailand to Cambodia at Poi-Pet couldn’t be more drastic. Cambodia is incredibly poor. The highways and most streets are completely unpaved. Many of their destroyed monuments have only been replicated with cheap plaster. There are people missing multiple limbs everywhere. The country is littered with land mines. Its really hard to rebuild [...]