xanadu's travelblog

Rocks of ages

2007-09-07T05:19:36Z

I'm no geologist, but sometimes I love to study rocks. Like last week, when I had a torrid three-day love affair with the stone remains of Angkor's dozens of Hindu temples. The sprawling ancient metropolis, probably the world's largest pre-ind...

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Cockle-doo-doo-death

2007-09-03T15:28:57Z

There are certain questions I have never expected to be asked. One of them is: "Would you like to go to a cockfight Friday?" It was the specificity of the question that surprised me last week, when Fong, a mototaxi driver who drives me around P...

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to the provinces

2007-08-29T08:17:05Z

I visited Takeo province a few Saturdays ago with my friend Lor Chandara, a Cambodian reporter with whom I work (more on the reasons for that trip soon). We visited his home village and motorbiked out to the small paddy he owns - which is mainta...

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one country, hundreds of governments

2007-08-27T05:50:00Z

On the first Friday night of each month hundreds of expats (i.e., white people) assemble in a bar named "Elsewhere" to drink and carouse and be seen. In any western city, the scene would be completely unremarkable, a typical gathering of 20- and 3...

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The sky is full of money

2007-08-20T08:09:30Z

Yesterday I learned the private bets I've been quietly placing with myself could make me a rich man. I could, during my remaining days in Cambodia, bet on the sky. As it turns out, there is a thriving rain betting industry here during the monso...

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Off we go to market

2007-08-19T09:03:56Z

Here are some of the thousands of things you can buy at Phnom Penh's Domkor Market, which smells like everything in the world mixed together into a massive noxious stew. Actually, it mostly smells like fish. The photo on the far right (which is, ...

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Self-abduction?

2007-08-19T07:56:32Z

One of the reasons I love to live and travel in very unfamiliar places (i.e. poor, non-Western places) is that they force me to ask myself questions that I often evade in the U.S. At home, familiarity often leads me to complacency, the false feeli...

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Filthy riders

2007-08-16T12:15:35Z

Cambodia's streets carry clouds of dust, but it's impossible to know just how wretched those clouds are until you rent a motorbike and drive through them for five hours. I agree with this simple and highly scientific equation, which I have just ...

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Look up

2007-08-10T13:00:19Z

I hate to think this as hundreds of people in the region fall victim to floods and their attendant illnesses, but I really enjoy South and Southeast Asia's monsoon season. From May to November, it waters the paddies, gives life to the tropics. It ...

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The statue got him high

2007-08-03T08:16:07Z

A laborer in Kep, the lazy coastal village I visited last weekend, takes a break in the sunny lap of his new best friend, Yeah Mao, the "Black Grandmother" who is believed to protect travelers and fishermen along the coast. Kep's only true lan...

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