I heart Cambodia! <3

Cambodia is an eerie beauty that seduces. Her grey sky accents the mystery of its temples and poverty in the streets.

When walking through town, I heard soft bells and drums. Soon I learned that this is how the amputee population in Siem Reap makes a living. The musicians are all victims of the three to seven million landmines left in the rice paddies and forest. Mines were the weapons of choice for the Khmer Rouge forces, a socialist terrorist group that envisioned a pure Cambodian race and sought to rid the country of chinese, vietnamese, muslim cham and hilltribes in the late 1970s. The mines were designed to maim, not kill, thereby causing economic burden for the government.

The Khmer children are quite beautiful, small with heart-shaped faces and dark almond eyes. Begging is an art form here. Late one night, a little boy came up to me, held my hand lightly and began to sob. I brought him a several other children into the 24h convenience store (yes, Cambodia is more convenient than Grenada) and told them each to pick something from the shelves. What did they all reach for? Milk formula, most likely for their little brothers and sisters.

The temples are more poetic than I can ever be. What I will tell you: they are supernatural beings themselves, simply majestic. I spent two days tuk-tuking around to each of them and hiking through their labyrinth walls of red clay dirt and tangled vines. This is where Tomb Raider was filmed. I am a blonde Lara Croft armed with a camera. My pictures say the rest.

I took a boat ride past the floating village en route to Battambang. This is Siem Reap's version of a ghetto, occupied 80 percent by Vietnamese. I asked my tuk tuk driver, Lam, to go with me and bought him his ticket which cost one third the price of mine. I wanted to ask him some questions. First about his family. Lam is the second of eight and from a village north of here. Did he go to university? "No, too expensive. But we pay my sister to go. She youngest." The government doesn't subsidize education, nor does it provide loans. We floated past houses on the water with families of 8-12 inside, swinging on hammocks with children playing on the floor. There is no front wall to these homes; their lives are completely on display for foreigner like myself to observe. I watched Korean tourists take pictures of me in my boat and suddenly felt very uncomfortable taking pictures myself. What a violation of privacy I committed.

I asked Lam if he's ever been out of Cambodia. Oh yes, he told me, he's been up north (where he's from), to Phnom Penh and to Battambang lots of times. All of these places are in Cambodia. He asked me if I went to Thailand. "Do you have any baht?"he asked. No, I don't, I said. But I have US dollars. "You American?" For two days he thought I was British.

We drifted past a floating grocery store, a mechanic, a church, several schools, a hospital. These structures are buoyant on old tires, barrels and stacks of pipes. A few years ago the Vietnamese government built a basketball court near the school. It is fenced in so the ball isn't lost to the murky water. The court is packed with children. I asked Lam why the Vietnamese came to Cambodia, which is considered a poorer country. He shrugged and told me that they pay the government for ID cards. I couldn't seem to get an answer to why they've relocated. I did read that Cambodians call Vietnamese youn, or "savages from the north." Possibly those living here are outcasts in Vietnam? Does Vietnam have a caste system I'm unaware of? I have yet to find out.

We ended up in Lake Tonle Sap where locals are paddling around selling waffles and fruit and soft drinks to the tourist boats. I bought a banana and asked Lam how the pollution affected his profession as a tuk tuk driver. Again, he shrugged and said people were masks. Many people do. In addition to the typical non sterile hospital masks people sport, some wear designer cloth ones with hip designs. I'd also like to note that you do not need a license to drive a motorcycle here. As in Thailand (and I'm guessing everywhere in se asia), you see whole families of four and five riding one moto or someone balancing a huge load of cargo on their bike. Traffic is never boring.

I asked Lam if the children begging on the streets were part of the slave trade. "What is slave?" he asked me. I tried to clarify. "Do people buy and sell the children?" He laughed. "No, they just poor!"

"You know the American actress Angelina Jolie?" I asked. Lam nodded. "What do people think of her?" Lam smiled and said they like her a lot. "I mean what do they think of her adopting a Cambodian child and taking him to the United States?" Lam shrugged and said,""She should have got a Vietnamese." Is that a green light for the adoption of Cambodian children? Don't worry Pop, I intend to fly back to the US alone.

"You want to see Crocodile farms?" Lam asked me.
"Yes, I would love to see the crocodile farms, " I replied.