My new resolution is not to travel during inclement weather conditions.

Hey everyone!

After a great few weeks travelling with my father around South West China I'm at last returning home!

Unfortunately a typhoon has put a bit of a kink in my plans! I was due to take off this evening and arrive home tomorrow morning, but now I should take off tomorrow morning and arrive tomorrow afternoon.

At the moment I'm holed up in my hotel room surfing the internet and eating room service. My plans for a shopping trip to use up my left over Hong Kong currency have had to be put on hold since all the shops have been closed and Hong Kong has pretty much come to a standstill!

Anyone care to make a donation?

We are hearing terrible things at the moment from the parts of China affected by the earthquake. Some of our colleagues have been evacuated from their college after their apartment building collapsed. They had to stay at the local football stadium. They have now been taken to the nearest city, but their students are still living outside for the time being, with no real shelter or sanitation.

The Amity Foundation (the people I work for) are organising disaster relief across Sichuan, Gansu and Sha'anxi provinces, and they already have plans in place for emergency aid as well as the future rehabilitation efforts. If anyone would like to donate to their emergency relief fund then please contact me so I can email you a form with their bank details on it. You can also donate via paypal here: http://www.amityfoundation.org/wordpress/?page_id=55.

If anyone would like to see the Amity Foundation plan of action for this disaster before they make a donation then send me an email and I'll forward that on to you.

I aten't dead yet!

Just wanted to let everyone at home know that Yizhou has not been affected by the Sichuan earthquake, so all is well here!

My students felt the tremors and came to class all twitchy, but I didn't feel anything at all! Of course when I got back to my flat I found some of my books had fallen over and my laundry was on the floor, so obviously there were some small quakes here, but I just didn't notice. Shows how sensitive I am!

Other Amity teachers have been affected, but no-one too seriously, so we are all grateful for that.

My thoughts go out to all those in Sichuan, especially in the badly hit areas. Some of my students come from there so of course they are very worried.

Landmines and Killing Fields

Warning: some may find the following stories upsetting

After an extensive visit of the Angkor Wat our tour turned to a more serious examination of Cambodia’s past. We’d already been confronted with the reality of cleared mine-fields, but nothing could prepare Janette, Susan and me for going to the Siem Reap War Museum. It was filled with the normal ‘war’ type artefacts: tanks, machine guns, helicopters etc, but what really hit home were the experiences related to us by our guide. He first showed us his artificial leg (his leg having been blown off by a landmine), invited us to feel the ball-bearing still lodged in his arm from shrapnel from a different landmine, and explained that he had been blinded in one eye from yet another landmine. However this was nothing compared to the loss of his wife a couple of years ago, she’d been killed by a landmine when out collecting mushrooms.

Our guide showed us the various kinds of landmines with his own appraisal of them.

Bulgaria made: bad, they only stay active for 3 or 4 years.

US and China made: good, they last forever.

Our dose of reality continued when we arrived in Phnom Penh. We went to Tuol Sleng, a prison camp where more than 20,000 people were held before being executed. While they were being held the inmates were tortured for the names of anyone they knew. Inside the rooms there are bloodstains on the walls and ceilings. Basically the Khmer Rouge policy seems to have been to imprison and execute anyone who knew the inmate. This included all family even small children. There are 6,000 photos of the inmates of Tuol Sleng up on the walls of the prison, including foreigners. Looking into the eyes of the young children is particularly haunting.

From Tuol Sleng we went on to the killing fields (Choeung Ek) themselves, literally fields just outside the city where around 20,000 people were buried having been executed. Bullets were too precious to waste on executions so axes, knives and bamboo sticks were more commonly used. Children were battered against trees.

It was horrific, and in stark contrast to the beauty and serenity of the Angkor temples. However I feel it’s important to see these places and see what’s left of the past if only to understand the present and what’s still going on in the world.

The Angkor Wat

The main reason for a trip to Siem Reap and Cambodia is to see the temples of Angkor built between the 8^th and 13^th centuries. Angkor means capital, and indeed the temples formed part of the old capital before it was abandoned in the 15^th century.

It was truly spectacular, the buildings looked like something out of Tomb Raider or Indiana Jones – hang on, they ARE the temples out of Tomb Raider and Indiana Jones! You didn’t have to imagine saffron robed monks walking around, there WERE saffron robed monks walking around!

Of course we did the very touristy thing of seeing the main temple – Angkor Wat, at sunrise, which my photographs failed to capture adequately! Still it was an amazing experience. I really enjoyed seeing the silhouettes of the wild monkeys run over the buildings.

Some of the temples have been well restored, while others are still early on in the process. A decision has been made to leave one temple as it is, being reclaimed by the jungle, this was the one where Tomb Raider was filmed. It’s weird to see huge trees grow up around the walls and through windows. I’m just glad that there aren’t any tigers as there were when they originally started restoring these temples!

Near the Angkor temples was an orphanage that we visited. I have to say that the children there looked much better cared for than the kids outside. Something that really surprised me was how good their oral English is and how confident they are at using it. Coming from China where the children are very reluctant to use English at all it’s quite astonishing that in a country far more disadvantaged the children have a higher level of English – maybe it’s the access to the foreign tourists that the Chinese children lack.

Journey to Siem Reap

We set off from our hotel in Bangkok early on the second day of our tour. The road to Cambodia was fairly easy going and it gave us all a chance to get to know each-other, Susan the Unilever marketer, Janette the engineering document controller, Laurence the dentist and Peta the para legal were in my minibus.

Once we crossed the border things began to change. I was able to get my Cambodian visa online, which was great. This may give the impression that Cambodia’s immigration control would be more advanced than that of countries where the internet has yet to make an impact on visa issuing. However this would be a misguided assumption! While Thailand’s border control was in an air-conditioned, queue encouraging sturdy building, Cambodia’s immigration seemed to be housed in a rickety sauna of a hut where visitors had to negotiate an apparent huddle of people that slowly formed lines when approaching the desk.

It became more obvious that we were in a less developed country as we got further from the check point. Apparently while there is money for a new road to be built from the border to Siem Reap this is being ignored while airline companies continue to bribe officials, making the only comfortable way to travel between Thailand and Siem Reap by air. We had been warned that the road was bumpy, and it was. Not the bumpiest that I’ve been on but certainly the longest bumpy road that I’ve travelled. The land that we travelled along was the flattest I’ve seen, you could see for miles until the land merged with the sky. It was also very dry and dusty, we watched locals try and fish in what seemed to us to be large puddles, and thin bony cattle look for grass.

Our journey was not made easier when my transport woes continued with our bus breaking down. Our bus driver got on with fixing it while we met some locals who were as interested in us as we were with them. They had the traditional house on stilts, presumably good in the wet season and for keeping the house cool, and a water pump recently installed by a Scandinavian charity. We all had a go pumping water, and chatted with the three school boys that we met. Two of them were twins and we were invited to guess how old they were. The general consensus was around nine or ten, so imagine our surprise when we found out they were fifteen years old! A life-time of lack of nutrition certainly appeared to be having an impact.

Eventually our bus was mended and we arrived in Siem Reap.

Thailand

Arriving in Bangkok airport was amazing, not least because I was wearing thermals, a jumper, coat, hat, scarf and gloves, and everyone else was wearing shorts. It was necessary to be bundled up though as I had come from Guilin where it was snowing for the first time in a gazillion million years (possibly an exaggeration) and where they have no heating. I'd shivered all through the flight, but was boiled once I'd arrived! Unfortunately I then had to carry my winter stuff all across SE Asia, but these are the minor trifles of travelling from a cold climate to a warm one.

I have to say that I wasn’t amazingly impressed with Bangkok, it was so polluted and chaotic it didn’t help relax me at all! However on my first morning I met a lovely girl called Alex who invited me to go along with her to a place called Ayutthaya, the old capital of Thailand. This was much more up my street and had lots of great things such as elephants to photograph! I had my photo taken with a baby elephant who was very playful and kept sucking on my arm!

The next day we visited the Grand Temple, it was packed but still very impressive.

That night I met up with my tour group. I had decided that I didn’t want to travel alone around Asia, so instead booked myself onto an Intrepid Travel tour of Cambodia, starting in Bangkok and finishing in Saigon. It was great to meet up with lots of new people from all over the English speaking world – UK, US, Canada, Australia, as well as our Cambodian tour guide – Yong. They were a great bunch of people and I really enjoyed travelling with them. That evening we went for a meal and three of us single girls went along to have a Thai massage, which certainly felt like it was doing you good!

Happy New Year

Have just celebrated Tet!

Happy New Year Everyone!