Cambodia

We first flew to Phnom Penh.  Little children would crowd our busses as we were getting on and off. They were trying to sell bracelets, postcards, little trinkets, or were just asking for money.  There were just so many of them, and they were so young.  Our tour guide instructed us, for various reasons, not to buy anything or give them money.  I gave one of them the Coke I was drinking.  I just couldn’t drink it in front of them.  We visited temples and palaces, and had a boat ride on the Mekong.  There were floating villages at the edges.  These were illegal immigrants that didn’t own land so they just built their homes to float on the river.  We went to the Genocide Museum and the Killing Fields.  There just aren’t any words to describe this experience.  Our tour guide was named Soca, and he lost almost his entire family in the genocide when he was 6 years old.  You could tell it was difficult for him to be in those places, trying to describe the situation to a group of people with no clue about it.  Standing in the entrance of the Killing Fields he stopped our group and said you and I are all standing here in the same place but are feeling very differently.
        We took a flight to Angkor and saw the Temples the next day.  I woke up at 445 in the morning to go to Angkor Wat and see the sunrise.  When we got there it was still pitch black, you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face.  The only light came from the tour guide’s flashlight up at the front of the group.  I was just looking at my feet so I wouldn’t trip in the dark, but then I stopped and looked up.  I was standing on the front steps of Angkor Wat and hadn’t even realized it.  The massive temple was looming over me, just a black silhouette in front of an almost black sky.  The group sat on the lawn waiting for the sun to come up.  I went in my own direction, which was towards the temple.  I went and explored the temple by myself just before the sunrise, so I could see just a little bit.  There were many long corridors and colonnades to choose from.  The one I chose ended up having some sort of animal at the end that was making a weird noise.  It was probably just a bird, but it was creepy yet somehow peaceful the way it echoed through the darkness towards me.  There was light coming in near the end of the corridor.  I walked towards it, it was a doorway.  When I went through I was standing behind a do not enter sign, oops.  I was looking at the group of people sitting on the lawn taking pictures of the sunrise over the temple.  They were so far away no one could see me.  I wonder if I was in any of their pictures.  I didn’t want to miss the sunrise so I quickly found my way back out of the temple.  There were other smaller temples in front of Angkor Wat.  I walked over to one of those temples and sat my camera down on the ruin for some long exposure photographs of the sunrise. 
        Later in the day we toured the Ta Prohm Temple.  There were huge trees growing all over this temple.  The tree roots looked like they were spilling down the sides of the ruins.  I just need to put pictures up.  I’m going to look for internet later today.  Currently I am sitting on the ship waiting to go through customs, and to be let into India.   After seeing Ta Prohm we went back to Angkor Wat.  We entered through a different gate then we had that morning.  There we monkeys everywhere.  I bought bananas from a lady on the side of the road and fed them to the monkeys. 
        The heat and humidity was stifling.  I’ve never been so incredibly hot before in my life.  There was a huge staircase that everyone, including me, wanted pictures on.  I sprinted up and down those stairs about ten times to take pictures and to pose for my own.  After viewing Angkor Wat in the daylight we went to Angkor Thom.  Cambodia was amazing.  This is a short and sweet ending to my Cambodia update because I’m running out of time.  Hopefully I’ll be stepping off the ship into Chennai within the half hour.