Angkor Wat, Cambodia

Another 7 hour bus journey to Siem Reip. The landscape in Cambodia is beautiful. The poor country folk live in simple straw and wood houses on stilts surrounded by lush green tropical fruit trees and paddy fields. Really picturesque. Buffalo grazing or cooling off in the rice fields, small canoes fishing in the ponds. Unfortunately the poverty means that most children in htese areas never go to school, cannot afford clothes and onl;y get a little rice and fish to eat all day. From the age of 3 when they can barely speak the children are sent out to sell postcards, T shirts etc to tourists to earn a little for food. And the tourists spend all their time haggling the price down from 1 dollar to 0.75 dollars for a T shirt. Its really crazy, there are however 1300 NGO's here so I guess something must be happening. But it seems at the moment that the rich are getting richer, the poor, poorer and the people don't know what they can do to improcve the situation. On top of that there are the many maimed beggers, injured by landmines, which until recently were still a threat in the countryside. There is just a senhse of helplessness and i don't really know how the situation can be improved, well not until all the corruption stops anyway.

Anyway Angkor Wat temples, huge remails of Hindu and Buddhist temples built in the 10th Century were extraordinary as expected, hundreds of them in the muiddle of nowhere, some even had trees growing over them. Well I watched the sun coming up over them at 5.30 in the morning and stayed until sunset. The stone steps leading up to some of the temples were so steep, from the top you literally couldn't see the bottom or any of the steps below. Even I got vertigo and usually i love climbing!