Thank Vishnu there are no trains in Cambodia

Only buses.  Crappy ones.  And it was impossible to get on the overnight bus to Siam Reap (the city adjacent the temples at Angkor), since there are only two companies in town that travel to Siam Reap after 1pm.  So I had to wait overnight and take the next day's bus (a twelve person minivan whose trunk fell open and spilled everyone's bags as it pulled away from my hotel).  At least the tour guide coincidentally sitting next to me spoke a little English, and pointed out a few things to me, like the crops burning in the fields to clean them before the next season, or the massive townhouses outside of Siam Reap, which the guide claimed were owned by people making money off of Western investment into the tourism industry in Siam Reap.  I arrived at the New Angkorland hotel after sundown, and called to set up a tuk tuk ride for a dawn trek to the temples.  Angkor Wat tomorrow morning.  

This Damn Monkey Slapped Me in the Arm

So Wat Phnom ("Mountain Temple") and its surrounding park are pretty breathtaking.  The temple (right) is one of the tallest structures in the relatively low-lying city, and its hilltop placement means it overlooks most of the city from its northern vista.  The temple itself is in the spirit of the rest of the capital city - definitively Buddhist, but with some sense of context of country.  The most notable part of the park to me is the landscape over which the temple looks:  the giant clock built into the ground is the recumbent centerpiece of a sort of open-air zoo.  I was distracted from the elephant-feeding station (US2 for a bushel of bananas to feed them) by the bevy of monkeys running freely about the park.  I saddled up next to a group of monks feeding a family of monkeys (I tried to come up with a clever pun for this scenario, but decided the sentence was funny enough on its own);  the above picture was taken with "mama monkey" before I got a little too close to her little one (below).  Once I snapped a pic of her baby, she sized me up for a brief moment, showed her teeth, and quickly slapped me on my uncovered forearm - and bear in mind, this uncovered forearm had just spent the day in the deadly Cambodian sun, unprotected.  Needless to say I was in some pain, and my stream of expletives translated well enough to scare off the monkeys, the monks, and just about anyone else near me in the park.  Touche, monkey.  Next time I'll admire the cuteness of your progeny from afar.

     

Mike Eats Ice Cream; Gives It the Thumbs Up

Unfortuately, I think my thumb got in the way here. 

[Edit: I lost the original of this picture, and had to retake it with a copy I found online, hence the grainy appearance.  The original thought, though, I assure you was knee-jerk.]

Pnom Penh is kinda small (or conversely, Mai Lynn is a big deal)

Special thanks to Mai Lynn Miller Nguyen (COL '07) for showing me around Phnom Penh.  As an editor/writer/apparently-all-things-to-all-people at AsiaLife magazine, she has her finger to the pulse of what's going on in Phnom Penh's current "cultural revolution" (no, not in the Chinese sense) - or I should say, westernization.  So once I'd finished my motorcycle derring-do during the days, I'd meet up with Mai Lynn (and her friends), who was happy to show me about as she checked out some new spots herself with an eye toward what to mention in her magazine (or so I gathered).  
My first night I received a text to meet at Metro on top of hotel Timbalaya, which happened to be 2 doors down from my hotel, on the riverfront boulevard Sisowath Quay.  I arrived late, though, and was only able to give the rooftop scene a glance before we headed to the Chinese House a little further uptown.  We bopped around at night to a pretty Western club scene - according to a couple conversations I had, foreign investment is pouring in, and those who are positioned to do so are making a penny for themselves.  One bar was a Miami-influenced "Copacabana," complete with outdoor beach and bottle service.  Another was a rock club, with '90's and '00's American music the featured tunes.  Each of my two nights out in Cambodia ended in a tuk-tuk ride where the rider was noticeably inebriated (or just flat-out crazy).  These nights out were fun, but also served to illustrate the beginnings of, and propensity toward, inequality in a developing economy being flooded with foreign money.  Is being Mumbai in 10 years a worthwhile goal or not?  To paraphrase myself paraphrasing Chubbs in my high school's senior yearbook quote:  Best of luck, Phnom Penh.  Best of luck.