Holiday in Cambodia

Greetings from Sihanoukville, Cambodia's answer to the Euro-crowded, Thai beaches. Barb and I are enjoying a few days of relaxing in the sun before we head north to check out the temples of Ankor.

The beach is beautiful, but ridiculously hot. Also, I had about a half dozen women randomly touch my legs today and cluck about my shaving habits, all in an effort to convince me to have my legs threaded on the beach. I didn't take offense after I saw them doing this to every other woman on the beach, too. And, I got off easy. Someone just yanked out thread and started trying to demonstrate on Barb.

Fun on the beach aside, the one thing that you continuously observe here in Cambodia is the pervasive poverty. For anyone who has been to an impoverished Caribbean country on vacation, imagine something ten times more dire. It's really incredibly sad, particularly since many of our interactions are with children selling things or begging for money.

Barb and I befriended one eleven-year-old girl this afternoon who was selling bracelets on the beach. Unbelievably smart, funny, and fluent in English, this girl was not in school, but spent the day going up and down the beach from person to person. (There are many other children like her.) We learned later in the day that both her parents had died, and that her five brothers were home while she was working all day. At one point, she laid down on my beach chair next to me and took a nap for a while. It was both cute and sad.

And here I thought the beach was going to be uplifting after trips earlier this week to the War Museum in Vietnam, and the Killing Fields in Cambodia (one site of Khmer Roughe genocide). Pithier stories coming soon, I promise...

In the meantime, I think it's time for a drink at the bar up the street called the Monkey Republic. (Fantastic name.) Speaking of which, yesterday I saw some monkeys randomly hanging out on a building in Phnom Penh, which I was not at all expecting. I had no idea there were monkeys here. Lizards and malaria-infested mosquitos - yes. But monkeys? I dared not imagine. A definite bonus (although I was slightly disappointed that neither monkey had on a fez).