All-Country Water Fight?? Yes, Please!

First priority: finding a bucket. The dinky little orange and blue squirt gun that only cost 34 Bhat just isn't going to cut it. Second priority: making friends with everyone by sneaking up behind them, dumping a deluge of cold water over their heads, and running away while laughing back at them.  They are usually in hysterics themselves by this point and, grabbing an even bigger bucket, they follow in hot pursuit. It doesn't take very long to become a sopping mess. 

This is the watered down (ha ha) version of the Thai New Year: Songkran. The water was not always thrown in such a heated fashion.  Instead, people used to pour only a small amount over each other as a gentle cleansing, a washing away of the old year and welcoming in the purity of the new. Now, however, after walking along the street for 5 minutes, I found myself forgetting there had ever been an old year. Water gushed along the main roads, huge stages had been erected for concerts that used the equivalent of fire hoses to spray the crowds, pick-up trucks roamed the town with a load of people in back tossing water at everyone in sight, and I scampered along the moat, dodging and weaving as I "made friends" with anyone who stood still long enough. I've never felt so purified in my life!

~Cerri

A Math Problem

Many people (myself among them) believe that through travel one can get as valuable an education as one can in a classroom. For example an English excercise might consist of: please list ten different ways to order "milk tea" (aka chai yen, masala tea, chai, black tea with milk, etc). Or a math problem might be: given the 3 currency exchange rates, your dinner costs $11 US dollars, you pay 400 Thai Baht, how much Cambodian Reil should you be given for change? This was a daily excercise for Cerri, Glenn (a fellow trekker who we met in Nepal), and I.

It has been a bit since we blogged, but our whirlwind trip to Cambodia sticks out in my mind. It was almost an afterthought to hop on the bus from Bangkok headed for the border and as we arrived the next day in front of the Angkor Wat temple complex we realized that we had no idea what significance this area held. Through our tour guide, we learned that the temple under restoration could be a symbol of Cambodia itself. Taking 37 years and 3.5 million people, it began as a Hindu temple dedicated to Vishnu, but was later changed to a Buddhist place of prayer when the official religion changed. It went through the war with Thailand in 1300AD and was again destroyed in the recent and bloody civil war in the 70s. You can still see the bullets in the wall from this recent war that took the lives of nearly one fourth of the population. As children sell copies of "First They Killed My Father" to tourists, countries from around the world are taking part in the temple's incredible restoration (basically a 3,000 stone 3D puzzle).
The friendly faces of the people that I met in my way too brief stay makes me wonder how the restoration of the people is coming along.