contrary to the song, nobody here dresses in black. in fact, light colors are the premium with hot daytime sun and swarming insects after dark. i heard some bugs transmit malaria so i wear smears of deet and every day take these evil little antibiotic pills that kill my stomach. healthy, i suppose.  
 
arrived here on a cannonball run from thailand a week ago that included 22 plane/airport hours, five bus hours, four taxi hours, and a couple more on foot without stopping. turned out to be an effective strategy because i crashed the instant i found a bed, slept 18 hours, and awoke synchronized with SE Asia time (GMT +7). on the way into cambodia, not far from the border, i saw community fire management in action: four kids no older than 12 burning a rice field (~2 acres) with bare feet, hand tools and voice comms. amazing! 
 
first stop: siem reap, home to angkor wat, the largest religious structure in the world, surrounded by angkor thom, a massive archaeological park containing elaborate sandstone and granite temples that once headquartered the mighty khmer empire, which controlled most of southeast asia in the 10th thru 16th centuries. photos attached. siem reap is a dirty little frontier town set up like las vegas with two long strips of guest houses, bars and brothels, and an economy solely based on tourism. it seems that two of every three souls there are travelers, mostly australian. i rented a bicycle from a pharmacy and used it on the 5 to 15 mile round trips in and out of siem reap, depending on the day's destination. a very nice way to approach things and attain a sense of scale, smell, and sound.
 
traffic in cambodia is a lot like road warrior: a cross between nascar and world wrestling federation, where size and speed matter, and the small must be nimble to survive. one lapse of attention and squish - just like grape. but as a cyclist on the road you generally can count on two things: a warning honk and an escape shoulder. at one point i thought about ditching the road for the mapped trails, then remembered that this is one of the most landmined places on earth, and decided to soldier on in traffic.
 
i'm killing time now in phnom penh, waiting for my vietnamese visa to go valid in two days. anyone who's seen the killing fields knows the shadow that looms over this place, as the maoist khmer rouge systematically depopulated the city from 1975-78 and forced people into the countryside to create "agrarian democracy." whole chunks of khmer cultural history literally were erased by pol pot with tactics not unlike those used by the afghan taliban (blow up buddha shrines, etc.). the hun sen government has its Extraordinary Chamber of the Cambodian Central Court (i can't wait til we have something like that in the US) working on a Khmer Rouge war crimes tribunal. my guest house is literally across the street from the tuol sleng genocide museum, formerly S-21, the infamous detention and torture center from which 15 to 20 thousand dissenters, intellectuals, artisans and even the torturers themselves were exported to the killing fields and mass graves at Choeung Ek. strangely, both places (the museum and the fields) are tourist attractions. we try not to thing about such things at bedtime. 
 
up next: the mekong delta.