If I wasn’t so familiar with Cambodia, I might have been afraid. Samantha, convinced that “being in the forest” would be frightening to me, asked over the phone “are you afraid?” and I assured her honestly, not at all. For starters, I wasn’t exactly “in the forest”! Listening to music on the bus I’d missed … More It’s Calling Me Home
When you get as old as me everyone starts to look young. Over 50% of the Cambodian population are under the age of 24 years old. Coming from a country where 40% of the population are over 50 years old, it is no wonder that I spend my life wondering why I’m surrounded by twelve … More We Can Survive Another Day
The first case of HIV in Cambodia was detected in 1991. In March 1992 the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) began arriving in the country. Over 20,000 military and civilian personnel from 100 countries were deployed to oversee normalisation of the country as decades of civil war was officially brought to an end. … More Wat Opot
All our knowledge has it’s origins in our perceptions Leonardo da Vinci I regularly tell people in Cambodia that I come from a rich country, but that I am not rich. Each time I hear these words from my mouth, I wonder how someone from a poor country who has never experienced societal prosperity, processes … More This Week’s Perceptions
As a young child I remember seeing footage on the television of scenes such as this coming from Cambodia. My enduring memories include a guy called Pol Pot, said by Mum to be “a very bad man”, and soldiers in black pyjamas with a checked scarfe. With the exception of the occasional elderly person, the … More The Krama
Most evenings I sit in a particular spot beside the Mekong River watching the evening cruisers go by on their variously populated motorbikes as I sip a glass of white wine. That’s a $2 luxury I can afford to spend on myself among the billions of other luxuries I take for granted in this lucky … More Dilemma of Departure
If you are interested in Cambodia then you definitely need to know about this guy, whose real name is Dr Beat Richner. He is a Swiss paediatrician who first travelled to Cambodia as a young graduate in 1974 with the Red Cross. He left when the Khmer Rouge seized power in 1975. In 1991 he … More Doctor Beatocello
On my first full day back in town Chom was taking a day off work to travel the 60km to his wife’s village, to pick her up and bring her home. He works up to 18 hours a day, six days a week now, in two jobs (tuk tuk driving and managing the hotel I … More Rock ‘n Roll
If you wait until you can do everything for everybody, instead of something for somebody, you’ll end up doing nothing for nobody. These words appear at the end of a short video currently doing the rounds on Facebook. In it, a young homeless man in a ripped t-shirt stands on a cold Manhattan street, holding … More “Just Stop”
It’s not really Paris, it’s an airport hotel on the outskirts of the city. Even Paris can be less than ordinary. In a few hours I’ll be winging my way to Phnom Penh. Thanks to the situation evolving with Paula, I finally picked Cambodia. It was an agonising decision thanks to the incredible experiences I’ve … More Pontificating in Paris
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