How to quit your job and travel around the world

EDITORS NOTE: DUE TO TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES OF THIRD WORLD INTERNET, I AM UNABLE TO LOAD PHOTOS FOR YOUR VIEWING PLEASURE.

If I had no attention from men in Thailand, I think I now have 20 Cambodian boyfriends. It is young perfect love. They smile at me with their famous ear-to-ear Khmer smiles and I smile back. That's it. True love. What can I tell you. It might also be the salt air of Kep, the magical ghost town we've just spent four days at. The town, about 3 hours south of Phnom Penh, was once where the well-healed Frenchcolonials went for beach holiday before they left the country in 1954. Their villas are now skeletal in their remains, overgrown and abandoned; torched and dismantled by first war, and now time. The effect gives the sleepy beach town something of a ghost town feel. This was amplified by the fact that there were maybe less than six Westerners (us included) there, no power during the day and apparently free flowing "sauvignon blanc" (same bottle every night, refilled in a back room with yummy, headachey rice brew). We stayed at the fanciest place in town, which had an irresistable swimming pool. Our cabin was wonderful too, until the second night when a little visitor called a Gecko took up noisy residence in the wall. Man, those fuckers are LOUD. We perfomed a gecko-cide with a plume from a bird-of-paradise. It was a messy affair. One word about our hotel -it was run by a flaming French man, who was an expert in the Funan, the people who were there BEFORE the Khmers back around BC something. He had an entire stable of Cambodian pool boys, who kept fit with homemade barbells. They could not kill the gecko, so we had to take the matter into our own hands. Karmically, I felt some remorse, but Rebecca hasn't wavered in her contempt for the gecko. She swears it said "Redrum" to us. (EDS NOTE: Rebecca disagrees with this characterization of the Gecko incident and is now having remorse. She claims.)

The thing to do in Kep, and I thank our friend Sunny who lived in Cambodia for a year for tipping us off, is to eat crab at the elevated platform restaurants on the tideline. You ask for crab and off someone runs to the trap to get some fresh ones. Fried upwith green peppercorns, you will never have anything better. Also, took a boat to an outlying island, Rabbit Island, where we asked for chicken. Two minutes later the dogs and kids took off running through the yard to catch our lunch.

Today, we took a car over to Sinhoukville, which the beachy party town to the west. It's a completely different scene - little girls running all over the beach to sell you bracelets, little cooked lobsters, manicures, whatever. Now we're going to find ice cream ...

Rebecca outside the Renaske Hotel.



Photos from the genocide museum. Up to 14,000 Cambodians passed through here under the Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1978. Almost no one survived.



It's a whole new world today - I've met up with my friend Rebecca Myers, a Canadian by way of New York and she's an editor at Time Canada magazine. We arrived in Phnom Penh, Cambodia from Bangkok this morning and will travel together for the next two weeks. We checked into this colonial era hotel called the Renaske, which probably is a lousy deal at $20 each, but the building is so charming we went for it anyway. It's near the river, and we found on our first outing the Foreign Correspondents Club, so we went for coffee immmediatly overlooking the Tonle Sap river.

After a nap, we set out for the Tuol Sleng S-21 genocide museum, which was a former high school used as a torture place and prison by the Khmer Rouge. It's extremely upsetting to say the least. Tuk tuk drivers just sort of attach themselves to you and the one who took us to the museum then also drove us around to this highly claustorphobic and sweaty indoor market called the Russian Market. Would have spent more time inside, but the heat was too oppressive, so we had beers instead.

It is extremely poor here - and it's disconcerting to see people driving Lexus SUVs and then children running around naked in muddy streets. When we left the genocide museum a beggar with severe burns all over his face latched on to us, so it's defintely a little work to brace myself for this new country, especially after the ease and comfort (and richness) of Thailand.

I have only read the cursory history of the country that was in the guidebook, but it's pretty stunning. All of it. Though everything seesm booming now, and tourism increasing, I do have the gut feeling that things could change really quickly if the conditions presented themselves. It's only been about a decade since the Khmer Rouge was outlawed. Who knows. To comprehend this city, it seems you have to suspend disbelief in the history and accept the city as it is today, and then again go through the process again tomorrow.

Ok, off for showers and then out to have drinks at one of the city's many expat watering holes.

They do make wine in Thailand! This vendor was selling glasses of fruit and herb wine for 20 bhat at the Sunday market in Chiang Mai. They had fruits of all types, but I had a glass of lychee fruit white wine to cool off. It was a fairly uncomplicated vintage, but all the same I was happy to find a glass of cold white wine in the middle of the roasting afternoon.



The Sunday market in Chiang Mai is something to see if you come to Thailand. It unfolds over dozens of streets and into all the neighboring courtyards, such as this one. I had a small shopping episode despite myself and finally bought some silk handbags, fisherman pants (these popular wrap around pants everyone wears) and tasted all sorts of street treats. The market was definitely THE place to be for both tourists and Thais on Sunday night. I hung around the market until I caught the 10:45 p.m. flight back to Bangkok.


Before I left Pai, I went out to the Ma Paeng waterfall on Saturday afternoon and this monk was sitting in the woods in his saffron robes, sort of like spiritual cameoflage. The season is disconcerting because it looks like fall here - all the trees are truning orange and yellow and losing their leaves, but it's about 30-35 degrees C. In fact Thailand is heading into hot season. They have hot, cool and rainy.



According to the sign, Thailand's biggest mango tree is 3 km outside of Pai.