#8 CAMBODIA

Cambodia is a beautiful country, and I've been lucky enough to visit it three times in my life. Of course, it helped that I lived next door in Thailand for five years, but in retrospect, I probably should have visited a few more times back then!

Angkor Wat

Well, the first time I went to Cambodia was in 2002 when I backpacked through Southeast Asia for a few weeks before returning to China for a second college term abroad. I was traveling with a new friend, Zoran, who I'd met the previous year studying in Nanjing. We did all the typical things backpackers do in Cambodia, including going to the Killing Fields and S21, where I was horrified to see the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge's genocide up close with my own eyes. We also took a boat along the Tonle Sap between Siem Reap and Phnom Penh, ate a lot of banana pancakes, and marveled at the incredible temples in Angkor. Looking back at my hundreds of photos from this trip, they're mostly all just a mishmash of contorted trees wrapped around stone blocks - a reminder of how amateur photography used to be in the pre-digital days.

Angkor temples and trees

The Bayon

The second time was in 2007 when I needed to do a visa run from Thailand, so I planned with some friends to make a weeklong trip out of it and go to the beach and revisit Angkor just for the hell of it. So we went to Kep and Kampot down on the southern coast, where we bought lots of black pepper and ate spicy crabs on the beach. We also went to Rabbit Island, searching for an isolated tropical paradise, which we found almost too successfully, considering there was nobody there, and we hadn't brought any food. However, as luck would have it, we did find one lady who could cook us an errant chicken at the exorbitant price of $25, which we grudgingly agreed to and quickly devoured. Starvation can be a strong motivator, we learned!

Wild and tropical Rabbit Island

Beach vibes, Rabbit Island

The third time was in 2011, when I accompanied a group of environmental and human rights activists from the Mekong region traveling from Phnom Penh to Can Tho, Vietnam, for a workshop on transboundary cooperation for the Mekong. This was a pretty cool trip, even though it was for work, because the people I was with were incredible and as serious about eating good food as they were about saving the environment!

Maybe I should end this here to bleed into my post on Vietnam, where I'll have all the pics from the rest of this trip. But, on the other hand, maybe I don't even need a conclusion to this post, and I'll leave myself open to a fourth visit back to Cambodia someday.

Monks at Angkor

Angkor temples

Bayon faces

Angkor feet