As the title of this entry suggests, Cambodia has all three. It's a strange mixture of glorious temples, stunning sunsets, bus loads of tourists, an unusual blend of locals, and a horrific past.

The Good
Yesterday was my second day of temple trekking. Angkor has over 200 temples in all, but most people will see only a handful during their stay. Our goal today was to shoot for six temples.
We started the morning at Bayon. A lot of people told me that Bayon was their favorite temple, so I figured that we should start there. I was skeptical. I mean, after Angkor Wat and Ta Prohm the day before, could Bayon really be that great? Holy crap, it was. My favorite temple by far. Better than Angkor Wat. Amazing. So Bayon is a bit of a mystery. It has these huge towers with 56 carved smiling faces, but no one knows what the faces are there for. It's got these great little passage ways to climb through and everywhere you look, these giant smiling faces are embedded in the stone towers. Really, really cool. After Bayon, we hit Baphoun, Preah Khan,
Ta Som, East Mebon, and Banteay Kdei. All great, wondrous temples, but, I have to be honest with you, by the sixth temple and the fifth hour of walking around temples and taking pictures, not to mention dealing with the scores of Korean, Chinese, and Japanese tour buses, I was done. I was templed out.

So, because it was hot and I was tired, I spent the afternoon back at the hotel poolside. Swimming. Reading. Ordering room service. I know, it's a hard life.

Today I booked a trip out to the Tonle Sap lake, the largest freshwater lake in SE Asia and home to countless floating fishing villages. We visited the village of Chong Khneas. They live in floating houses, attend floating school (the kids have to learn how to paddle a boat very young so they can get to school), shop at the floating store. It was very interesting to see. But it also made me sad. Because what they called floating houses, I would call floating shacks. It is poverty to a degree that I'm not sure I have ever seen before. The children seem very happy, but I wonder if they will ever see anything outside of this village. I felt a bit guilty. Most of us are so incredibly blessed, so fortunate to have so much. These people have almost nothing. It seems a bit unfair that we have so much, and they so little, just because we happened to be born in different countries. Which brings me to.....

The Bad
Cambodia is a country where men are treated very differently than women. Here it is okay, expected even, for men to smoke, drink, and gamble. These same practices are highly frowned upon for women. A country plagued by domestic violence and divorce, where it is estimated that 75% of men will cheat on their wives. David told me a story yesterday about his own wife. Two years ago, he said, after his wife gave birth to their third child, he told her that she was getting "much too fat". He told her that she needed to lose 25 pounds (she weighed 140 pounds at the time, he said). When I inquired (as tactfully as possible), what happened next, he smiled and said that she did it. She stopped eating completely and now weighs just around 100 pounds, which he seemed very happy about. He laughed when he told this story. A bit mortified, I told him that if I were his wife, I would have punched him in the face, and so would, I believe, almost every American woman. I mean, this woman birthed your three children and he thought it was amusing that she stopped eating just because he told her to. I was offended for all women, but did my best to keep it to myself. It's the culture here.

The Ugly
I had heard about a "movie theater" in the night market that showed films about Cambodian history from the Dutch guys I met in Vietnam. I say "movie theater" because it is really just a good size projection screen with some chairs set up around it. Still, I have always found history interesting, and I wasn't doing anything else, so I figured, what the heck? The movie I watched was about Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. At this point, I would normally say to you - go google it if you are interested, but I'm going to do a very brief history lesson just because I think many people, especially my age, are not aware of this part of Cambodian history. The Khmer Rouge were the Communist group who ruled Cambodia from 1975-1979. Their leader was Pol Pot, a man whose radical ideas led to the genocide of anywhere between 2 and 4 million people. The goal of the party was to enact a radical social reform process aimed at creating a purely agrarian-based society. They eliminated religion, money, education, business, and medicine in an effort to return Cambodia to an "everyone is equal" rural farming country. They forced people from their homes and moved them out to collective farms, making them slaves, and forcing them to work for long hours in terrible conditions. They tortured and killed anyone who spoke against them, anyone who was suspected of supporting Capitalist ideals, and almost every intellectual in the entire population, including the people who wore glasses. Almost one quarter of the Cambodian people were killed. To save on bullets, most were killed by pick axe to the back of the neck and buried in mass graves. It is estimated today that 75% of Cambodia's population is under the age of 35. The government does not require that history teachers teach about the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge, so the history must be passed down by word of mouth. It was the most lethal regime of the 20th century.

That's it. I'm done...hope it wasn't too boring for you to listen to me ramble. I am a bit over half way through this trip, and for those of you who are reading along, thank you for coming this far with me. Again, I miss you guys so much and will see you all soon. Stay well.