Call me lazy....

The pace has quickened lately. This is my lame excuse for having not updated this page in a while. My apologies to the friends, family, acquaintances, fans, internet addicts, detractors, and faithful groupies who no doubt monitor this page closely and have been awaiting this post with bated breath. I shant keep you waiting any longer. The last three weeks, in brief:

1) Zooming around Pursat province on a moto. My official function was to shadow the RACHA people as they launched the insurance thing in a new area. It would have been a lot more edifying if I had anything that resembled competency in Kmer. But I don’t. So I took to wandering the village, which was fabulous. A lot of the kids had literally never seen a white person before, so I was a smash hit. When the launch was done, I took off on the moto, following a rural lady around as she was selling insurance and telling people about the relative merits of using birth spacing. Not knowing Kmer was less of a crutch, I got to amuse myself by distracting the infants and children while their mothers listened attentively, which suited me perfectly. On top of that, I was staying for free at the RACHA guest house, using their motos and spending time with their staff, who were so pleasant in every possible way. People here are amazingly welcoming and generous. There was a mango tree in front of the house, so every morning I was presented with a fresh mango for breakfast. Yum!

2) The ladies in the office invited me to see a traditional Kmer dance. The Kmer rouge tried to exterminate the art, but it is being revived, slowly. Cambodian dance is slow and precise—they move with deliberate, graceful steps and tell the story with their hands. The traditional costumes are fabulous, with sparkling beads and smooth silk. And the ladies in the office are so good to me, showing me a culture I may not have found on my own.

3) This is me on the top of a mountain. Awesome.

4) You can also go inside the same mountain. It was a phenomenal place—a Buddhist wat marked the entrace to the cave, which lead to a circular glen inside the mountain, lined with smaller caves, wherein there were several smaller shrines and things. The mountain was pretty much hollow, there were caves everywhere—some had swimming holes, some reeked of bats, and one was used as an extermination site during the Pol Pot regime. The kids who were our guides called that one the ghost cave. It is eerie how the past can sneak up on you where you least expect it.

5) Welcome to paradise. Unfortunately, we could only stay for a night. But this is what tropical islands were supposed to be like, before tourism ruined them. Solitude. The sound of the waves. Cool, salty sea breeze. The most beautiful sunset you can imagine. Fresh tropical fruits to your hears content. A hammock strung between palm trees. Cows, pigs and goats roaming freely between the thatched bungalows. Ours was equipped with a mesh hammock, a bed, and a single bare light bulb, and I wouldn’t change it for the world.

6) School has begun in ernest—by that I mean, I have 12 credits of work to complete in the next month or so, and this while traveling throughout southeast Asia. Fun stuff, as a course on world religions couples readings (which in theory I should have already completed), talking personally with religious leaders and my extremely knowledgeable professor, and visiting ancient religious sites.

7) Faced with my complete inability to communicate, Ashley and I found ourselves a language tutor. Chhinn is a fabulous fellow that we met at church. He just got off a mission in California and was looking for a productive way to fill the one month before he goes back to the states to start nursing school. He’s been helping us every night to learn basic words and grammar, and he pretty much rocks.

8) Thanks to the Cambodian knack for simile, I’ve learned a lot about myself that I didn’t know before. I have hair like gold, a pointy nose, and teeth like pearls. My face looks like a doll’s face. And the hair on my arms looks like pigs hair. Nice.

Tomorrow morning, I take off for Thailand, Myanmar, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia (tourist edition), Malaysia, and Indonesia. All things told, it will be just under one month of travel. It should be fabulous. I’ll try to post pictures periodically, but no promises.