Back to Vietnam

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Life happened, and I realized it’s been over a year since I last updated the blog. That’s especially egregious because I still have a few photos from Asia to share. After leaving Cambodia Sam and I embarked on what was probably the highlight of the trip: a motorbike adventure through northern Vietnam. This was one of our boldest moves – neither of us were comfortable on the bikes and we rode to places much less developed than where we spent most of the trip – but we were rewarded with truly breathtaking scenery. Photos can’t do it justice, but I’ll try anyways.

Thanks so much to Tom at Vietnam Coracle for the route – this never would have happened without him.

As a bonus, here are a few photos from our last days in Hanoi, where we ate more bun cha and took in some traditional Vietnamese music (by which I mean Japanese punk).

Angkor Wat

It’s been another long break. After moving out to California, school started and life got busy again. New Year’s Day is putting me in the mood to create, so let’s get back into things. I don’t have a lot to say about Angkor Wat. It’s big, hot, and as impressive as people say it is. If you can visit someday I’d recommend it, but try to get to Phnom Penh too. If you’re going to enjoy the wonder of Angkor Wat, you owe it to the country to educate yourself on the horrors of the Khmer Rouge.

The Hill of the Poisonous Trees

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Sam and I didn’t have a particularly good first impression of Cambodia. We got off our boat in the heart of Phnom Penh and were greeted by scorching heat and pushy tuk-tuk drivers. We had trouble finding a place to stay and were underwhelmed by the food. But after a few days, things changed. It’s not that we grew to like Phnom Penh. Rather, we realized why the city didn’t match up to others we had visited.

Modern Cambodia is, in a sense, less than 40 years old. Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge ruled from 1975 to 1979, and in those four years they destroyed the country. One out of every four Cambodians was murdered during the genocide, with special attention paid to city dwellers, the educated, and ethnic minorities. In his quest to create an agrarian utopia, Pol Pot killed 2,000,000 people.

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