Returning

Returning.....chapters end and new beginnings await. Cambodia has been like a book I randomly pick up and read through sleepless nights until I sadly turn the last page; re-reading the last line, frantically looking for more text somewhere in the last blank pages....hoping and wondering why the book has ended so fast; longing to go back in time and read it even more calmly, savouring every line, every paragraph...every moment; surprised at how much I have enjoyed a book I had been putting off for some time; putting it down calmly, with joy and satisfaction at having experienced it, reminded of the tears and the laughter it has brought to me. Cambodia has been this book.

When I first set out on my trip, my brother Luis and my friend Kevin said "don't miss Angkor Wat", and I wondered..... Angkor "what"? Angkor Wat, I found out, is only one of the many sublime temples in the Angkor complex in Cambodia, and one of the well deserved wonders of the world. I dabbled with dates and plans to go there, since Angkor is not too far from Bangkok, but it was never the right time. And then the 25th of February rolled along. I had heard stories, good and bad, about travels in Cambodia and secretly hoped to travel accompanied, ideally by a man, who would look out for me. And so along came Chris, a fire-fighting pilot from Canada on holiday in Asia for a month. He came to Chiang Mai to learn thai massage and was ending his Asian travels with a 10 day trip to Cambodia. We met at Walai House, and after my friend Gai and I tore the poor guy apart with sarcasm for hours on end, we realised that not only could he take our sense of humour (and see right through it), but that he was actually a genuinely nice guy, despite the tough exterior. Chris and I would soon embark on a 10 day intense journey through the dust filled flatlands of Cambodia, with the rising heat from the ground, and the recent violent history of this beautiful country still tangible in the air.

You know I like to pick events and delve into them a bit, instead of giving you a long list of where we went and what we saw. Cambodia, however, may take more than one entry to do it justice. It is there that I learned that while I was wiling away learning the periodic table in high school or even graduating from University, young kids under 12 were still fighting to survive, forced to plant landmines, or trying to escape the horrors of Pol Pot's genocides. It is here that I have seen for the first time, tens of people, mostly teenagers, maimed.....maimed for being kids running in rice fields, only to find a plastic round container they thought was a toy, that ended up blasting in their face, their arm or their leg. I realise that the chills this reality brings before me is what drives me to travel. There's nothing like travel to teach me history...or spark curiosity in a country I never knew anything about.

Land mines - remember Princess Diana's Halo Trust? It fights against land mines around the world. It all starts to make sense when I get to Cambodia and walk into Aki Ra's War of the War museum; an open air wooden shelter in the fields outside Siem Riep, filled with de-activated shells of landmines, hand grenades, and other horrific inventions of war created to maim and kill. The walls are complete with statistics about the millions of landmines still active in Cambodia, the countries who still manufacture these artefacts, the countries who's incidence of maiming from landmines is highest. Cambodia is in the top 5. Aki Ra's story is quite unique to me. A Cambodian kid who's parents are killed by the Khmer Rouge and who is then forcibly enlisted to fight for them....only a kid. A few years later, in an ambush, the Vietnamese take him hostage and make him fight on their side...against the same people he fought with before. All this time, he is also forced to lay landmines in the fields of Cambodia. Years later, when the conflict finally ends in the late 80's, Aki Ra begins to realise the amount of kids who die or are rushed to hospital every hour of every day in Cambodia for having stepped on a landmine. He sets up a centre to help support these kids with schooling in English, a home and shelter and a job, and turns to the fields with a team of locals, every day since, to de-activate the same land mines he was forced to plant as a child. Aki Ra is not much older than I am.

And so Chris and I meet Aki Ra in person that day, while he is filming for a documentary...and ask him about his work and how we can help. His English comes in spurts...but his look of gratitude is evident. We can join hime anytime...but maybe Halo can give us some training first. Chris and I eventually cycle out 16Km on a rickety bike without gears, with the heat pounding on our heads and only a respite of shade from the occasional palm tree lined country lane, all the way out to The Halo Trust to find out about their work and whether with proper training, we could volunteer to help. It's a hot Saturday afternoon and work is over for the week. We get the Director's business card with a warm smile of encouragement. When you ride through the brick red dust of the countryside, watching the stick thin cows feeding in the dry fields, hearing children laugh as they bathe in dirty brown waters, taking snapshots of young teenagers fishing for whatever they may find in the roadside pond of water lillies, you understand that these people can make a living if you can offer the help to clear their land and make it safe.

There are many children in Cambodia...nothing like the one-child natality controls of China....because here the Killing Fields and the Khmer Rouge regime wiped out one third of the population less than 30 years ago. Yes....there are many other stories to tell....some sad and hopeful like this one, some to do with "happy" (ganga) pizza. That'll be the next one, and maybe I'll throw in a bit about the temples of Angkor!