Home again

We arrived in Vancouver to the chilly weather and are slowly getting used to being back home.

Some shots and thoughts

Vendors selling everything from sunglasses to sticky rice to the passengers on the bus.

Cedar enjoying the boat ride and our capitan, below, with a confident smile moments before the engine quit. After about half an hour's tinkering he managed to get it running again.

Taxis drivers are very eager for our business. Once while riding in a taxi we had another driver come up to us and ask us if we wanted a taxi. We're still not sure if he was joking or not.

Here is a picture of the crowded train between Thailand and Cambodia. Humidity was up near 100% and the temperature above 35 degrees.

The border crossing between two kingdoms: Thailand and Cambodia.
















Koh San Road in Bangkok is a pretty crazy place and quite the shock for us coming from the rural quiet of Laos.


















































































ts and landslid es.



Next to Afghanistan and Angola, Cambodia is the most heavily mined country in the world.

It is estimated that between 4 and 6 million unexploded mines still litter the country side. Since 1979 more than 40,000 Cambodians have suffered amputations due to land mines.

The other social cost is that vast tracts of land are unusable due to the presence, or possible presence of land mines.


This is the main highway between northern Vietnam and Laos.

We checked out the Communist Party; it was pretty dead.





Cell phone coverage is excellent in Cambodia. Despite only earning $35 per month, our guide and park ranger, has spent $50 to purchase a phone.

There are more than 4 million phone subscribers in Cambodia (35% of the 14million population). In contrast, only 31% of Cambodians have access to safe drinking water.

Despite talking on his cell phone he was a very knowledgeable guide and pointed out lots of things we would not have seen on our own, for example, the gecko in the picture below.



































































I ran out of gas in a little village. Half the kids in the village came out to watch the "gas station" attendant fill the tank with gas from 1 litre glass Pepsi bottles.