Cambodia

Honeymoon recap: Bali, Thailand and now Cambodia.

After spending christmas and new years in Thailand, we flew to Siem Reap, Cambodia on Jan. 2nd. We spent the next week in Cambodia: four days in Siem Reap and three days in Phnom Pen (Cambodia’s capitol city).

Siem Reap is the closest town to the Angkor Complex of ruins. Angkor is kinda like all the incan/mayan/aztec temples in north, central and south americas all located within 10 square miles of each other. It’s an archeological disneyland. We spent three days touring the complex and maybe saw 40% of it? It’s astounding how truly beautiful and large each of the temple ruins were. Siem Reap is a gorgeous dilapidated post-french colonial town in the midst of an insane construction boom as Cambodia opens up to more and more tourism. We took several forays into the neighboring villages and for our last day we took a tour of an ethnic vietnamese floating village on the Tonle Sap lake.

Phnom Penh is a noisy, bustling, living city. The vestiges of french colonial architecture and fresh daily baguettes won us over immediately. In this leg of the tour I became obsessed with motor scooters and their near ubiquity in Phnom Penh city life. This obsession would intensify in Vietnam and crescendo in India. If you think The United States has a lot of cars, you should peep the amount of motor scooters in Southeast Asia. Amazing!

Cambodia was filled with genuine, friendly and helpful people. Such a warm and inviting culture, but cambodians have been through so much. You could literally see it in the face of anyone over the age of 20. Cambodians take education very seriously, from their own kids to the tourists flooding into their country. War survivors and kids on the street sell counterfeit Lonely Planets next to survivor accounts of the Khmer Rouge legacy. There are books everywhere on the subject, cambodians feel it is their duty to educate the world so no one forgets.

Cambodia is where we really started to encounter heavy, wide spread poverty like nothing Marcia and I have ever experienced directly. It was a daily struggle for me to overcome my own inhibitions to put myself out there, no hiding behind a lens. To get that close even if only just for a few minutes, long enough to share a meaningful connection and to take an intimate portrait. A woman with no legs begging for change in the shadows of ancient ruins, kids playing under the stilts of their thatched house, a former indentured soldier. Cambodia was littered with land mines by the Khmer Rouge and there are people everywhere, who fell (and still fall) victim to them. It’s rather easy to photograph people from afar but it gets increasingly harder the closer you get. My portraits are often taken within one to two feet of the person. It takes a lot of courage and an open heart for someone to allow a tall, blonde-haired blue eyed stranger (with a big disarming smile) to stick a very big lens and camera into their face long enough to capture a good photo and for that I am very thankful to each of the people I met and photographed. Cambodia really woke something in me, I’d say this was the point in our trip where it became less of a vacation and more of an educational experience. This education only intensified as the trip wound on. Welcome to Cambodia!

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