The handless bookseller of Siem Reap

has been on my mind since I sliced my right hand open [sutures are out and it's healing well] and spent a week using only my never-the-most-coordinated left.

Last month on the streets of Siem Reap, the Cambodian city launch pad to the temples of Angkor, I bought a guidebook to the archaeology from a man with no hands pushing his wheeled bookstall. With the sensitive skin of his wrists he removed plastic wrappings so I could browse titles and when I paid he whipped out his wallet and counted out my change without a pause.

How'd he end up handless and selling me a guidebook? While in the Cambodian army in the 1980s fighting the Khmer Rouge, his hands were blown off by a mine while he was setting up camp in long grass. Prevented from killing himself with a grenade by a brother-in-arms he spent years languishing on the streets of Phnom Penh as a begger before an NGO fronted him cash and support so he could set up his mobile book stall a decade ago. He's now, he told me, master of his own destiny with a business and a wife and son.

A damn good book too.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Ancient-Angkor-River-Michael-Freeman/dp/0500974853/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1261390078&sr=8-6

So once again I find myself on a hospital bed.

This time I'm staring out at a glorious day and the low curve of sand that comprises the isthmus on the island Phi Phi, Thailand where the town of Ton Sai has been rebuilt after the Boxing Day tsunami obliterated it five years ago. It's idyllic, except for the nasty 2 inch long gash in heel of my right hand, close to the bone, gobbules of yellow fat shielding the full depth of the cut. The doctor has a look inside and tells me she can see the artery pulsating away but fortunately it's unsevered and as a bonus I can move all my fingers. Aside from repeated jabs to freeze the tissue and the odd needle through unfrozen flesh as she puts 7 sutures in, it's surprisingly painless though watching Karen's not-so-poker-face made me think I was having an ampution. An hour and 2200 baht later and I'm back walking the beaches of this Garden of Eden. How did it happen? Flippers, a stumble in a foot of water and a very sharp barnacle or piece of coral.

This wasn't the blog posting I was going to write about Koh Phi Phi, which truly is paradisic, but as that one would have bordered on gloating to those trappped in offices with the winter sun setting at 3:45 pm, I think I got my karmic feedback ahead of the act of blogging vulgarity or else it's a twist on that old favourite Biblical plot of bissful lounging in the Garden of Eden always being buggered by the hand of man.

No gloating here.

Children's excercise equipment and whips made of electrical wire

are but two of the implements of torture on display at Tuol Sleng, a former high school in Phnom Penh, Cambodia converted by the Khmer Rouge into their chief centre of torture. Known widely as S-21 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuol_Sleng_Genocide_Museum, a visit is a full frontal visceral assault. A guantlet of burned and disfigured men, many with missing limbs, begging for US dollars flank the entrance. Inside agitated vistors with tight faces and crossed arms shuffle from one classroom to the next reeling in the full horror of the Khmer Rouge killing machine that cut down a quarter the Cambodia's population in just over three years. Rounding out an afternoon of misery is a trip to Choeung Ek http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choeung_Ek, the closest 'Killing Field' to the capital of some 200 execution sites established by the Khmer Rouge and where some 8,895 S21 and other prisoners met their end. It's an awful, chilling place with the skulls of the murdered housed in a glass fronted Buddhist stupa. Walking the paths amongst the excavated pits, fragments of bone and clothing still poking out of the earth near the 'killing tree' against which babies were beaten to death, is a putrid tonic for idealists of all political stripes.

As I write this the trial of 'Duch' who ran S21 is coming to a close.

The hammer and sickle, the five pointed star and the swastika

are the three most prevalent symbols in Vietnam after Uncle Ho's ubiquitous smiling face.

Like a familiar yet foreign montage of misplaced World War II symbols to a Westerner rubbernecking from the back of a motorbike. But clearly WWII has nothing to do with any of this. Rather than symbolizing the Soviet Union, the hammer and sickle is the emblem of the Vietnamese Communist Party, which has seen its earlier Russian counterpart off into the history books. Instead of the stencilled logo for the the US Army, in these parts the five pointed star [yellow or red] is of course the international sign for communism. And the swastika, typically positioned above the gateway to a wat [temple] or emblazoned on the chest or forehead of a statue of Buddha, is an ancient symbol from India and associated with Buddhism and other Eastern religions for two-and-a-half thousand years before the Nazis hoisted it over Munich and changed everything.

Still, even with all of this in mind, swastikas are not something you get used to seeing anywhere let alone framing the entrance to a tranquil Buddhist wat.

Three men and a coffin, a refrigerator and a 100 kg pig in a bamboo cage

are but a few of the things spotted on the backs of motorcycles during a 4 day motorcycle tour we took through the central highlands of Vietnam on the backs of the rides of a couple of Nha Trang 'Easyriders.'

In country where there are 30 motorcycles for every car (Saigon alone has 5 million motorcycles), two wheels is the way everything gets moved. Other freight spotted on the backs of 'motos': a dozen live ducks hanging from their feet, 10 boxes of Budweiser beer totalling 240 bottles, a queen sized mattress folded in half, 60 litres of water (I know because I drew 30 litres out of a well for the driver), two dozen durian fruits, several hundred bananas, a 50 litre bottle of compressed natural gas (yikes!) and even worse, 50 litres of petrol, a couple of dozen coconuts in massive panniers, a 4-inch wide giant bandsaw blade slung across a rider's shoulder, various families of five with two kids wedged between the parents and the baby holding the handle bars, two sheets of plate glass 1.5 metres by half a metre held by a passenger, a freshly born calf in a wire cage, a half dozen five metre long pieces of rebar over a driver's shoulder, a cage crammed with piglets, 10 metres of air conditioner duct, bundles of giant bamboo, 200 pairs of trousers folded and stacked, a cubic metre of firewood and a glass-fronted wood credenza.

Ok, to be fair the motorcycle with the coffin and undertakers did have three wheels and the credenza driver was pedalling...

2.9 metres is the high water mark

on the walls of the riverside cafes of the UNESCO World Heritage city of Hoi An http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoi_An in central Vietnam from the tidal surge of the 30 Sept 2009 typhoon. Possibly the highest ever recorded. A beautiful place and once the most important trading port in Vietnam and known for its historic Chinese trade association halls, these days this town is in trouble. Only 4 km up river from the South China Sea and with minor street flooding at every high tide, it reminds me of Chiswick on the Thames in west London. Except unlike London there's no flood barrier in Hoi An and given the vast flat estuary surrounding it, little likelihood of one being possible if even remotely affordable. With polar cap ice melt and thermal expansion of the oceans, by IPCC www.ipcc.ch/ reckoning on a good day diners will be up to their knees by 2050. When the ever more volatile typhoons of a warmer era start rolling in this historic town could well be resigned to history.

With a golden statue of 'Uncle Ho' looking on, the guide slid back the display case cover and handed me an AK-47

Safety first. I popped out the magazine and slid back the bolt to make sure it's unloaded before handing it to Karen. Why don't they let you do this at the British Museum?

A few days ago were were in the so-called 'Demilitarized Zone' or DMZ which was the heavily fortified border between North and South Vietnam from 1954 until 1975 along the Ben Hai River. Its now a rice growing area strewn with Vietnamese war graves and the odd burned out shell of a US tank. This was a US 'Free Fire Zone' so everything standing is post-1975. There aren't many sights here, simply locations of death and destruction including Khe Sanh Combat Base, the Rock Pile and the human meat grinder known as Hamburger Hill.

Buried beneath the overgrown jumble of bomb craters from B52 heavy ordinance is Vinh Moc, the only remaining tunnel complex beneath the DMZ of the many dozens built by villagers and the Viet Cong. Twenty-three metres underground in the low unsupported earth tunnels, where several hundreds lived, dozens of babies were born and uncounted surguries executed in the makeshift hospital as napalm and 500 lb bombs rained down, is a sobering experience.

She said take 1000mg of Amoxicillin twice daily and and the juice of two coconuts

So the other night I was laying in a Lao hospital bed on a Sunday night watching a lizard eat insects off the wall near the light and waiting for the results of a bood test for Malaria and Dengue Fever. As luck would have it I had neither and my 8 day headache and 2 day fever were chalked up to a random infection and the muscle spasms in my legs to dehydration [partially from the aftermath of a dodgy tuna sandwich] and low potassium from sweating while hiking. 270,000 kip ($40 US) later [it being Sunday night and all so double the regular rate] and the solution was evident - a prescription for Amoxicillan, 5 packets of World Health Organization hydration salts and direction from the doctor to drink the juice of two coconuts every day as cocunuts are high in potassium. Problem solved.

Laos and the World Food Programme

A few weeks ago we were in in Luang Namtha in Northern Laos, a town strangely familiar with its dusty, empty main road, reminicent of say Vulcan, Alberta yet completely alien. The people here are wee in the sense that they are exactly that - 5 feet tall and 50 kilos for the men. Tucked away on a side street is a small World Food Programme (WFP) compound. A week later we were in Luang Prabang, a few hundred kilometres to the south and as we stepped out of our guest house there was a WFP truck as parked out front. A quick chat with the two WFP staff revealed that they are surveying the food security of Laos in the aftermath of the fifth typhoon to sweep in from Vietnam and the South China Sea in 7 weeks.

This country is poor with 80 percent of people living in rural areas in bamboo or wood huts and only a failed rice harvest away from severe hunger and the need for WFP food distribution. Two thirds of the population lives under the threat of food insecurity and half of children under 5 are malnurished. To cap it off a sizeable part of eastern Laos is unfarmable because of an estimated 30 million cluster bombs and other bits of unexploded ordinance (UXOs) strewn across the countryside courtesy of 2 millions tonnes of bombs dropped in 580,000 bombing raids by the US over a 9 year period during the Vietnam War. Shame Laos was 'neutral.'

Check out the WFP and the situation in Laos

http://www.wfp.org/countries/laos

Not another bleeding travel blog...

Hello all

Here is the beginning of my long promised and not yet delivered blog.

I won't bore you with my usual diatrabe against travel and most other blogs [self-aggrandizing rubbish nobody wants to read] as that would be hypocritical and I willing to be anything most days except that. I will promise, especially to those who have in the past had to read my work emails, to keep postings short [250 words max] though as usual sentences may be Germanic in construction. I will also strive to make the postings topical. Spelling might suffer sometimes partially becasue I'm not a proofreader and partially because of SE Asian keys.

We are currently in Hanoi, Vietnam, having arrived a few hours ago. I won't bore you with every dusty detail of the bus here, bus there tedium. Suffice to say we got here by flying from London to Bangkok on 12 Oct, a week later we took an overnight train to Chiang Mai in northern Thailand stayed for a few days, bussed to Chiang Khong on the Mekong River, crossed on a fast longtail to Huay Xai on the Laos side of the river and then a dusty mini van up a half built or half disintegrating road to Luang Nam tha, down a worse road to to Luang Prabang then to the Laos capital of Vientiane and then a short 1 hour turbo prop flight to Hanoi [instead of a ball breaking 32 hour bus ride].

My posts will start from here. Please feel free to comment or email me - rwestinlondon@gmail.com and to pass this link to anyone you want.