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.