Bits and Bobs on the road

Tomorrow I leave Siem Reap with all its services (including fish massage: a pool, where you put your travel weary feet and let little fish eat away the dead skin!!) and head by riverboat West to Battambong. I am sad to leave my excellent 7 dollar (including breakfast) guest house with its friendly staff, marble floors and complimentary bicycles, but a travelling Finns life is hard - it's go go go! News from home tell of good Finnish achievements and medals in the Winter sports World Championships, which are on right now... As I sit soaking up the heat and sipping my exotic fruit shakes, it all seems too distant for words!

Today I just took the bike out for a walk and a mere kilometre out of town and away from the temples, the countriside begins. The countryside here, and throughout South East Asia, has just that pictoresque quality, the rice paddies, the stilt houses, water buffalos and palm trees, which we have all seen in countless movies, posters and holiday fantasies. And I apoligize, but there will be lots more of these images before this blog is done. The scenery is just soooo lovely, and at least if you ask me, beats the Winter World Championships any day!

The people here are smashing - so much fun, happy and polite - always up for a good laugh. Now HOW on earth these people (well anyone really) can be the perpetrators of the atrocities that took place here during the Khmer Rouge era is a mystery to me! They are just good and lighthearted people, interested in having a good time with friends, for example at a travelling amusement park, like the one, which one day appeared on the roadside to the temples. By European standards it was like something you could find in a kiddy-park in your back yard. The piece de resistance was this roundabout, where kiddy-bikes and plastic toys revolved slowly, silently and without neon lights. However the roadsides were lined with people in a festive mood partaking in the plenty. My moto (moped) -driver saw the fair as we were driving by and with a longing, which couldn't be mistaken, asked if madam would possibly like to see the show. Madam did. When offered a round at the stall, where you won prizes if you hit balloons with darts, he looked like a man who had just found Santa Claus. He won a can of lyche juice and was so proud of his achievement, I swear he smiled all the way back into town. Now he was a grown man. At times it feels like back home it would take at least a new home entertainment system to make a guy feel that good so it's refreshing to be among people, who appreciate little daily joys like they seem to do here.