Cambodia — A Kaleidoscope of Colour and Kindness

Monks on the move, Phnom Penh, Cambodia February 2025

We’ve just returned from an exhilarating, incredible three weeks of travel around SE Asia and life in the Northern Hemisphere is taking quite some adjusting to! I’ve found the jet-lag incredibly hard — it’s been five full days now and I still feel groggy and discombobulated. We left Bangkok at 8:30am on Monday morning and arrived in Vancouver at 6:30am, same day! (thankfully only a 14 hour flight rather than 16.5 going out, thanks to the jet-stream!) We worked out we travelled East across 15 time zones, whereas coming from London, UK to Vancouver is only eight and I find even that takes a few days to recover. Melatonin supplements and getting out into the daylight are important; luckily with a young Border Collie to walk that hasn’t been a problem!

It’s not just the jet-lag that’s challenging, it’s re-adjusting back to a different culture. Life here in qathet initially seemed so quiet, so civilised, so dull !! Bangkok and Cambodia are a feast for the senses, landing there is almost like arriving in a tardis on a different planet! Sights of wonder and curiosity meet you on every corner — monks on mopeds, whole families on mopeds, babies propped expertly at the front (no helmets involved!) beggars with no limbs (landmine casualties most likely), fried frogs on roadside stands, petrol for sale on the roadside in plastic bottles, traffic everywhere (mainly mopeds, tuk tuks and rickshaws) and the overwhelming heat, averaging 34 most days. And the overwhelming beauty amidst the chaos — the omnipresent Buddha present everywhere, temples, shrines, lotus flowers, frangipani trees…

We spent two nights in Bangkok, then flew to Siem Reap for four nights, the vibrant, pulsing city next to the Temples of Angkor complex, which we explored for three full awe-inspiring days and still didn’t see it all! We visited the Apopo Visitor Centre, where rats are trained to detect landmines to save lives, wandered the night-markets and feasted on Kymer food. Then we flew south to Sihanoukville to stay in paradise on two of Cambodia’s Southern Islands — Koh Rong Sanloem for six nights and then the larger island Koh Rong (both accessed by speedboat). Both are your tropical island dream come true — mostly undeveloped as yet, with an astonishing lack of people/tourism —as yet mostly undiscovered — although an airport is planned for Koh Rong and roads are being built on Koh Rong Sanloem.

Then a speedboat, a cattle-wagon type vehicle (!), a three-hour minibus ride and we were in our final destination, Cambodia’s capital, Phnom Penh, sadly only for two-nights. Here we visited Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum — the memorial site of the S-21 interrogation and detention centre of the Khmer Rouge regime under leader Pol Pot. His radical communist government forced the mass evacuations of cities, killed up to three million people during the Cambodian Genocide (1976–78), and left a legacy of brutality and impoverishment which the Cambodian people are still recovering from today. I felt physically sick during the whole two-hour visit, but for us and many others it was a must. We must be messengers of peace and kindness in today’s fractured world, and understanding the brutality and inhumanity of past regimes is part of that.

We visited the Royal Palace and National Museum of Cambodia and simply wandered the streets, ate and simply watched. I could write so, so much more about our trip, but as I type now, from the comfort and privilege of my seaside home, my overriding memory of Cambodia, which I will treasure forever, is the sudden, brilliant, beautifully warm flash of the Cambodian people’s smile. The Kymer people have endured such recent hardships, yet, the essence that prevails is one of kindness. That human to human connection that’s experienced in an instant, those moments that I experienced over and over again are what I will remember the most.

Cambodia — A Kaleidoscope of Colour and Kindness

Learning Grows Until it Dawns on You