Angkor

It was an intense experience, I still dont know what it meant for me to be there, standing by myself.. I'll come back to this eventually.

fellow-companions

We met five year old Lali on Koh Jum Island in Thailand and travelled together for a day and half on our way abck to Bangkok. She and her mum were travelling together from Aus. Lali and Kapil became close friends the day they met and were inseparable till we had to go our different ways. 

Hamish and Andy, two very sweet boys from Edinburgh, were on the bus with me from Siem Reap in Cambodia to the Thai border at Aranyaprathet (where one has to cross the border in order to enter Thailand). I befriended them at the immigration queue as I was traveling alone and was feeling slightly edgy. As it turned out, the queue at the border was three hours long, instead of the promised half hour, making me incredibly late for my flight back to Bangalore from Bangakok airport. Hamish and Andy came to the airport with me in order to make sure I made it in time and in one piece. If not for them, I think I would have died in the cramped corner of the mini-van in stress or would have been lost to the dark rainy evening of Bangkok.

The two twenty-two year olds, best-friends for 10 years, decided to save all their money and travel through south-east-asia and Australia for a year - working, surfing and discovering new places. 

Rice fields

Bus ride from Siem Reap to Poipet border in Cambodia, on my way to Bangkok. My co-passengers were a young thai girl and an old Russian man on their way to Pataya. They were eating sweet mangoes which was making me very nauseous. Somewhere half way there, a woman started screaming "Tuk-Tuk - Hospital - Stop - My husband - He is dead" I froze. I saw two seats ahead of me a man was lying lifeless, his woman hysterical - unwilling to touch him. There was a doctor on borad who revived him. "He has suffered a minor stroke, but is stable" she declared. After sometime, we were on our way again.