Romanticised Horror

(Angkor Wat, Cambodia, taken on 24/10/2009)

I went to Cambodia and Vietnam for 6 days on a guided tour last month.

The most memorable thing of the trip?

"It has been a peaceful 4 years," the local tour guide in Cambodia, Mr. Lam, said with a genuine smile on his face, "No sounds of gunshots at night. There isn't much worth complaining about anymore."

This trip has given me a new appreciation to life and I am grateful I did the tour. All the things we take for granted - peace, stability, economic affluence, are not easy to come by, yet this generation have forgotten how the men before us had fought so hard so that we can enjoy these things today.

Because of the short stay, we only did one day in the Angkor temples. It was magnificent. How had people back then managed to construct such architecture with such fine detail? Although it is so beautiful that even my legs were cramping and my back was screaming I had to keep scouting around for interesting things to photograph, all the while I cannot help but shudder at the thought of thousands and millions of people slaving away just to build something so the king would be remembered by. When I look at Angkor Thom I see beauty, but I also see blood.

Just like the pyramids and the Great Wall, I suppose. Romanticised horror, all of them.