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The Great Indochina Expedition, Episode 8: The End of the Beginning
Our flight out of Siem Reap did not take us eastward across the Pacific toward North America. Quite the reverse: we headed west for the second half of our trip. Siem Reap has a brand-new airport, out in the middle of nowhere forty-six kilometers east of the city. It was built and is apparently run…
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The Great Indochina Expedition, Episode 7: Angkor Again and Again!
After such a busy day on January 1, you might expect us to sleep late the next morning. That was not to be. We arose on the 2nd at 4:30 a.m. and took a chilly tuk-tuk ride through the darkness to the western bank of the moat around the Angkor Wat temple complex, in order…
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The Great Indochina Expedition, Episode 6: Angkor at Last!
On New Year’s Day 2026 we tuktukked to the visitor center at Angkor Archaeological Part, got our three-day passes, admired the Christmas decorations, and then headed into the park for our first look at the ruins. The first day focused on Angkor Thom, the remains of the former capital city of the Khmer Empire. (Angkor…
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The Great Indochina Expedition, Episode 5: In and Around Siem Reap
December 30 was our first full day in Siem Reap. We kicked off the day with a visit to the Wat Bo temple (I’m being redundant here: “Wat” means “Temple,” but it does make the whole thing more clear), not far from the Rambutan hotel. Wat Bo is an active Buddhist monastery, and indeed we…
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The Great Indochina Expedition, Episode 4: Road Trip!
The original Lost Plate tour schedule included a day in Battambang, a city southwest of Tonle Sap lake. But because of the Recent Unpleasantness with Thailand, they dropped that from the schedule and routed us around the northeast shore of the lake instead. For the first time we did not travel by tuk-tuk: we had…
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The Great Indochina Expedition, Episode 3: Emotional Whiplash Day
Our tour set out again on the morning of December 28, aboard tuk-tuks once again. The first stop was not far from the Rambutan, at a restaurant where we tried a Cambodian breakfast specialty: a noodle soup called Kuy Teav. Suihong, the trainee guide, explained that it’s not the sort of thing one has every…
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The Great Indochina Expedition, Episode 2: Phnom Penh
On our first full day in Cambodia we woke up early — which was surprising as I had expected to be utterly wiped out after the flight. Apparently my body decided that sitting in a chair for 30 hours didn’t count as “real fatigue” so I didn’t deserve real sleep. At breakfast we met one…
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The Great Indochina Expedition, Episode 1: Background and Back Pain
When Dr. Kelly and I were planning the Great Australian Expedition of April-May 2025, one idea which came up early on was to include a side trip to southeast Asia. I’ve always wanted to visit Angkor Wat, and while Cambodia isn’t exactly close to Australia, it’s a lot closer to Australia than it is to…
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Ho Ho Ho
It’s coming up on Christmas Eve, and that means it’s beginning to look a lot like NORAD. The oddest, silliest, yet curiously sweetest Christmas-themed site, another front in the U.S. armed forces’ ongoing war against irony.
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Retro-Review: Hellstrom’s Hive
Hellstrom’s Hive is a novel by Frank Herbert, better known as the creator of Dune. He wrote it in 1972, inspired by a somewhat obscure film by David Wolper called The Hellstrom Chronicle. I haven’t seen the movie, but I gather it’s an odd combination of a nature documentary about bugs, coupled with some alarmist narration by the fictional…
The Cambias Digression
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