Stymied in Syria as Internet access sinks

Editor's note: Seattle Times reporter Haley Edwards traveling in Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam and Syria and filing dispatches. For the jaunt around Asia, her 23-year-old friend, Stevie, is her sidekick. See Edwards' dispatches below (most recent on top).

I've been traveling in Syria this week, staying at the house of two American friends in Damascus and venturing into the countryside from there. Due to a variety of factors — not the least being that the undersea Internet cable lines that run to this region were severed this week, apparently by a ship's anchor — I haven't had reliable access to Internet. Dial-up lines have been understandably clogged. For those of you who have been waiting (and thank you for your emails!) for my tales of Syria, I truly apologize. I will write a print story about my adventures in Syria in an upcoming Seattle Times Travel section and post some more online then, too.

Last days are a whirlwind of motorbike, train, bus and boat

We took a motor bike tour around the countryside outside of Hue. Visited old U.S. wartime bunkers in the hills, ancient tombs of emperors, and stopped at a Buddhist family's house for lunch.

Once you leave Hue's city center, most of the streets aren't made for cars. They're only wide enough for two motorbikes to pass at once — and even then, you're praying you don't clip your knees on the oncoming moto's handle bars. Canals, rice paddies, fish markets, pagodas, ancient tombs and one-room houses built from bamboo and saplings line the trails. Stopped at an old arena, where emperors used to watch tigers and elephants fight to the death. The tigers were declawed first, so the elephants always won.

Later, leaving Hué on an overnight train to Hanoi, little girls no older than 12 or 13 leap on board at every stop hawking hot coffee, tea and beer to the passengers. This is strictly forbidden by the railroad (which offers its own coffee, tea and beer service in the dining car and charges slightly more).

So this is how it goes: A young girl swings up onto the train when it's still moving, tears through the passenger cars taking orders, and leaps off at the next door, just as the train is coming to a complete stop. She then sprints over to where her mom (her aunt? her older sister?) is manning a cooler and a thermos just off the platform. The girl gathers her order and sprints back onboard, narrowly evading a uniformed train officer, who by this time has run over to block the entrance. He's scowling and his arms are crossed. She shimmies between passengers, dropping off her orders and picking up her payment, and then leaps off the train. If, by some chance she's taken an order from a stupid tourist (me) who doesn't have change for a 50,000 Dong bill (about $3), she'll roll her eyes, grab your money, jump off the train, narrowly evade the officer (again), and — somehow! — leap back on board just as the train is beginning to move — careen by your room, hurl change at you (she's honest), and throw herself off the train, just as we're beginning to gain speed. Meanwhile, the uniformed train official stands by, his eyebrows furrowed. It's incredible to watch.

We arrived in Hanoi on that overnight train just after dawn and set out immediately on a bus headed for the coast (about three hours away), where we'd pick up a junk-style boat and cruise Halong Bay. Again, the guidebooks indicated that we should expect a day full of sun-bathing and strawberry daiquiris. We got rain.

Still, the bay is beautiful. Thousands of islands — pillars of rock, really — rise up out of the clear water of Tonkin Bay, like enormous stalagmites, and the tourist boat we were on served fresh prawns for lunch. Not much to complain about. That night, we stayed on Cat Ba Island (the closest island with a beach), which is usually overrun with tourists. In the cold weather, the place was nearly abandoned, but I liked seeing the locals live the way they might if boatloads of tourists weren't unloading on their shores six times a day. After dark, the island was quiet. School kids played hacky-sack in the streets. High school girls in braids flirted with boys wearing matching blue and white blazers. Stevie and I played darts in a New Zealand-themed bar where no one spoke English

Little city of Hué is soaked in war's history

The road up the coast to Hué is beautiful. On your left: shades of green, layered on deep mottled black hills. On your right: impossibly turquoise water and the bright pinks, peaches and blue-greens of beachfront buildings. The jungle here is thick and ominous, but also only four or five feet high. There are no trees, just tangled underbrush, weeds and ivy — the first round of plants that have grown back after the whole place was chemically deforested by Americans and South Vietnamese during the war.

Hué, a little city that straddles the Perfume River on the north-central coast, has a kind of sweet, Eastern European feel to it. Two major bridges span the river and, on the north side, the streets are narrow, lined with markets on one side, and a grand citadel (known as "The Citadel," originally built in 1687) on the other. This was once the home of the Nguyen Dynasty, and then the French colonialists — and then the North Vietnamese, and then the Americans, and then the North again. But, each time it switched hands, thousands and thousands of people died. The dirt, the water, the walls are thick with the history of it.

Here's the quick-and-dirty on its role in the Vietnam War: the North Vietnamese communists took control of the Citadel for three and a half weeks in the late '60s, during which time they rounded up between 3,000 and 5,000 civilians who were deemed "uncooperative." According to the Lonely Planet, those civilians were "summarily shot, clubbed to death or buried alive," and their bodies were later found in shallow mass graves outside the city.

A few weeks later, American and South Vietnamese (AVRN) forces besieged the Citadel (you can still see bullet holes and the scars of grenades on the stone walls), sustaining approximately one casualty per meter gained. (One man, one meter. War is crazy). That famous photograph from Life magazine — the one with dead Marines piled on top of each other and loaded onto a tank — was taken here.

Here's how Michael Herr (that Esquire reporter who wrote "Dispatches") remembers that siege: "The AVRN and a few Americans were shooting blindly into the flames, and the bodies were burning where they fell. Civilian dead lay out on the sidewalks only a block from the compound and the park by the river was littered with dead {$326}"

Stevie and I stood in that park by the river, feeling — as we've felt so many times in Vietnam — like we were peering in on a "history" that's too recent to be considered history at all. Our parents' generation was here. It was their bodies that Herr describes floating in the moat. Had these people survived, they would have been still middle-aged. Their children would have been the ones drinking beer with us a few blocks away at a bar named the DMZ Bar. (Really, I couldn't make this up. It seems that all the bars popular among Westerners and backpackers are war-themed. I heard someone order an "AK-47, on the rocks.")

A 24-year-old Vietnamese kid was running the pool table when we got there. I wrote my name on the chalkboard and when it came my turn to play him, I was so terrible, he started laughing and taught me a few tricks. By the end of our hour-long game (he was going easy on me and I wasn't sinking any), the whole bar cheered when I sunk two in a row. Afterward, Stevie and I hung out with the pool shark and his sister, who now works at a nail salon in Vancouver. She comes back home to Hue once a year or so and has helped contribute money to buy her family a house here. She's my age.

Tailors, cooking classes and backpacker bars

in don't-miss town of Hoi An

The overnight bus from Nha Trang to Hoi An is billed as a "stretch-comfort sleeper." It's more like a sardine can on wheels. Suffice to say that the "beds" are not made with average Western measurements in mind (the 6-foot-6-inch Canadian guy to my right spent the night rolled into the fetal position). Luckily, the driver blasted Celine Dion's Greatest Hits for the vast majority of the 11-hour trip. So that was nice.

But Hoi An, Hoi An! If there's any place in the world worth enduring an overnight bus (and the "Titanic" theme song on repeat) to see, this quaint Old Vietnamese-style town is it. Because of a variety of factors — not the least of which being its proximity to Danang and China Beach, American hangouts during the Vietnam War — Hoi An escaped the bombing and shelling that eviscerated cities less than a 100 miles away. Its narrow streets and charming old buildings date back to the 18th and early 19th centuries.

There's lots of stuff to see here — the 18th century Japanese bridge, the ruins from the Kingdom of Champa and a whole bunch of pagodas — but the big thing to do in Hoi An is to get clothes tailor-made at any of the 100-or-so tailors around town. Stevie and I both got winter coats made, for just over $30 each. You walk into a shop, flip through fashion magazines, point at a style you want made to fit, and then you choose your material. Come back six hours later and voilà! It's there, waiting for you. We felt like celebrities.

At night, all the college students studying abroad here and 20-something backpackers pack into the bars (Tam Tam Bar is a favorite), wearing their brand-new dresses and slick jackets. Everyone's playing dress-up. It's quite the scene.

The next day, Stevie and I took a Vietnamese cooking class with a woman nicknamed Miss Vy — the Tom Douglas of Hoi An. She owns and runs four restaurants here, all of which are delightful and well-priced (in particular the Cargo Club, where a French pastry chef bakes up slices of heaven every morning). The cooking class was a four-hour affair that began in the early morning in the bustling, outdoor fish-and-produce market. She led our class of about 15 tourists through the labyrinthine stalls, chock full of Asian spices, vegetables, eggs and meat, dispensing advice (cook goose eggs if you want to get pregnant; wash your hair with husks to die it black) as we meandered.

In the subsequent cooking extravaganza, we learned how to make fresh spring rolls, eggplant pancakes, chicken chili satay and papaya salad, after which we ate them all — and a tofu stir fry and flan for dessert, which Miss Vy whipped up, in case we were still hungry (we weren't; we ate it anyway). Not a bad way to spend the morning.

We spent all afternoon riding rented bikes through rice paddies and out to China Beach, where American soldiers used to take a few days of R&R during their 13-month tours here in the '60s. I've been reading a book called "Dispatches" by Esquire reporter Michael Herr, written about his time spent covering the war here. Most of the book is taken up with pretty gruesome accounts of the front — life in the trenches, in the bunkers; the horrors and insanity of war. Here's what he says about China Beach:

"It was a place where they could go swimming or surfing, get drunk, get stoned, get laid, get straight, groove in the scivvie houses, rent sailboats, or just sleep on the beach{$326}They would splash in the surf, giggling and shouting, riding beach disks along the shoreline, playing like kids{$326}"

The day Stevie and I were there, it was cold and windy and the only things alive on the beach were crabs. Palm fronds, driftwood and plastic bags marked the high-tide line. Down the beach, yellow billboards illustrate the construction plans for enormous, shimmering hotels that will be erected in the next decade. In 20 years, it's going to be the Miami of Vietnam, the locals say. Today, it feels like we're peering in on history, caught between costume changes.

A beach town with Beowulf

Took the overnight train from Ho Chi Minh City to Nha Trang, arriving in the little beach town just before dawn. In the pictures in the guidebook, it's a honeymooners' paradise: gorgeous hotels on the beach; palm-frond umbrellas and chaise longues to match; endless waterfront cafes serving drinks in hollowed-out coconuts.

Unfortunately, we arrived during a torrential winter rainstorm. Spent the morning under a corrugated metal awning watching the palm trees bend under the weight of the wind. Raining so hard you couldn't hear drops on the metal roof, just sheets of oily water, slamming out of the sky like someone slapping a hundred tambourines at once.

At about 3 in the afternoon, I went hunting for a movie theater and found a strange cement building. Aside from the movie poster that had been glued to one of the cement columns out front, you wouldn't know it was a theater at all.

After a brief and painstaking conversation with a man milling around on the street out front, I managed to determine that there was indeed a movie playing that night, and it may or may not be made in Hollywood, and it may or may not be in English, and it might play at 5:30, or possibly 7:30, and it'll (probably) cost around 25,000 Vietnamese dong (just over a dollar). (Have I mentioned that my Vietnamese needs a little work?)

Anyway, that night, Stevie and I hoofed it over to the theater during a break in the storm. A smiling woman shepherded us up an outdoor cement staircase and into a small room about as big as your average McDonald's seating area. There were twelve rows of seats, once crushed red velvet and now blackened and mangy. There were about 25 other people in the theater.

The movie, which turned out to be the animated version of Beowulf, had been dubbed in Vietnamese and then subtitled in Chinese. Once in a while, the dubbing would be off and we could hear the English words underneath. (A Vietnamese man to our left picked up on those English phrases, too — "Kill Me! Kill me! I am Beowuuuuulf!" — and shout them gleefully in the quiet theater, looking to Stevie and me for approval.)

So, quick recap: We spent the evening in a small town on the south-central coast of Vietnam watching a 21st-century digital animated remake of an 11th-century English epic poem, which has been subsequently dubbed and subtitled into languages that neither the producers nor the original playwright would have understood. All in all, a wonderful, rainy night.

(On a side note, if you're planning to visit Nha Trang, there's a lot more to do than just listen to the rain and watch badly dubbed flicks. Check out the mineral mud baths at the Thap Bo Hot Spring (a big hit among Vietnamese tourists) and the Po Nagar Cham Towers, which were built between the 7th and 12th centuries (incidentally, just about when Beowulf was fighting Grendel's mother). The cavernous altars are cool, even if you're suffering from Severe Pagoda Fatigue.)

Coping with culture and culinary shock

The Lonely Planet Guide to Vietnam warns that many people experience "extreme culture shock" upon entering this country. The noise. The pollution. The smells. The poverty and filth and the gruesome remnants of the recent war. It can be very overwhelming.

That said, the only thing that has sent me reeling so far is the sight of a dog being cooked on the street. It looked like a giant, skinned rat. Pig-sized, but not pig-shaped. I couldn't look away.

Down the street, puppies — between four and six months old, probably — slept, wrestled and yapped in their cages.

"For eating!" a cyclo driver yelled from the road. He had a huge smile on his face, obviously a veteran of the typical Western reaction: horror and disgust. I swallowed hard and kept walking, trying not to give him the pleasure of watching me blanch.

On one hand, I understand my reaction: My dog Ben, a floppy Labrador, has been an integral part of my family for most of my life. The thought of anyone eating him feels almost cannibalistic.

On the other hand, I can't justify the hypocrisy of allowing myself to be horrified by eating dog, but not horrified by eating any other four-legged mammal. I eat lamb. And cow. And B.L.Ts. And philosophically, it's no different. And, to hundreds of millions of Hindu people, it's much less gross than chowing down on a Red Mill Deluxe, so who am I to judge? Braised Puppy Leg in a Peanut Sauce, anyone?

Ok, so while I'm not quite ready to try the delicacy myself, I did a little research anyway. Here's the skinny: Traditionally, only certain Vietnamese restaurants (about 60 in Hanoi, much fewer in the small towns) serve dog meat (thit cho), and those that do, only do so at the end of the lunar month, when eating it is considered good luck. Most restaurants that specialize in thit cho actually close their doors for the first couple weeks of the lunar month, when eating the delicacy is considered bad luck.

And for those of you who plan to come visit — or who plan to taste-test the delicious Vietnamese food available in Seattle — please don't worry about "accidentally" eating dog meat. Thit cho is more expensive than other kinds of meat, so the likelihood of a chef slipping it into your stir-fried noodles is very, very low.

Something old, something new on the teeming streets

The streets here in Ho Chi Minh City are packed — impassable at times — with motorcycles, bicycles, ox-carts, horses, enormous tourist buses, wheel barrows, motorized wagons, electric bikes and tiny cars. It's as if every form of transportation that has been used over the last 400 years has coalesced at once on the streets here. And it's more than just the forms of transportation that seem to transcend the boundaries of time.

Picture this: A middle-aged lady in a traditional Vietnamese gown (called an ao dai) weaves between the cars and motorcycles at a packed intersection, selling the bouquets of pink incense that people leave at Buddhist temples around town. She's gossiping on her cellphone, laughing into the smog. Down the street, a toothless woman, her eyes lined with history, sells mangoes and tamarinds from traditional baskets — two bamboo bowls lashed with twine to a whittled sapling — which she wears like Lady Justice's weights across her stooped shoulders. At first glance, it looks as if she's been plucked out of the 1700s, but look closer: Her toenails are painted bright red.

Behind her, a kid with a mohawk mans an outdoor kiosk where Western backpackers can upload new music onto their iPods. Next to him, about 15 preteen Vietnamese boys hover over three computers playing online video games against faceless opponents — probably other 12 year-old boys in Prague or Delhi or Seattle.

Join the motorbike crowd

Speaking of motorbikes ... That's the main way to get around in Vietnam. There are taxis, but only a few. If you want to get anywhere quickly, hop onto the back of a moto driver's bike (drivers hang out on every street corner) and he'll take you anywhere for about 50 cents. It's really fun and, statistically speaking, incredibly dangerous (sorry, Mom).

If you're a teenage girl in Saigon, you ride on the back of your boyfriend's moto and hold onto his stomach. If you're anyone else — and if you're riding on the back of a stranger's bike — you don't hold on at all. You just balance with your hands on your knees, looking bored.

If you're a tourist, you hold on with both hands, look terrified, and occasionally yelp when your driver runs three red lights in a row.

Cross the road and hope not to die

A quick note on crossing the street in Ho Chi Minh City: Oh. My. Goodness. You'll think you're going to die.

First of all, 95 percent of the traffic in this Vietnamese city is two-wheeled. Bicycles and little Honda motorcycles rule the road and move like roaring schools of fish, swallowing the cars and buses that block their way. Second, traditional traffic rules (i.e. stop at red lights; yield; don't kill pedestrians) are considered more advisory than anything else.

So that brings me to crossing the street. If you want to cross, you can't just wait for there to be an opening in traffic. There will never be an opening. Just steel your nerves and take a step off the curb. Then another step. Then another. The sea of motorcycle drivers will just avoid you. Whatever you do, don't take a step backward. Just keep walking forward, maintain your pace and don't freak out. That's how the locals do it.

I don't mean to sound blase. It's completely terrifying, especially at rush hour. And especially at night, when you don't even have the benefit of looking oncoming drivers in the eye.

Other advice:

1) If you can find a Vietnamese person who's crossing at the same time as you, stay directly next to him. Walk when he walks.

2) If you're crossing in a group, stay very close to one another. It's easier for the moto-drivers to avoid a clump of pedestrians.

3) Run only when absolutely necessary.

4) Try not to imagine your own imminent death.

A little extra protein with dinner

After two weeks of living out of our backpacks, Stevie and my standards for cleanliness have dropped precipitously. Last night we had dinner at a Saigon street cafe. Seconds after our beef-and-pineapple dish landed on the table, a swarm of little green insects descended on it. We shooed most of them away, but a few were stuck in the sauce. Geckos shimmied down the walls and a cockroach skittered over my foot. We looked at each other, shrugged and dug in. (A little more protein never hurt anyone, right?).

On that note, if you want to travel in Southeast Asia, you're in for some delicious meals. And you can find hundreds of places with a little more ambience than the one I was just describing. But a word of warning for the squeamish: People in these cultures aren't estranged from their food in the same way we are. To us, the "chicken" in a chicken stir fry comes from Safeway. To them, chicken is the one just outside the restaurant, clucking around. If you order chicken here (or rabbit, or duck, or pig or anything else) the waiter is liable to bring a live chicken to your table, at which point you'll be expected to inspect it and approve of it, as you might inspect and approve of a good melon.

Munching on crickets and dancing at Apocalypse Now

HO CHI MINH CITY/ Saigon (most of the people here still call it Saigon) — This place is incredible. Feverish, whirling, overwhelming. All the guidebooks warn that it "churns" and that's about right: Street markets spill out onto every sidewalk, hundreds of thousands of Honda motorcycles, Vespas, bicycles and cycle rickshaws crowd the streets; the sounds of construction, honking, yelling and laughter rise up through the vaguely-French architecture and reverberate in the eves.

Stevie and I went out to eat tonight at this place called Bo Tung Xeo. Some of the stuff on the menu? I copied them, for all of your benefits, exactly as they're listed: "Sliced ostrich. Steamed goat penis with Chinese medicinals. Grilled fields rat. Fried cricket. Deep fried scorpion. Mixed bonded chicken feets. Bloody-cockles salad. Roasted pigeon. Grilled turtle dove. Kangaroo grilled. Grilled breast she-goat. grilled crocodile. Eel rice gruel. Pig heart with garlic."

The fried crickets weren't so bad. Taste like corn nuts.

Spent the day doing everything tourists are supposed to do in Saigon: Rode a cyclo, visited the old French post office, had a drink atop the Rex Hotel (where the South Vietnamese and American captains used to lunch during the war), visited the Reunification Palace, the Jade Emperor Pagoda and the War Remnants Museum. Whew. A few highlights:

The Reunification Palace. It was built in the early '60s by the South Vietnamese president, Ngo Dinh Diem. In 1975, North Vietnamese Communist forces rolled onto the front lawn and took over the place. They toppled the government, but pretty much left the palace exactly how they'd found it. The result is that the whole building is a time capsule to 1975 — complete with all the garish furniture, avocado-green carpeting and disco decor. The fake wood-paneled bomb shelter, lined with '70s-era maps, enormous FM radios and spying equipment, feels like something James Bond — or Doctor Evil — would have appreciated.

The War Remnants Museum. This one goes under the category of not-fun-but-necessary sightseeing. The small, partly outdoor museum is about the Vietnamese War (the Vietnamese call it the American War, for obvious reasons), as told from the Vietnamese perspective. It's pretty heartbreaking stuff: Photographs of little girls burned by the napalm bombs dropped by American planes; testimony from the massacre at My Lai; photographs detailing the ongoing birth defects attributed to the American use of chemicals like Agent Orange and Dioxin. It's awful. Most of the tourists here are not American, but I did meet one American girl whose father had been a GI during the war. She remembers him telling stories about how horrible it was to be there. The humidity and mud; the booby traps placed by Viet Cong guerrillas; watching his friends die. What an awful, pointless war.

That night, Stevie and I went dancing at a nightclub called Apocalypse Now. It is, as is the eponymous Francis Ford Coppola movie would suggest, Vietnam War-themed. Barbed wire coils around the ceiling, sandbags line the patio; there's a "Charlie Don't Serve" sign by the bar; the tables are made out of faux toxic chemical barrels.

My first reaction was how tasteless could this possibly get? My second reaction was a little more upbeat: There I was, in the middle of a dance floor, dancing to thumping techno with 700 Vietnamese kids. We were all sweating on each other, laughing, singing along to the words. A Vietnamese boy bought us shots of Jim Beam. The music was too loud to hear what anyone else was saying anyway, so we all just smiled at each other, clinked glasses and kept dancing. In between songs, we'd give each other thumbs up. Ah, diplomacy at its best.

At about 1:30 in the morning, Bryan Adam's "Summer of '69" came on. In the summer of 1969, about half a million of my mom's and dad's generation were in the jungle just north of here, killing and being killed by these people's moms and dads. Maybe 30 years from now, my kid will go dancing in Baghdad. Maybe.

Good morning, Vietnam

Our attempt to cross into Vietnam was hilarious and ill-fated. We were in a hired van, but our driver got lost along the way, somewhere on a single-lane dirt road with nothing but fields and palm trees as far as we could see. Our driver spoke no English, but communicated via Cambodian pop music, which he blasted at full volume from the van stereo. After about three hours, we realized we were lost. Worse than lost. We didn't even know what country we were in. And no one had a map. And even if we did, the streets had no names.

The situation was funny until it became clear that someone in the back of the van needed a loo. So we pulled over in front of someone's three-room hut, built from palm fronds, bamboo sticks and mud, and asked to use the toilet. The woman of the house — a sturdy, smiling woman with a child in one hand a basket in the other — welcomed all 15 of us inside. (Can you imagine a van-load of tourists showing up on your front lawn and asking to use your loo?) The dirt floor had been recently swept, and a hammock, hung in the middle of the room, constituted all the furniture in the whole place. A family of pigs was asleep in the kitchen. After letting us in and motioning toward the bathroom (a hole in the ground by the kitchen sink), the woman of the house sat on her dirt floor and began speaking to us in rapid Khmer. Neither Stevie nor me, nor any of our fellow travelers, speak the language, but she seemed to take our smiling silence as shyness, because she went on talking. Occasionally, she'd laugh at one of her own jokes, slapping her knee and grinning.

Outside, two little girls ground sugar cane through a metal grinder for us. The juice was delicious. Kind of sweet, but not artificial sweet. Kind of like lemonade, but without the lemon taste, and with a consistency that's almost milky.

After another bathroom break (and more than a few pit-stops, during which the driver handed wads of money to loitering officials), we eventually made it to a border crossing. Just not the border crossing we were aiming for.

This border crossing was in the middle of nowhere. There was no town, no pavement, no parking lot. Just a little kiosk, where a Cambodian border guard was sweating in the shade. He seemed confused — completely flummoxed, even — by our request to cross the border. Evidently, no foreigners actually cross here. So the guards — they began to crawl out of the woodwork after a while — didn't know what to do with us. It took us about 3 hours (and making sure those officials' palms were nice and greasy) to get by.

An Australian man explained to me later that in Cambodia, as is the case in many developing countries, bribing officials isn't quite as mafioso as it seems. The police don't make enough to support their families, so asking a few sunburned tourists for a Jackson or two seems logical enough.

When we finally got through, there were no buses or taxis to take us to a town, so we climbed on two local guys' motorcycles, pointed at a restaurant listed in our Lonely Planet, and rode into Ha Tiem. Good morning, Vietnam!

How many does it take to hack open a coconut?

SIHANOUKVILLE, Cambodia — It's a beach town a few hours south of Phnom Penh, and, evidently, a sister city of Seattle's. It was a much-needed respite for Stevie and me.

We went out on a boat with a bunch of tourists — Canadians, Brits, a French couple and three Russian guys. The best part was when our German "guide" (he's this 19-year-old kid who's paid to hang out on the beach with us) tried to open a coconut with his bare hands. Hilarious. We eventually got hold of a Swiss Army knife and determined that, while the Swiss thought of almost everything, they'd really dropped the ball by not including a coconut-opener on the standard knife.

After about half an hour, we managed to hack it open. Picture this: Three Russians, two Americans and a German sharing a coconut on a beach in South Cambodia. Thirty years ago, who'd have thought that would have ever been possible?

A T-shirt with butterflies, a reminder of who's buried in a "killing field"

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — The Killing Fields outside Phnom Penh (in Cheong Ek) are bigger than the ones near Siem Reap, but still, the whole place is no bigger than a single baseball diamond at Woodland Park.

A checkerboard of car-sized holes in the ground. I always imagined mass graves to be in long lines, like ditches. But here, they're not. They're just twelve-foot by twelve-foot holes, maybe seven or eight-feet deep. Weeds grow up the sides. Cigarette butts and empty bottles line the fence, where cows graze. It's quiet except for the distant sound of children screaming gleefully at recess at the school nearby.

Thirty years ago, people from all over the countryside were bused here to be killed. The Khmer Rouge got pretty efficient, managing to murder 300 men, women and children a day, once they hit their stride around 1976.

Most of the mass graves have been excavated and the bones interred in a pagoda in the center. This pagoda's bigger than the one at Siem Reap. You can walk into this one and see all the skulls arranged on different shelves, according to age group and sex.

Here are the women, aged 14 to 24. There are the men, 60 and older. On the bottom shelf, there's a a heap of the victims' clothing. One girl was wearing a T-shirt with blue and red butterflies on it when she died.

UPDATE: PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — After seeing the killing fields, neither Stevie nor I spoke to each other. We were silent, horrified, sick to our stomachs.

Why were we forcing ourselves to see this? What was the point? Couldn't we just read the section in our Lonely Planet Guide about Khmer Rouge and the killing fields and call it a day? Are seeing these horrors up close and personal different from just knowing they happened in some abstract place, in some abstract time?

Now we've seen the skulls. We've felt the warm earth where these people died. We've touched their clothes. Maybe there's something in that. Maybe this is our legacy as human beings.

Later, we met up with the same British couple we'd met in Siem Reap. Had bottles of wine (too many) at the Foreign Correspondents Club ("The FCC," for people in the know) in downtown Phnom Penh. It's an impossibly colonial-feeling, open-air rooftop bar and restaurant overlooking the river.

It's where the journalists used to hang out and write in the 60s and 70s, before they were driven out by Pol Pot's henchmen. The brave work of photojournalists lines the walls.

ONE MORE UPDATE: Another depressing entry. Sorry, everyone.

Went to visit an old Khmer Rouge prison called S-21. It's the creepiest place I've ever been. It used to be an old high school before Khmer Rouge turned it into a place to torture people. In each classroom, there's a bed with chains attached to it, and a host of metal tools — pokers, sharpened knives, whips. In case that's not fodder enough for your imagination, the curators of this now-museum have blown-up, black-and-white photographs of actual victims lying — convulsed, starved, bloodied — on those actual beds. You can tell it's the same classroom by the patterns in the chirpy orange-and-white checkered linoleum floor. Barbed wire lines the hallways where teenagers gossiped and reapplied lipgloss in 1973.

The other classrooms are lined with row after row of photographs of the victims, which were taken by the Khmer Rouge just before their deaths. Men, children. Women holding babies. They're all lined up against a wall. A number pinned to their T-shirts. Most of them look terrified.

I couldn't stop staring at a photograph of one girl in particular. She looks about my age and she's wearing a Hang Ten T-shirt with little footprints across the chest. She's got a short bob and bangs. Her mouth isn't smiling, but her eyes are. It's not a happy smile. It's rueful, hateful. A few days later, she was murdered.

A two-dollar cup of coffee and sunrise over a wonder of the world

SIEM REAP, Cambodia — The temple complex at Angkor Wat was recently chosen as one of the "New 7 Wonders of the World" in an international, internet-based election.

It's obvious why: The place is magical, expansive and beautiful. It was built in 802 AD. it's part royal palace, part Buddhist monastery and part Hindu temple.

We got up at 4 a.m. to watch the sunrise over the main temple building, which is topped by 5 skinny-pineapple-shaped towers ("prangs"), each of which represents one of the mountains in the Hindu universe. The center one is Mt. Meru, which is where the gods live.

In the dim, expectant light before dawn, we joined a crowd of tourists that were gathered alongside a row of little red children's chairs. A handful of Cambodians were selling coffee for $2 a Dixie cup (highway robbery in a place where a candlelit dinner is $7), but most of us forked over the green with no regrets. With a view like that — the sun, ringed red, then white, peaking over the roof of elegantly carved ruins, a spoonful of instant coffee in lukewarm water is practically a delicacy.

A tiny pagoda is a huge reminder of what happened in this "killing field"

CAMBODIA — For those who are, as I was, a bit hazy on recent Cambodian history, here's the quick and dirty: During the Vietnam War, parts of Cambodia were heavily bombed by American forces. Between 1975 and 1979, a genocidal dictator named Pol Pot and his party, the Khmer Rouge, murdered between two million and three million people. In 1980, there was a massive, nationwide famine.

The first day we were in Siem Reap (the first major town you encounter on the aforementioned Dancing Road), Stevie and I visited one of the "killing fields" where Khmer Rouge soldiers murdered and buried civilians.

You think "killing fields" and you think it's going to look like Gettysburg. It doesn't. The killing fields here aren't really fields at all. They're just a few patches of dirt, interspersed with trees, about the size of a soccer field. Houses — three-walled structures made of corrugated metal and cardboard — lean into each other around the outside. Kids play in the trash heaps out in front.

One of the reasons why historians know that Khmer Rouge used this place to torture and murder people was because in 1980, they found 75 maimed and decapitated bodies that had been shoved down a well. When we arrived, there were two boys playing along the rim of that same well, balancing and goofing around. Life goes on, I guess.

The only indication that this ground was once wet with blood is a tiny pagoda, maybe 20-feet tall. It has four little stair cases on each side leading up to a plate-glass window, stretching floor to ceiling. Inside, it's full of skulls. Victims' skulls.

Our guide, Chea Bunat, told us that his father's skull is in there somewhere. He doesn't know which one. All he remembers is that one day, when he was eight years old, a bunch of men with machine guns rolled into his tiny village (Kleang Village, it's called) outside Siem Reap, and started going door to door, hauling anyone who was educated out into the street. They took Bunat's dad, who was a math teacher, but left his mom, who was a housewife. He remembers that the soldiers interrogated his mom about their neighbors. What did they do for a living? Did that guy go to school?

"And you couldn't lie, they knew everything. It was test to see if lying," Bunat says. "If lie? Then, bam." He mimes holding a machine gun, then hits himself in the forehead. "Right there on the street."

Six hours on the Dancing Road: "Terrifying and incredibly fun!"

CAMBODIA — The best way to get from Thailand to Cambodia is to take the Dancing Road, a deeply-cratered one-lane dirt road, stretching from the Thai border into the dusty expanse of northwest Cambodia.

It's named the Dancing Road for the way that people jitterbug around their cars while hurtling at top speed over potholes large enough to hide an entire cow.

It takes roughly six hours to negotiate 150 kilometers, from the border to the next biggest city, Siem Reap. But the potholes, craters, dirt moguls and ATV-style jumps (really, our bus got at least two feet of air over some of these) are hardly the biggest obstacle. Every kilometer or two, the road just ends.

There's a little orange "Detour" sign, written in the elegant Cambodian script, behind which is a 20-foot cliff. Cement drums are piled up on either side of the road at these junctures, indicating that the man-made gorges will, at some point, be filled in as drainage ditches. But, for now, they're just another reason for the bus driver to pull the e-brake, crank into a four-wheel drift and skid around a hairpin turn, all the while narrowly missing the herds of cows, auto-rickshaws ("tuk tuks"), motorcycles ("motos"), stray dogs and throngs of children in impossibly white school uniforms who crowd the sides of the road.

It's part terrifying, part incredibly fun.

Stevie and I first experienced the Dancing Road on a public bus, and, while none of the other passengers really spoke most of the time (it was nearly impossibly to hear over the deafening creaking of our 70s-era school bus), everyone on the bus leaned into the aisle and peered out the front window, just to watch the show. To scream. To pray. Sometimes, the whole bus would break into hysterical laughter after narrowly avoiding broadsiding a cow, or swerving to avoid a man on a bicycle carrying over 400 mangos in a fishing net on his back, or after the driver slammed on the brakes and all of us smushed up against the seat in front of us, our luggage skittering down the center aisles like skipping stones.

But for anyone who's ever ridden in a developing nation — or on the streets of Rome, for that matter — the Dancing Road would be old hat. It's chaotic and death-defying, sure, but it's what's on either side of the road that makes it unique to Cambodia:

Thatch houses balance on stilts (not because of floods, but to keep the home cool) as its occupants sleep in hammocks underneath.

Impossibly green rice paddies unfurl in every direction, the water flashing silver in the bright sunlight, and then end, abruptly, and the landscape turns into the dusty yellow-red of desert. Palm tree forests dot the landscape, looking like something out of Dr. Seuss. Kids wear blue surgical masks with their blue-and-white school uniforms, to avoid the dust. Billboards remind children not to touch landmines. Craters from American bombs still pockmark the fields. Men with no arms, no legs and no faces beg at rest stops, their livelihoods stolen by the landmines that, 30 years later, still lie in wait in these rice fields.

"Gas stations" — old 2-liter bottles of Pepsi, filled with petrol — simmer in the sun. Ranch-style gates, the kind you might see in Texas, line the side of the road, leading to temples ("wats"), too far down the dusty paths to see.

Thirty-five men cram into the bed of a single pickup truck (really, 35 seems impossible; it's not), red-checkered cloths (a traditional Khmer cloth) wrapped around their faces.