Team line-ups

Here's a few few team line-ups from Sunday's trip to Phnom Chisor and beyond. The top photo was taken inside the main vihara at Wat Srah Keo, next to the scattered remains of an ancient prasat and where the head monk, Touch Seam Lean (stood next to me wearing glasses) spoke pretty good English and offered to join me on one of my trips in the future. He was particularly interested in my visits to genocide memorials around his province of Takeo and neighbouring Kandal. Wat Srah Keo is about fifty kilometres from Phnom Penh and I'll post a few more photos of this pagoda soon. The middle photo was taken in a rice field en route between Route 2 and Route 3 when I stopped to play football with this crowd of youngsters and immediately regretted it as sweat poured off me in bucketloads within a minute of joining in. A word of advice - trying to play football in a ricefield is not conducive to skilful football as I found out after ending up looking like the village idiot when missing my shot completely, which greatly amused my new team-mates. The bottom picture is of a group of teenage boys who were visiting Phnom Chisor, were immaculately behaved and who'd just had their fortunes read by the guy in the background of the photo. They came from a village about 20 kilometres away and had never visited the hilltop temple before. I think it's great that these boys made the effort as group to visit this historical site and treated it with the respect and deference it deserves. It brought back some very happy memories of when I was a teenager as I too spent my Sunday's visiting local landmarks, alongwith a group of my pals on a fleet of bicycles.