Ben Welsher | Writings

Day 6 - Rangoon My bucket list isn't well defined but Burma has long been on it. A combination of its long isolation under military control, which to me promised that elusive 'authentic experience ', and a evocation of an imperial past stoked my interest. I don't know if I much like either of those reasons for wanting to visit if I think about it but sometimes I need a break from being a liberal, lefty, guardian reader feeling guilty about absolutely everything. Speaking of guilt the British are second only to the Dutch in Europe in their positive feelings towards their former empire. 32% of Britons think that the empire is more a source of pride than shame. That is a more nuanced and layered question than the question of whether ex-colonies are better off for having been part of the empire. 33% of people believe that in the UK and it is, quite frankly, ludicrous bollocks. A globe-spanning empire like Britain's can only be built off the back of immense exploitation

Day 5 - Siem Reap With the water festival finished we has one more place to visit in Cambodia. Angkor Wat is an indisputable wonder of the world and the largest religious monument ever constructed. It sits within a temple complex covering 400km², the scale of which is impossible to adequately describe. Its towers seem to rise organically from the ground, the stone flowering from the earth into wonderfully symmetric form. Only modern capitalism and totalitarian hubris seem to inspire similar architectural endeavour as the gods did in the past. I don't necessarily agree with any of those ideologies and their human cost but religion's diminished power permits me a less coloured appreciation of its monuments. In the stone of Angkor Wat you see reflected the same desire for, and defiant belief in, permanence that runs through our species. I see it in the chiselled signage above the entrance to long dead banks and businesses in the City of London. The owners thought the gilded lobb

Day 4 - Phnom Penh We'd waited a day longer in Phnom Penh than we would have otherwise chosen to. The Bon Om Touk water festival's climactic day caused this. As I've said people travel to the capital from the countryside to support their local team of rowers. Forty or fifty men fill a long, narrow boat painted in a single primary colour. The rower's shirts match the colour so that when they are racing it all forms one machine of many parts heaving down the river towards a finish line that will decide whether they return to their villages and towns as heroes or failures. Two boats at a time race, starting at a point on the river I could only barely see through the haze of the day. They pull their oars rhythmically through the brown water and are kept in time by the cox standing on the prow, standing so stable and sure that he could be on top of a million year old mountain. The crowd sits on a concrete incline that reaches from the promenade above down to the muddy water

Day 2 - Phnom Penh A great many awful things have been done by a great many people to a great many people over the centuries. The reasons why are rarely novel and we are a species with a barely quenched enthusiasm for killing one another. Yet the further back some atrocity happens the easier it becomes to attribute it to some aspect of the human psyche that is primitive and now banished. But only two years before I was born the Cambodians were killing each other in quantities not seen since the holocaust. One quarter of the population died in four years during a psychopathic attempt to return the country to an idyllic rural existence no more realistic than the picture on a tin of biscuits at Christmas. Near Phnom Penh city centre, hemmed in on all sides by low-rise concrete accommodation blocks lies a prison with the innocuous designation 'S21'. It was a school until 1975 when the Khmer Rouge seized power. Soon after it became a detention centre for enemies of the new regime,

Day 1 - Phnom Penh, Cambodia Seven years later and Southeast Asia is still a land of gold, barely scratched on my wall map of the world. Two weeks stewing in Bangkok was no great second act to my South American odyssey. Part of me ever longs for those days though, when time was so elastic and impeded nothing. It was a trick of the mind to think time was waiting. It wasn't but its steady progression has brought some wondrous things, experiences and experience, friends and love. The future is more real now than it was then, in some bad ways but in good ways too. It isn't so much the sights that I saw that make me miss those travels, those natural wonders, the charming towns and bustling cities but rather the in-between places. Those hours spent looking out of bus windows or out of train windows or simply outwards, just thinking and feeling as I cut straight through life and its innumerable hues. The long journey to Phnom Penh began, as is custom, with pre-flight beers. They wer