“Tell me a story about love”

That’s a question I always ask to the girls I interviewed. For most of them, the feeling of love is incarnated in different concepts like food, travelling or friendship. How comfortable they are in front of the camera, I always notice a bit of reserve when we talk about Love. They rarely open themself about their travel romances or love stories and I can feel that it is a taboo subject. 

Love can have different shape and shades and I know there is different kind of love… If I had to tell a story about love while travelling I think I would talk about that moment at the really beginning of my trip, in a train going to Lopburi from Bangkok. I felt pure love for the first time in a while. It was filling my heart but not only… It was warming every atoms in my body. It was all around me and no matters how dirty was the seat I was sitting on, no matters if I was on my own and couldn’t talk about this amazing instant, I enjoyed it as much as one could. No particular reason to have this feeling, I was just happy and I was attracting all the good things around. I was basically radiating LOVE.

So what is love?
Everybody will answer : you’ll know it when you will feel it.

And what is hate now? If you ever put a foot in S21, the place where the Khmer Rouge put in jail and tortured thousands of people in the 70′, if you ever feel the vibrations in these walls and listen to the stories that happened there, you’ll understand the concept of hate. Pure horror.
    
    

How hard it has been for me to step in these old classroom and imagine the screams, the smell of blood and malnutrition, the incomprehension, I would recommend to visit S21 and the killing fields. 

That visit happened at the end of my visit in Cambodia and suddenly a lot of things made sense. I, as a little Frenchie will never understand how it is to deal with a national genocide. I will never know how hard it can be to cope with this kind of stories. 

The part that is still really obscure for me is the fact that a third of population has been decimated in few years, how it has been easy for the envaders to take the control over an entire nation (Phnom Penh has been evacuated in three days! I mean, EVERYBODY left the city, those staying were murdered in their house), how the intellectuals were suddenly the enemies and how you could have been tortured for absolutely no reason. 

Chaos, horror, drama, starvation, torture… It is not a nice moment but you have to know what happened there.
    
    
 

On the other side, we found a really nice hostel, 11 happy backpackers. If you go there, try to make Sammy laugh, he has the most happiest and communicative laugh ever.