Universal Traveler

Ah, travel. The sights! The smells! The characters you run across! I love people watching in general, but when you're travelling, it's like someone bringing a smorgasbord to your front door. And you end up find a lot of similarities between people. Some folks are really interesting and some are complete morons who you wonder how they managed to get to this side of the world when they should be choking on the flies falling into their stupidly gaping maws. Here are some sketches from the Cambodian leg of my Thai adventure.

On the left is a big Italian guy with a big round gut that I couldn't help but stare at on the bus ride from Poipet back to Bangkok. He was sporting a very impressive diamond ring and probably also had feet but I don't recall what they looked like. In the middle is a nice Englishman staying at our guesthouse in Siem Reap, with whom we shared a cab ride to Poipet. He told us stories about his carpenter son who "was not gifted in the brain cells" and his daughter working at a ski resort and her imminent descent into lazy alcoholism.

The girl on the right is my favorite, in that love-to-hate sort of way. I think she was from Austria, travelling with her friend and a perpetual scowl (debilitating underbite?). They were on the same bus as us on the way to Cambodia, and held the group up at the border by a good half hour. I did not appreciate this, as it was high noon and close to 40 degrees C, and Poipet is not a very happy town. A couple days later, as we waited at Aranyaprathet to go back to Bangkok, our bus group was delayed again. This time by an hour. "Two more, two more!" the driver kept telling us. "Wouldn't it be bizarre if those girls were the ones holding us up? Ha! Ha! But that would never happen because we live in a fair and just world, don't we?" I chuckled. Oh no. Oh yes! There they were, piling into the bus an hour after it should have left without their sorry asses. Now I'm officially allowed to hate them. I guess it would have been more fair to draw both of them, but I can't remember what her friend looked like and I don't particularly care.