"Danger, it is strongly advised not to attempt to ride a motorcycle here! It's madness. Cambodia is not a good place to get sick or injured. Basic stabilization facilities exist, but for serious treatment, evacuation to Thailand is the only option." That was Cambodia described in the tourist book I had lying on my desk.

Looking out the window of my house in Montana I saw a snowflake float past. Snow usually brought a halt to my motorcycle riding. I have had to ride in the stuff from time to time. Some of that riding was memorable but none was fun. In the coming months I knew I would see more of it, possibly a lot more. I also knew I was faced with work and meetings, another set of ugly thoughts. A short walk to my neighbor's house to use his telephone (I do not have one in my Montana cabin) had me booked on a flight to Thailand where I had an apartment reserved and a stored motorcycle.

Sometimes I have to shed my motorcycle riding gear and go into a work mode. The thought of doing this in the coming months, coupled with the snowflakes, found me booked on a flight to Asia for the winter. There I would be riding motorcycles, wearing tee shirts and the only snow I would see would be on TV. My mother says I "clean-up pretty good."

I admit to being a two-wheel adrenal gland junkie; a motorcyclist, who thrives on adventure, defined in the true meaning, that being to include the word risk. I do not see adventure as being on a canned motorcycle tour, where the tour guide or organizer has removed all risks. When I see a motorcycle ride with a high degree of risk, like what the Cambodian Tour Book was advising against, I see an opportunity to experience real adventure. Into Cambodia on two wheels I went. Besides an opportunity to suck in an adventure fix, I also saw a chance to mix with one of the Seven Wonders of the World, Angkor Wat.

Palm trees along the road to Siem Riep. Riding by them I could only smile knowing how cold it was in Montana.

An idyllic Cambodia village. 85% of Cambodia's people live in villages such as this. With average salaries around $260US per year and 36% of the population classified as poor, Cambodia is one of Asia's poorest countries. A major difference between the people of Thailand and those of Cambodia next door was I heard almost no laughing in Cambodia.

The tour book was right, in a sense. To the novice or timid motorcycle pilot, used to rules of the road and pavement, Cambodia would have been a nightmare. The roads were some of the worst I had ridden anywhere on the planet. Often the paved sections were so bombed out it was easier to ride on the dirt shoulders of the road rather than dodging and sometimes not missing the potholes. Several of my motorcycle acquaintances have found the roads to be so bad they opted to pay to load their motorcycles on trucks rather than attempt to ride them to Siem Reip.

The main road into Siem Riep had bombed out sections like this. It was easier to ride on the shoulder than on the pavement.

In Phnom Penh, the largest city and capital of Cambodia, the rule of the road was "There are no rules." Small 100-cc motorcycles rode everywhere, dodging trucks and cars, and often on the sidewalks. Stop signs were ignored by all vehicles, and it was not uncommon for several vehicles to use your driving lane, coming at your from the opposite direction. At intersections cars, trucks and motorcycles nosed their way into the intersecting street knowing other vehicles would give way and let them cross. The only place I had ridden motorcycles in the world that might closely approach the madness of Cambodia was India.

One local motorcycle shop owner in Phnom Penh suggested the reason for the madness was no one knew there were rules, like a Stop sign meaning Stop. He said anyone that had enough money could purchase a vehicle. There were no requirements that they know how to ride or drive.

Interestingly dangerous were the people who came to the cities from the villages scattered all over the country. In their villages there were only dirt roads. There they drove very slowly and anywhere they wanted. When they came to the city they knew of no reason to change their driving habits. Of the thousands of small motorcycles I saw in Cambodia only one had a set of rearview mirrors. No one seemed to worry about what was behind them or about to over take them from either side.

In Cambodia's second largest city, Siem Reip, tourists were prohibited from renting motorcycles. One of the local guides told me the reason for the law was because so many Europeans had crashed rented motorcycles, stressing the "Europeans" versus foreigners in general. Europeans are likely the most trained and skilled motorcycle riders in the world, and being so channeled in their habits they could not adjust to breaking those habits to adopt to the local riding style. Thinking they had the right-of-way sent many out of Cambodia by air ambulance to Thailand. The authorities in Siem Reip decided it was easier to bar foreigners from piloting motorcycles than to continue to receive bad press because Europeans kept crashing.

A "Tourist Police" cop bike. Each of the two horns was larger than the motorcycle engine. The motorcycle was Chinese made.

I once likened riding in India to watching ants scramble after having covered an anthill with gasoline and lighting it. In Cambodia I thought the same could be true, except that one would want to use Mekong Whisky instead of gasoline. While they both may have tasted the same I thought the alcohol would add the element of chaos not provided by the petrol.

The temples of Angkor were worth the adventure into Cambodia. Numerous temples ("wats") were spread over a several hundred square kilometer area. Their varied designs and construction ranged from Hindu to Buddhist influence. The stone carvings, sometimes full-breasted exposed women, elephants and often Buddha, provided visual options with no two of the wats designed the same. The grand daddy wat, Angkor Wat, was a structure that would fit in Disney Land. 1,000's of tourists per hour flow in and out of this world wonder.

Angkor Wat. Along the outer wall I could see bullet holes in the stone work, a reminder of harsher times. On this day the wat was full of visiting Japanese tourists, 1,000's of them. It was Japan/Cambodia Friendship Week. I was the tallest tourist in the throngs.

I spent a full day crawling up and down the wats, literally. It seemed most were built above the swampy ground and required climbing up steps. I did this climbing part poorly. My right knee was ruined over thirty years ago and the grinding of cartilage going up and down steep, irregular made for small legs and short feet, had me eating Ibuprofen like Life Savers. Coupled with high humidity, which was added to by my body sweating out a bucket of Angkor Beer from the previous night, I must have been the perfect obnoxious tourist as I swore, stumbled, and smelled for hours in the jungle heat.

Looking back on my temple day, other than the Anchor Wat , the other wats have flowed into a rainbow colored psychedelic memory. Some of that may have been due to my body flushing beer, and some the Ibuprofen I was taking. The rest may be attributed to the NyQuil I was swallowing for the cold I had come down with from going in and out of the air-conditioning in Bangkok. Or possibly the Benadryl I was gulping for my allergy to the exhaust fumes and smoke (the locals were burning trash and fields as I rode to Siem Reap). There might have also been some carry-over from the Melatonin I took for sleep in the noisy guesthouse in which I was booked for the night. Added could have been the effects of the Cifloxin I was ingesting for the Hershey Squirts from mistakenly brushing my teeth with Cambodian tap water. Then there was my daily mix of Glucosamine, GarliMax and Centrum pills for the ills associated with age and failing body parts. In retrospect, the hallucinations may have been from the Malarine I had bought the day before over the counter in Phnom Penh for a flare-up of the malaria I had met seven or eight years earlier in South America.

I hired a guide for the day ($5.00US), someone who could direct me to the best temples and explain more than what was published in the tourist guide books. He turned out to be one of the best investments I made. Some people spend a week or more touristing the temples, poking through the crumbling rocks, and soaking up the ambience of the holy sites. I am a motorcycle adventurer, so my main focus is on the movement of myself and my motorcycle. Sometimes I have stopped and played "tourist," like in Cambodia, but only for a short time. In this case I had budgeted one day for temple touristing, and the guide managed to get me to the best of what could have been a week worth of touristing.

This is how some tourists traveled from temple to temple. The motorcycle was a Honda 110-cc Wave.

My guide had a sense of humor. He would laugh when I would groan, like when I was looking up at the top of a temple with nearly vertical carved steps from the bottom. Around noon he asked if I was hungry, then laughed when I said I could eat a raw monkey head. He took me to a small outdoor food booth and suggested I try the "moo gwop chin shup." When I asked him what was in it, he said, "You like, eat good." As I prodded through a thick brown bowl of soup I stabbed what appeared to be an eye." As I inspected it with disgust he laughed again, then said, "Good no? Dog eye soup, close to monkey head."

I thought he was making fun of me, but then remembered that only a week before three Thai men were arrested in Ratchaburi Province (across the border in Thailand) for selling dogs in Cambodia. They had been driving though villages offering $5.00US for stray dogs, and when caught had 13 destined for delivery in Cambodia. As I looked at the eye speared on my chopstick I thought I might be eyeballing one of the Thai dogs. Then I started to laugh. My guide wanted to know what was so laughable, but I could not find a way to tell him I was thinking, "Here I am, eye to eye with a Thai.dog."

I quit laughing, mouthed the eyeball and molarized it before swallowing what felt like a raw oyster. If someone had asked me what it tasted like I would have said, "soft boiled baby sheep gonad." What sheep nuts taste like I had no clue, but I thought the image would give the answer some likeness to the mushy texture.

After lunch I started to look around for a toilet, a commodity hard to find. Whoever designed the temples five to six hundred years ago at Angkor left out toilets.

There were none. I concluded that if a person was in a temple and needed to relieve him or herself, what they did was take a walk out of the wat and into the jungle.

Behind my luncheon food stalls I saw a toilet, but when I looked inside I saw it was a "squatter" (a porcelain unit at floor level with a hole in the center, or raised up about 10 inches off the floor). Because of my severely damaged right knee I have found these squatters a vertical challenge, all over the world. This one looked to be a larger than a normal challenge because whoever used it before managed to hit everything except the bulls-eye. As I looked at it and mentally debated an attempt to overcome the challenges my dog eye tried to see the light of day and I backed out of the hooch to keep the pooch optic in the dark.

I walked to my guide and asked if he knew where there was another toilet. He smiled and said, "I take you to Toilet Temple." It was at the Toilet Temple I realized every penny I paid my guide for the day was worth the investment. He took me to a newly constructed blockhouse of toilets, all fitted with "sitters," not squatters. As I sat on a gleaming new toilet that had "American Standard" stamped on it I gave thanks for where I was and for the fact I was not squatting in the jungle, worrying about snakes, swatting mosquitoes, or realizing I was straddling a land mine. I guessed that was why my guide called it Toilet Temple, a place of worship, because I was on the throne worshiping as well as any religious person can in a temple.

My guide told me this tree root reminded him of a man's member. I joked with him, saying "maybe Cambodian man, not Crow Indian man from America." "What difference?" he asked. I said, "Crow Indian point up, Cambodian point down." He laughed longer than anyone I had heard laugh in a week. Then he said, "OK, not Cambodian man. Elephant nose."

Mines are a problem all over Cambodia. During my short stay mines killed four people. The Khmer Rouge buried mines along roads and in rice fields. Some areas, like this one, had been swept clean. It was an area surrounding a temple. The clean-up crews found 19 mines, plus unexploded ordnance. The government does not have to spend a lot of money on signs that read "Stay On The Path" in tourist areas. A wandering tourist can pay a high penalty for leaving the regular path. Throughout Cambodia I saw numerous limbless people. An estimate is there are over 40,000 Cambodians who have lost limbs to mines, or 1 in 275 people.

I passed on the usual tourist stops in Phnom Penh; Tuol Sleng Museum and the extermination fields of Choeung Ek. The Tuol Sleng Museum, also known as S-21, was formerly a high school. In 1975 Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge Party security forces turned it into Security Prison 21, converted it to the largest detention and torture center in the country. Between 1975 and 1978 more than 17,000 people (men, women and infants, including nine westerners) were taken from S-21 to fields near Choeung Ek, now referred to as the Killing Fields, about 15 kilometers from Phnom Penh. The detainees were dispatched in the fields, often bludgeoned to save precious bullets.

A western tourist was appalled when I told him I had no interest in touristing to the Killings Fields or S-21.

He said, "Man, you gotta go there. You can see 8,000 skulls there. Babies, women, and men. Those skulls tell you how bad Pol Pot and his buddies were. You gotta see 'em."

I asked him if he had been up to the top floor of the Foreign Correspondents Club?

"Nah, what's up there?"

"A sunset view of the Mekong, streets and ladies," I answered.

" I like my women white, the river's a sewer and who cares about the streets?"

My answer came slowly. I did not know if this American had a marble for a brain or was possibly capable of intellectual sight.

"Ahhhhhh, women. I think it was Rudyard Kipling who wrote in The Ladies 'the things you'll learn from the yellow and brown, they'll help you a lot with the white.'

And the Mekong is the life blood of Southeast Asia."

"And the streets?"

"As you look down, try to imagine the sound of gunfire, screams of the dying, and the smell of blood. 30 or 40 years ago that's what the journalists were hearing, seeing and smelling at sunset while they drank."

"Yeah, but Pol Pot was a bad guy. He killed them 8,000."

"We killed 250,000."

"Huh?"

"Yep. In 1969 our B-52's started to carpet bomb eastern Cambodia. Our military was trying to hit suspected camps of communists who were hammering our troops in Vietnam. It was a secret program, kept from the American public. In 1973, near the end of the summer, our Congress finally put the halt to what the President was doing. Some 250,000 Cambodian villagers were 'collateral causalities' during those illegal bombing runs."

"Well, err, that was for the war. We needed to do it."

"Right or wrong, 250,000 Cambodian lights were snuffed. There's no museum with pictures of them. And that's only about 10% of the number of dead between then and 1979 when the Vietnamese toppled the Khmer Rouge and pushed them back into the jungles between Cambodia and Thailand."

"I don't believe it. 250,000? Two million? How come I never read about it?"

"You were hand held hope in your daddy's mind in 1969."

He screwed up his face, trying to figure out if he or his parentage had been offended. Then he said, "Does that mean you're stupid for not seeing S-21?"

I wanted to shout at him, "You dumb Texan cracker. Stupid has nothing to do with it. A Texan was responsible for those 250,000. A smart Texan, somebody not like you."

Instead I took the high ground, I thought. "Look, I've wandered the grounds of Auschwitz. I've seen gulags in Russia. I'm an American Indian. One of my Sioux ancestors was "hung by a rope until dead." I've ridden motorcycles to the Battle of the Big Hole, Wounded Knee, and walked the site of Salt Creek. In New York and Washington, DC, I've seen 1,000's of skulls of American Indians. I think I've enough feeling for how humans can be cruel to one another and not to have to look at 8,000 skulls."

"Yeah, but you're gonna miss 8,000 Cambodian skulls."

I spent my last hours in Cambodia watching the sun drop behind Thailand. From the open-windowed Foreign Correspondents Club I saw the coffee-with-cream colored Mekong River. The river is born in China, feeds much of Asia, and eventually will be a river-road from the South China Sea deep into China. A Mekong Whisky with ice and water insured no more flowing sweats. The orange sun fell below the horizon to the west, somewhere in Thailand. Looking onto the now bloodless street below, I wondered.

Jungle riding in Cambodia; hot and dirty. A welcome relief from the suit, tie and cold I left in Montana. I didn't see a single heavyweight-touring bike on the road. Cambodia is not great riding if you are on a Harley-Davidson or big BMW. That does not mean someone has not ridden one there. The bikes just would not have been happy in the jungle.