Massage, sir? Only $3. Lady you buy something? Silk scarf only $2. Special price for lady.

Little expenses, all so innocent on their own, but pile them together and you won’t believe you spent that much.

But how can you help yourself with so much cheap luxury?

When it comes to mobile travel apps, it’s a buyer’s market at the junkyard. There is not shortage of half-baked, vaguely useful apps that you may use once or twice then forget they existed.

So many location-based apps that suggest attractions close to you have incomplete and often outdated databases. Place-specific guides also tend to be limited, often listing the most obvious attractions.

When selling bootleg books didn’t work, the boy turned to begging for food. He looked 12 and was still perfecting his pity pitch.

After four days in Siem Reap (and another week in Sihanoukville), I got used to saying no to child sellers and beggars. I read enough articles to know giving them money does more harm than good:

A benefit of traveling off the beaten track is that when you finally visit a well-trodden place, it’s a pleasant surprise.

The annoyances of tourism – hustlers, touts, tons of restaurants and bars catering for tourists, loud drunken backpakcers – become a cultural attraction, no longer a burden.

To add a little challenge to my trip I did the following:

1. I stuck to off-the-beaten-path locales
2. I stopped using a guidebook
3. I started arriving at strange cities at late hours and without a clue

Result: it was still laughably easy.

On your rental scooter, that is. You never know what might be coming up from behind.

See full article for an intriguing picture.

Around 2 pm – shortly after breakfast – the first flyers are delivered by pretty Finnish girls with hangover sunglasses. Tonight’s specials are the same as last night’s: 25-cent beers from 9:00 to 10:00, then free vodka “buckets” from 10:00 to 10:30.

It’s monsoon season, so the many bars in Sihanoukville have to compete for few customers. If one is feeling bold, it will begin its free drinking period 10 minutes before the other one.

In the town of Koh Kong, near the border with Thailand, there’s a Buddhist spiritual retreat with a bizarre collection of sculptures by its riverfront.

In the photos below you’ll see sadistic-looking sculptures dressed in KR uniform killing people with the heads of animals. You’ll see a man being sawed in half while being pecked by a garuda, a bird of Buddhist mythology.

See full article for photo gallery.

If you want a real mind screw, visit Phnom Penh’s killing field and its glitziest night club on the same day.

On one you will see what a genocidal nightmare Cambodia once was. You will be greeted with a tower containing hundreds of skulls arranged by gender and age. You will walk past mass graves and step on bone fragments that emerge from the ground with each passing rain.

If the lottery is a tax on stupidity, paying twice for a Vietnam visa are the punitive damages.

You’re given the choice of a cheaper single-entry visa or a pricier one that lets you enter and leave the country as much as you want in a time frame. Budget-conscious – and logic-deficient – travelers like myself by reflex opt for the cheaper visa. After all, I only planned to visit Vietnam once.