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My journey in the Caucasian region starts in Tbilisi, fascintimg and gorgeous city whose history runs back to the 8th century BC when the Greek established here the Colchid reign. Arriving at  Tbilisi Airport in the middle of the night, I was so exhausted and overwhelmed with tireness that I deciced to stretch out my legs on an armchair in the departure  hall and take a relax before going to the city centre. At six am I ended up getting a taxi to the town straight to the hotel and fell down asleep in a very short time.
It’s 11 am and it is time to get out and start exploiring the city. I should start by the area immediately  around the hotel but the extreme warmth and the heavy boiling air prevents me from adenturing beyond the closing hotel area, even because I really needed some breakfast first.
In front of my hotel there was the metro station and past it the roads were busy with traffic and no cafè point was recognisable.
Very fed up, at last I managed to buy my breakfast and took a relax sipping my coffee and eating some yogurt.
I started my city exploration around 1pm from Ravasteli Avenue, a lively area with many historic buildings and booksellers stalls.

National Ballet in Ravasteli Avenue

Then I moved to liberty square and to the cablecar point to  go up to Narikala fortress, from where I had a gorgeous view of the city and this gives you the idea of its dimension and envorinment. From the cablecar you can have a wonderful view above the river and the Peace bridge with the Daughter of Georgia statue dominating from above.

A refregerating descend gets you to the old town where the different areas were once part of the arriving streets along the silk road. Here you can contemplate the surprising old wooden buildings, some restored, some not yet, with their lovely old wooden balconies. There are also the old baths were in the 5th century the thermal spring was discovered and this gave the name to Tbilisi, which means ‘hot place’.
The external facade of the baths is decorated with beautiful Blue and green tiles which certainly gives you the impression to be in one of the fascinatimg Asian tracks on the extraordinary Silk Road.

Old baths in Tbilisi

The real emotion to travel Easthern is, without any doubt, the great sensation to see the cultures changing, modifying and integrating themselves in a perfect symmetry, something you can definitely experience travelling by land and surely not by plane.
My impression on this wonderful region, the Caucasus, both Georgia and Armenia, and it should be perceived even in Azerbaijan, place I have not visited yet, is dealing with the great sensation to be travelling in an in-between land, rejoining West and East, a kind of bridge of ancient and profound cultures whose purity is trying to be destroyed and deprived by the the Western.

Wooden balconies in old town, Tbilisi

Siem Reap
Just the approaching of the Angkor Temples area by tuk tuk was an amazing experience. The hot could be felt less intense by means of the pleasant air which was refreshing your skin while travelling on board of this funny transport.
Whenever the driver came to the entrance of a temple and you were gently left down to pay your visit to the temple, the boiling air assaulted you but you were immediately paid back thanks to the scenographic scenery it set out in front of you.
Sometimes the temple was higher from the main road and the first thing which stroke you was the steepy ancient staircase that you needed to climb on to reach the summit of these religious sites of the Khmer civilization which dates back to the eleventh century.
And obviously the view from up there was fantastic! Getting around there you could easily imagine striking stories from the past, slow rhythms of life spent through the immersion in a spiritual existence and this gives you a sensation of great balance and knowledge of the soul.

Angkor Tom temple, one of the most inspiring because of its hugeness and the red stone it was built, made me remember the old Maya’s temples.

Banteay Srei, the only temple built by a woman is absolutely worth mentioning, even though to reach it you need to travel quite a long way from Angkor Wat by tuk tuk or you can also rent a scooter. This beautiful temple composed by small shrines almost at the grand floor level gets you into a tiness and a mutual atmosphere were gentless and sacrality predominate. Some small temples are introduced by little animal statues situated at some column basements. They are mostly monkeys but you can spot other symbolical religious animals linked to the past Khmer history.

Not to mention the surprising Ta Prohm were the power of nature has left innumerabile traces of its sublime hugeness. I am referring to the tall trees whose roots completelety wrap up the walls of the buildings like a shawl to protect them like a magic spell. Considering the fact this is the most famous and largely visited among the whole site area, it could seem a  trivial attempt trying to talk about it. I can just describe you my reaction towards the amazing scenery of the roots wrapping the sacrality of what once represented a religious place attended by monks . It seems almost a sacrilege imposed by nature which has set up here its corrosive journey towards eternity so as to inorporate the work of men into its sublime essence.

Just as I was approaching the coach station in Battambang coming from Siem Reap, I could notice a crowd of local people , who, as it usually happens, are welcoming the new arrivals in the town.
Mr Soon, a very friendly man , spotted me from the pavement before getting down. I was sure he would have bothered me with the usual offerings of tours or some other kind of purchasing we travellers are doomed to deal about. I could say, yes the place seemed to fascinate me perhaps more than the arrival in Siem Reap, in the sense I found the town more authentic in its French colonial heritage. 
I immediately understood it would have been worth while spending some days there.
A beautiful location, east from Siem Reap towards the Thailand border, vivacious but not as cahotic and touristic as Siem Reap. The town is crossed by a river coming from Siem Reap and going on to Kampong Chnang through the Tonle Sap Lake.

Our friend revealed to be a very informed and discrete guide and, as I went on his tuc tuc, we planned a tour for the following morning to the oldest Khmer houses just on the suburbs of the town.
The speech went naturally to the past civil war which took place thirty years ago and whose signs have been dramatic to these people.

The oldest Khmer house, of one hundred years, was shown us, me and my daughter, from its friendly owner. He went through the terribile story of his family who had been living there for one hundred years. The house had been an outpost during the war between Vietnam and Thailand as Cambodia has always been a land imprisoned between these two countries. The rooms and corridors revealed the past history of his grandmother, a Cambodian woman who was forced to marry a Thai army captain in order to save her family.

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