Back from Bangkok

— A smaller iPhone factory – Foxconn’s – about an hour down the road.

— A lot of iPads being used — awkwardly — as cameras, mostly in the ubiquitous Buddhist temples, which in Thailand were usually freshly painted and which were crumbling charmingly in Cambodia.

— Loads of iPhones, but mostly in the hands of tourists. In fact, the iPhone was the most popular phone – by far —  of the tourist class. One Swedish family we met used them as baby monitors.

— A lot of Nokia and Samsung feature phones, mostly in the hands of locals. Two of our guides carried iPhones, but only one actually used his as a phone (battery life too short, he complained).

What else we did…

— Visited a lake – Tonlé Sap — on which 10% of Cambodia’s population lives in utter poverty (but decent cellular coverage) in floating houses that move with the shoreline as the area covered by the lake grows five-fold during the rainy season. Video: Cambodia’s great lake. 

— Took a two-day boat trip down the Mekong from northern Thailand to lovely Luang Prabang, Laos. Videos: A slow boat down the Mekong and The monks of Luang Prabang.

— Had audiences with a couple of practicing shamans – one Hmong, one Lahu – who wisely avoid giving marital advice and send their seriously ill supplicants to the hospital.

— Fed and washed some savagely abused elephants (some blinded by nail-studded prods, some with broken backs, one that stepped on a landmine). Video: A day at the elephant sanctuary.

— Saw the effects of the ordnance dumped on Laos – where the U.S. dropped more bombs than all the combatants in World War II. The rice paddies are still littered with unexploded cluster bombs designed to look like fruit.

— Visited Ho Chi Minh (well-preserved despite his express wish to be cremated), photographed a guillotine at the “Hanoi Hilton” prison and learned how to cross Hanoi’s traffic-clogged streets without getting run over (the trick is to just keep walking). Video: How to cross the street in Hanoi.

— Learned how to make spring rolls and harvest rice.

— Ate deep-fried crickets and frogs. Were also offered some rat-on-a-stick shish kabobs. Those we did not eat.

— Read two first-rate books on Indochina: Norman Lewis’ Dragon Apparent and Graham Greene’s The Quiet American. Spotted several travelers reading paperback copies of Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs.

— Missed another $110 drop in Apple’s (AAPL) share price in the four weeks we were away. When the company reported its Q1 2013 earnings, an island in the Andaman Sea was a pretty good place to be. Video: Leaving Koh Ngai.

Next week: San Francisco for Asymconf and Macworld.