Overall, a country that brings out a bag of mixed emotions- awe, inspiration, sadness, horror and tranquility.
Once again my tour guide extraordinare, Mykol, organized a fantastic trip and only had to rip a few people "new ones", after failing to fulfill their promises.
Met Mykol at our Chinese hotel in Phnom Penh after overzealously avoiding the taxi hawkers and looking like a frightened fieldmouse wildly driving a baggage cart to find the easily-located airport-sanctioned taxi company. So green, I know.
STAYS
Myokol found a great hotel in Phnom Penh with satellite tv and cheap foot massages on the first floor. Hello, heaven. It was our comfortable and cheap base for the first and last parts of the 8-day trip.
Arriving in Siem Reap after 7 hours on a cramped bus ride desperately avoiding eye contact with a socially-inept foreign traveller who regaled his poor Cambodian seatmates with TMI life stories and photos and tried to get our attention by snapping his fingers in front of our faces, we were so looking forward to a hot shower. We booked the hotel in Phnom Penh at our reliable travel agency and thought all was taken care of. However, the hotel decided to double-book our pre-paid room. After being told we couldn't have our pre-paid room, but could go to a hotel 30 minutes away, Mykol brought out the angry face and away the manager went looking for the poor couple who thought they had a place to stay. The manager literally interrupted the couple during dinner and made them haul their suitcases out. Exemplary customer service.
We could only stay one night, so after dinner we traipsed down the main hotel drag looking for available rooms. Walking to hotels with snarling security dogs to greet us, Mykol half-joked that we were Jesus and Mary looking for a manger to lay our wearied heads. After walking into 15 different places at 10:30pm, we found a clean guest house and the manager, still pyjama-clad, made our reservation.
SHOPPING
Like Vietnam, Mykol and I had a hard time not overbuying, as we went to outdoor markets, night markets and street-side stands selling so many different products. Bought some beautiful bamboo purses, multi-coloured silk bags, scarves, purses, wooden handicrafts, dried fruit, not to mention overseas toiletries at a great supermarket in Phnom Penh. Also handmade shoes everywhere- my dream.
SIGHTSEEING
There are so many places to see in Cambodia, from World Heritage sites to museums to French-colonial architecture to somber memorial sites. The highlights:
- Our dream had been to see the thousand-year old ruins of the Khmer Empire's region, Angkor. What I didn't realize was that this is a huge area with over 1,000 temples, not simply a few beautiful temples as I had naively thought. Favourite temples were definitely Angkor Wat (surrounded by a moat and featuring 5 massive towers), Thom (the last capital city of the Khmer empire) and Bayon (featuring massive smiling faces facing all directions). Our tuktuk driver also took us to some more remote wats (temples), with few people and more greenery. Amazing experience. Also enabled us to see small housing areas within the grounds where families live and create wooden and other handicrafts.
- National Museum: sandstone open air museum exhibiting ancient Khmer artifacts from around Cambodia, shared with a roof full of bats.
- Wat Phnom: a temple from the 1300's overlooking Phnom Penh, still used by locals to pray.
- Royal Palace: beautiful, ornate architecture covered in silver or gold and featuring a variety of stylized animals to decorate roof tops. Also has the famous Silver Pagoda, with over 5,000 solid silver tiles, although to be honest we didn't realize we saw it until after looking at our guidebook. A little underwhelming.
- Killing Fields: It was a sunny, blue-sky day when we visited, making for an eerie juxtaposition of beautiful landscape and a history of horror. The focal point is a glass mausoleum with 8,000 human skulls belonging to the tens of thousands of Khmer Rouge victims killed at this site. Surrounding the tower are many grassy pits, which were once the mass graves. We saw a few people break down after walking through the site.
- Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum (S-21): one of the most disturbing but necessary museums to visit in our lifetime. Here you will see torture rooms with the original metal bed frame where prisoners were leg-shackled and brutally tortured, poles in the middle of the compound where prisoners were strung up for days in the blistering sun, and cells about 5ft long by 1 1/2ft wide. I will never forget these images. The prison, a former high school, features thousands of photos of these prisoners, some literally with their heads propped up because of starvation, including men, and their wives and children. Upstairs there's a well-organized exhibition that gives a voice to some of these victims, explaining their life histories as told by family members and friends.
FOOD
Cambodian cuisine comes from the country's centuries-old Khmer culture and includes fish, spicy curries and coriander and lemon grass-infused vegetables dishes. Very delicious and so cheap. People often compare it to Thai cuisine, only less spicy. Some highlights:
- amok: steamed catfish in a coconut curry
- fermented shrimp or fish paste used to flavour many dishes
- beef noodle soup, influenced by the Chinese
- traditional Khmer dessert: banana-leaf-wrapped sweet rice balls (something like Japanese mochi)
- sour fish soup
- all kinds of fruit- especially mangosteens, durian (!) and pineapple- made for every-morning shakes
- Spent New Year's Eve at the famous Dead Fish restaurant, eating Khmer curries and drinking smart cocktails (unfortunately this was followed by a street party full of drunk foreigners dancing to techno music, while the 50-something beer-bellied men hit on anything that moved)
LASTING IMPRESSION
Before I left a Kyoto, a friend warned me that poverty in Cambodia would be unlike anything I had seen. He was definitely right. At night, we saw mothers and their 6 month-old babies crawling on sidewalks looking through piles of garbage. Everywhere there were street hawkers and so many of them are children, working late at night. Their eyes betrayed their little bodies. Their smiles and banter to get you to buy their postcards or books were sweet, but the minute you bought something or gave them change, they quickly move on to their next buyer, ignoring you when you say goodbye. They were little old people, missing out on their youth.
However, there seem to be many organized charities operating in Cambodia to help these children and other misfortunate people. It was heartening to find a store in the Russian market in Phnom Penh combining social initiatives and commerce. Cambodian parents receive training and support to make goods, so they can support their families and help their children get an education and avoid becoming street hawkers. The products are artistic and cool- like bracelets made of rolled magazine pages or wallets made from cigarette boxes. There seems to more of a crackdown on child prostitution as well, with magazines and ticket backs featuring ads for the serious penalties involved.
What made the trip was meeting so many interesting Cambodians: our kind and patient sightseeing driver in Phnom Penh who got us access into a beautiful private temple; the guest house manager who took care of us each day and showed that courting is not that different in Cambodia (he proudly described his New Year's gift to his girlfriend); and our hardworking trilingual tuktuk driver Eang Visal, making money for school, while taking heat from his girlfriend for working long hours.
Cambodia is a breathtakingly beautiful country and one which still hasn't been overrun by development. For now. Although my trip was too short and there are many other places I want to visit upon my return, it's a place that has stayed with me, almost 5 months after I left it.
