So let me tell you the travails and ordeals of our commute from Chiang Mai to Phnom Penh. We boarded yet another night bus (they never seem to travel during the day for long hauls...) for Bangkok at 10:30pm. Wait, that's a lie. We entered the tiny waiting room to board our bus at 10:30pm. Actual bus boarding did not occur until 11:00pm, with bus leaving by 11:30pm. We had splurged to make the ride more enjoyable - VIP including individual televisions, snacks, on bus toilet and extra leg room. These perks totally fell through. My free juice was vegetable. Bleh. And the AC was a solid 28 degrees, a mere 3 degrees difference from being outdoors and at least with the window open we'd have had a breeze. Our English movie selection was dreadful: I Know Who Killed Me, Apocalypto, Flood and Red Line. And made worse by the fact that these movies were in fact only intermittently in English. Apocalypto was in fact in ancient Maya with Thai subtitles. Then Mehr started feeling carsick and spent the subsequent ten hours all queasy and nauseous.
Our bedraggled selves emerged from the bus at 7am in Bangkok and proceeded directly to the airport to pass away the six hours until our flight to Cambodia at 2:30pm (which of course was delayed until 3:30pm once we arrived at the airport. Even my spirited narration of the adventures of Cu Culann, the Irish boy wonder, were insufficient to cure Mehr's nausea, so her wait was far more tortuous than mine. We were fairly ravenous and were rewarded with the worst airport meal I've ever eaten. In fact, it was the third worst meal of my trip after the raw chicken in Cusco and the rooftop meat in Bolivia. My Tom Yam Soup was a puddle of mushrooms (I do not care for mushrooms) and Mehr's noodle soup was the saddest spiciest thing I've ever seen ladled into a bowl. Even treating myself to a DQ blizzard afterwards didn't improve my mood. In fact, it made things worse, since I've had a cold and it drastically increased congestion levels. Curses! But once we made it onto our flight, all was well again (we bounce back quickly) because we were going to the kingdom of wonder, Cambodia!
We had no idea what to expect of Cambodia. We've heard both rants and raves from different sources and of course, it was nothing like whatever we might have expected. I had envisioned something similar to Thailand, maybe lots of hilly jungle forests and lots of knock off goods. What we encountered was an incredibly flat land of deltas and bayous and clay dirt, with a population full of smiles that belies a recent tragic past.
Phnom Penh is accurately described as the tarnished pearl of Asia. It shows all the traces of a major hub of civilizations that has fallen into disuse. It is a vivid city, with no skyscraper-plastered financial district to speak of, where families travel four to a motorbike and smells of every cuisine in the world and every garbage you can think of mingle in the streets.
The nicest area for strolling is the Riverside and the only areas you'll really see significant numbers of other tourists are the main sites: the Palace, the Independence Monument, the temples, and the bars. Though there are more than enough NGOs and NGO expats to be found - everywhere here lists prices in US dollars! We couldn't even withdraw Cambodian riel from the bank, so it's been a bit more expensive than anticipated because we get dinged on the exchange rate!
The other major sites are the memorials commemorating the Khmer Rouge genocide. For those who don't know, the Khmer Rouge regime headed by Pol Pot kidnapped, tortured and executed as many as two million of their own people during the 1960s and 1970s. Tuol Sleng, the genocide museum, is housed on the site of detention center S-21 in the middle of Phnom Penh.
It was formerly a high school but was converted into a prison and interrogation center during the genocide. The other major site is the Killing Fields which are just south of the city. Mehr and I were undecided on whether or not to see these, since it seems wrong in some ways to have places where so many murders occurred as tourist attractions. Tuol Sleng was a haunting experience. You could walk into the cell blocks. There was also a video detailing two prisoners' experiences. We also met the only living survivor of S-21 (only 8 were alive when it was closed), and walked through the galleries of victims' photos and paintings. It gives one chills.
The Killing Fields were more problematic. They have recently been bought by Japan which is unfathomable... Can you imagine if Poland needed money and some country offered to buy a concentration camp from the Holocaust? There is a massive charnel with over 8000 skulls inside as a memorial to the victims and you can wander around but it felt like a violation of a terrible graveyard.
Just when we started to get antsy on our tour, we were besieged by local children and their flock of roosters who asked for candy and then serenaded us with "Beautiful Girl" by Sean Kingston, which was both funny and absurd in the moment, but gave us a bit of relief from all the trauma of the day. But I think what bothered us most were the gift shops. GENOCIDE GIFT SHOPS. That was really not okay.
After such a traumatic morning, we spent the afternoon relaxing and wandering around the city. We then spent our evening on a corner restaurant where two eighteen year old girls whomped us both at Connect Four and pool. Multiple times. But they never tired of playing us, so we kept on. We even went back the next day for rematches. And were creamed again. Oh well. Better luck next time.
1 comment:
I appreciate the balanced viewpoint - it does lessen the envy. Sounds like its time for another massage.
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