I know it's been a while since I wrote a new post, but to be honest, I didn't have much to write for a while. After I got back to Bangkok and Paul headed back home, I just felt like taking a bit of downtime, which I did.
When we last left off, we were getting ready to go out for Paul's birthday. It ended up being a great time out on Khao San road, but luckily it wasn't nearly late or as crazy as our previous adventures there. After Paul took off the following day, I was kind of scratching my head wondering what to and where to go next... it's a lot easier travelling in small groups than it is solo over here. Funnily enough that afternoon I went down to the lobby and bumped into a couple friends I'd made back in the hostel I had stayed at in Budapest in December. Small world. I ended up hanging out with them here and there for the next few days which was fun. I didn't really feel like doing much sightseeing, so I mostly stuck to walking around to the markets and different neighbourhoods near my hostel during the day. I decided it was time to move on to the next country, so I chose Cambodia. I had to get a photo taken for my visa, so I went in search of one of the many camera shops I had seen on my previous outings. Unfortunately none of them would take my picture, including the ones that said “passport and visa pictures” on their signage, so I ended up walking for over an hour until I found one. As you can imagine, walking around in 35 degree heat in muggy Bangkok for an hour did not lead to the most flattering photo. I wish I had a scanner to share this photo because I basically look like a serial killer who got thrown into a pool at a party while dehydrated and perhaps punched in the face with a crack pipe. More or less.
Nevertheless, I flew into Phnom Penh (Cambodia's capital) on the Saturday. The drive from the airport to my hostel was something else. Back in November when my dad visited me in Italy, he was blown away by the chaotic driving. When I saw Thailand I chuckled at that because it was much worse. And then I got to Cambodia. That place takes the cake (so far) by leaps and bounds. I would rather ride motorcycle blindfolded in Rome than attempt to drive here. In theory there are lanes for traffic going both ways, but they are very much up for interpretation. Bikes, cars and tuk tuks all jockey for position as they drive, narrowly missing eachother by inches as they pass. And that's only the folks going the right way down a street. There are one-way streets and lanes seperated by medians, but if it is more convenient for a driver to go the wrong way to make a turn, then that's what they do. I quickly learned to stop watching for impending doom on the roads as a passenger, because the heart attack would kill me if the drivers didn't.
I got settled into my hostel and walked around for some exploring. I wasn't a huge fan of Phnom Penh. It's a lot poorer than Thailand, but thankfully a lot less overdeveloped too. There's only a few palaces and museums to see, which are apparently not as impressive as those in Bangkok so I didn't bother. The main tourist attractions are the killing fields and S21 prison, which I wasn't in the mood to see. So after a couple days, I hopped on a bus north to Siem Reap. I'll spare you the complaints about this bus, but if ever you're in Cambodia, do yourself a favour and spring for a “deluxe” or “vip” bus over a “standard”.
I arrived in Siem Reap after dark, but immediately warmed to it. The staff at my guest house were friendly and helpful. I had booked a room, but accidentally booked it for the following night. They only had their biggest room available, but were willing to give it to me for the price of the cheap room. I felt like royalty, having two king-sized beds and a private room to myself. A friend, Jamie, that I had made in Bangkok got in on the same evening, so we met up and hit Pub Street, the main nightlife drag in Siem Reap. Siem Reap is a little more touristy than Phnom Penh, but because of that it also means better facilities in general. It also means a lot of aggressive touts. I could not cross the street to get from my guesthouse to pub street without at least 4 tuk tuk drivers barking at me (“hello sir!”) to give me a lift. It got old real quick. I also came to learn that when I was with Jamie they would only offer us tuk tuk rides. When I was by myself at night, they would also offer drugs and prostitution. It got to the point where on my way from walking Jamie back to her hotel, as soon as a tuk tuk or motodop (motorcycle taxi) driver would approach me I wouldn't look up, I would just say “no tuk tuk, no ganja, no boom boom!”. They seemed to find this entertaining, but wouldn't push, so I kept that strategy when walking solo. There were also a lot of children begging/trying to sell crappy trinkets during the day. While sitting out at a restaurant, it wasn't unusual to get asked for money at least 5 times in different ways by different people. One amusing note on this is that most of the kids have a little script prepared based on where you are from. So a kid would ask where I'm from and when I'd tell him, he would respond robotically: “Canada. Capital: Ottawa (well shit...you already know more about it than most Americans I've met on this trip kid). Prime Minister: Stephen Harper. Biggest city: Toronto. Languages: English and French. Do you speak French? Bonjour. Capital of France: Paris...”. It was cute, but it can get pretty tiresome when all you want is a quiet meal in peace.
The main tourist attractions in Siem Reap are the temples. I have to admit, I wasn't in the mood to see these either so I think I'm the only tourist to ever visit the city and not go to any. I was happy walking around and just discovering the city on foot, strolling the city, especially along the river. Jamie's grandmother was in Cambodia with her, so one night the three of us went out for dinner on pub street. Jamie and I were feeling adventurous, so we got the Khmer bbq, which is a little contraption they bring to your table. It's gas powered and you cook your own food. It has a rim around the edges that you fill with water, vegetables, and noodles, and as you cook the meat in the middle, the juices drip down to create a tasty soup at the end. Those who know me won't be surprised to learn that it wasn't the ability to cook my own food that appealed to me. It was the food that we were cooking. We were given 5 different meats. Pork, beef, frog legs, cobra, and crocodile. I wasn't too impressed with the snake because it was very tough and chewy, but I did like the crocodile. Kind of like a slightly tougher pork. Siem Reap also has lots of massages, so we treated ourselves to a couple. I quickly learned you get what you pay for though, as we found one with a rather cheap price tag. The girl would basically just dig her thumbs in everywhere, which felt nice in some areas, but not necessarily the base of my spine. She seemed legitimately surprised that I winced in pain when she did that. Ah well. The other fun option is the fish massage, where you set your feet in a big tank of water full of fish. These fish eat at the dead and dry skin, leaving your feet uh...less dry and dead skin-ish? I lack the dermatological terminology. Anyways, they tickle like all hell and it's a really weird sensation as they just swarm your feet as soon as you dunk them. I felt bad for Jamie because I guess after months of being on the road, my feet were pretty dry. She had a dozen or so fish on each foot...I had the rest of the 200 or so.
Jamie had to fly back to Korea where she teaches English and I had had enough of Siem Reap, so I headed back down to Phnom Penh on Saturday. I was only planning on staying one night as stop over on my way down to the beach town Sihanoukville. However, in the morning I was talking to a couple of English guys who wanted to go to the Killing Fields and I decided I'd stay the extra day to see it. I'm glad I did, because we ended up having a very good, although sad at times, day. I've never had a day more violence-oriented day in my life I think. It started when we were still sitting out at the common area of the hostel. We could hear a Cambodian woman screaming from inside, but ignored it. It got louder and louder until all of a sudden the owner comes barging out with the woman's hair grasped in his hands, trying not to let her get a swipe at him with the mug she was wielding in her hand. He dragged her into one of the tuk tuks and yelled at the driver to take them away to wherever they went. We were kind of stunned, but shook it off as a lover's quarrel. Then about 10 minutes later the staff started shuttering and locking the entrance to the hostel and we quickly saw why...the woman had taken a motodop back on her own because she wasn't done screaming apparently. She just sat down at the table next to us and screamed at the top of her lungs for a solid 10 minutes, and just got louder when the owner finally got back. We took that as our cue to leave. The killing fields are a little out of town, so the tuk tuks tend to cost more. There's also another somewhat notorious tourist attraction out there that one of the Brits in particular wanted to go to, so even though it wasn't the most appropriate day for it, we started there nonetheless. Uh... you may want to just skip down to the start of the next paragraph mom. We went to the shooting range which has such a bizarre set up, it's almost comical. The employees sit you down at a table and bring you a menu. Except instead of food, each page has a different gun with its own price on it. Depending on how much money you want to spend, you can shoot anything from a handgun all the way up to a Rocket Propelled Grenade. Rumour has it that for extra money, you can go somewhere even further out and shoot said RPG at a cow... apparently Cambodia doesn't have much of an active PETA presence. Having never shot a gun before, I decided I'd give the shooting range a try and settled on the AK-47. My Brit friend chose a machine gun. It was an interesting experience, but now that I've done it I can't say I'm itching to fire a gun again. It was just more of a boys and their toys curiosity than anything. Impressively I actually hit the target with about half my rounds.
From there we went to the killing fields. This is where the Khmer Rouge regime would take prisoners by the truckload from the S21 prison and kill them with various rudimentary and horrific measures and bury them in mass graves. Walking around the fields was a very disturbing experience. Because of the heavy rainfall they get for half the year, there are still bones and clothes that come up through the soil every year. So as you walk on these paths you are actually walking over bones and torn clothes from the dead beneath you. It is very sobering. At the centre of the fields is a monument that is stacked with thousands of skulls and bones in a glass case. You can see that many of the skulls have fractures in them from being killed by blunt force trauma and missing teeth from torture.
After this, we went to the S21 prison, where the prisoners were held before being murdered. It used to be a school, but was turned into a prison where unspeakable torture took place. The very quick history is that the Khmer Rouge regime wanted to eliminate anybody with ties to the previous government or anybody they felt would threaten them, so they would imprison them, torture them, and eventually kill them and their families. This included women and children, as they wanted to minimize the chances of somebody coming for revenge later. Back at the killing fields there is actually a spot on a tree that is marred because that is where they would swing children by the feet to smash their skulls. I knew a bit of what to expect back when I visited the Dachau concentration camp, but this one took me completely by surprise because we didn't learn about this history in school. What really struck me was that it took place less than 10 years before I was born. If you want to read more about this, wikipedia explains it all a lot better than I can.
By the afternoon, we had gotten to know the tuk tuk driver we had hired, Tom, pretty well and he told us there was a Cambodian kickboxing match going on in the evening. We decided to go, so he took us there after S21. When we got to the hangar it was happening in, we looked around and saw that the bleachers were completely packed. I figured we'd have to stand for the whole show, but Tom quickly made his way to the gate next to the ringside seats and spoke a few words to the girl sitting there. She waved us right through and next thing I knew, we were sitting a row behind the timekeeper and announcers table, ringside! I have no idea how we got those seats or why we didn't have to pay, but I got the strong impression it had something to do with the colour of our skin. Either way, we sat back and enjoyed the fights. There were 5 in all and were quite entertaining. At one point a man came and sat in the row in front of us, just a few seats over. I noticed pretty much everybody, including the trainer in one corner started to glance over a lot. According to Tom this man was pretty much the biggest boxer in Cambodia. We had no clue who he was, but were nonetheless impressed to be sitting amongst the high society.
So after a long day we finally returned and had dinner and a couple drinks. That was last night. This morning I woke up and finally caught my bus to Sihanoukville. I just arrived a couple hours ago, but am already looking forward to reading a book or two on the beach. I'll let you know how that goes.
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