Cambodia 1/05

If you want to be surrounded by badly sunburned white guys with cornrows, go to Bangkok. I’m happy to say that after a 13-hour overnight bus trip, we have put a few hundred kilometers between Thailand’s lovely capital and ourselves. I’m sure that with more than a day’s exploration, Bangkok would reveal many charms, but our 24 hours spent in the vicinity of the backpacker’s Mecca called “Khao San Road,” revealed only a ghastly parade of drunken Swedes, sweaty pedophiles and westerners swathed in tie dyed “MC Hammer” pants.
At the end of the road is a fence covered with hundreds of “Missing Persons” posters from the tsunami. Large portions of the posters were of small children, sometimes entire families. It was quite heart-wrenching and reminded me of the “Missing Persons” posters scattered across NYC after 9-11.
Cambodia also put forth its own share of heart-wrenching images, but this was offset by the charm and kindness of the Cambodian people. I must say that Cambodians are among the friendliest people I have ever met. As we rode our bikes through the countryside near Angkor Wat, all the children from the villages ran out onto the roads to greet us, screaming hello and forming curious crowds around us when we stopped.

Cambodian children speak excellent English and are always ready to bombard you with questions about your name, age, nationality and marital status. The adults are equally as friendly, and when common language was a problem, I found that comparing tattoos was an excellent ice-breaker. Many rural women have designs tattooed on their wrists, and many of the men have tattoos of magical symbols that are said to protect them from bullet and knife wounds, decorating their entire upper torsos. I met a young monk while I was waiting for Pierre who was proud to show me his brand new tattoo of a king cobra that spanned his entire arm. He then proceeded to study all 500 pages of my guidebook, asking me to read aloud and explain almost every photo caption. The monk was accompanied by his mentor, who looked on sternly at first but soon became friendly when he ascertained that no inappropriate behavior was occurring between his novice and me. The older monk then gave me his business card which had his name printed on one side and an image of his disembodied head omnisciently peering down over Ankgor Wat on the other.

Cambodia is by far the poorest place that we have visited in Asia – amputee beggars and naked children with distended bellies milling around the outer walls of the Royal Palace in Phnom Penh is not an uncommon sight, but signs of recovery and new business are not uncommon either. The city has an undeniable spookiness about it.

In 1975 Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge emptied the city of all 2 million inhabitants within a mere 48 hours. The people were told that they were being evacuated to escape an impending attack by the Americans, but they were really being sent to work in the countryside as slaves or to be exterminated.

We visited S-21, which was a former high school that was turned into a prison by the Khmer Rouge. S-21 has been nicknamed “Auschwitz on the Mekong” and some of the images depicted there were even more graphic than any that I’ve seen at former Nazi concentration camps. The walls of the prison are covered with mug shots of the inmates, which included thousands of women and children. The inmates were either tortured to death by the guards or “reprogrammed” to become prison guards themselves. Among the most sadistic prison guards were the young children, who had been apparently normal upon first being incarcerated. In the mug shots from the early years of the Khmer Rouge, the inmates wore defiant expressions, but as the years dragged on, the expressions on the inmates faces became more and more deranged – they had been driven mad by the brutality they had been subjected to.

It was heartening to see that these days people wear expressions of friendliness and openness despite all the horrors they have been subjected to. Phnom Penh is actually a really fun city with a certain gritty, hard-edged charm. Sure, it’s really too dangerous to walk around anywhere at night, but those in charge of Cambodian tourism have cleverly set up a very pleasant backpacker haven on the lake. Unlike those of Saigon and Bangkok, the tourist area in Phnom Penh is a very laid-back and fun place to take refuge from the certain armed robbery that awaits the hapless and very stoned “permanent vacationers” that haunt the city.

Pierre and I also headed down to the Cambodian coast, and of course up to Siem Riep to see the Angkor Archaeological Site. The coast was undeveloped and relaxing. We had planned to explore an abandoned hotel that was supposed to be haunted and we were sure was now inhabited by a colony of demonic monkeys, but sadly the hotel had been renovated and is set to reopen next summer. We did however discover another group of friendly Cambodians when snorkeling out on a remote peninsula. They introduced us to the joys of Khmer wine, which is made from toads and claims to cure syphilis, the clap, and TB on the label. Pierre drank two bottles by himself and said it made him feel great.

Up in Siem Riep, the window of the room where we stayed overlooked a pit of 40 crocodiles. They made cute noises and we could hear them splashing around in their little pool at night. Angkor Wat and all the surrounding temples and structures was of course indescribably breathtaking and thus very frustrating to photograph. We spent 3 days riding bikes around what seemed to be endless ruins with towers filled with bats – many of the shrines and temples have yet to be uncovered, and lay hidden in the Forrest, shrouded by vegetation and surrounded by the occasional landmine.

So far Cambodia has been a major highlight in our trip and I really hope to make it back there again before leaving Asia. The people there don’t seem to resent America for killing thousands of Cambodian people or for supporting the Khmer Rouge who killed millions of Cambodian people. I hope American tourists continue to go there to enjoy the fascinating culture and to contemplate things that happened there in the past.

So…we’re now in Chaing Mai, which is a much nicer part of Thailand – we’ll soon be heading over the Mekong into Laos, then back up to China.