Cambodia With Rob And Erika

I've been with Rob and Erika for a few days now (when I started this post, finished later) and as expected it's been a great time. Besides how much I like them personally, it's good to be around people that I know for a change and it's also nice to have a schedule especially since it's a temporary status. They've also both been good sports about all the small hardships of travel even if they do complain about the heat a little much. I guess I did too when I first got to Bangkok but these days it seems relatively mild to me. That doesn't mean I haven't been sweating like crazy though. It's just that like the bug bites that riddle my legs, I don't give it a second of thought.

Thankful to break my rather dull routine at the Happy Guesthouse, in the morning I moved my things over to the Royal Guesthouse that I'm spoiling my guests with. In the middle of the afternoon I took a tuktuk through the heavy holiday traffic to reach the airport and waited around a hell of a long time to see them come out of the gate. Rob spotted me first and they looked pretty fresh to me, not like I'm sure I looked after my flight to Bangkok. That's perfect because we had a lot of bars to visit.

Unfortunately the airline lost their luggage in San Diego and it wouldn't be delivered until the middle of the next day. This changed our schedule a bit, but that's no real issue. The main issue was the only clothes they had were their warm jeans, shirts, and sneakers from the flight and it's hot as hell here in Phnom Penh. They made it through the night with a bit of sweat, but it would be a funnier issue the next day, just like this fat kid on a moto.

After showing them their room we headed out to one of PP's more famous restaurants, the Foreign Correspondents Club. It houses lots of classic Cambodian photographs but as it got expensive the actual journalists moved to a cantina down the street. We also tried some fried frogs in chili sauce that was being sold on the street and I think that they're pretty tasty. Anyways, it was a nice evening and we didn't get too crazy because I wanted us to get up the next day before the heat set in.

Erika and Rob are only on the ground for 9 days total, so we have to keep a tight schedule to fit in the 3 cities, 3 6-hour journeys, and dozens of sites. That means that despite being outfitted in uncomfortably warm clothes, we had to do a tour of the city in the morning in clear view of the hot sun. It gave me plenty of laughs though. While looking for food, we passed a small store and bought a couple palm fans that probably saved Rob's life. We had the traditional hot noodle soup for breakfast and set off for the Silver Pagoda.

The pagoda is in the royal palace complex that was initiated in 1886 by king Norodom when he moved the capitol to Phnom Penh. Besides a nice garden, the complex is made up of a dozen or so buildings with graceful roofs trying to outdo each other in splendor. Darting from one shady spot to the next, we only went in two of the buildings that seemed the nicest. One was the royal throne room and the other was the Silver Pagoda itself. It's so named because of the 500 silver floor tiles that are now mostly covered with thick rugs. In the middle of the room, on a high golden throne, was a 2 foot tall statue of the Buddha carved out of solid greenish crystal with matte finish that gave it a glowing and warm aura. Unfortunately no pictures were allowed. The room also had many other golden jeweled Buddhas.

After following a wall covered in old paintings of traditional stories similar to that in the Bangkok Royal Palace, we left to visit the central market where Erika and Rob could purchase some cooler clothes in case their suitcases didn't show up as planned. We rode over in a tuktuk, strolled around looking at the shops, and they both purchased a pair of sandals, a shirt, and some light shorts. They were of course dirt cheap at under 2 dollars per piece and it was a first chance for them to practice their haggling skills. I think Rob's a natural since he didn't want to buy any of it if it weren't for the heat, and detachment is the first key to bargaining.

We also saw the meat and seafood area of the market for as long as we could handle the smell and I was pretty impressed by the variety of seafood and saw all kinds of live conchs and shellfish for sale which is new to me. They also had some pretty nasty looking skinned frogs and Erika claims that some of them were twitching. Awesome. We went home to get changed.

When we arrived they were jubilant to see their luggage had arrived as promised and after changing we set off for the less pleasant portion of the day's tours, to the killing fields and S-21 prison. These were part of the genocide perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge, a communist government that terrorized Cambodia in the 70s. I suppose I should give a quick rundown of them.

In 1970, the king was in power and was his government was unpopular. He was deposed by a military junta led by general Lon Nol. This turned out to be an even more corrupt and unpopular government and so Maoist rebels based in the mountains and countryside started fighting in rural areas. This was against the backdrop of the Vietnam war of course and as the US was supporting Lon Nol, there was a brutal struggle with the communists finally gaining control of the cities in 1975.

It was the Khmer Rouge (the Khmer is the name of the largest Cambodian ethnic group) vision to turn Cambodia into a classless agrarian society completely free from foreign trade and influence. Their primary supporters were rural peasants and so the first step was to evacuate the cities and move everyone to the countryside. The next step was to exterminate anyone that could be a intellectual threat including politicians, teachers, police, army officers, foreigners, and anyone who could speak a foreign language, went to school, wore glasses, or had tasted chocolate. So pretty much everyone but rural peasants was in for trouble. After purging the country of these 'threats', a couple years later the government still felt insecure so they killed off the families of those they came for earlier. After 4 years, the KR had eliminated 25% (1.7million) of the country's population through starvation, forced labor, and targeted killings. In 1979 the Vietnamese invaded and defeated the KM to stop them from attacking villages on their side of the border and abducting their teenagers. Things slowly got better after that but even today the democratic government is terrible and led by a former KR guerrilla.

So, the first stop in this tour was to the famous Killing Fields near Phnom Penh that was popularized by an American movie of the same name. It was one of many execution sites around the country and today about half of the 129 mass graves there have been dug up revealing just under 9000 skeletons, many missing their heads. All over the sites dirt trails, scraps of old clothing pokes up from the earth and is deeply disturbing. In the middle of the grounds, a towering pagoda houses hundreds of bones and piles of clothing as it's Buddhist tradition to revere the remains of the deceased. Unfortunately, the pictures that we took weren't with the kind of respect that I would have shown if I had learned more about it first. I guess it's just a bad idea in general to pose in front of skulls outside of Halloween.

I got my picture taken next to a tree which I later learned was used to swing babies like baseball bats against. The KM didn't have much of a budget, so most of the killings were done with farm tools like hoes, hammers, and sickles. After checking out the museum, we got the hell out of there... it was very depressing to say the least. We also visited a secret prison, S-21, that housed hundreds of men, women, and children for months at a time while they were being tortured daily. When they needed more space for additional prisoners, the old inmates were sent to the fields. The KR was meticulous in its paperwork and left behind documents and photographs for every prisoner that passed through its doors. The museum there now shows off hundreds of these pictures and drawing of what it looked like in operation. I didn't take any pictures of the place as a dark cloud hung over us and I really didn't feel like prolonging it.

So with all of that unpleasantness behind us for the moment, we got a shower back at the hostel before going out for dinner and drinks. I can't remember anymore what we ate, but I'm sure that it was spiked with lots of local beer because I do remember the bar hopping that followed along the riverfront of the Mekong river. In a display of great luck, we ran into one of Rob's friends (whatever his name was) at a bar that we walked past. The friend was all beardie now but her recognized Rob and made himself known so that we could enjoy way too much beer with him and his girlfriend. They gave us some tips for Angkor Wat but I didn't hear too much of that... I was mostly chatting with some Spanish guy at the table. Anyways, it was a fun night with a lot of laughs.

So now that we've got the luggage we were ready to go to Siem Reap. I had bought bus tickets before Erika and Rob got here but when I got them pushed back a day, we lost our good seats and so we got stuck with the 3 in the back of the bus. They were kind of raised up and had a way of trapping us in the worst of the heat. It's also much bumpier in the back of the bus and all together it was a very unpleasant ride made bearable only by our palm fans we bought for $1 in PP. We stopped just once in 6 hours, to get lunch, and passed up a fried bug vendor to enjoy some regular local food, though it wasn't so great anyways. Maybe we would have been better off with a big back of salted crickets.

The city of Siem Reap exists only to serve the tourists visiting the Angkor Wat temple complex, and so the primary industries are in hotels, shopping, food, and transportation. We got a free ride from the bus station to the hotel because it's the drivers hope that we would hire him to drive us around the temples for a few days. Well, we did and we got the normal price of $15 a day for the use of his tuktuk. I've heard some backpackers haggled a 3rd free day after two $15 days but we didn't have the time for that anyways.

Instead of the rather bland but comfortable hotel that we had in PP, I checked us into a less luxurious guesthouse that I had heard about from other backpackers. It's called the Garden Village and it offers regular rooms, like Erika's $7 double with fan, but I got the $1 mattress on a bamboo platform with mosquito netting. It was cool outside at night and I slept without a sheet or blanket without complaint. Actually, I did complain a bit, but that's because the bar overhead plays music till 2am and the kitchen next to me starts cooking at 7am. I didn't really get so much sleep but it was good sleep at least. The key feature to the place was the 3rd floor bar and patio area with free computers, comfy chairs, movies on TV, and cheap cheap beer on tap. Rob said that he could picture spending some real time at a place like that, and I would too if it wasn't so damn loud at night. Oh well, it's an experience.

We had to make the most of our time in SR, so we visited the market (nothing special, but they did have lots of t shirts that we'd have to come back for) and then went out for a special dinner. We'd heard about some some restaurants that put a grill in the middle of the table to cook meat on, and the drippings go into a soup that cooks just underneath. The process is a little slow as everything comes to you raw, but the food was tasty and I like the performance. I guess it's kind of like getting hibachi Japanese food... it's not that it tastes so special, just that it's fun.

We also got drinks at several different bars, got buckets (a novelty for my guests) and I remember at some point in the night spilling a drink and slurping it off the table with a straw. How undignified, but it was a good one so hey.

The next day our driver met us at the guesthouse at 9 and we set off into the morning heat. The temple complex is vast, and covers a tremendous area of the jungle. Back in the day, they were really planned cities with stone temple complexes and palaces in the middle, but the old homes that surrounded have been swallowed by the jungles. They were all built between the 12th and 15th centuries by the Khmer dynasty that dominated SE Asia militarily and culturaly. After they fell, most of the surviving artists and teachers went to Thailand where their influence shows today.

I'm not going to get into the individual history of each temple, but the first one was called Bayon and it featured a lot of stone faces affixed on small towers. We got an elephant ride around it and did our best to fan ourselves constantly as the sun was getting hotter by the minute.

We also climbed a couple other temples in the jungle, saw an enormous wall decorated with elephants at war, and marveled at the huge crowds of tourists. When we would come close to any roadside restaurants we'd be overwhelmed by swarms of vendors selling drinks, guide books, and bracelets. It's hard to ignore 10 people surrounding you yelling 'Sir!'. I bought a couple bamboo bracelets, from children, for $0.50 during lunch and then 10 minutes later was offered 10 of the same thing for half the price. Frustrating. I don't know if I've mentioned this before, but here in SEA it's part of the backpacker culture to collect as many ratty bracelets as possible. They sell them everywhere and a lot of bars and such give them away for free. It's as good a hobby as any I guess.

The final temple of the day was the famous Tomb Raider temple (Angkor Thom) where the movie shot a lot of its scenes. It's notable for being shade by jungle, being generally crumbled in part, and having large trees growing on top of so many of the structures. It feels more adventurous if not all the growth has been cleared away. This one is everyone's favorite temple even if it's not the most impressive for its scale.

With a lot of temples under our belts and even more sweat under everything else, we went home to take a nap and clean up for the evening. This night we got some fantastic Indian food at a place that touted having a genuine Indian chef in the kitchen. The food in this area is really nice and caters to every income level since rich or poor, everyone must travel to Siem Reap if they want to see one of the finest lost cities ever built.

We also spoiled ourselves with a fish massage after dinner. These places are basically large fish tanks on the street that you can dangle your feet in to the delight of small hungry fish. They clean off the dead skin and callouses and tickle massively. I love their slogan... "Do you know the fish that can feel good???". We haggled free beers into the already cheap deal and that helped, but you sure get a lot of curious looks from people walking by. I finished the night at a cocktail bar with a surprisingly good live band.

The next morning we headed out to the ruins for a second day of sweltering heat (this is the cool season) and went to the actual Angkor Wat temple as the first stop. This is the most famous and impressive of the temples and is featured on the Cambodian national flag. It's centerpiece is a huge tower surrounded by 4 smaller towers and it's supposed to represent the mountain home of Vishnu, the Hindu god. The highest tower has a vertical shaft going down it that was supposedly once filled with treasure.

We walked around that place for a good hour or two admiring the grand scale of the place. It was originally built as a palace but ended up serving as the tomb of the king who built it along with several other temples in the area. One of the inside walls that surrounded the complex was covered in an enormous bas-relief depicting many Hindu stories. It went on forever. Out back there was a some jungle that housed a large family of monkeys that the tourists would occasionally feed. I don't know what else to say about this place... it was great.

We saw several more temples that day and after a while they did all start to look a bit similar, but it's said that to see them all would take weeks. I believe it... the ruins covered the largest area that I've ever seen for this purpose. I really liked seeing all the groups of school children that had been literally trucked in to the site.

That night was another night for the Water Festival here in Siem Reap. It's a festival held here and in Phnom Penh celebrating the bi-yearly change in direction of the Tonle Sap river. The Tonle Sap is special because it's the only river the the world that changes direction, diverting water out of the Mekong to fill a huge lake in the rainy season and then draining it in the dry season. The lake grows 10 times larger in the rainy season covering thousands of square kilometers. This tidal action stirs up a lot of silt and keeps the river rich in nutrients and freshwater fish providing the livelihood of many villages built on stilts over the water. The festival is celebrated with fireworks and boat races. We saw that in PP the next day and I'll talk about that later. This night we kept pretty quite since we had to be up at 6:30 the next day to catch our boat back to PP.

The boat that we took the next day is also a 6 hour ride, like the bus, but much more comfortable and scenic. Unfortunately it costs 4x as much at $35 so it's not the normal means and transport and was filled exclusively by tourists. The boat was going really fast so we got to enjoy the sun with a strong breeze on the deck and I wrote some of this post below deck. The Tonle Sap river that we rode back towards Phnom Penh was so wide most of the time that we could not see the shore. At times there would be some mangroves with villages on stilts within sight sporting some floating gardens that reminded me of Inle Lake in Myanmar. We also saw some tiny houseboat communities. I don't know why anyone would live on those boats though. It must be tough being a landless peasant.

That night in Phnom Penh, after checking into our guesthouse that was scheduled to go out of business the next day, we rode motos out to the riverfront. Riding the moto is just hopping on the back of a scooter and it's fine and cheap for a single person but we hired 3 of them so that we could all have the experience. It's my favorite way to get around here though you have to clutch your belongings close lest a motorbike riding thief rip you off. They call these guys 'cowboys' and it's said that they can steal the sunglasses off your face as you walk down the street. What assholes.

The riverfront was a madhouse of people out for the 3rd and final day of the Water Festival. Earlier in the day they had boat races on the river but we just saw them practicing. The boats are tremendously long and thin, with up to 60 rowers down its length, hurtling the boats down the river at unimaginable speed. Most of the rowers are standing on the edge and kind of stab at the water from straight above. It's awesome. We tried some strange delicacies at the festival including sugarcane juice with lime, sliced cane for chewing (it's REALLY juicy), and of course fried bugs.

We got a small bag of fried crickets, huge chewy tarantulas, and a fried snake. The crickets were greasy, salty, and not too threatening. All three of us had that one. Rob and I went for the tarantulas which I would say are a lot more chewy and generally better tasting but the thorax is filled with a huge glob of white fat and not too good. I guess it's an acquired taste. Finally I had the snake and it was rock hard. Not too nice but it made for some good pictures.

The crowd was one of the biggest that I've ever seen. We spent a while wading through it near the river but eventually we sat on the side at a bar watching the constant flow of people on the street that never seemed to thin as it got later. Once sufficiently dark, a chain of huge lit up boats started to float up and down the river while a tremendous fireworks display boomed overhead. It was a really special night.

The next day, before we took our bus, I saw an email from mom asking if we were near the stampede the night before. We hadn't heard anything before then, but I asked around and apparently there was a bridge in town that was the focus of a stampede of people that somehow crushed, drowned, and electrocuted over 300 victims and injured many more. I don't know how it happened or exactly where it was relative to us.

The ride from Phnom Penh to Saigon (HCMC) in Vietnam wasn't too interesting. I slept some of the time and finished up the second of two books that I read about the Cambodian genocide. The border crossing was quick enough but we had to get our visas before showing up since they're not too efficient about that in Vietnam despite letting pretty much anyone in.

Saigon looks like a prosperous city. We were dropped off in a fairly well developed neighborhood with tree lined streets and after a bit of walking and asking around we found a decent hotel that was a bit more expensive than anything I've seen before in SEA at $10 a night for the single or $12 for the double. Still, it's quite comfortable and probably worth the money. Saigon is blessed with many majestic old French colonial buildings that have been lovingly cared for. There are many large traffic circles, parks, and tasteful neighborhoods. It's by far the prettiest large city I've seen in SEA. Of course, this has a lot to do with its great wealth.

Saigon is in the south of Vietnam, the Mekong river delta, and has 3 rice harvests per year as compared to the 2 in the north of Vietnam. This geographical quirk, along with a troubled history, blessed the south with wealth and cursed the north with relative poverty. That's why the north is the heartland of the communist movement. This combined with the longer communist occupation of the north (or capitalist occupation of the south depending on perspective) means that the south is the business capitol of Vietnam. Of course after the north 'liberated' the south in '75 following 25 years of warfare they re-appropriated land, business, and instituted a communist economy which devastated the whole of the country. In '89 they gave that up, switched to a market economy, normalized relation with the West in '95 and Saigon has bloomed in recent years. Nowadays the registered communists are outnumbered 89 to 2 in millions of people and the north is still poor so I really don't know what the point of their communist revolution was other than to be free of the disastrous French colonial rule. It's a very similar situation to China.

We explored the city starting in the late afternoon and marveled at the sheer number of scooters on the roads (5 million of them in Saigon alone, 7m population). The traffic never really clears for you to cross the road, so you simply start walking across at and even pace and the bikes will go around you. I'm so used to walking through traffic now that it didn't phase me at all, but it made Erika nervous and Rob said it was his favorite part of the city. I love it too.

We had a wonderful dinner at a really fancy gourmet Vietnamese restaurant in the upscale part of town near the biggest hotels and best bars. Saigon is a culinary treasure after 100 years of French rule and so many cultural influences over the centuries. We also went by the central market as we walked home and saw the huge outdoor restaurants that are set up each night after the traffic and heat die down. Finally we had beers at an outdoor cafe near the hotel and sampled the dried squid jerky sold from carts wheeled near the bars. I liked it but Rob loved it so much he went back for seconds.

This next day was our last one together in Asia, so we tried to make the most of it. We slept in kind of late (10am; we've had so many early days this seems late) and then set off walking towards lunch. I chose a Vietnamese restaurants that the guide book recommended and it seemed really popular with the locals too. It was some really weird food and we shared it all. Rob got the fresh spring rolls with shrimp, bbq'd tiger prawns, and spicy grilled pork with a lime dip. Erika ordered the green papaya salad and a coconut seafood salad. I ordered a kind of mashed shrimp wrapped around a sugar cane, fried, and then made into spring rolls at the table. I also got a similar thing with steamed pork slices but I really had no idea what I would get with any of these orders. Also, we all got Vietnamese ice coffee. This country is famous for it's ice coffee which is served very cold, with lots of sweet condensed milk and strong espresso. It's great but very rich.

After that heavy lunch we waddled towards the War Remnants Museum but it was closed for lunch. So, we hired 3 cyclo drivers to peddle us to a Taoist pagoda a kilometer away where we marveled at the strange statues, lucky turtle pond, and intricate wood carvings. Some local girls were there making videos of themselves practicing English with foreigners and they interviewed Erika for a few minutes. It was a really hot day and I felt a little bad for them ferrying us around in the heat but I guess that's just their lot in life.

When we got back to the war museum, I really enjoyed the old American military vehicles that were parked out front. My favorite piece was the mobile artillery that could seriously devastate the battlefield. Well, that was the fun part, but once inside it got seriously depressing since it's a museum that's singularly dedicated to highlighting American war atrocities and the lingering victims of Agent Orange. It was really gruesome stuff. We also walked past the Reunification Palace, the old seat of the South Vietnamese government.

Later that night we went out again after a long rest at the hotel. We found a good French restaurant in the book and enjoyed a bottle of wine. I've had better French food, but this was really cheap comparatively and generally good. After some more beers at some more bars we called it a night. I saw them off to their taxi in the morning.

Ah, it was really good having them out to see me. I got to know Rob a little bit better, I got to know what they're like together (it's a good situation), and I think that we got a lot done out here. It's always a lot of work to tour all day every day and I think that we kept it fun and had a lot of memorable moments. I'll always remember Rob's shades falling off the tuktuk and getting run over by a car as we all watched, Erika getting freaked out by all the rats on one street in Saigon, all the locals looking and giggling at Rob's height, the two of them sweating in their jeans at the Silver Pagoda, and all the flat out weird stuff we ate together. Yes, it was a good 9 days.