Holiday in Cambodia

our bus ride to cambodia came close to being an absolute catastrophe when the border guy couldn’t find my passport for about an hour.  no matter how hard you want to hold onto your passport and stay near it, it’s always needed for something out of your sight and if you protest, you risk being left behind and having to fend for yourself.  i must say though, they came through in the end after sifting through all the hundreds of other passports and came up with mine!!!

the land is cambodia is completely flat and extremely dry.  there were parts of it which reminded me of the national geographic african safaris i’ve seen on t.v.  the houses are on stilts and surprisingly very beautiful.  they were very colorful with really neat wood shutters and doors.  as with all countries we’ve been through, even the crappiest shacks have televisions and satellite dishes on them.  phnom penh, to my surprise, was full of hummers and mercedes and very expensive automobiles.  we found out later there’s actually quite a bit of money in the city.  an average home there cost around $300,000!

when we arrived in phnom penh we were mobbed by tuk tuk drivers, which we had been warned about.  drew and i decided it would be best to walk to the lake where we planned on staying (great advice Missy!).  it wasn’t a long walk but it was certainly a hot one.  that was the first time i remember fully sweating through my shirt and leaving a huge sweat stain on my back pack.  the lake side had been recommended to us over the river side by a few people.  one would never ever guess a gigantic lake would be smack in the middle of such a big city.  the interesting thing is, it’s completely surrounded by buildings all the way up to the river’s edge so unless you’re sitting on the deck of said buildings you’d never know it even existed.  in laos we met a girl who had been living in phnom penh for a year doing legal work and she said most people who live in the city don’t even know it’s there.  she also told us the lake had been sold and it’ll soon be filled in and built upon.  so sad.  the road we stayed on was nothing more than an alley tucked off the main streets.  we made our home there at a guesthouse called ‘happy guesthouse’ which certainly lived up to its name.  i gotta say, cambodia was the first country we spent time in where we honestly felt like we were somewhere new and exciting.  all of the previous countries had such a western flare to them. here, for the first time, our eyes were opened up to something so completely different. 

the main two tourist attractions in phnom penh certainly aren’t happy ones but nevertheless should not be missed.  you see, back in the mid to late 70s the khmer rouge took over and their goal was to establish a plebeian society.  in order to attain their goal, pol pot decided to kill all the monks, intellectuals, people who wore glasses,  basically anyone who seemed or looked ’smart’ or who he thought could potentially cause an uprising.  now, how does one get rid of so many people?  you guessed it… genocide! 

we hired a tuk tuk driver for the day who first took us to The Killing Fields.  at the entrance is a monument which houses 8,000 skulls which were found at the killing fields.  along with skulls were clothes that had been dug up.  as you walk the fields the mass graves that were found are marked, a long with a tree where children were beat and areas where they housed chemicals that were meant to kill and/or hide the smell of the rotting bodies.  i’ve never been to any of the concentration camps in europe but i imagine them to be similar.  the difference is, no one was kept at the killing fields.  they were simply brought there to die.   interestingly enough,  there’s now a fence that borders the killing fields and on the other side is a school where we heard children laughing and playing the whole time we were there.  what a contrast…

tuol sleng genocide museum also called the s-21 museum is where the people were kept and tortured before being killed.  the s-21 museum used to be a school before pol pot closed it down and took it over.  it’s three rectangular 4 story buildings all facing a courtyard.  there are still remnants there of pol pot’s regime such as rusting beds and medical equipment used to torture.  the second building you enter on the ground floor is completely covered in photos of all those who stayed in the facility as well as some pretty horrifying pictures of those tortured and killed.  twice a day they show an hour long film with people who had been there and those who had lost loved ones.   i think sometimes it’s easier to watch films like this when the events that took place were years and years before.  i guess the more time that passes it’s easier to distance yourself from the events.  it’s quite hard to do this when these atrocities were happening in my sister’s lifetime or even moreso in drew’s lifetime and i know it’s happening now, today in places like Burma, it’s just… i dunno…

afterwards we went back to our guesthouse to sit on the deck and digest all that we’d seen.  in the lake there are a few small boys who paddle boats up to your guesthouse and ask if you want a boat ride for $1.  i decided it’d be a fun thing to do so we had some really yummy special smoothies and hopped in the boat with a sweet 12 year old boy named Rambo.  Rambo paddled us around and told us about the watercrest growing in the water that they pick and eat (oh man, the water was so filthy and full of trash. i totally saw a maxi pad tangled up in the watercrest!!! and there were rats!!!!!) and how he goes to school for 3 hours a day for free and then paddles the boat for money.  he was mesmerized by the sparks of construction on the city’s first high rise.  he was really sweet!  as were all the people we met in cambodia… it was quite a contrast from china and vietnam.  it was so much more relaxed and the people weren’t trying to always get something out of you… at least not the people we met.  in poor countries there’s always somewhat of an agenda when the native people see westerners coming their way but so long as you’re pleasant, smile, and say ‘thank you’ both parties generally come out on top.

 oh and the most important thing of all.  MONKEYS!!!! Like real life, not in cages, cold chillin like squirrels!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 wat? wat? are you a light bulb?

 Check out our pics of Cambodia!