Penning from Phnenomenal Phnom Penh

    We arrived in Phnom Penh around three in the afternoon. Kristina was out of town with a flat tire, but three hours later she arrived and took us into her apartment to stay in her spare room. She's a teacher at an I.B. school just outside of town, here on a 2 year contract. She has worked in Bangladesh as well. She loves Asia, and finds the international school circuit preferable to being a supply teacher waiting forlornly for a full time job in Canada. She has hosted twenty Couchsurfers including us, in Canada and overseas, and used to organize Couchsurfer meetings in Fredericton, N.B.

    Kristina arranged for us to ride around with her favourite tuktuk driver, Nil, (Nils?) and gave us his cell phone number. Nil took us to the five main City attractions for tourists. The first two were deeply sombre: one of over 300 "killing fields" where Cambodians, a kind and gentle people, massacred between one in eight and one in four of their own countrymen in less than four years, over three million people, under the influence of an ideological and psychopathic megalomaniac who called himself Pol Pot. The world is at a loss to explain how such a thing could happen, and the Cambodians themselves even more so, although a lot has been written about it. It illustrates the juggernaut brutality of waves of ideology, an ignorant peasantry, rising expectations and blind obedience crashing together. I'm guessing that in the leadership that supported him, there was also a measure of corruption and cowardly complicity.  Only one of the butchers, a camp commandant, has ever admitted his guilt and expressed his regret for those nightmare years. (That's an understatement - I don't even have nightmares that are as horrific as what happened to those people.)

    The world has seen so many genocides, but one perpetrated by a people on themselves stands out. All leaders were targeted, and anyone who tried to hang onto property, therefore a disproportionate number of ethnic Chinese.  All intellectuals, teachers, Buddhist monks, the Muslim Cham communities, any educated person, and their entire families.  A few foreigners who saw too much or were in the wrong place at the wrong time were swept up and murdered.  Innocents who Pol Pot felt there was no gain in keeping alive, and some risk, because they could seek revenge, were slaughtered behind military camp walls with loudspeakers playing revolutionary songs at high volume to drown out the sound of screams. They went "like lambs to the slaughter", as many ignorant innocents in history have, probably quite unable to perceive of the treachery and butchery that they faced; one survivor relates that he was promised a job that he coveted, but was taken to the prison and held at gunpoint. Perhaps the Cambodian aversion to confrontation prevented some from refusing even if they harboured suspicions. The only brutality I observe in Cambodian culture today is their boxing matches, which are called "Cambodian boxing" but look identical to Thai boxing matches, which Deb and I saw in Chang Mai a few years ago.

    We have picked up a book of Cambodian history, with an appropriately black cover, and I will try to absorb the experience, even if I never understand it, because as my Couchsurfing motto goes: "I'd like to know what this whole show is all about before it's out" (one of Piet Hein's grooks). Here are our photo memories of the Genocide memorial centre and the CS21 Toul Sleng interrogation and torture centre , which was set up in a former high school). You can choose to skip these photos and move on to happier ones that follow.

    The rest of the day included three more cheerful sites. We went first to the National Museum - not a great museum, but it showed the religious influences of Cambodian culture. Cambodia is more Buddhist and Hindu than Vietnam. Vietnam is more atheist but there are still Catholics there, and several other religious groups, at least one of which has been described to my as a synthesis of all the main world religions, with the whole panoply of gods and saints. A momentary downer for me was when the guard admonished me to put away my camera - I was not using flash - while all around me, school tours were snapping merrily with their cell phones and cameras, as were several other tourists. I don't know why I got picked on.

    At the Wat Phnom Pagoda we observed the strength of the religious influence that Pol Pot had tried to destroy, including gold and silver in quantities that approached the gilded South American cathedral we photographed last winter.  We toured the Palace grounds, which is covered with buildings like the Coronation hall, exhibition halls, museum rooms, stupas and pagodas.

    During the afternoon we had a snack of a rice, mango and coconut treat wrapped in banana leaf, quite tasty. I had a shish kebab of what the vendor claimed was chicken, but it was chewy and weird, unlike any chicken I'd ever tasted. A thought surfaced that had niggled at me in Vietnam: "Vietnam, a place where "puppy chow" can have a slightly different meaning..."  However, Deborah, whose heritage includes such delicacies as chicken feet, assured me that what I was actually munching on was a skewer of "chicken stomachs".

    We got home in time to take Kristina for supper at one of her favourite restaurants, where she steered us toward the Cambodian national dish, Khmer Amok, and a jug of Angkor beer. I was able to teach her an expression she'd never heard, "running amok" - which, however, has nothing to do with the lovely spice mix that is used to make the dish.

    For our final evening together we met a friend of hers, an equally nice guy named Jared. We had dinner at another of her favourite restaurants, and then went to a comedy show where we saw Emo Phillips and Gina Yashere from front row seats - both very funny. I remembered seeing Emo on TV once or twice, and he is as good as he ever was.

    Here are the photos of our two days in Phnom Penh.

    Very early the next morning, Kristina left to accompany the grade 6's on three day school trip to a beach town, while Deborah and I headed to Siem Reap in a van. That was a hairy trip - I think I'm cured of choosing vans, even if they are faster. As usual, we got front row seats, right up front with the driver.  We had the best view of the road as he raced to make up for a late start, dodging potholes and blaring his horn at every vehicle we passed at breakneck speed (no-one passed us!). The road was absolutely awful for at least two of the six hours the journey took, and he was well past the limits of safety. We saw one passenger van with a blown tire; if we'd had a blow-out at those speeds there wouldn't have been any hope of recovery, and I shuddered to imagine how we'd fare in a head-on collision up there in the cab with the driver. The road is being widened to four lanes, but I don't know when they started that project or how long it'll take to complete.

    Jared tried to hook us up with a guide he trusts to tour us around the Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom temple complexes, but that guide didn't answer his phone so we booked someone else to drive us back and forth for the three days that we planned to be there.  We were going to stay for only two days, but you can only get one day or three day passes. We had no luck finding Couchsurfing hosts in that tourist mecca.  They probably get inundated with requests from young backpackers. 

    We wanted to stay at the Sinh Tourist hotel, but we drew a total blank with emails and phone calls to the Sinh Tourist office in Siem Reap and in Phnom Penh - no answer, and delivery failures to our email messages. This is a major tour company recommended in Lonely Planet and on TripAdvisor.com, and it's the one we used to come from Saigon to Phnom Penh, so I was astonished at their lack of response, but I've been told this is something to expect when travelling here. However, our newly contracted driver put us into a very comfortable hotel near the old market - another large tiled room with high ceilings, AC, frig, hot showers, a swimming pool, breakfast included, a large washroom, daily room cleaning, wifi...I'd call it a two star, possible approaching three. Like many Asian hotels, though, everyone leaves their street shoes on the steps or in a rack at the front door to the hotel. It was excellent value for $20/night.

Next entry: Siem Reap and Angkor Wat