Phnom Penh, Cambodia’s Capital
I feel like I really ought to be able to describe the countryside we passed through on the bus trip from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh, but sadly about all I can say is that it was very flat, there was a tons of rice growing, many palm trees, and the occasional village or town made up of the traditional Cambodian houses on stilts.
There are two reasons for this. First, I slept for a fair bit of the trip. Second, when I wasn’t sleeping I was talking to the fellow in the seat next to me. He was a young Cambodian man who spoke no English or French at all. We did our best to teach one another bits of language, with him pointing at words in my guidebook and my doing my best to mime them, or to find them in the “useful phrases” section. My favourite was “Tiger,” whose meaning I managed to convey by snarling, making my hands into claws and then “painting” stripes on my body with my fingers.
We did make a couple of stops including one at a small shop, where everyone wandered down a path into the woods (though not off the path for fear of mines) to pee.
It took about four hours to get to Phnom Penh, the Capital, and indeed, only city in Cambodia (though at 155 000, I suppose Sihanoukville in the south counts too.)
Upon arriving, we picked one of the many tuktuk drivers vying for our custom at random. It took a fair bit of work to cram three people (two of us considerably larger than the average Cambodian) and our bags onto the tuktuk, but we managed. The traffic wasn’t too horrendous, and before long we were at our hotel, one of about a half dozen on the street, each called the Golden something or other.
After a short rest at our (relatively) luxurious hotel, we undertook to see a little of the city. Our sightseeing took the form of a walk down to the Lao embassy, where I hoped to obtain a visa, since I’d be visiting that country next.
The state of the roads in Phnom Penh is… Well, let’s say the city would be a dream for paving companies the world over if only the government could afford to pay them. The main streets are actually in pretty good shape, but many side streets are simply swathes of dirt between two rows of buildings. Interestingly, the sidewalks, where they exist, are almost uniformly pretty and in good shape. The only difficulty is that they’re often completely filled with vendors, merchandise from nearby shops, garbage… This means that the curb lane of the street turns into a (surprisingly efficient and even marginally safe feeling) unofficial pedestrian, bicycle and motorcycle lane (though some of the motos in Phnom Penh are probably too heavily laden to be thought of as motorcycles in any standard sense.)
As we walked, we passed by many of the liquor bottle petrol stations, though some actually had volumetric hand pumps and large drums of gasoline. Others had air compressors and facilities for patching punctured tires. In a similar vein, we also saw many improvised phone booths. These line the sides of the roads and are actually just small stalls on wheels. Their proprietors have a variety of mobile phones and when a customer wants to make a call, they simply pick the phone that has the most economical rate for the number desired and then time the conversation, billing the customer at the end. An imaginative solution in a country with few in-home phones and no truly public telephones at whatsoever. (I now realize that this isn’t strictly true. After about five days in Phnom Penh, I did see one.)
That evening we had dinner at a wonderful Indian restaurant near our hotel. During dinner, we talked about what countries’ foods could be truly called “world” cuisines. We came up with Italian, French, Indian (a bit misleading, since it really is many cuisines), Thai, Chinese, Japanese and American (if you count fast food as cuisine.) Before bed, I set out my many horrendously dirty clothes to take advantage of the free laundry service at our hotel.
The next day we started out by walking down to Psar Tuol Tom Pong, better known as the Russian Market, since this was where most Russians shopped during the days of that country’s heavy influence on Cambodia. I was entertained by perusing the stalls offering used power tools, car parts, homewares and so forth, as well as by the many shops selling countless copied CDs, DVDs and computer software (A copy of the latest version of a well known Computer Aided Drafting program that sells for $2000 or so in Canada was available for US$2 here.)
I browsed the DVDs, picking out a couple I liked to send back home with my parents, while they (primarily my mom) spent what felt like an eternity in the clothing section of the market. Thankfully the folks at the DVD shop were happy enough with my purchases to give me a chair where I could sit and read while waiting for the clothing spree to end.
After the Russian market, we headed back to our hotel to drop off our purchases. We returned to our hotel via a route we’d taken previously, passing some of the best and worst of Phnom Penh. While it wasn’t always evident, the poverty and miserable state of some of its people occasionally came through, as in the case of the roadway and canal we walked across. So too did the divide between some of its citizens, as we passed some buildings that were positively palatial.
Back at our hotel, we sat down for lunch before heading back out onto the streets and making for the Royal Palace. Probably Phnom Penh’s premier tourist attraction, about 1/4 of the grounds are open to the public. The gardens and buildings are (as one would expect) very pretty. The probable highlight of it all is the Silver Pagoda. This building contains many of the most prized surviving Buddhist relics in Cambodia. More than almost anywhere else, the word “surviving” is significant. The Khmer Rouge regime destroyed huge numbers of religious icons of all sorts, and sold almost all of what was left to help fund the oppression of their people. The most striking of the Buddha images is the 190+kg standing Buddha; made entirely of gold, save for the encrustations of precious stones. Also very notable is the figure at the centre of the pagoda, the Emerald Buddha, made from a beautiful green crystal. (Sadly, no photos of these beautiful items, since photography was prohibited inside the buildings [and indeed, even to take photos of the outsides cost an extra $2 “admission fee” for the camera.])
Perhaps the most striking feature of all in the Silver Pagoda is the 5000 or so silver floor tiles. They’re mostly covered by red carpet in the area where visitors might walk, but without noticing it, my mom and I ended up with our bare feet pressed against them when moving to get a closer look at some of the Buddha images.
Another unique portion of the temple is the gigantic fresco that adorns the inside of the perimeter wall. Perhaps 700m long in total, these beautiful 100-year-old plaster paintings re-tell the entire Ramayana epic along their length. Though all of these were wonderful, I suspect my mom’s foremost memory of the Royal Palace will be of the Garudas (mythical Hindu bird-men) that adorned many of the building exteriors.
After our visit to the Royal Palace, we continued our wander ’round town with a walk up the Mekong River. Though work still continues on it, the park lining the west bank is almost all complete and is a very pleasant place for a stroll. As nice as the park is, we were never too far removed from Phnom Penh’s busy streets. Walking as we were, we were almost continually accosted by moto (motorcycle taxi) and tuktuk drivers. At first we’d assumed that this was simply persistent salesmanship on their part, but after a bit more thought, realized that more or less no one in Phnom Penh walks anywhere. Bicycles and motorcycles abound. Cars and cycle-rickshaws aren’t uncommon, but virtually no one goes more than one or two hundred metres on foot. So perhaps the moto drivers simply didn’t comprehend that people with money for an alternative form of transport actually wanted to use their feet…
Our walk continued to the central post office, which bore strong reminiscences to one I’d visited in Ecuador many years ago. The inside was fairly Spartan, and had a strange air of “official chaos” about it.
After the post office, we headed up another small street towards the train station. As the sun began to set we looked up and spotted a sign that while Phnom Penh might be a large capital city, it still isn’t too far removed from the plains and jungles that abound in the rest of the country.
After making brief schedule inquiries at the train station (or rather with the people nearby, since the station itself was closed) we headed back towards our hotel, walking in twilight and eventually dark. We had a wonderful Cambodian dinner at a restaurant near our hotel, and then headed off to bed for my mom and dad’s final night with me in Cambodia.
The next day we headed down to the south part of the city by tuktuk. I was changing accommodation to a less expensive place, and all three of us planned to visit the museum right across the street from my new home.
As I checked in, my mom and dad went to the post office again, this time to mail some postcards. Unfortunately, the tuktuk driver misunderstood the destination, and they took a lengthy trip back to the central post office, several kilometres away. It took them perhaps forty minutes to return, but eventually we were reunited.
After taking a look at my guesthouse, we walked across the road to the museum.
From the outside, the Tuol Sleng Museum looked ominous, with opaque sheet metal fences topped with barbed and razor wire. Despite the fact that many private residences in Phnom Penh also had these, it still had a darker feel. As befit the most infamous and terrible of Khmer Rouge prisons.
Built in a former school, Tuol Sleng, or S-21 as it was known, saw tens of thousands of inmates during its time, but only seven of these are known to have survived. The rest were tortured into confessing crimes against the revolution before being taken to Choung Ek outside the city to be executed. Much of the museum of the Cambodian Genocide has been left in its former state. Iron beds still stand in the middle of the torture rooms, the classrooms are still divided up into tiny prison cells with attachments for leg irons still in place.
Even with all this in mind, it was only in the second building of the complex where the horror of the place really began to sink in. The entire bottom floor of the building was filled with thousands of portraits that were taken of inmates upon their admission to the prison. Men, and women, old and young, everyone was represented. Many of the photos looked to be of children no more than five years old. Walking past row on row of these photographs with the knowledge that all of these people had passed through this place, and that all of their lives had been cut off soon afterwards filled me with terrible cold sadness.
Watching a film made by survivors and workers from the prison deepened my feelings of horror at the place. The rows dark cells. The leg irons, electrical cords and other implements of torture. Even the piles of skulls in one room. They were all terrible, but didn’t come close to touching me the way the voices of the people who had once been there did.
By the time we left the museum I felt physically ill.
It didn’t feel right to simply walk away from that place out into a beautiful sunny day. It doesn’t feel right to immediately begin writing about some other subject. I suppose I must.
After visiting the museum we walked back through the streets of Phnom Penh. I was relieved and amazed to see the life and happiness of its people after having seen so vividly part of what they’d been through. The walk, the bustle of the city and the beautiful weather broke my miserable mood, but even so it took a while.
We arrived back at our hotel and walked a few doors down to a great Cambodian restaurant we’d already been to several times. There I enjoyed a final lunch with my mom and dad. After lunch, we headed back to our (former) hotel to pick up their bags and meet their taxi to the airport. Big hugs and happy/sad goodbyes. It was wonderful to have had them with me for almost three weeks, especially after having not seen any of my family for so long. My only fear is that I’ll miss them (and everyone else) after having been reminded how wonderful it is having them around.
After my mom and dad left, I started to make my way back to my new residence. On the way I stopped and wrote at an internet cafe until well after dark. The growling of dogs in some of the smaller streets made me a bit nervous, but I arrived back at my guesthouse unbitten and in one piece.
I spent the evening sitting in the garden in front of the guesthouse, eating dinner and talking with Nick, a fellow Canadian who I picked at random to talk to, since he was also eating alone. We chatted a bit about Cambodia and Southeast Asia, and then I went up to sleep in my beautiful big mosquito net covered bed, readying myself for the trip down to Kampot on the south coast the following morning.
Very special thank yous in this entry: My mother and father. Not only for ensuring that while with them I always had my own room in a much nicer place than I’d have picked for myself. Not only for taking quite a lot of time, money and effort to come and visit me while I was away (though I’m sure they had a great time in the process.) And not EVEN just for being so happy and excited for me when I was leaving home and them for a year. But for being such wonderful parents over the years and for working so hard to make sure that I turned out as the sort of person that could even do this. Without them as examples and teachers, I never wouldn’t have dreamed of an experience of this sort. Thank you yet again mom and dad!
Tags: Cambodia
Llew