Cambodia Revisited

A piece of music from war-torn Somalia reminds me why I write this. It is not for me. It is for the bones I walked over.

Cambodia is not a place I particularly want to revisit. If a friend were going, I would strongly recommend a fierce-looking large man for a travel companion. I would not try to talk anyone out of going, but I would relate my experience. Consider carefully. It changed my life.

I don't talk about Cambodia often. It has left a strange taste in my mouth. When I read stories of Afghanistan and Iraq in the papers, I keep thinking if there is ever peace, five years later either one could look a lot like the Cambodia I experienced.
I cringe when I read in the papers that Cambodia is a safe, multi-party democracy (Edmonton Journal, Feb. 25, 2006). It is neither. If you have USD$300 a day to drop on your guided tour, you might be given that impression. But if you are a backpacker overlanding the country on a shoestring, you will see neither a multi-party democracy nor will you feel particularly safe.

I do not consider a country where the leader of the opposition has spent the better parts of the last few years in exile to be a multi-party democracy. Perhaps this is a matter of opinion. On paper, multi-party democracy exists in Cambodia. In practice, the opposition and human rights activists are threatened with prison unless they apologize for their behavior to the Prime Minister.

There is no such thing as safety in a country where the people are so desperate to survive. Anarchy rules the streets; everything is used to make a profit. In tourist centres, happy pizzas are as common as money-changers. Guns are somewhat visible, and machetes are as common as tools there as umbrellas in London. These days they are used for making your dinner, but it is not a great stretch to imagine if a few choice things went wrong, they could be used on you.

I hadn't planned to visit Cambodia. It took me about a month to get used to the idea, and another few weeks of reading to try and understand what I was walking into. Our first border crossing, from Thailand, had only become legal in the last few years. We'd heard stories that it was unsafe to be out after dark, and that use of weapons was rampant. We were going to Phnom Penh to visit the Killing Fields and we were told they weren't finished cleaning them up. We were told there was a tree where babies were bashed to death. We were told the roads were unsafe, possibly impassible, and that getting from Phnom Penh to Siem Reap would be difficult and unsafe. But once there, in the sanctuary of Angkor, we could breath again in relative safety and tranquility before braving the long road to Poi Pet, a wild west town trying to revive itself as the dirty Las Vegas of the east.

My guidebook had a lot of information on Cambodia. This was not a good sign because it was a book designed to have the most information on the countries that were the most difficult to visit.

Cambodia had a number of different names in the past 35 years, and its immediate history is as tumultuous as ice in a blender. On April 17, 1975, the Khmer Rouge, led by Pol Pot, entered Phnom Penh, ending Cambodia’s five year civil war and beginning a series of atrocities that would see between one and three million of the country’s people – just over a quarter of Cambodia’s total population – brutally massacred. Being on the Khmer Rouge’s hit list wasn’t difficult. If you were a simple, uneducated, hard-working peasant not prone to exploiting others, your chances were better than average for survival. Everyone else was considered an enemy of the state. Family relationships were dismantled. Religion, private ownership and money were banned. Communications with the outside world were eliminated.

The murders and terror continued until January 7, 1979, when the Vietnamese entered Phnom Penh. Cambodia was then placed in the care of Hun Sen, a man who fell out of favour with the Khmer Rouge when he defected to the Vietnamese in early 1978.

Cambodia is currently enjoying a period of anarchistic quasi-stability. Hun Sen remains Prime Minister. While I was in Asia he openly berated those who gave money to Tsunami victims while not giving money to fund Cambodia’s human rights trials of former Khmer Rouge members. Shortly after that he welcomed with a VIP reception a man who had been among Pol Pot’s elite cadres, granting him amnesty from his past human rights offences in exchange for defection to the government.

This kind of corruption extends throughout the country where everything is for sale. Our first experience was crossing the border from Thailand to Kroh Kong, a chaotic land border crossing. We were escorted into a little room while fighting to keep our bags (no, thank you, I really do want to carry my own bag) and given a form to fill out saying we didn’t have SARS. The whole thing was a small-scale extortion scheme. At the time I felt scammed, but looking back I don't mind a bit. It was a hassle, but the men running the circus can now feed their families or maybe even send their children to school. I can't argue with that.

A car claiming to be a taxi took us from the border checkpoint to the boat dock. Most taxis weren't marked, merely men with cars offering rides for money. There is one boat a day from Kroh Kong to Sihanoukville, where we planned to spend the night, and it leaves at 8:00 a.m. However, the driver of our car assured us that if we stopped to change our money the boat would wait. We weren’t so sure but changed money anyway. The brick of Riel I acquired in place of my USD$100 wasn’t going to fit in one piece in my money belt or anywhere else. I, like many others, had come into Cambodia carrying a large stash of cash, because while many Khmers carry cell phones, the country was devoid of ATMs. (In the last six months, an Australian bank has opened an ATM that accepts foreign cards in Phnom Penh.)

From Kroh Kong to Sihanoukville, the road is either unsafe or simply unfinished. My guidebook said there wasn't a road, but that building one had been planned. I wasn’t able to determine which because at the border the only option presented to us was the boat. Like many forms of public transportation in Asia, the boat stopped to pick up anyone who flagged the captain down on the way. When we arrived at the pier in Sihanoukville, we were met by hoards of motorbike taxi (moto) and car taxi drivers, all wanting our business. Negotiating a cab fare was trickier than it looked, and after a morning battling touts, I was in no mood to argue and every mood to get to our hotel and not have ten people grabbing my bag and another five trying to offer me a ride or a deal. I had no idea when we left the calm rationality of Thailand what we were getting into, and the intensity was overwhelming.

Apparently most people stay at one of Sihanoukville’s beaches, but since we were only staying one night we picked a hotel in the city’s downtown area. Luck had it that our hotel was across the road from the bus depot where we would be catching our GST bus to Phnom Penh.

GST is the public bus company. This, of course, spawned a discussion with my Australian friend on our respective Prime Ministers’ promises to abolish our GST, which we carried on mostly to persuade the two or three moto drivers vying for our attention that we really weren’t interested in paying for a ride anywhere. (If you stay somewhere long enough and always walk everywhere, the drivers stop offering you rides and start teasing you good naturedly for consistently refusing a lift.)

Sihanoukville was our first exposure to the true Cambodia. It was raw, dirt poor, and vaguely frightening because after the chaos of the border crossing, we had no sense of whether or not it was safe. Stories abound of weapons and lawlessness in Cambodia, fueling our unease. Outside a cafe frequented by diplomats in Phnom Penh there was a guard sitting beside a sign advising patrons to check their weapons at the door, and some of Phnom Penh’s wealthier estates had armed guards. Downtown Sihanoukville showed no signs of violence. The roads were crowded with motorbikes and as dusk fell, the air filled with the smell of charcoal cooking fires.

Down the road from our hotel was a coffee shop owned by a mad English bloke. The coffee exceeded expectations, as did the conversation, but the details have been all drowned out by the presence of three or four children mumbling pleas and begging in the bushes beside our table. We had no idea what to do. If we gave to one, we might suddenly be mobbed by ten of them. It was possible they all worked for the same adult, and wouldn't have actually received any of our money at the end of the day. We had no idea how much was too much or too little to give, and there weren’t enough westerners where we were to guarantee the kids would have sufficient income if we ignored them, which we tried to do, all the while feeling absolutely awful.

In the morning we hopped on the bus to head north to Phnom Penh, USD$4. We lucked out with the kids begging and selling things at rest stops during the bus rides, because we both carried our small hand drums. Kids love drums. So do the grownups. It seems like everywhere we went we were asked to bang out a rhythm or two or three, and people asked to try the drum. Kids in particular liked it and crowded around in groups, having forgotten they were trying to sell something or beg and just asked to play the drum for 30 seconds. If you plan on traveling to Southeast Asia any time soon, I recommend doing it with a hand drum.

Phnom Penh is a city unlike any other. We stayed at a guesthouse on the lake, and other than the handful of guesthouses, the lake was surrounded by little shacks of wood and corrugated metal scraps. The tiny shacks were often smaller than my bedroom at home and would not meet Canadian building codes. Further from the lake near the Canadian/Australian Embassy, the architecture started showing French colonial influences. Buildings and estates were grand things with high fences and often armed guards. I looked at the estate owned by the Church of Jesus Christ that was large enough to comfortably house my entire extended family and I wondered what Jesus would think of their grand estate while the locals live in the shacks.

The primary purpose for staying in Phnom Penh was to visit the killing fields of Choueng Ek and the Toul Sleng torture museum. However, much to our delight the city had attractions enough to keep us highly amused while we procrastinated, mostly in the small tourist ghetto near the lake. Slightly further afield we tried to watch monkeys in a public park, but to our dismay we ended up being the sideshow. Apparently it is uncommon for westerners to sit in that particular park as we were quickly surrounded by limbless and child beggars, hawkers and gawkers. We didn’t stay long.

Finally, when it could no longer be avoided, we spent a day crossing the fields of hell. It is far more disturbing than the death camps from the Second World War; so much of it simply has not been cleaned up.

The museum was filled with extremely disturbing facts and graphic photos. The fields looked clean from a distance, but upon closer inspection I realized even on the footpaths I was walking on several someones’ graves. Bones, bones, bones. Bits of clothing shoddily half buried. Tree roots wrapped into the ground around bones. Mass graves not deep enough to burry me to the knees. And the Khmer Rouge would have. Me, my entire family, every one of my friends. Bones and clothing even buried in the ground under my feet, starting to surface. Bones under my feet.

A stupa (Buddhist burial fixture) housing skulls. Skulls that used to belong to the faces in the haunting photographs hanging in the Tuol Sleng Prision museum. Estimates of between one and three million tortured and dead and the UN hasn't yet raised enough money for the trials of those Khmer Rouge members responsible.

Kids play on the steps of the stupa and on the paths in between the main grave pits, bicycle tyres riding over bones. The tree where they bashed babies and young children to death has a placard around it so that you know it is The Tree. Other trees have at their bases piles of clothing bits and bones.

Bones haunt me. Why was the Khmer holocaust and the Killing Fields of Choeung Ek never a part of my high school curriculum?

You probably want to know why I went to visit such a gruesome site. The answer is simple. Think of everything you did today, right from getting up until going to bed. Then imagine all of your friends and family and think of what they did all day today.
Then picture them all dead in shallow pits, bashed to death to save the cost of bullets, probably while you watched.

Now you might begin to get an idea of why I went.

I began to gain an appreciation for why Cambodia felt so full of anarchy - if you had been repressed and brutalized for years, wouldn't doing something simply because you can have appeal?

The Khmer people have developed incredible ingenuity from years of having to make do with nothing. The krama, a large checkered scarf, is an integral part of Khmer fashion and also has many practical uses. The first kramas were red and white, and later a blue and white variety cropped up. Near the end of its reign, the Khmer Rouge used the blue and white kramas to identify northerners who opposed their rule. Today kramas come in all the colours of the rainbow, and for the most part are not associated with certain groups, although the blue and white kramas are sometimes sought by foreigners who wear them in remembrance of the slain northerners.

Kramas can often be found wrapped around the owner’s head and covering his mouth against dust and exhaust fumes from vehicles, or covering the back of his neck. Kramas are used to wipe tables, sling babies, carry things and stuff a flat bike tyre until you reach a patch shop. It works as a towel, a makeshift sarong, and a belt. I used mine to tie my flashlight to the front of my bike one night. It is not uncommon for people to own more than one krama, and if you are going to spend any appreciable amount of time in Cambodia, it is invaluable.

The other distinct element of Khmer fashion is the sarong. They're not sarongs like we think of them in the west, brightly tie-dyed and imported from Goa or Bangkok. The Khmer sarong is patterned in a style reminiscent of Samoan art and I didn’t see too many with fringes.

During the journey from Phnom Penh up to Siem Reap, villagers could be seen near the road. Always we saw men. Women either hung near the doorways or stepped inside when we arrived. In Phnom Penh we could hear their laughter as they did our laundry, but we never saw the wash women. Men did all the tourist driving, ran the hotels and took our laundry from and returned it to us.

Our guesthouse in Phnom Penh arranged a guesthouse for us in Siem Reap and had a driver pick us up at the bus. This is a very smart idea because otherwise you will be mobbed by touts struggling to grab your bag from you and take you to the guesthouse of their choice as you get off the bus. It was a very welcoming sight to see a man with a huge smile carrying a sign saying Mr. Paul and Miss Jeno.

Siem Reap is an interesting little town. It can be crossed by bike in a short period of time, and the town itself didn’t appear to have any attractions that compared with the magic of Angkor. We stayed in two guesthouses, both beside crocodile pits, the most memorable with the least scary crocodiles being the Dead Fish.

A hotelier from Thailand decided Siem Reap needed an affordable yet funky retreat from the usual standard, and thus the Dead Fish was born. The sign on the restaurant advertises they don't serve dog, cat, rat or worm. The restaurant itself has many shoes-off raised eating platforms and is very classy. They feature live traditional Khmer music and dance, and also rotate two Thai piano players, one who is blind. The guesthouse is loaded with style as well. We were put up in number 17, a room in the Lonely Lodge, upstairs past the crocodile pit. The room itself was nice, carpeted even – the first carpeted room I had since I left New Zealand – and a hot shower. Downstairs each of the rooms were named after different hotel chains - the Ramada, the Sofitel, the Hilton. Within opening hours of the guesthouse salon/spa, manicures, pedicures, head massages, shaves and haircuts were all free to guests.

After acclimatizing to the town, we made our first foray to the temples. Located 12 kilometers north of town, the temples can be accessed by tuk tuk for USD$5 per day, or a bicycle can be rented for USD$1 to USD$2 per day. While tuk tuks require less effort, riding a bike allows you to interact with the locals in a way that you wouldn't otherwise be able to.

Adding to the atmosphere outside a couple of the temples were traditional Khmer musicians. Khmer traditional music is very melodic. There are varieties of oriental violins, a drum vaguely similar to the Middle Eastern doumbek, and a hammer dulcimer. The phenomenon of the music and musicians near the temples is particularly unique because the musicians are all crippled, most the victims of landmines. Instead of begging on the streets, they have been retrained as musicians and sell their albums to tourists.

As we left yet another temple, we were gifted with the sound of tiny voices rising from the gate. Children were on raised platforms carved into the arch, singing and performing traditional dance for the visitors.

When we visited the temple of Ta Prohm (famous for trees growing out of the crumbling walls) the second time, we waited for the tourists to disperse, and talked a bit with Niem, the temple’s sole resident. If you are not sure who I'm talking about, go to a book store and look at the cover of the Lonely Planet guide for Cambodia, where you will find his picture. He was very gentle and quiet and seemed happy to pose for the camera with his copy of the Lonely Planet. Some internet research later uncovered that the Khmer Rouge had murdered his entire extended family.

The Bayon was another memorable temple. It seemed to be run entirely by Buddhist nuns. The complex has many towers, each with a face carved into it - the face of Avalokitsivara, the Buddha of Compassion. It was a very peaceful place and throughout our visit, nuns handed us lit incense and invited us to pray in front of the temple's many shrines to Buddha. When I returned home I tried to study Cambodia's nuns, but literature is nonexistent. They are not ordained, and like the country's monks, were disrobed during Khmer Rouge rule.

Finally we took the plunge and visited the actual temple of Angkor Vat. We arrived mid morning, parked our bikes, and sat on the stone bridge over the moat. I threw stones from New Zealand into the water and we took a moment to appreciate just being at the entrance.

Inside the vat I felt something turn me to the right. Down a corridor I was drawn to a saffron-wrapped statue of a Hindu god, Vishnu. I lit incense and fell to my knees to pray. I felt visible white energy fill me, and I swayed a bit. I felt an incredible urge to open my mouth and sing the song that has no tune in the universal language but the voice inside me was no longer mine. I kept my mouth shut because I wasn't sure if it was culturally taboo to sing while in prayer.

As we made our way around the second level, a young monk visiting from Thailand stopped us to talk, practicing his English. He spoke very well.

Inside the complex after lunch we made our way to the inner/uppermost sanctum. After an extremely steep ascent we observed four Buddhas in shadow, one facing east, south, west and north.

We undertook nearly our entire Angkor visit by bicycle, which presented its own set of challenges. First, you must understand Cambodian drivers are not like drivers back home. Aside from the vigorous tootling of horns (and if you don’t have a horn on your bike you are expected to use your voice as you pass someone), you must constantly be aware of everything and then some in order to not die. Yes, those mammoth huge trucks will pass you and nearly take your handle-bars off. Yes, those tour buses expect you to ride on the shoulder as they blow by. Intersections are a real treat - nobody stops. You weave in and out of everyone else relatively slowly. If you go backwards you're as good as dead and if you stop your chances aren't great either. Keep moving. Traffic will move around you, but you need to have the Gonads of Steel to move with the traffic first.

Potholes are another menace of Cambodian roads. They are frequent, large, surprising, and they will jump up and bite you if you aren’t paying attention.

Having a flat tyre on your bike is not a big deal near Siem Reap, even half way between town and the temples, because it seems like there is a place to have your tyre patched around every other corner. This we discovered twice in one day, the second blown tyre leading to a whole new adventure: biking 12 kilometers from the temples back to town in the dark. Never have I seen a better case for the use of bicycle lights, and never again will I leave home without them. Thankfully, I had my flashlight in my bag, which I tied to my handle-bars with my krama, making us at least visible, though it didn't cast much light outward.

Traversing Cambodian roads at night by bicycle is not something you really want to do. You can't see the potholes and other road traffic can’t see you. You can't see the pedestrians on the side of the road until you are pretty well on top of them – heck, most of the time you can't even see the edge of the road. Luckily, two young students on a motorbike rode beside us most of the way in the dark so that we could see by their headlight until we reached the lights at the edge of town, and we arrived surprisingly and thankfully without incident.

Cambodia’s roads are generally in abysmal condition. The road, if you want to call it that, from Siem Reap to the border at Poipet is pure and unequivocal hell. A trip barely over 100 kilometers ended up taking a stomach-churning six hours that left my back feeling like I received a mild dose of whiplash. Sand, rocks, dips, potholes, one washed out bridge we had to go around, pavement, no pavement, piles of rocks in the middle of the road, other vehicles awaiting repair after the road claimed one of their wheels, and oncoming traffic were some of our obstacles.

Once we finally arrived at the border in Poipet, we were, for the first time since we started the journey, completely ignored. No offers for tuk tuk, boom boom, drugs, new suit, food, drink, shoe shine or whatever else you can dream up. On the Cambodian side of the border, the entrance to customs and immigration from Thailand was lined with limbless/homeless/child beggars. On the Thai side, little girls carrying crying babies were wandering among the tourists begging. The girls were barely bigger than the babies.

We decided we needed water, and between the Cambodian and Thai borders was a large outdoor seating area with drinks. It felt strange to have been stamped out of one country but legally not be in any country after that.

The Thai side of the border felt nothing short of unbelievably welcoming. Due to the obnoxious condition of the so-called-road, we missed the last train to Bangkok by about 15 minutes, meaning we had a night to spend in Aranyaprathet. Not mentioned in anyone's guidebook, we had no map, no clue as to whether or not there were any guesthouses in town, and flew by the seats of our respective pants quite blindly, with a fun outcome. The town is deliciously Thai, and quite clearly they don't see many foreigners, or Farang in Thai – we elicited more than our fair share of stares from locals. The internet cafes were few and far between and full of kids playing noisy games.

Life was returning to what we had come to accept as normal, and the intense chaos and desperation of Cambodia started to fade into a memory of the enchantress who kicks you in the teeth, leaving you wondering whether or not you can ever return.