Phnom Penh, Land of Sins and Grins
From our journals dated May 7th through May 23rd and May 30th through June 2nd
As soon as the bus rolled to a dusty stop, we were attacked by a chaotic mob of waiting tuk-tuk drivers, like salivating dogs they sprang to life at our arrival, all vying for our attention and ultimately our $2-dollar business. They were all waving guesthouse fliers, smiling and screaming, "OK!?
Very cheap! Come with me!" I focused solely on securing our bags and Rebecca was befriended by a very nice tuk-tuk driver named "Mr.
Mao or Mr. Black" who coincidentally worked for our desired guesthouse, therefore the ride was free. Every driver has a set list of things to see around the city and are always trying to set up an itinerary.
..Mr.
Mao was no different. He spent the five minute ride trying, successfully, to secure our business for a full-day tour the following day. He was also quick to announce, "This is Phnom Penh!
Watch your shit!" He explained how bags can be snatched by mopeds speeding by and cameras are often taken right out of tourists' hands. With the dizzying undulation of thousands of mopeds speeding around us and our lumbering tuk-tuk squeaking along, I could see how easily things might fly out of your hands.
Just like all good backpackers, we looked to our Lonely Planet guide for guesthouse advice, and we chose Lazy Fish on the Boeung Kak Lake, on the northeast side of the city. It was a chill place with a deck right on the lake, built on a rickety wooden pier. For $4 dollars a night we got a decent room, but there were some issues, well, more like a magazine rack of issues.
There were parts of the floor that had never been cleaned and behind the bed was either splattered curry or something much worse. The lock on the door couldn't have hindered a pissed off poodle and we had to straddle the freestanding toilet in order to take a shower in the tiny bathroom. I tried to make the toilet situation a little less humiliating by calling it the Party Podium and referring to the bathroom as the Venetian Spa.
It didn't work. As the sun went down, the creatures of the night came out. Crickets began dive bombing us on the bed and we counted at least five other random insects swarming around the bed.
In order to survive the night, and avoid choking on a mouthful of insects, we asked for, and received without argument, a mosquito net. The only problem was the mosquito net had more holes in it than fishnets on a drunken hooker climbing a barbed wire fence. The pieces of cheap shipping tape used to repair the holes illuminated in the night like the most horrid of all creatures.
With no other options, we simply shut our mouths tight, held each other close and prayed for salvation.
Lazy Fish, we believe, suffers from what we've dubbed the "Lonely Planet Syndrome" of a deep complacency forming after being published in the single most popular book ever written about touring Southeast Asia independently. A mention in this book makes a place successful, instantly and continuously.
The most recent version was published in 2003 and hasn't been updated, so for 3 years straight, backpackers and budget travelers have been streaming into places like Lazy Fish, blindly and without question. They simply had no need to update or clean a room when a fresh load of westerners shows up each and every day. To their defense, their food was spectacular, so after we had moved to another guesthouse we still went back there many times and watched as tuk-tuk after tuk-tuk dropped off some dirty travelers clutching their Lonely Planet guide like a Southern Baptist preacher does the Bible.
The next day we promptly checked out and moved 2 doors down to Smile Guesthouse. We were amazed to find a much cleaner and more hospitable room for only $2 DOLLARS a night and we ended up staying for over 2 weeks.
Same Same, But Different
There are dozens of guesthouses lining the Boeung Kak Lake and each one is exactly the same, constituting Phnom Penh's Backpacker Ghetto.
Smile is just one of 15 or so crowding the dirt road for a bit of lake view and backpacker revenue. Each one has the same menu and prices, a homemade pool table, bamboo and wicker furniture, a Buddhist shrine in the corner of the deck, a big posterboard menu offering buses, boats, an d visas, a free book exchange filled mostly with bootleg copies and outdated travel guides, a television, a huge collection of bootleg DVDs (the local format is actually VCDs), a radio, another huge collection of bootleg CDs. The lucky ones on the lake all have the same big Beer Lao and Tiger Beer deck umbrellas cemented in vegetable oil canisters, and hammocks filled with swinging babies, all distributed evenly on a patchwork of wooden planks forming a swaying deck hovering over a lake filled with bright green algae, snails and lots of trash.
Looking out along the lakeside you can see all the other guesthouses with the same setup, the guests drinking beer and watching movies, the Cambodian teenage boys in baseball caps and fake Abercrombie and Puma t-shirts playing pool.
We loved our $2 dollar room and the family running the place. They took care of us around-the-clock with the sweetest smiles, and they made the most perfect fruit shakes we've ever tasted.
There always seemed to be a couple babies lying around, usually swinging in a hammock or taking a bath, but always being adorable.
The rooms were very simple. The walls were paper thin, to be specific, they were Balsa wood thin.
It was creepy how close our neighbors sounded. It felt too perverted to take a shower at the same time, as yo u could hear the person less than two feet away, splashing water from the same pipe, separated by nothing thicker than a laminated magazine. If someone entered their room, we jumped out of bed thinking someone was opening our door.
Talking, even whispering, was easily overheard. It took all my strength not to join in on the conversations going on at either side of us. Sometimes the urge overwhelmed me and I would blurt out something strange and disturbing just to bewilder the neighbors.
The plastic wall in the bathroom was so thin and transparent the sun would shine through and illuminate the room from the outside. When we first noticed this phenomenon we spent several minutes going through a simpleton's order of elimination to figure out where the light was coming from. I could only think that a drunk person could easily fall through the wall and plummet into the water below, never to be seen again.
Even the floor was emaciated. Mice ran rampantly under the makeshift building, squeaking and scratching all day long. We were lost in a caveman science experimentation again, and searched under the faux-linoleum vinyl flooring that wasn't "installed" so much as "placed" like a dropcloth at a frat-party.
Even after we searched in vain for mice living in the floors, we couldn't believe how close they sounded as they taunted us with their squeaking laughs.
The wooden structure of the guesthouse was alive with creatures. Geckos numbered in the thousands and would occasionally fall off the roof in some sort of temporary lapse of control and plop onto us, scaring the living shit out of us due to our combined fear of roaches and rats.
Mice would scurry up and over the wooden poles that made the main structure of the building. Luckily they never fell on us, but one did get caught in a trap trying to descend a pole into the kitchen. It was mortally wounded and was writhing around, much to the displeasure of the female guests of the guesthouse.
My services were requested to release the mouse from his misery. I boldly accepted the challenge and after three powerful thumps to the tiny cranium, I was declared victorious. The crazy little granddaughter at first seemed amused by all the activity, but when the grandfather dislodged the rodent carcass and showed her, she ran away screaming.
Welcome to the Killing Fields
Cambodia's history is bloody and fresh. Back in the late 1970's, when I was collecting frogs and getting beat up by my brother, kids my same age in Cambodia were being trained by the Khmer Rouge to be the new commanders of the peasant population, to implicate friends and family to be murdered. Millions died during the auto-genocide of their fellow comrades, including almost all educated citizens, and for such crimes as having good teeth or falling asleep during indoctrination lectures.
The mindboggling ideology of the Great Leap Forward, whose master plan by Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge envisioned one million young, hardened souls to do nothing but farm rice and never think again, took hold in the years 1975-79. The United Stated of America had abandoned the remaining Cambodians to their fate, pulling out completely near the end of the Vietnam War. I would guess that few people in America even know we have a history with them.
Cambodia is a living example of Orwell's 1984 mental nightmare. Only when a person comes here can they come close to understanding the torturous burden Cambodia still carries on it's back.
The two main tourist attractions in Phnom Penh is S-21 and the Killing Fields.
S-21, or Tuol Sleng, was the largest and most centralized detention center and prison used by the Khmer Rouge to torture its own citizens. The sky and atmosphere turned gray but retained its stagnant heat as we approached the gloomy concrete buildings. The fact that they once were schools for young children - that the metal frames once used for jungle gyms and swings had been converted into torture devices - made the place even more morbid.
Prisoners were shackled en-masse by the ankles and were tortured daily at this genocide factory. The torture techniques were diabolical and diverse: electrocution, hanging, drowning, clubbing, starvation, and isolation. The results were stunning.
Each prisoner would inevitably confess to hundreds of crimes. Most of the admissions were surprisingly mundane and irrational. In order to avoid further torture, which would only cease through final expiration, any friend, foe, or family member that could come to mind would be implicated in the never-ending rabbit hole of paranoia and delusion.
The numbers were staggering. Men, women, kids and several westerners were caught in the dragnet seeking to eradicate any semblance of free thought or dissent. Photographs were taken of all the prisoners, and now the eyes of the doomed stare back at you as you walk the cursed halls.
The wooden cells are still in working condition and the barbed wire has not rusted away. Though we wished we were visiting ancient site, it is barely 30 years old. Only 7 people survived Tuol Sleng Prison out of 14,000.
..this place was truly hell.
The other main attraction in Phnom Penh was the killing fields outside the city called "Choeung Ek," a mass burial site of 17,000 Cambodians and the final resting place of most S-21 prisoners. After S-21, we were obviously feeling a bit down and didn't think we could handle any more history lessons. But after a silent lunch and the smiling encouragement by our tuk-tuk driver, we decided to finish the tour of torture and visit Choeung Ek.
Keep in mind there were hundreds of mass burial sites throughout Cambodia, but this one was the largest and is now the most infamous.
The 15 km's in the tuk-tuk was torture in and of itself, but we couldn't help but think that thousands of people from S-21 had taken this very road in the past. After leaving the city center, the road was horribly deteriorated, dusty, and conveniently under construction.
The road work was another sign of Cambodia's progress, but also a reminder that a huge part of Phnom Penh's tourist industry is based on its miserable past. It would be like visiting Germany for the sole purpose of seeing Auschwitz or going to NYC just for the World Trade Center site. On approach, a tall slender building called a stupa was visible.
The Buddhist structure was beautiful from a distance, but as we came closer, the morbid reality assaulted our eyes and hearts. It contained over 5000 skulls, exhumed from the grounds surrounding it, displayed behind plexiglass, but not sealed so that the spirits of the deceased can visit their remains freely, according to Buddhist beliefs.
The surrounding grounds were simple, but profound.
Dozens of grown over holes littered the place like bomb craters, but these were the excavated mass burial sites of the 8,000 bodies that were found. Bone fragments and pieces of decaying clothing could be seen throughout. Signs bluntly explain what was found during the excavation: one burial site contained nothing but headless corpses, another one contained hundreds of women and babies.
There was a tree used for smashing infants. Another tree was used to harness a large speaker to drown out the cries of victims being bludgeoned to death with pickaxes and ox cart handles to avoid wasting precious bullets..
.most skulls showed massive blunt trauma.
That evening, back at the guesthouse, I found a bootleg copy of the book "The Killing Fields" which was made into a movie back in the 1980's.
I felt it very appropriate to read this low quality photocopied version, here in Cambodia, sometimes struggling through the distorted words. The book was much better than the movie, as is typical, but the movie was probably the most effective public relations campaign Cambodia has ever received in the west. The book did a great job of explaining the politics leading up to the fall of Phnom Penh to the Khmer Rouge, with American forces slipping out unannounced, fleeing a sinking ship.
It then told the story of Pran, a Cambodian interpreter working for a New York Times reporter, who was forced into a rural labor camp after Phnom Penh was evacuated and left to ruin. Keep in mind that at the time, Phnom Penh was the most beautiful and sophisticated city in all of Southeast Asia. The malnutrition, sleep deprivation, inhumane working conditions, indoctrination, torture, and systematic removal of all culture previous to 'Year Zero' was described with morbid imagery.
Rebecca and I agreed that the worst part was when a dissenting citizen, rebelling due to mental and physical state of collapse, was tied to a tree, cut wide open and forced to watch two teenaged Khmer Rouge soldiers filet and eat his liver. This graphically described the level of desensitization reached by the Khmer Rouge soldiers through incessant indoctrination, reeducation, negative reinforcement and torture. The young citizens of Kampuchea were eager to accuse anyone of anything for the reward of being able to execute the traitor themselves, and possibly receive a little more food than the rest.
At one point they were allocated a single spoonful of rice for every 20-hour workday. The remainder of the day was spent trying to weed out the traitors within, as even sleep was considered disloyal.
It's a wonder that Cambodia was able to recover from this decapitation of population and culture.
Over half of the current population is under 20 years old, most lacking formal education and productive skills, over 75% of the population relies completely on sustenance farming. But what we saw in the people we met was encouraging. They don't dwell on the past, rather they are eager to build a future.
Phnom Penh has the most fascinating mix of old and new...
people with wooden pushcarts in front of new skyscraper construction sites. Patient cyclo drivers waiting for a fare, their numbers diminishing in the midst of motos, taxis, andcrowded streets. Simple sidewalk barbers still in business while kids stream past with their fancy new sneakers and MP3 players, and multi-hued hairdos.
Monks, dressed as they have for ages in their saffron robes, now scoot around town on the backs of motos, some on cell phones. Development projects, though meager in the eyes of western civilization, are numerous and enterprising. Cambodia has a thriving tourism industry that brings in more and more visitors each year.
Phnom Penh has a busy riverfront with new restaurants, bars, and boutiques. Its central boulevards, left in complete ruins in 1975, are lined again with the scarlet flame trees and fragrant frangipanis. I am confident that Cambodia will be a much better place in a decade.
They deserve as much support and encouragement as they can get.
Bec came across an article in a National Geographic that shed some disturbing light on genocide over the last century. More than 50 million people were systematically murdered in the past 100 years.
From 1915 to 1923 the Ottoman Turks slaughtered up to 1.5 million Armenians. In mid-century the Nazis liquidated six million Jews, three million Soviet POW's, two million Poles, and 400,000 other "undesirables.
" Mao Zedong killed 30 million Chinese, and the Soviet government murdered 20 million of its own people. In the 1970's the communist Khmer Rouge killed 1.7 million of their fellow Cambodians.
In the 1980's and early 90's Saddam Hussein's Baath Party killed 100,000 Kurds. Rwanda's Hutu-led military wiped out 800,000 members of the Tutsi minority in the 90's. There's still genocide today in Sudan's Darfur region.
In sheer numbers, these and other killings make the 20th century the bloodiest period in human history. As a human race, we really haven't advanced that much, have we?
We're not history majors and we're not adding anything substantially new to the discussion about Cambodia, but if any of this moves or inspires you, then I implore you to read up on Cambodia's past, present, and future.
They need to be better understood, as does much about this region of the world in the eyes and hearts of Americans. Do it!
Ironically, on the way back from the Killing Fields we were asked if we wanted to go to the shooting range.
The third most popular touristy thing to do in Phnom Penh is to shoot a fully automatic AK-47 or a Bazooka. The AK-47 costs a dollar a bullet, providing about 20 seconds worth of enjoyment. The bazooka comes with a free chicken, if you're not morally abhorred, for $200 an ordinance.
This type activity isn't in our budget or our philosophical intentions, so we passed, but I did get into several discussions with fellow travelers about it. My opinion was that the bazooka was the best deal due to it's exotic obscurity. I've shot a semi-automatic AK-47 before and I believe that it's now legal to own and operate fully automatic weapons in Texas, but I can't imagine another situation where I can shoot a bazooka.
Therefore, the bazooka is the weapon of choice. It was counter argued that the AK-47 is the weapon of choice due to the amount of enjoyment that would be received, chicken or no chicken. Popping off 30 rounds of 7.
62-mm hot madness is surely a better experience than a single pull of a bazooka trigger, regardless of the explosion 100 yards down the field. Also, it's understood that a chicken is very difficult to hit, so 30 chances is better than one. And finally, you're much more likely to have some semblance of a chicken left to eat with the AK-47 than the missile.
These are complex arguments, the nuances endless and profound, the decision is tough, but it's ultimately up to you to decide.
We also went to the Angkor museum, where they have some of the precious statues and artifacts from the Angkor temples. It was a good finale to the whole Angkor experience.
Hundreds, if not thousands, of examples of stone, metal and wood statues and carvings were on display throughout the large square building with a beautiful garden in the middle. There was way too many artifacts to see, it made it hard to focus an appropriate amount of attention or respect to any one piece, even though each individual piece is worth worshipping, literally.
Later on we checked out an art studio showcasing some amazing and detailed pencil drawings of the Angkor temples.
The theme of the project was discussing the concept of looting. Angkor has been deserted, as a functioning society at least, for a thousand years, and has suffered some of the most barbaric and systematic looting any world heritage site has experienced. But what defines looting and when, if ever, is it acceptable?
Is protecting artifacts by barricading them inside a museum not looting and coveting in itself? Is it appropriate for tourists setting foot on sacred land, trampling on ancient stone walkways and entering temples that were reserved for kings and gods? Hasn't every culture looted from another through conquest?
Every culture has been influenced just a bit by their neighbors, right? It's definitely worth thinking about.
Ok, so it's about time to discuss the uncomfortable subject of toilets and things that you do in toilets.
The whole world poops, but each culture does it a little differently. We had read a lot about eastern toilets, referred to lovingly as 'squatters,' but finding the wisdom and dexterity to actually use them correctly had eluded us for quite some time. We knew the pieces that made up the puzzle: a hole in the floor, a bucket of water and a ladle; however, the complex combination necessary to assemble a successful poop was beyond us.
We knew that a few ladles of water from the bucket would flush the toilet through gravitational momentum, but what about our bums? Toilet paper is a scarce commodity around here. It is available, if commandeered in a premeditated state, for about 25 cents a roll, but the aftermath of flushing it would prove disastrous.
The plumbing pipes used in most of the region are about a third of the size compared to the west, similar to the plumbing of a small yacht. Some places provided a small plastic bin to place your used paper, if you can stand the sight and smell of the evil that lurked inside.
Westerners don't have the capacity to squat properly.
Asians have been doing it all their lives. Throu gh my knowledge of anatomy, I understand that the muscles surrounding the pelvis are too rigid to allow a western bum to lower itself into a proper position with feet placed flat on the ground. We can only do a catcher's squat, on our toes.
Bec and I have been practicing in our room a bit, trying to get into the correct position. I can only hang in there for 30 seconds and that's while gripping the side of the bed like my life depended on it. There's no yoga pose as painful and self-deprecating as the eastern squat.
So assuming a tourist can crouch in some feasible position, then what? How does the "cleaning process" go down? Assuming the ladle isn't infested with several species of feces, assuming there is enough room in the stall too maneuver, which is typically the size of a broom closet, how is a cup full of water splashed haphazardly towards the bum going to do anything?
Or are we expected to use our left hand? And which angle do you dangle? From the front or back?
The backsplash from either angle seems unsanitary and uncomfortable. The logistics are overwhelming and every travel magazine or internet discussion on the activity conveniently glosses over the specifics with gross abandon.
Luckily the guesthouses and restaurants we've patronized have almost exclusively had western toilets, usually with western plumbing, but some have the bucket and ladle requiring a few pours to flush the floating brownies.
Attached to the wall is what Rebecca has affectionately named "The Butt Blaster." It's a spray nozzle, the same you see on some kitchen sinks for washing dishes. It's a manually operated bidet, of sorts.
You basically point and shoot, and it works wonderfully, although the power is often overzealous. But with a drippy bottom, you are assured of a clean one and that, in itself, is fantastic. In the beginning we would routinely remove all clothes before using it and follow-up with a shower, just to be sure.
But with practice we have gotten more adept, and thanks to our new butt-blasting friend, we haven't seen or used a roll of toilet paper in well over a month. That said, in public the best combo is the Butt Blaster and a roll of TP, so you can be clean and dry.
To this day, we have yet to have done "Number Two" in an official squatter, but we're mentally preparing for it each and every day, and perhaps after a dozen more rigorous bedside yoga sessions, I'll be able to perform in a professional manner.
I got a $2 haricut and I'm still paying for it.
The last day before we took a sideways trip to the beach town of Sihanoukville, I decided that my hippie hair had gotten long enough and it was time for a cut. I hadn't touched it since before we got married and now it was past my shoulders and making a beeline for my butt.
If I didn't do something soon, I would most likely turn into a dreadlocked rastadork that I dreaded so much. We had noticed several roadside barbers advertising $2 haircuts. They were simple enterprises: a chair, a hanging mirror, one unlicensed Cambodian with a tool box of cutlery.
With nothing else to go on, I chose the first one that was free...
in retrospect, perhaps that wasn't the wisest selection technique. With an insurmountable language barrier, I used hand gestures to say I wan ted about 2 inches off the back. He agreed, at least in theory.
His first cut was within range, a 2 inch lop of dirty backpacker quaff fell to the street. As he ventured towards the other side, however, his angle turned sharply upwards and before he had made one pass four inches was missing. I had been wearing glasses due to the massive amount of pollution clouding up my contacts, and had taken them off, so I had no idea what was going on.
But I could feel the apprehension building in his muscles and noticed that he hesitated several times and looked at Rebecca for guidance, but she was too busy giggling and taking photos.
"It's too late now", she said through a laugh that sounded more like hyperventilation. I was enjoying the cultural exchange too much to fret about the possible damage.
Cambodian street barbers don't have much experience with long hair I'm afraid and he had difficulty righting his lines, so after several passes from one ear to the other, over 5 inches had been removed.
In many other situations I would have been pissed and highly resentful, but the nature of our travels renders any type of grudge moot. Hell, I'll have hair back to my shoulders by the time I touch soil in Europe so what's the big deal?
I was a little saddened when Rebecca said she had no idea how attached she was to my long hair, but she later apologized for that insensitive comment. She now says in a daily mantra, "I love your little bob!"
Throughout our relationship, we've had to accept the fact that we look a bit similar especially since we're both over six feet tall.
But now we have the same exact haircut, and are highly concerned that we look disturbingly like brother and sister. We're afraid to kiss in public, worrying that we'll be arrested due to some sort of cultural taboo on sibling smooching. I'll be paying on this one for a while.
Back in Bangkok Rebecca bought a small tin of talcum powder called "Prickly Heat." South East Asians, Thais especially, are absolutely dependent on talc to appear fresh and dry, defying the elements that destroy tourists' appearance and hygiene. As travelers stumble around dripping with sweat and stinking like oxen, the locals keep the most amazing composure.
Even the girls behind their fiery woks all day on the street appeared cool as cucumbers. They didn't stink, never sweat, and were always clean. We had been using a bandanna to constantly wipe away our repulsiveness, but thought the talc might make a nice addition to our arsenal.
So one day, after a cold shower, we sprinkled a modest amount all over our bodies, focusing on our chest, armpits and nether regions. We weren't in a hurry so we just sat there on the bed. The immediate feeling was a cooling effect, like a menthol cough drop, but less than a minute in we were concerned.
Everywhere the powder had touched was burning profusely and we both began screaming in pain. Something had gone wrong, terribly wrong. My arms felt like I had just gotten an Indian sunburn from an ogre.
I thought the skin on my chest was about to peel off. It was like we were in the movie "Nerds," and an entire bottle of Liquid Heat had been soaked into our jock straps. The sensation was so intense it felt like ice and fire at the same time.
We writhed in pain for about 10 minutes, screaming and laughing hysterically until it began to wear off. We swore that Prickly Heat was the devil's work and we wouldn't touch it again. But the next day, after a cold shower, we dabbled in it again, much less this time, and soon enough we were addicted like the rest.
Each and every day I had been walking around the corner to a simple little snack-shack to buy water. It was a scary feeling to be in the high heat of the day without a bottle in our hand, so we usually traveled with a couple reserves in tow. For 500 Riel each, about 13 cents, I would get several one-liter bottles of drinking water to survive the day.
The bottles were packaged in the cheapest flimsy blue plastic imaginable. The ink used to print the bottling factory's name would smear away, making it appear to be a bootleg version of purified water, a scary thought indeed. The tops were sealed with a weak plastic rip cord, that would break off about 80% of the time, regardless of what technique Rebecca or I thought was best.
It was infuriating, because then I'd have to get a knife or pen top or my teeth to break in and the result would always be a big cold squirt of water in my face and lap. We were drinking four to six bottles a day and soon enough we had a huge pile of empty bottles in the corner of our room, making it hard to move around without feeling like we were in a kids' playground ballpit. But it gave us a great perspective on the value and necessity of clean water, having to personally secure each and every drop of hydration that touches our lips.
Phnom Penh is happy, happy, happy...
happiness is everywhere. There's happy pizzas, happy shakes, and happy cigarettes. In fact, you can make anything "happy" for an additional $1.
50. It's marijuana and it's everywhere. Tuk-tuk drivers offer it to you on the streets with reckless abandon, but that isn't surprising.
What we didn't expect was the guesthouses offering it on their menus and wanting to put it in our food. For the sake of science, I'll describe the herb in greater detail. The price is amazingly cheap.
$5 will get more than an ounce. All in all, it's not any worse than the bundles of compacted swag smuggled over the Texas/Mexico border. It's so cheap and plentiful strangers are willing to toss you a nug of the bristly green bud without hesitation.
The bags are so huge that backpackers will often go half-in and for $2.50 can get well over 10 well-endowed joints. Keep in mind this stuff isn't of high quality or potency.
Tokers are just as likely to develop a migraine as get the giggles. Everyone inevitably develops a hacking cough that in itself will make the diagnosis of tuberculosis next to impossible. Every night as we walked back down the dirt road to our guesthouse, tuk-tuk drivers would boldly hold out fat bags of weed and tiny bags of low grade opium.
..we almost had to bat them away just to get through.
The low quality of the weed became a huge joke amongst the guests. We had been hanging out with a couple of crazy young Canadians that were completely lost in their own personal narco-tour. The first day I met them, they were smoking, by far, the largest joint I have ever seen.
It was like they were huffing on a muffler. It was easily a $10 joint. With the help of four professional potheads, they were only able to finish half of it, and when disassembled it was still two handfuls.
They were able to procure a small bag of what is referred to as "Super Skunk", which made them burst out in hysterical laughter each time the local kid working at the guesthouse would say it. Canadians, British Columbians specifically, are self-proclaimed cannabis aficionados. They feel that "BC Bud" is by far the best smoke in the world.
So the idea of a mangy nugget that smells more like evergreen oregano than marijuana being referred to as Super Skunk can be expected to receive some heckles.
Over the period of a week, these two Canadians ate, drank, and smoked everything they could get their hands on: weed, opium, ecstasy, hash, Mekong Gold, Ketamine, and Yabba. Mekong Gold is a $1 dollar bottle of cheap whisky, or as the Canadians referred to it as "wicky".
Ketamine, or Special K, is a cat tranquilizer and the most commonly used anesthetic in the Vietnam War. Yabba is the one to worry about, almost all tourist drug overdoses are due to the use, and often misuse, of Yabba. It's a methamphetamine, often abused by hard working farmers and long-haul drivers, but it's the tourists that fall victim to the dirty drug.
Overdose is common as is heavy metal poisoning from the use of mercury used in production.
I ate Khmer food most days. Their food wasn't near as spicy as their Thai neighbors, but that could be easily remedied with chili sauce.
Most dishes were loaded with vegetables so the question of proper nutrition seldom came into question. "Amok," a curry and coconut stew with fish, shrimp or chicken was by far my favorite. Every guesthouse, and most restaurants as well, focused heavily on western style recipes.
It was weird to come this far from home and be inundated with pasta, hamburgers, and Mexican food. But each and every morning, almost without fail, we would both be ordering eggs, bacon, and coffee. We'd venture into a bowl of noodles for brekky every once in a while, but some habits are just hard to break.
Several times a week, we would sneak back to Lazy Fish for a fried fish sandwich that for $2, we both agreed was in our Top Five best fish experiences ever. We just hoped they weren't catching them in this lake.
The Boeung Kak Lake is polluted without question, and we wouldn't call it beautiful, but it is definitely serene.
On days when the heat hits you like a dose of valium, we would lounge all day at our guesthouse, looking out over the peaceful waters, as patches of healthy looking green ivy floated past. These are the hydroponic plants that produce the lotus flower and would travel with the wind, collecting in massive clumps on one side of the lake, then the other, in an endless dance with the weather. The sunsets were psychedelic zen.
Mr.Mao, our original tuk-tuk driver bumped into us a few days later, and when I thanked him again for assisting us the other day, he invited us to a party at the guesthouse in between Lazy Fish and Smile, called Hello Guesthouse. We were honored at the invite and left with him immediately.
We entered the deck overlooking the lake to find the party in full effect. Two icy cold Beer Laos were placed in our hands within seconds of setting foot on the deck. The pool table was covered with several Khmer dishes and all sorts of devouring was going on.
The music was thumping and the dance floor was pulsating, literally. With 20 rambunctious Cambodian men vibrantly dancing, the wooden planks making up the floor bowed like a trampoline mat. No one seemed to notice, so I didn't give it another thought until I almost got my toes caught in between the boards reverberating like soundwaves.
It became obvious that music and dance is a huge deal to the people of Kampuchea. We were asked, no, forcefully dragged, up to dance. There didn't seem to be a choice.
They would get so excited when we would join, that they would collide, bump, and sometimes gyrate with us. It wasn't a sexual thing or any type of perversion, for we noticed that all the guys were dancing very close to each other, though haphazardly, without a single female around. The energy of the room seemed to build exponentially at each new song, until a modern Cambodian pop song came up and everyone exploded in jubilation.
Seeing the shock in our faces, Mr.Mao quickly explained that "This is a very popular song in Cambodia".
After each song, we would quickly retreat back to the dark corner where we tried to drink our never ending supply of Beer Laos, but the sanctity seldom lasted long enough to even sit down, for another group of half-drunk guys would forcefully demand we rejoin the dance party.
After a half dozen songs, I gave up trying to run away, and stayed on the dance floor hoping it would provide Bec with some semblance of immunity. It was great fun, though I surely burnt a full day's worth of calories in less than two hours. The number of beer bottles floating around the room was staggering.
Each and every Cambodian had one, if not two or more, bottles of Beer Lao in hand and would run around vehemently toasting everyone in the room, then starting it again. This caused everyone beers to foam over, looking like they were drinking alcoholic volcanoes.
They taught us how to dance Khmer style.
It was a simple 4-step maneuver but it made them so excited to see us try it. By the end, I had thrown in some Khmer-inspired hand movements that reminded me alot of the "hand rolling" that was popular in my short tenure as a rave kid. I wasn't doing it right but that wasn't the point.
These people loved to dance!
During the few moments we were allowed to rest, we sat next to two westerners who appeared to have Cambodian girlfriends. The tall quiet guy, a Norwegian, turned out to be the owner and was married to a Cambodian who was by far the best dancer in the room and had the most graceful hand movements.
The shorter guy, shirtless and randy, leaned over to say,
"Keep in mind this is a party for a four year old"
The Norwegian/Cambodian couple had a beautiful son named Nickolai, that along with his dozen other friends, ran around and played completely oblivious to the adult debauchery going on above them. The dance floor was duel zoned, at the feet of each stumbling dancer was a kid with a plastic firetruck or ball. It was amazing to see the fragile dance between the two rival parties, but not a single catastrophe happened.
At one point, the drunkest guy in the room paraded Nickolai on his shoulders, barely able to stand himself, a few spotters followed behind for safety.
The idea of this extravagant party being in honor of a 4-year old's birthday consumed me. We asked the shirtless boy wonder what a real party looked like.
He said when he got married, just a few weeks ago, the party went on for 4 days straight and damn near killed him.
It was somewhere around the end of the first week in Phnom Penh that I felt like we were making a bond with the people. I felt that a brotherhood had been formed and as cheesy as it sounds I felt like we were all one people.
But later that day, at 10:30pm, when we snuck off to Lazy Fish for a fish burger my reality came crashing down. We approached the gated entrance too quick to realize that everyone was asleep. Not a single light was on, nothing moved, the place was dead.
..all except for the teenaged kid manning the gate.
We tried to run away, but he kept insisting that they were open and ready to accommodate us. It was ridiculous. We kept inching towards the gate to leave, embarrassed and horrified, but he yelled at one of the rooms, in Khmer of course, for everyone to wake up, that we have hungry guests.
Before we could escape this nightmare, 4 pajama-clad girls streamed out of a room, turned on all the lights in the main area, including the television and fans and handed us a menu. We were tormented because now it was too late, we had to order, but the trauma of the situation killed our appetite, we just wanted to run away. As we flipped through the menu, 4 sets of eyes focused solely on us and our selfish needs.
We ordered some noodles and a beer and sat in petrified silence as they cooked. After ten minutes of silent horror, the food arrived, we scarfed it down as fast as humanly possible, skulled the beer, paid the $6 bill, tipped a buck and ran away crying.
We befriended some English blokes named John and Andy who, like ourselves, really appreciated the chilled out vibe of the lakeside guesthouses.
We had a great conversation with them regarding begging and who's genuine and who's not. Ever since we set foot in Cambodia, literally as we walked across the border, we had been inundated with the full spectrum of begging, many of them were gut wrenching and had brought tears and overwhelming feelings of guilt and empathy. It couldn't be that each and every one of these people were so desolate that if we didn't give them a dollar they would starve to death.
John and Andy told us of a time they were walking down the street in an area not frequented by tourists, so they were basically the only non-locals in the crowd. A lady that, up until coming across these two shining white faces, had been completely sane and sovereign, instantly dropped to her knees and made the most pathetic gesture for help and money. It was like some sort of involuntary spasm, an automatic attempt to retrieve some money from the tourist industry.
They basically ignored her and kept walking. Just as quick, she rose up, dusted herself off and continued shopping. They told of decrepit looking kids holding their infant siblings in slings begging for money to buy food, and when offered a hot meal, they refused and stomped off.
They also told of ladies making the most heart-breaking attempts to portray the pain and suffering of their miserable lives, then refusing to accept 100 Riel, seeing it as an insult. 100 Riel is about 3 cents, not much I agree, but in a country where five of these meager donations could secure a meal or clean drinking water, a person who refuses help doesn't deserve it.
We had read in a local magazine a warning about a western beggar in Phnom Penh, supposedly an American citizen.
He had survived off tourists donations for years and attracted a lot of controversy. It's a hard concept to ponder..
.should a westerner be able to beg in a third world country? Is he any less entitled?
According to the article, he didn't think so and even argued that he was showing the Cambodians that they don't need to feel embarrassed to beg. There were allegations, however, that he had violently assaulted a few western females and even tortured a dog. To our surprise, we were approached by this unlikely celebrity right as we were boarding our bus to Sihanoukville.
He was very polite and calm, though very shaky from some affliction or substance abuse, and he simply asked for any amount of money we could spare, with no manufactured story of stolen wallets or a life-threatening emergency.
We were in love with our guesthouse and the family that ran it. We were amazed at the quality of our $2 dollar room, the tasty food and bend-over-backwards hospitality that we received at any hour deemed necessary.
We found it impossible to find anything to be unhappy about. We assumed this transcended all travelers who were lucky enough to find the guesthouse at the ass end of a long dirt road. One afternoon a couple Israeli girls came to check out the place and were interested in staying.
Israelis have a certain reputation in the travel circuit for their relentless ability to negotiate for a cheaper deal. If you read into this statement, you'll probably know that this often creates friction. What happened next far overstepped any bounds of normal haggling.
Rooms with a single bed are $2 dollars, rooms with two beds are $3, and rooms with three beds are $4...
simple enough and quite reasonable on a global scale. The girls wanted separate beds so grandpa of Smile guesthouse politely said it would be $3 a night. They disagreed adamantly.
Their logic deduced that since there was a $2 dollar room in existence, they should get that room, but with two beds in it, since they didn't fancy sleeping in the same bed together. They argues so loudly we heard it all from the pool table. I was having trouble following, but they seemed to think that the owner had made an error in judgment by not having a $2 room with two beds.
Grandpa, the owner, was bullet-proof but never lost his cool and 20 minutes later, after hearing the same exact irrational, almost delusional gripe, the girls consented to a $3 dollar room.
To be fair, it was only one girl doing the damage. The other girl didn't say much at all and seemed content either way.
Although I was highly disgusted in their ungrateful and stingy attitude, we ended up chatting with them later that evening. To have a little fun, I told the perpetrator that we were paying $1 dollar a night and she exploded. She might have had an aneurism hadn't Rebecca killed my joke immediately by saying we were paying a dollar, each.
Her friend was really cool and seemed very articulate and aware when a group of us, Canadians, Americans, and Israelis, got into a discussion about world wide resentment towards Americans and conversely a world wide perception of traveling Israelis. We told of our first guesthouse in Bangkok that had a prominent display refusing service to Israelis, due to "problems." The girl of angst, not surprisingly, was completely unaware of the Israeli reputation and of certain attitudes towards Americans.
She was literally living in her own personal budget bubble of ignorance and denial. I felt sorry for her.
The main kid hanging out at Lazy Fish was Pot, pronounced "put".
He was a hyper, smiley type dude, who's broken English was easy compensated for by his gregarious flamboyancy. His life was full of color and troubles. He was a pro kickboxer and showed me several times how he could kick my head effortlessly.
He was on television as the spit bucket side kick of a famous local kickboxer during a monthly championship tournament on Cambodian National Television. He was into motocross and participated in pointless and highly dangerous races occasionally. He then told of a time when he was racing his bike on the street and collided with a female pedestrian and injured her badly.
He had to pay $1,500, which is why he's still broke, and the girl still can't walk. He didn't quite seem to have the right level of remorse as he told this story so we decided many of his troubles were self-induced. He was a DJ and fashionista.
He was also a hopeless romantic, a pool shark, and possibly a male gigolo.
Mr. Mao, our original tuk-tuk driver, who initially wanted to sell us weed and have us shoot a chicken with a bazooka, by the end of our stay he had landed a job with a bank.
We saw him very happy in a starched white shirt and slacks the day before we left. We shook hands and congratulated him, feeling that progress was being made, indeed.
The road to the guesthouses on the lake was narrow and made of dirt, rock and miscellaneous debris.
Our first night out late scared us to death. The time slipped past us and soon we found ourselves walking home past midnight. The road had no lights and no one seemed to be awake.
It was as dark as a forest and our fears took a deadly grip on our nerves. An invisible dog lashed out at us behind a gate and made us jump five feet back and grasp each other tightly. It was a tiny dog, but the eerie situation manifested a pit bull in our minds.
Each corner was surely full of bandits armed with machetes. I knew this was the end of it all. We rounded the last corner of the death march and came across a large black figure lying on the ground.
We almost stepped on it and it raised up in concern. Our fight-or-flight instincts kicked in, but I ran one way and Bec the other..
.we were holding hands and damn near dislocated our shoulders trying to drag each other to safety. I won and slowly dragged Rebecca's petrified body past the black werewolf.
It was just a docile black dog belonging to the neighbors, but in the darkness of the night, everything seemed so scary. We vowed to always carry our headlamp with us from now on.
If darkness were the only threat
A few days later construction began on our road for a new drainage system.
A small army of rough looking laborers dug a deep trench through the middle of the road using nothing but pick axes and wicker baskets to transport the dirt...
the pace was painfully slow, but the overall progress was impressive. Day by day, the trench grew by 15 meters and the pile of dirt and debris on each side grew as well. It was difficult to walk on during dry weather, but one night it rained heavily and we learned the true value of paved roads.
The dirt turned to mud and the mud turned into a thick viscous cement-like material that simultaneously would grab our flip-flops in a death grip refusing to let go without surgical removal, and then facilitate a frictionless slide straight towards the black hole waiting for us at the bottom of the sloping hill. It was a living nightmare, we were traveling at 3 feet a minute, having to hold each other for support, one person finding some sort of balance which allowed the other person to use the counterweight to maneuver through the mud. Even with this methodical, anal retentive technique, we almost fell into the trench several times and were covered in mud.
Several pounds of it had stuck to our feet, legs and backside. Our friend at the guesthouse had to hose us down for a while just to get us to a point that we could dash into our shower without leaving a trail like a 200 pound mud snail had attacked the village. So we made another vow to never venture out in the rain.
At least not while the street was dug up.
Malaria!
We've been taking our Anti-malarial pills, doxycycline, ever since we left Bangkok.
We were not enjoying it. The warnings on the pill bottle were long and scary. "Drink lots of water, don't lie down, don't ingest dairy, avoid sunlight, digestive ulceration likely.
" The pills definitely caused stomach pains and cramps. Combined with spicy food almost guaranteed gastrointestinal catastrophes. The directions also say to "Take pill with or without food," which sounds like a worthless statement, but it's saying to take the pill regardless.
The pill causes discomfort with a belly full of food to minimize the repercussions of the caustic ingredients, but without food, causes unbearable heartburn.
All this and the pills don't guarantee anything. In fact, they often mask the symptoms of malaria, then make treatment less effective.
The alternative anti-malarial drug, Lariam, causes vivid nightmares and has been associated with suicidal tendencies and paranoia. Many travelers, most often the long-term travelers like Peace Corps workers and reporters, opt to not take anything at all. They instead are overly observant of the symptoms of malaria and are quick to get treatment.
There is no perfect solution to the disease that kills millions worldwide, only outdone by AIDS, and we're not the first to bitch about it.
We had begun dreading the pills to an embarrassing degree. We would postpone meals, even though we were famished, and would wince as we swallowed the bright blue pills.
We began with the intake at breakfast, but by the second week, we had pushed the dosing to well past 7pm. At this rate, we would be eating midnight snacks, passing out the pills like we are at a rave, yelling "Party, Party, Party!"
We then started singing a parody to the Aquarius song from Hairspray (or the Forrest Gump Soundtrack for you uncultured ones)
Nausea and Dysentery
'Sqeeters and Flies abounding
Citronella candle illumination
Rising fiery indigestion
Traveling our S.
E. Asian courses
Guided by the Lonely Planet forces
Oh, care for us;
Malaria!
This is the dawning of the age of Malaria
The age of Malaria
Malaria!
Malaria!
Don't forget the Dengue!
Our pills do nothing to prevent it - nothing does except not getting bit by mosquitoes - and many people feel it's much worse than Malaria.
It's referred to as "Break-bone Fever" because your body becomes so sensitive to any touch that the weight of bed sheets can cause a person to scream out in blood curdling pain. The headaches are described as icepicks to the temples. Delirium then sets in and nothing makes sense anymore, days pass, then weeks, until the untreatable disease slowly runs it diabolical course through your body.
Dang!
We took a week hiatus to a beach town called Sihanoukville, but that's another story. We arrived back into Phnom Penh a bit cranky having ridden in the front row of the bus, seemingly right next to the jet powered horn that would send cows and monks skidding into the dirt shoulder.
The roads are filled with all sorts of vehicles, trucks, busses, cars, motorcycles, mopeds, tractors, bikes and pedestrians. The biggest beast on the road dominates, which is usually our bus, so the deafening horn is used endlessly as a means to clear the road.
The tuk-tuk drivers were waiting for their prey.
Even before the bus came to a stop, the tuk-tuk drivers were fighting amongst themselves to get first pick of the tourists. "Back off, they're mine" they said in a universal language accented with sharp elbows and dropped shoulders. The guy who laid claim to us was sporting a brand new green "mini tuk-tuk" that he was proud of.
We had to haggle a bit, but that's to be expected. He made us check out a few other guesthouses on our way back to Smile, but none of them came close to offering the clean cozy $2 room that Smile did.
We were welcomed like old friends returning home, and everyone commented on my $2 haircut.
They're very observant people. Right as we walked out onto the deck, we saw John and Andy sitting at the same PC's playing games like nothing had changed.
It was time to apply for our Vietnam visa, so we handed over our passports to our guesthouse.
They facilitated the potentially complicated procedure for a $2 surcharge. For $32, they could get the visa back to us in less than 36 hours, for $38 they could do it in a day. Quite a progression when you consider this type paperwork used to take a week.
As promised, we had our passports returned to us the next day. We took a look at our colorful new visas, conveniently taking up an entire page in our passports, and noticed that the visa was stamped Sihanoukville. To my amazement, our passports were put onto the same bus we had just ridden, processed that day, and returned on the bus the following morning.
Quite a logistical feat.
As soon as we had arrived and set our bags in our room, the sound of plump rain drops began pounding against the metal roof of the guesthouse. The rain built quickly and violently and soon enough we were engulfed in a deafening onslaught of metallic cacophony.
It was like a powerful waterfall had surrounded us and there was no escape. We were all yelling at each other, but it was futile, so we all ran around screaming at each new thunder boom and as the driving rain built and crescendoed repeatedly. The sturdiness of the wooden guesthouse structure, built entirely on wooden stilts, came into question as the wind gusts rocked the building a bit.
The rain riot built up into a furious roar. The monsoons are upon us!
It was at this point we thought back to the dirt road outside.
The condition had surely disintegrated into a minefield of slippery death. It had been repaired considerably, with just the sewer caps now exposed, but the hard packed dirt would surely return to ooze by this watery assault. The violent storm passed as fast as it arrived and the road didn't reach full muddy saturation, at least not today.
The next day, to our horror, we walked along the dirt road to find a full-sized backhoe digging a deep trench down the long straight section of the road. The skinny road barely accommodated the massive diesel bea st as it indiscriminately ripped through existing drainage lines and years of compacted trash. The aftermath of this trench was terrifying.
The high volume of dirt being excavated in order to bury cement culverts basically formed a steep sloping V, pointing directly into the muddy trench quickly filling with dirty water from the broken drainage pipes. It was very difficult to traverse the steep dirt walkways when dry, but when the rain returned that afternoon, it became a bona fide deathtrap, a gauntlet that even the locals dared not to cross. The trench was at least 3 feet deep, much deeper than the ditches manually dug with spades and hoes.
The excavated dirt piled on the sides were an additional 3 feet height, making the inevitable fall from grace a devastating 6 feet into a pool of waiting hepatitis. We were going to have hell getting out of this place come tomorrow.
Before we left Phnom Penh, and Cambodia for that matter, we headed to the Central Market for a little tourist shopping.
It was taxing. The main building was a run down golden art deco building, cross shaped with four wings shooting off in each direction. The interior reminded me of NYC's Grand Central Station, filled with street vendors and open air butcher stalls.
But each wing looked exactly alike and outside was an even more dizzying accumulation of vendors, making it impossible to get any bearings. The symmetry and chaos of the redundant, never-ending booths made orientation impossible. We were spinning around in circles of bags, sarongs, glasses, notebooks, toiletries, t-shirts, and postcards.
All the while amputees, the blind, and badly deformed begged for money, grabbing our arms and chasing us down yelling "Mister, mister, Madame" and sometimes just, "hey lady!"
As I haggled with a vendor over the price of a backpack, I felt a tug on my sleeve. What I saw chilled me to the bone.
I looked up and into the face of the most deformed human I had ever seen, outside a formaldehyde filled jar. He had a growth on the side of his head that was large enough to initially look like a still born twin brother attached to his face. It was a huge flap of skin growing off his left side of his skull, folding over like a malignant apple turnover.
It must have weighed 10 pounds and was covered in the same hair that grew on his head. The kid deserved all the money in my wallet, and I wanted to give it to him, but the arresting sight instantly turned me into a coward.
By the end, I had purchased a $6 "Northface" backpack, a $3 "Prada" sunglasses, a $2 Beer Lao t-shirt and 10 postcards for $1.
Rebecca failed to purchase anything, falling victim to the overwhelming dichotomy of simultaneous claustro/agora-phobia...
and the never ending parade of begging war victims.
It was time to move on. Cambodia has been at times, soul-fulfilling, heart-breaking, hilarious, and frustrating, and we will never forget it.
We had used up our 30-day visa fully, so the next morning we boarded a bus and made a 10 hour trip into Vietnam. What lays in store we don't know, but stay tuned and we'll surely tell you!
We quit our jobs, got married and left to travel the world on year-long honeymoon. These are our stories.
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