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Published: February 7th 2010
01/16/10 - 01/17/10 Our journey began on Friday, January 15th as we boarded the plane from Busan to Seoul, Seoul to Bangkok so we could spend the night in the airport before finally flying into Phnom Penh at 8:40am on Saturday...The flights were mostly uneventful and we spent the night in the airport trying desperately (and failing completely) to sleep. It seemed that everywhere we tried to catch some zzz's the crowds would follow and soon the peaceful area was filled with hustle and bustle. When we got on our final flight into Phnom Penh, we were pleasantly surprised to find out that we were being served a full breakfast on this 50 minute flight! The flight attendants barely had time to serve and clear the meal before we were descending into Cambodia!
In the airport, we had to get our travel visas, which was a simple and uncomplicated process - give them 20$ and they put a sticker in your passport saying you can be in the country for 30 days. We then went through security...or did we? Still not sure about that one!! There was essentially no customs/security at this airport...it was a tiny airport. As with
anywhere, we were immediately flocked by many tuk-tuk drivers (side note: A tuk-tuk is their main form of taxi in SE Asia. Basically it's a motorbike that pulls a small carriage that can carry about 4 people) all wanting to take us into town and be our drivers for the remainder of our trip. Thanks for some helpful guide books we haggled with the best of them and paid 3 USD rather than 8! Our first successful barter!
After checking out a few hotels, we finally settled on one, Her Royal Highness, which was an "OK" hotel at a decent price (10USD). The room had no window to the outside (which really was fine, since they don't have screens on their windows, so because of the bugs, we wouldn't have left the window open anyways!). I imagine that back in the day this hotel was a grand place because the ceilings had these beautiful carvings and paint on them, but due to lack of maintenance it had become a low-end hotel.
Some of the first things we noticed about Cambodia was the ratio of cars to bikes on the roads - for every one car, there was 10
motorbikes or bicycles! There appeared to be no rules of the road, everyone just basically doing their own thing, even driving on the wrong side of the road sometimes, but everyone seemed to look out for others as well. I never felt unsafe on the roads. It was what I would call "organized chaos!". Another thing that hit us right away was the poverty: wooden homes that had only a roof, no walls, or that seemed on the brink of falling apart; kids running around naked or without shoes; lots of garbage everywhere on the side of the road; animals (horses, cows, chicken) roaming free on the side of the road. It was quite shocking at first because it was such a stark contrast from where we have come from, but in the end it was interesting, because that is how Cambodians live and we really enjoy learning how different cultures live as well as doing the sight-seeing tourist thing. On the opposite end of the spectrum from the poverty, we were also surprised at the number of beautiful, new buildings as well as the number of Lexus' that we same! It seems there is a big divide between the
rich and poor in Cambodia. Another thing that we noticed right away was how they overfill every vehicle with people. Seeing a family of 4 riding on a motorcycle was so common, as well as seeing a bike pulling a trailer rammmmeeeddddd with people! And it wasn't always people, it was things too...trailers overloaded with garbage, pottery, coconuts, wood, you name it, we probably saw it! Driving around Phnom Penh became somewhat of a game to see who could find the most outrageous thing!
Time to start the sight-seeing! We found a tuk-tuk and agreed to pay him 25USD to be our driver for the day and take us anywhere we wanted. We started with Cheung Ek, or The Killing Fields, as they are popularly referred to. A quick background: Cambodia has a very tragic recent history. In 1975 the Khmer Rouge took over the country and in an effort to reform it in the ideology, they killed many many innocent people, all people who were educated were either tortured or killed. It was brutal and horrific and Cambodia is still today trying to recover from this event. Arriving at the Killing Fields, we happened to run into Mara
and Drew, who we knew would be in Phnom Penh that day as well, but figured we'd have a hard time catching up with them! Unfortunately they were leaving as we were arriving, so we chatted briefly then went our separate ways. The Killing Fields brought on a wide range of emotion for us. It was very interesting to learn about what had happened to this country and to try to understand how it has affected the people. However, the pictures and stories were so explicit that, even today, it pains me to think of the horror that these people experienced at this place. Basically this was the place where the Khmer Rouge took it's victims to brutally kill them and then bury the evidence dead or alive. Years later this place was discovered, the bones were excavated and now lay on show as a reminder of the tragedy that once took place here. All over the area, there are big potholes in the ground to show where bones were found and they built a 7-storey building in which lay all the skulls from the excavations. It was truly a solemn place, and although parts were interesting, it's hard to
say that we enjoyed ourselves here.
Our next stop was no less sad and horrific: The Genocide Museum, or Tuol Sleng, or S-21. This building is an old high school that the Khmer Rouge turned into a prison to house prisoners before being sent to the Killing Fields. Most of the jails cells were still on display, along with some of the torture devices. Some cells were the size of classrooms while others were barely wide enough for a chair. Again, a truely tragic place to be. There were also many pictures of the people who had been in this prison, and it was at that point that I couldn't take it anymore and sat outside while Mike finished the tour of the prison. There were some more interesting parts though, for example a big section of this man from Switzerland who had come to Cambodia and wrote a book on how civilized and advanced their culture was (the Khmer Rouge had basically set up the country to look inviting and prosperous). Years later the man found out he had been duped, and that all he had seen was a complete show and further upon world wide discovery of
the Khmer Rouge, he apologized for his lack of insight and has pledged to help the Cambodian people in their recovery.
Deciding we needed something a little lighter in nature, we went to Wat Phnom, a small temple at the peak of a hill in the middle of the city. This modern temple was small but it was the first Cambodian Buddhist temple we saw. Around the temple grounds we saw tons of monkeys frolicking in the grass, climbing trees and lamp posts and being overall cute. Some people out to make an extra buck were also there trying to sell us food for the monkeys - oranges and some type of plant-like thing. Because of this constant feeding by tourists, some of the monkeys had gotten quite pudgy and didn't move around much! The temple itself was good, although inside of it, where the main Buddha statue is and where people come to do their worship, were a bunch of neon and LED lights flashing around Buddha, like as if it was trying to be modern and flashy, almost like a buddha slot machine or something, it really didn't do it for us - in fact, it made it
seem more like a joke than anything! Our tuk-tuk driver pointed out to us this tree that had tons small black balls hanging from it. We had no idea what it was, maybe some kind of fruit? Nope, it was bats - tons of bats, hanging, waiting for dusk, when they all come to life and fly around!
We decided to go for a sunset cruise on the mighty Mekong River so our tuk-tuk driver hooked us up with a friend of his who has a tour boat. We paid 20USD for 1.5 hours on the boat, which is a pretty decent price considering this boat, which could easily hold 50+ people, had only 3 on it - us and the captain! We toured the coastline of Phnom Penh, admiring the views, drinking some Angkor beer, then he took us near the other bank of the Mekong where we saw some small villages and our first signs of real Cambodian lifestyle. One of the coolest things was a floating village, where all the houses float on the water, rather than being on land! All the houses are really close to one another so everyone can hop from one house
to the other to get where they are going! We saw lots of people fishing with these really huge nets, washing their clothes in the river as well as themselves! It was a really interesting and relaxing boat ride and we made it back to shore just as the sun was setting.
Wandering around after the cruise, deciding our next move, we happened to run into Mara and Drew again, who were just heading off to Wat Phnom. Even though we had already been there, we decided to join them and see the temple at dusk, as the sky had turned a beautiful shade of pink. On our way to the temple we were stopped by some really cute little kids who were begging us for money. This is one of the things about Phnom Penh that was tough - everywhere you looked was poverty and those little kids are so darn cute and hard to say no to, but it is a known fact that many of them are sent out on the streets by their parents, or by a "pimp" of sorts, who then all take the money from the kids at the end of the day.
They pull at your heart strings so we ended up giving them a dollar which made them happy.
After the temple, we went for dinner at a Khmer/Thai restaurant called Lemongrass which was delicious then went to enjoy some 0.60$ beers along the river shore! What a great way to end a super long and tiring day! We returned to our hotel more than ready to get some sleep, but found instead a whole slew of teeny tiny bugs had infested my pack and everything in it! Upon further inspection we realized that I had a couple Werther's candies in my bag that had melted in the heat and the bugs were attracted to the sweetness of those delicious candies. Luckily were were able to clean most of it out, but we definitely slept in our sleeping bags that night, not quite trusting that the bed was clean!!
Day 2 in Phnom Penh was only going to be a half day since our bus to Battambang left at 3:00, so we got up early that morning to fit in as much as we could. We enjoyed a delicious breakfast at our hotel of eggs, toast and coffee for
a whopping 1.50$ then walked to the Royal Palace that was near our hotel. The Royal Palace, parts of which are still in use today (and therefore off limits to visitors) was a grand and beautiful array of buildings and gardens. The buildings were golden and magnificent and we had a hard time taking our eyes off them! The Silver Pagoda is the main attraction in the Palace grounds and it was much greater than any pictures we had seen made it out to be! It was so big and in the morning sunlight it was beautiful! The buildings were so intricately decorated! We spent a couple hours exploring the Palace before heading on our way.
Next, we went to the Russian Market. Not sure why it's called the Russian market, but it's a huge maze-like building filled with stalls after stalls selling anything you could imagine from silk scarves, to motorcycle parts to food to perfume. We wandered around in amazement for a while before finally making a few purchases of scarves (2USD each) and a t-shirt (2USD as well). They even had real (or so they say, I'm not totally convinced) Hollister, Calvin Klein and other brand
name clothes at super cheap prices - if only we didn't have another 17 days of traveling to carry all this stuff around for we might have bought more stuff! When we decided we were finished with the market, we realized that in the maze that was this market, we couldn't remember where we had left our tuk-tuk driver! Finally we found him (or rather, he found us!) and we went to Tul Tompong temple.
We went to this temple for one reason only: we had recently watched the latest season of the Amazing Race and during that season they went to Phnom Penh and this temple was featured for one of the tasks they had to do! Maybe we should have expected this, but the temple looked MUCH nicer on tv!! It reality it is a rarely-visited temple and many parts of it are crumbling and not being maintained. In the main level of the main temple building, all we could see was people's laundry hanging, and our tuk-tuk driver confirmed that this temple is mostly now used as a home for the homeless. The cool thing about this temple was that off to one side there were
Cheung Ek aka The Killing Fields
In this building is 7 stories of bones, mostly skulls, that were dug up after the tragedy the Khmer Rouge inflicted on the Cambodian people. This building was built in order for Cambodia and the world to never forget this tragic event.a bunch of big tombs, kind of like in that scene from Double Jeopardy when Ashley Judd is chasing her kid through the cemetery...you know???haha.
We had a wonderfully delicious lunch near our hotel of stirfried veggies and beef with yellow egg noodles. We also got a bunch of mini bananas that are super tasty for dessert! I think the entire meal, including drinks cost 5 USD! With a little time to kill before our bus, we wandered around the city some more, absorbing all the people, the sights, the buildings, the ways of life before heading off. We got picked up at our hotel 45 minutes late to get the bus to Battambang, which initially worried, us, but we quickly learned that nothing in Cambodia is on time and our bus left almost 45 minutes late as well!
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