Cambodge

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Our bus into Cambodia was a welcome smooth and short journey - only 6 hours to Phnom Penh and the bus conductor handled the border crossing admin for us. We stopped just over the border at a rather dodgy looking roadside cafe with a canteen style set up of prepared food in a glass cabinet. All the other tourists headed for the snack counter, but we had decided that the best approach to bus journeys is to eat a meal when the bus driver eats and you'll feel much better than incesently snacking on crisps and peanuts! We arrived in Phnom Penh in the mid-afternoon and were greeted by hoards of touts and tuk-tuk drivers scrabbling for business - they were shouting wildly whilst being held back by barriers and uniformed men, making us feel like celebrities being stalked by the paparazzi. We caught a tuk-tuk to a pretty basic but central hotel and checked in before heading out for a wander to get our bearings - past the National Museum , the Royal Palace and along the river to a riverside bar for an Angkor beer. We sat outside and were constantly hassled by the stream of hawkers and beggars - many limbless, presumably land mine victims. It was the first time we'd felt we ought to have given beggars money, perhaps because of the lack of social welfare system many have no other option and it left us with a real sense of guilt.

We went for some Cambodian style Tapas at an amazing restaurant run by Friends International - a charity supporting street children of which there are 10-20,000 in Phnom Penh alone. They give them shelter, counselling, education and the older youths are provided with vocational training such as in this restaurant, where our delicous gourmet food was cooked and served by former street youths to practise their hospitality - allowing them a future career and a chance in life. Having picked up a leaflet from the restaurant stating not to give directly to begging or hawking children as it keeps them on streets and places them at risk, but to instead find and support services that help them, we felt less guilty about the beggars in the cafe and throughout Cambodia.

The next day we walked to the Royal Palace, only to be told by the guards that it was shut for lunchtime - at 10.30am! We got a lift in a tuk-tuk to the Toul Sleng Genocide Museum which is a building that used to be a High School but became the Kymer Rouge prison known as S-21 and now acts as a museum to the atrocities. S-21 was an interogation centre designed for the educated and elite - so doctors, teachers, military personel, government officials, univeristy and school students over the age of 6, anyone who could speak a foreign language, even anyone who wore glasses, were detained there and tortured until the confessed to fabricated crimes against the state, then they were taken away to be killed. The Kymer Rouge's totalitarian regime's ideology was to create an entirely self-sufficient agrarian state that had no place for anyone who had been educated, reducing the entire population to peasantry. The prison is a heart rending experience. On the ground floor is a display of thousands of black and white mugshot photos of the victims, their eyes expressing a variety of emotions from fear to defiance. You also see the cells and a display of the methods of torture used, as well as information and personal accounts about the Kymer Rouge regime in general. It was harrowing to realise that this genocide was going in the mid 70s and that nearly a third of the Cambodian population died under the regime (nearly 20,000 went through the S-21 torture.)

We went for lunch at the Friends restaurant and had a look at its adjacent craft shop selling items made by the street children from recycled materials. We then went to look around the Royal Palace, ensuring we were well covered up to be allowed inside. It's a complex of very ostentacious gilt buildings - even the musical instrument store room was ridiculously elaborate! We asked a tuk-tuk driver outside the palace to take us to the Central Market. He did but as we pulled up nearby he told us it was closed for renovations and suggested he drive us somewhere else for an extra charge. We were angry that he hadn't told us of these renovations before driving us there to make an extra fare, so we got out and walked to the Central Market defiantly, not wishing to give our con-man the extra money. As it turned out, we were right to do so as the market was in fact open! After a wander through the market we walked to a different area of the city (partly to explore more of Phnom Penh but partly in search of some exceptional cakes we'd read about!) It turned out to be a grotty backstreet flanked on each side by tired guesthouses and cafe bars - our "bakery" turned out to just be someones dusty backyard! We ate dinner at another charity's shop (next door to our guesthouse) where you could order any dish from two of the neighbouring restaurants and the charity gets 10% of the profit.

We had breakfast at the same place we'd eaten the previous night (all these charitable restaurants seem such as a good idea as you're spending money that you would anyway, but it's going to a good cause!) We'd arranged the previous day to be picked up by our happy chappy tuk-tuk man and driven to the Killing Fields. He found us where we were eating, where various other hopeful tuk-tuk drivers had been circling like sharks as we ate. We seemed to be very quickly out of the city and into the surrounding countryside, along dirt roads with dust billowing in through the tuk-tuk's open sides, particuarly when trucks went careering past us overtaking eratically and forcing us off the road. We passed various fabric factories with hundreds of women in overalls pouring out into the street.

Choeung Ek (or "The Killing Fields") is the site where prisoners from Toul Sleng prison were brought for execution after their torture and shot (or after the cost of bullets became too expensive bludgeoned or stabbed) to death, and buried in mass graves by the genocidal Kymer Rouge. Though it is less of an emotianlly jarring experience than the S-21 prison, perhaps because it is essentially an area of grassy mounds and excevated pits, but the wooden markers indicating how many bodies were found in each are chilling reminders that it's not just a field. That and the modern gold roofed memorial at the centre of the site where the skulls and bones of many of the victims buried here are piled on shelves. From the Killing Fields we were driven to the Russian Market (nothing Russian about it now - there used to only be Soviet Russian tourists, so essentially it is a tourist market) for a look around at all of the crafts and souvenirs. We ate dinner at the sister restaurant of the Friends place, which served only Cambodian food. We were again served by former street youths and the food and surroundings were beautiful. We tried Crispy Fried tatantula - the legs are good, but the body and head weren't quite our cup of tea!

We were up first thing to catch the bus north to Siem Reap. So after a rushed breakfast at the guesthouse (bolting it down thanks to the classically slow service!), we got driven to the bus company office in a tuk-tuk and finally when the bus arrived, we were off. The bus took about 4 hours and we arrived in Siem Reap to be greeted by a sign saying our name held by "Mr Sam", who the wheeler dealer we'd booked the bus ticket with in Phnom Penh had arranged to drive us free of charge in his tuk-tuk to a guesthouse. (Free, in the hope that we would use him for driving around the Angkor Temples, which we did!) Later on we walked across the river to the market - mainly tourist trinkkits and not the most exciting of markets.

Our first day at the Angkor Temples, we were picked up in the morning in a tuk-tuk, not driven by "Mr Sam" but by a smiley employee of his, "Jimmy" (or that's what his name sounded like!) On the way we had to stop at the very official ticket booths and buy ourselves a pass for 3 days entry, with our photos on, that was then checked at the entrance to most temples. We went first to Angkor Wat, the most famous of all the temples, and it was a very impressive sight and surpassed all the photos of it we'd seen! It's enormous (the temple itself is a kilometre square) and not like a 12th Century ruin, it is very much intact - it's 5 distincitvely pine-cone shaped towers and countless intricate carvings on the walls inside.

After a good long wander around we went to find Jimmy, all the time outside the temple being hounded by ladies with piercing voices shouting "you want water" etc, much more as agressive statements than polite offers! We drove on to Angkor Thom which is an ancient walled and moated Royal City and to its centre to the "Bayon" temple with its giant stone faces. Also inside Angkor Thom we saw the "Terrace of the Elephants" (which unsuprisingly is made up of carved elephants!) and the Baphuan temple. We found Jimmy in a hammock swinging away at a little cafe and got some noodles and rice for lunch ourselves. The next place we stopped there was a temple on each side of the road. We went first to see the very pretty ruin of the "Chau Say Tevoda" then across to the "Thomannon" which was set in the forest. We drove on to TaProhm - one of the most atmospheric of the temples, as its a labyrinth of tumbling ruined passageways with huge trees growing from its terraces and walls, their massive roots clinging to walls and prising apart giant stones. Our final temple of the day was "Baneauy Kdei" where we were stalked along the long path to its entrance by a very persistent girl about 5 years old trying to sell us postcards (even if it wasn't wrong to buy from child vendors, we'd jsut bought an identical pack earlier in the day!) but she wasn't taking no for an answer. She found out we were English and started giggling "Chubblery Chubbly" but her parting sales pitch was "If you don't buy you make me cry!" The temple itself was again quite impressive but, a little templed out, we headed back to Siem Reap. Along the road we saw lots of familys picnicking by the roadside overlooking some fields in the sunshine - presumably picnics off the beaten track are not an option because of the unexploded land mines. We ate at a lovely Cambodian restaurant (Cambodian food is tricky to track down - it's easier to find Thai or a pizza!) and had papaya salad and an odd fish dish in banana leaf, all in modern minimalist surroundings.

We left the guest house at around 4.30am to ride in Jimmy's tuk-tuk to Angkor Wat for sunrise (though Jimmy clearly didn't like early mornings and was running late!) The loud ladies had already begun their chorus outside in the dark, but we entered to see the first light of dawn creeping into the sky behind the temple. Soon, the sun rose behind Angkor Wat silouetting its towers against the coloured sky and reflecting a perfect mirror image in the lily pond in front of us. The overwhelming sense of calm and beauty was topped off by the sound of chanting monks in the nearby moanastry. We weren't the only ones there to watch the sunrise, in fact by the time the sun was up there was quite a bank of people with cameras milling around, but it didn't spoil it as there was so much space. We went for another look around Angkor Wat in the soft light of the very early morning before setting off round a few more temples.

Our first stop was Preah Khan which was fairly ruined and being encroached upon by the jungle - was a great place to explore the tumbledown passageways. The next temple, Neak Pean, was less impressive but quite different from the others as it was set on an island at the centre of a large pool (now and for most of the year, dried up) We enjoyed the next, Ta Som, it was like a minature Ta Prohm but without so many tourists around, with trees growing from the walls. We drove on to East Mebon, a more simple brick and sandstone temple that is guarded by lifesize stone elephants, and then on to "Pre Rup" with a very steep climb to the roof but great views stretching for miles across the countryside. As evening fell, the heavens opened and the dirt road outside the guesthouse became a muddy river, so we didn't venture far for dinner - just dashing next door for Thai!

A less hectic day, having seen almost all of the Angkor Temples, we turned our attention to working out how to get to Bangkok and started to look at Indonesia. We ate lunch down by the river and later were picked up (in the rain!) by a lovely man who drove us to the Floating Village. When we arrived at Tonle Sap River, the weather had cleared up and we set off down the river in a little wooden motor boat driven by a teenage boy and with another acting as our guide. Tonle Sap is an enormous freshwater lake that fluctuates massively in size depending on whether it is the wet season or dry season, so the people who live on it are itinerant as their houses float and can be moved with the water. The houses are utterly basic - built on bamboo rafts and the people who live here do so because they cannot afford to buy land. The river does entirely resemble a normal village community, with a floating church, school, karaoke bars, even basketball courts (our guide told us - "because there's not enough space for soccer!"), and with a constant thoroughfare of 2 way traffic (just boats, not cars!) Children were all playing out, either on boats or floating around in big buckets! Our boat took us along the river through the village, out onto the vast Tonle Sap lake which is like a sea with pretty large waves and no land in sight! We then pulled up to a floating restaurant which was also a fish and crocodile farm (they catch them when small and then keep them in an encolsure underneath the float to grow before selling to the towns and cities for more money!) It also had upstairs a viewing tower which gave us a perfect vantage point over the daily village life as the sun was setting.

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Photos

The Gallows at S-21
Interrogation equipment where the prisoner was hung upside down until losing consciousness, before being dunked into the jars of filthy water

Comments

[Parry]

Cambodibodi
I'm proper done up that you've enjoyed Cambodibodi as much as everyone always seems to! That sunrise photo literally took my breath away...hope you're having Bali fun! x

[Mum & Dad]

Water buffalo hide jam and now tarantula - some people have all the fun... In fact, cleaning out for you at home, we have discovered plenty of spiders - should we save them for a supper one evening? Temples look atmospheric and transport seems less frenetic.