Phnom Penh

---

Boy I've got a lot of catching up to do. I'm writing this from Ho Chi Min city, Vietnam, but I should quickly summarize Phnom Penh first.

The city was quite brutal getting in, but after a couple of days, you become quite used to it. Actually, by the third day, I hardly got hassled at all - I think I walked the city with a bit more confidence, and the drivers and dealers could see that.

Having said that, Phnom Penh sure did try to sell me a lot of drugs. Quite sad to see I guess. People would flash their bags of whatever at you as you walked down the street. I checked into the hotel and two reception staff tried to sell me weed on seperate occasions.

We met up with some Norweigans we'd run into in the islands, and so we went out partying with them and a friendly Cambodian girl. The first club we went to was full of really old guys picking up prostitutes - not exactly the nicest scene. So the girl took us to another club, which was entirely devoid of tourists. This was a lot of fun. I had my ego inflated when I went onto the dance floor and was easily a head taller than everyone else. That was quite funny.

We went to the Tuol Sleng museum the next day. Heartbreaking. Tuol Sleng was a school that Polpot transformed into a house of detention and torture. It was the last stop for anyone on their way to the killing fields, where they were interrogated and brought half to death, usually by young children who had been trained into enjoying this sort of cruelty. They rooms were full of pictures of victims of the place. They really had no mercy. Old men and women, kids, mothers with children, westerners, it made no difference. It was a really difficult place to walk through. Impossible to think the the strife in Cambodia only ended in 1989.

The next day we went to the killing fields. This was a bit of a disappointment - it turned out to be a total tourist trap. The main attraction was a temple that had been built, displaying about 4 or 5 stories of skulls of the victims. It seemed to me that this was glamorizing the whole ordeal a bit.

We had dinner at a great restaurant called friends. It was the best food I'd had in Cambodia by a mile, entirely prepared by kids who used to be on the street.

We went out with the Cambodian girl again that night, and that proved to be quite interesting. She was really interested in whether or not I was a virgin. I told her I wasn't, and she was quite astounded. She asked if I had a girlfriend, and I told her I didn't at the moment. She asked me if I'd had more than one, and I answered yes, about four. And no, they weren't virgins either. This was all a bit hard for her to take. She explained that in Cambodia, if a woman lost her virginity, she could not be wed, which would mean she would find herself financially destitute till the end of her days. If she kept her virginity, the families concerned would pool two or three thousand dollars US for her to hang onto, in case of emergency. She was engaged to a thirty year old, who she would marry as soon as she turned the legal age of nineteen.

We walked past a group of cops on the way home, and she grabbed us quickly and had us walking in the other direction. "Are you not scared?" she asked us.

Our new route sent us past the hotel royal, the finest place in Phnom Penh. According the the girl, it cost 5000 US a night to stay there. It seemed like quite a lot to me, but to her, this amount was unbelievable. She kept repeating "Five thousand, all one night, I can't believe it!"

So that was Phnom Penh for me

---