Holiday in Cambodia

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I couldn't get the lyrics of the song 'Holiday In Cambodia' by The Dead Kennedys out of my head:

It's time to face
what you most fear,
The wrath in the ruins
of Kampuchea.
Brace yourself, my son.
Brace yourself, my son.
For a holiday in Cambodia
Where people dress in black.
A holiday in Cambodia
You can go but won't come back.

I decided not to share this with Linda.


Bus tickets are available in Bangkok for the journey into Cambodia for only £7.50 to Siem Reap or £12.00 to Phnom Penh.
We had heard plenty about these services.
The trip through Thailand is OK so long as you don't fall asleep, in which case your bag may be rifled (2 cases of stolen cameras met).
The bus stops just short of the border and travellers are herded into an agency to buy their visas in the belief that this is an official stop, only to find 10 minutes later that they've paid a hefty commission for the "service".
At the true border officials may ask to see your vaccination certificates and then levy a "fine" when it is not available.
Once inside the country, worst case scenario finds you on the back of a Toyota pick-up for a nightmare journey along rutted dirt roads at reckless speeds - unless, that is, there's been a heavy rain storm in which case the road may have been washed away and you are stranded at the desolate border town until the mud has dried enough to drive on.


Another option is to fly. A budget airline flight from Bangkok to Phnom Penh costs £21.
Tough decision.

Getting a visa on arrival at Phnom Penh International Airport is a process which apparently requires the attention of 7 immigration officials.

They sit side by side, fully attired in spotless military style uniforms and wide hats, in a long booth.

You hand the passport and paperwork to the first one, walk past five and hand $20 to the seventh.

Meanwhile, your passport makes its way along the row and is returned with a bright new visa inside, allowing you to transit passport control and baggage collection and emerge into a bright throng of taxi hustlers for the 7 km ride into town.


My first impression of Phnom Penh was of traffic chaos.

There are roads, there is traffic, but there are no rules.
At least that how it seems.

95% of the traffic consists of mopeds which interweave in any which way anywhere in the road.
Carnage is avoided because the average speed is only about 15 kilometres per hour, allowing people to rely on their reaction times to get them out of trouble.

We headed for the touristic area along the riverside and found a very nice hotel before breakfast (oh yes, another early start. How else do you think the budget airlines keep their costs down?).

Our second impression of Phnom Penh arose when we hit the streets.

It is a hard-core hassle destination.

To start with, there is a major oversupply of moped-taxis looking for business. Walk ten yards and you will be asked "Moto, sir?" ten times.

Then there are the beggars, in a variety of guises.
Mothers with babies sit at a strategic point on the pavement.
Skinny teenage girls carrying tiny babies on their hip congregate on street corners from about 6pm.
Land mine survivors hobble between cafe entrances and peer longingly whilst displaying their stump or prosthetic limb.
There are a couple of quadrapelgics who spend all day being pushed up and down the road in wooden carts, "Hello sir, hello sir".
Finally, children carrying baskets of counterfeit books are looking for customers.

(As an aside, I have only recently come across the concept of counterfeit books. They are complete photocopies of original books which you can only tell from the originals on close inspection. Even the photographs in the Lonely Planet guidebooks are faithfully reproduced on photo-quality paper. No doubt they fall apart pretty quickly).

Anyway, once you know the score it is easy to deal with taxi drivers, beggars and sellers alike. A cheery "No thank you" and a smile works a treat.

After a few days we began to get recognised and ceased to be a prime target, at which point we could actually have quite interesting conversations with some of these characters, particularly as the standard of their English is impressively high.

We treated one fourteen year old itinerant bookseller to a coke and learnt that his day goes like this.

06.30 am - get up, go to school.
12.00 pm - finish school
02.00 pm - travel 1 hour from home to tourist area. Sell books.
11.00 pm - stop selling books. Travel 1 hour home.

He wants to be a teacher when he's older. I hope he gets the chance.

The economy of Cambodia revolves around the US dollar.

Most cash transactions are made in dollars, the local currency, riel, being useful only for small change.
Even the few ATM's dispense greenbacks.
There must be a good few million cash dollars in circulation in this country.

It is ironic that the vagaries of international finance can lead to one of the poorest countries in the world providing an interest-free loan to one of the richest like this.



If you were to make a graph of the last thousand years of Cambodia's history, it might look a bit like that of the Enron share price.

The long gone glory days are embodied in the ancient temples of classical times.

The bust comes in relatively recently, when power is taken by the murderous Khmer Rouge who set about the elimination of their countrymen and ultimately, each other in one of the great genocides of the 20th century.

So, for the visitor, history is presented in two distinct sections: Ancient and modern.

In the period between the years 800 to 1300 a Khmer Empire gradually emerged in a two steps forward, one step back kind of fashion as campaigns were won and lost.

At it greatest extent this empire contained most of Thailand and Vietnam, in stark contrast to the remnant country left today.

During this period the kings oversaw the construction of hundreds of great temples, most famously Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom.

Handily for the visitor, a great many temples were built over a single area of land, near to the location of the modern town of Siem Reap.

The best way to get around the temples is in the back of a moto-remorque. This is a two seater carriage attached to the back of a moped which trundles along the paved roads at a sedate pace.
We hired the services of a very pleasant young man with bike for the sum of $8 a day.

A 3-day pass to the temple site cost $40, included a photo-id and makes a nice souvenir.

We found that 3 days was sufficient to get around the main sites.

Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom are fascinating, huge and really have to be seen to be appreciated.

Everywhere the architecture is incredible, the carving is ornate and the symbolism is explained in the guidebook.

No wonder the empires kept faltering as the immense manpower needed to build these monuments must have stripped the peasants from the fields and crippled the rest of the economy.

Other temples were overgrown by the jungle for five or six hundred years and, though now reclaimed, are entwined with the roots of towering trees. I took lots of photos.

Siem Reap was a pleasant place to spend the evenings, although a bit more tarmac on the roads wouldn't go amiss.

As we wandered the streets one passer-by remarked to Linda "your hair is grandma, but your meat is young", which she decided to take as a compliment.


We travelled between Siem Reap and the town of Battambang by boat.

Cambodia is a very wet country and there is a big lake, called the Tonle Sap whose depth changes dramatically during the year, depending on whats happening with the flow of the Mekong River, with which it is associated.

At this time of year the level is low, which means that the waters edge is 15km from Siem Reap, instead of 7km.

The boat between the two towns is marketed as an express ferry to tourists, charging $15 for the trip, but is in fact a river-bus for locals, charging them not a lot.

The trip is fascinating though, passing through a slice of life that we wouldn't otherwise have known existed.

The boat departed from a floating village, passed through a lot of wetland countryside and a couple of floating towns.

People here cannot live on dry land as it disappears with regularity, so instead they build houses which float.

What I found so interesting was the scale on which this was done.

This was not a couple of dozen people living a quaint but idiosyncratic lifestyle.

These were mainstream towns housing thousands of people and all the associated stuff that goes with it.

Therefore, in addition to floating houses we saw floating shops, floating schools, floating petrol stations, floating churches, floating pig pens and floating chicken coops.

The locals looked fairly glum but then again so would you if you had to wash and poo in the same water.

The low water level meant that the boat couldn't make it all the way to Battembang.

We were kicked off at a floating cafe which was attached to dry land by a series of bamboo poles lashed together. This was indeed a tenuous way to get to shore, particularly as I was carrying two rucksacks. The lashed bamboos rolled and submerged with each step and the impatient locals clucked and tried to overtake as I inched along.

Our hearts sank when we reached the shore to find a Toyota pick-up waiting for us, to complete the journey.

I happily pay good money to avoid this type of transportation.

Linda played the "grandma" card and got a seat in the cab.

Me and 16 others got a severe whipping in the back as we hung on for dear life, ploughing through the overhanging vegetation until we reached a proper road.

Battembang turned out to be a rather ordinary town, despite the French colonial architecture extolled in the guidebook.

Here a moped accident took place right in front of us. A family of 5 was spilled from one machine when the father failed to look before making a turn.

In the second half of the 20th Century Cambodia wrote the book on how to become a third world basket case.

Royalist, nationalist, communist, extreme communist groups waged civil war on each other, with a good deal of pot stirring from their regional neighbours and the imperial powers.

The Americans helped in their own unique way by carpet bombing and invading the country in pursuit of communists and then losing interest at the critical moment, allowing the worst lot to take control.

The Khmer Rouge were in power for a period of less than four years in the 1970's but the events they perpetrated in that time remain with the Cambodian people today like an unhealed scar.

Their leader, Pol Pot, was deeply impressed by the Cultural Revolution that took place in China in the late 1960's.

On taking power the Khmer Rouge took this a few steps further by returning the calendar to year zero, abolishing currency, and cutting the country off from the outside world in an attempt to create a peasant society.

People from the towns and cities were sent to the countryside to practise peasantry and wholesale executions ensued in a land where other peoples life became worthless and paranoia ruled.

The killing fields, where people were taken to be executed are justly renowned, but I believe that many more people were murdered in their homes and villages as simple brutality became endemic.

In the suburbs of Phnom Penh, about ten minutes from the city centre is a place called Tuol Sleng, a former Khmer Rouge prison converted from a district primary school.

Here we saw cells and torture rooms in what had been classrooms.

In the interests of a quasi-judiciary outcome, inmates were tortured until they admitted some crime, real or imagined, for the authority to sanction their execution.

Kept in chains, inmates were not allowed to urinate, defecate, stand up, sit down or even roll over in their sleep without the permission of a guard.

There was a set of rules written on the wall. Of these, number 6 reads"while getting lashes or electrification you must not cry out at all".

Today the site is called a genocide museum.

Each inmate was photographed on arrival, and these photographs form the bulk of the display for visitors.
Ordinary faces, bewilderment.

From the records it appears that about 12,500 people passed through here.

Once an adequate counter revolutionary confession was extracted they were told they were to be released, but were instead transported to the field of Choeung Ek for execution.

They were bought under cover of darkness from the prison, led blindfolded one by one to the edge of a pit (so that the others wouldn't hear), and bludgeoned on the back of the head.

There are apparently 129 communal graves in this area alone.

Some have been exhumed and a 17 story glass encased tower full of skulls and bones has been erected as a grisly memorial.

There are many such killing fields dotted around the country.

Around Battembang there is a cave in the side of a hill with a skylight hole at the top. Victims were smashed on the back of the head over the hole and dropped into the depths below.

It was particularly interesting to meet people whose lives had been changed by events of that time.

On the bus to Kampot we got talking to a man named Tony.

He had fled to Thailand from the Khmer Rouge and lived in a refugee camp for 3 years.

Eventually he was allowed into Australia where he now has citizenship.

He had believed that all his family were dead but after 15 years the Red Cross traced his mother to the USA.

He returned to Cambodia for the first time in 2000, after 25 years.

When we met him, he had just married a very beautiful Cambodian girl in her mid-20s but expected to wait for another 18 months for her to get a visa for Australia.


From Kampot we hired a taxi for a day out to Bokor.

This used to be a playground for the wealthy, with a large hotel/casino, church and other buildings built on top of the areas biggest hill.

Bokor was abandoned upon the accession of the Khmer Rouge and now remains as an elegant ruin.

Wandering around a large deserted, derelict hotel is weird. You feel like an extra in a horror film.

The 30 kilometre drive up the hill takes about 2 hours as the road, which has not been maintained since 1901, has almost ceased to be.


Also interesting was the story of our taxi driver, Chang Tre.

He returned home from school one day to find that his mother, father, brothers and sisters had all been killed and he was next.

He ran off and hid in the forest, where he stayed alone for nearly 2 years.

"That must have been terrible" I said.

"Not really", he replied, "there was plenty of fruit on the trees and wild chickens to eat".

One day he heard a lot of gunfire. He went to the local town to find that the Vietnamese had liberated it from the Khmer Rouge.

That day he joined the Cambodian army, under the control of the Vietnamese, to fight against the Khmer Rouge.

He subsequently lived and trained for a few years in Vietnam and did a communist indoctrination course, rising to a senior rank in the army.

In the meantime he got married and started a family. The army wages of $15 a month were inadequate for his needs, so he left the army and became a taxi driver, where he now regularly earns $25 dollars a day in his suspension enhanced vehicle.


Although peace now reigns across the land, the legacies of all this conflict are ongoing.

The most apparent of these are the results of the perhaps three million landmines left just below the soil throughout the country.

Hundreds of innocent people fall prey to these each year.

A farmer can be reduced to a beggar in one step.

There are many cases of children playing 'catch' with the strange object they found in the undergrowth.

On the outskirts of Siem Reap an ex-soldier has developed a land mine museum to publicise the problem and get funds for mine clearance and victim support.

His name is Aki Ra.
When he was aged 5 his parents were killed by the Khmer Rouge (his father for being ill and his mother for calling out to an old man who was about to trip).

He was inducted into the Khmer Rouge as a child soldier and taught to handle guns, grenade launchers, mortars etc.
He was battle hardened by his early teens.

When his position was overrun by the Vietnamese he was given the option to join them or be killed.

Eventually he wound up in the Cambodian army and then worked in mine clearance for the UN during the initial peacekeeping.

After the UN pulled out he decided to devote his life to clearing mines for ordinary people.

Child victims gravitated to him and he has ended up supporting a small community of blast damaged children through the museum proceeds as well as continuing to fund the clearances.

The museum is fascinating, being both amateur and professional at the same time.

There is loads of ordnance lying around and interesting facts and figures (of 10,000 landmine victims only 3% were involved militarily) and limb-reduced child victims only too keen to practice their English as they show you around.


Our final stop in Cambodia was Sihanoukville, the main (only) beach resort.

By now we had seen as much of Cambodia as we wanted to until they build a few more roads.

As we still had two weeks on our visa we surveyed a range of accommodation near the beach and ended up in the big hotel.

Regular readers might notice a bit of a trend ("I thought you were supposed to be budget travellers?"), but we got a nice en-suite room with cable TV and hot water for £12 a night.

I dunno why it always seems to be low season when we go anywhere, but we appreciate the discounts.

The main beach here is only a couple of kilometres long, thoroughly backed by shacky restaurants and bars.

To sit on the beach is to be a target for every vendor and we quickly found ourselves surrounded by a small court of masseurs, manicurists, leg waxers, bracelet sellers and snack merchants who sit down and make themselves comfortable.

Usually I cope easily with the attention but it's not so simple when you're sitting on the sand wearing only a pair of trunks.

Anyway, we caught the tail end of a tropical storm which caused havoc in the Philippines and the Chinese coast and brought four days of torrential rain and thunderstorms. It made a change from moaning about the heat!

We left Cambodia, taking a slow boat down the Mekong.

Hopefully I will now be able to forget that bloody song.
It's been driving me nuts.

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Photos

Phnom Penh
Unreliable Transport