Pnews from Pnomh Penh

STATS: Day count=180; theft count=0; rip-off count=1; tourist screw-up count=4; Chris’ photo count=1600; Emma’s photo count=62; touch-typing char/min=234 (still trying!); Poi skills mastered since last post: None

The border crossing from Thailand into Cambodia was fairly unproblematic. We had been warned beforehand that there was a ‘medical check’ that they had just started doing and that the doctor there charged 20 baht per person to do this. This check consisted of an electronic thermometer being pointed at our forehead. That’s it. Oh and the filling in of a form. We suspected the 20 baht ‘fee’ was a bit of a scam, so we politely asked for a receipt for before we paid. Nothing pushy (after all, we were at a border and didn’t want to be refused entry!) but neither of us are comfortable with bribes and corruption (however small the amount). The ‘doctor’ backed down pretty much straight away – wasn’t worth his effort arguing so we just moved on to the next part of the process.

This set us thinking - corruption of this form: is it acceptable? It was only 40p each, and I suspect the government of Cambodia don’t pay him very much at all. Many people in corrupt societies (from things we have read, people we have talked to and our direct experiences) like Burma and India just accept that this is the way it is – just because our society in the UK is (relatively speaking) incorrupt, are we right to think that all corruption is wrong? Does acceptance at the small scale encourage continuation at the large scale?

A bus to our first stop in Cambodia – Sihanoukville, on the coast. The couple of hours on the bus gave us our first impression of Cambodia. Green.

Cambodia is reported to be a very poor country and still trying to re-establish itself after the decimation of the population by the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s (in fact, literally speaking, it was worse than a decimation, which implies the killing of 1 in 10 people. The Khmer Rouge actually killed. or allowed to starve to death, 1.7 million people, which was almost 1 in 4 of the population at the time. Scary thought). We have so far seen a country that is clean, tidy, well organised and friendly. The lush, green paddy fields are neatly arranged amongst lush, green trees and between dusty, but obviously tended, villages. Run down, but loved, wooden houses nestle between pretty French colonial-style houses in the larger towns and cities and the large villas left from the French occupation and destroyed by the Khmer Rouge are being restored or rebuilt. The government is still corrupt, there is no public transport, no public health programme and no welfare state for the thousands of people, many of whom are children, injured by the millions of landmines that still litter the country. But the country seems to us to be progressing quickly – the people are friendly, the private transport efficient and the cities we have seen are flourishing. We like what we have seen so far.

In Sihanoukville we initially stayed in a cheap hostel run by a laid-back-to-the–point-of-being-rude Australian. When, the following morning, we walked down to grab some breakfast and were greeted with the sight and smell of drunk people lying comatose on the chairs we decided to move elsewhere. The town itself is busy and relatively non-descript (so I won’t describe it any more). There are a few beaches around and we walked to most of them – still persevering with our ‘walk in the midday heat’ policy. All the beaches are lovely, white sand, with warm, clear water, but are also very narrow – not a problem for Victory Beach, which had very few people on it (maybe 5, including us), but a bit more of an issue on Serendipity Beach, where most tourists go, with it’s beach-front cafes and sun loungers – 100 people on that beach and it looks crammed. The whole area is undergoing rapid development – many new hotels being built and a number of self-contained resorts springing up. We’re glad we visited when we did – in 10, or even 5, years time, it will look like the Costa Brava. With narrow beaches. Ah well – can’t blame them for trying to bring money into the country.

After a few days sunning ourselves, and stocking up on illegally (but very professionally) photocopied books (copyright laws don’t exist in Cambodia, so most books are copies) we felt we should see more of Cambodia than a tourist-focussed beach town, so we got a bus to the tourist-focussed riverside town of Kampot. Famous for its pepper, apparently. The bus broke down before it even got to us, but the very nice company rep came and picked us up on two scooters to take us to the broken down bus (they fixed it in the end). One small, 125cc scooter had the driver, my 25kg rucksack, me and the company rep all wedged on somehow for the 5 minute ride. Brakes were pointless, with that much weight, and turning was a little precarious, given that my rucksack was preventing the handlebars from moving at all. All good fun.

Kampot – pretty town, nice restaurants, more nice, friendly Cambodians. We didn’t stay long, but our couple of days in the small town were very pleasant. Progressed to Kep, just along the coast – another coastal town but this time a very small one. Our hotel overlooked the sea – the sea breeze was very welcome as the temperatures are still in the high 30s and rain doesn’t cool you down as much as we hoped it would! Most people staying in Kep eat the local freshly caught crab and then hop onto a boat to the nearby beaches on Rabbit Island for the day (the beach at Kep isn’t that great). We ate veggie rice and walked round a big hill. We like being different. The sign on the wall by the entrance to the nearby expensive (by our standards) hotel saying “No weapons or hard drugs” was reassuring.

From Kep to Phnom Penh was a 4 hour bus journey. Only problem was at the end of the journey when they were offloading the luggage from the hold – a plastic bag containing a couple of chickens had been thrown into the luggage bay. They were alive at the start of their journey, one was dead and the other nearly so by the end, due to either the heat in the hold, or the movement of the luggage on the rough journey, or a combination of the two. The owner of the chickens was remonstrating with the bus company – more at the loss of income from a now dead chicken than any consideration of cruelty. We have the luxury of being able to afford to be vegetarian on principle – it is scenes like this that reinforce the decision for us.

Phnom Penh is a nice city. Sprawled out over a large area it has recovered well from the late 1970’s, when the Khmer Rouge entered the city and forced all the inhabitants to leave over a period of just

4 days. Most people were compelled to work in the countryside, in ‘collectives’ that had impossible rice quotas to fill. They could keep any rice left over after the quota, but as that was next to nothing, many starved to death. Those not sent to work in the fields were the educated people – people who could speak French or who taught in schools, or even who just wore glasses. They were executed. Education was abolished, monetary system was abandoned. It’s impossible for us to imagine what it must have been like to live in such times. Our current set of books to read attempts to give us an insight.

The ex-pats and tourists tend to congregate around the bars and restaurants on the river, as do the Cambodians – the marked difference being that the foreigners eat and drink in the bars, the Cambodians buy from the stallholders and eat on the benches overlooking the river, or the grass outside the royal palace. The atmosphere is friendly, the traffic deadly. The river has a pretty promenade and beer is cheaper than soft drinks. We came across a celebration at some Buddhist shrines near the river – many people praying, burning incense and queuing up to make small offerings in the shrines. The confusing ‘merit-making’ ritual of buying a caged bird to set it free was offset perfectly by the guys nearby who were catching the birds from the trees using long sticks with sticky thread at the end – they would jab the stick at the bird and it would stick to the end, ready to be caged (assuming it survives the capture) and sold to be released (assuming it survives the captivity). A dead bird casually tossed aside on the ground nearby reinforced the pointlessness of it all. I will never understand such illogical practices in the name of religion.

Fiona, Emma’s friend, joined us in Phnom Penh for the next 2 weeks and we spent a harrowing and thought-provoking day visiting the main legacy of the Khmer Rouge’s activities in the area – the ‘Killing Fields’ at Choeung Ek. Here an estimated 17,000 people were executed – men, women and children who were initially shot but later beaten to death to save bullets, and dumped in mass graves, only some of which have been excavated. A memorial on the site, filled with the bones of the victims, is a poignant reminder of mankind’s ability to prove that he is worse than any animal. This is confirmed by a visit to Toul Sleng, the notorious interrogation centre in the city. Somewhere between 13,000 and 20,000 people entered this place in the 4-year rule of the Khmer Rouge. Seven people survived. Evidence and reports of extreme torture to extract confessions and implicate other people are shown and described in the various buildings that have now been turned into a museum. Entire families were wiped out, including babies, to avoid later revenge attacks on the ruling organisation. Signs around these memorials state that such genocide should never happen again. The same was said in the late 1940s when the Holocaust came to light, and in the 30 years since the Khmer Rouge the world has seen similar, if not worse, atrocities in Rwanda and Bosnia.

On a lighter note…

We are finally seeing the rains that the term “rainy season” seems to promise. Torrential downpours turn bone-dry roads around our guest house into 2-foot-deep rivers within an hour. The motorbikes and cars struggle through valiantly, pedestrians caught out in it lose their flip flops and chase them down the road. When the rain stops, within 30 minutes the road is clear and within another 30 minutes it is bone dry again. People don’t choose to walk out in the rain – that would be stupid. We did. Locals pointed and laughed. Tuk-tuk drivers debated whether to call out to us as they usually do, as we were obviously mad and they didn’t want three mad, drenched foreigners messing up their tuk-tuks.

We have now moved on to Siem Reap, location of the famous and well-visited Angkor temples. The town of Siem Ream is, on first impression, very nice. Lots of tourists, but that doesn’t seem to have spoilt the town. Good quality guest houses abound and if the markets and roadside stalls don’t take your fancy, there are plenty of restaurants, cafes and bars in the south of the city. People are friendly, tuk-tuk drivers stop asking when you have only said no twice and beggars joke with you, even if you don’t give them money. In fact, we haven’t seen too many beggars here – most people seem to be trying to sell books and postcards to make their money rather than ‘just’ begging. The large number of landmine victims has produced a lot of amputees of all ages and all around Cambodia we have encountered begging, but it has never been intimidating.

During a rest stop on the bus here we encountered a market stall selling fried insects. It’s not the first time we have come across these, but it is the first time we have seen fried spiders. The French guys sitting behind us on the bus tried them, but they’re French and they’ll eat anything. Fiona was offered one, but surprisingly refused, probably falling back on the same “vegetarian” excuse that I used. If I weren’t vegetarian, male bravado and human curiosity would no doubt cause me to try one! The thing that really concerns me is that the tarantulas did not seem to be in short supply, implying that there are lots of live ones still around here, somewhere…