In March 2004 we spent 7 days in Siem Reap in Cambodia, as part of our four month time in SE Asia. We wanted to spend longer, but we had two fixed dates either side, and couldn't extend our trip - so we went back later in our trip to see Phnom Penh.
Part One covers our time in Siem Reap, and our overland journeys from Bangkok.
This part covers our visit to Phnom Penh, and overland trip on to Vietnam.
We've also created a Cambodia photo album.

Tuesday, April 27, 2004

Wednesday, April 28, 2004

Phnom Penh - a strange city

We're in Phnom Penh, and we can't make head or tail of the place - there seem to be such wide contrasts.

Take our accommodation, Diamond's Guest House, which is in the centre of the city and handy for the Royal Palace, National Museum, and the restaurants and cafes along the banks of the Mekong. It's in a side street of 4 storey apartment blocks, but it has obviously had a previous life. Last night, our room (which we've now moved from) was decorated with padded purple silk fabric on all the walls and ceiling, and a huge mirror on one wall. We guess that before becoming a Guest House it was either a karaoke bar or a 'massage parlour'.


Like most hotels and guest houses all over the world, there are various policies stapled to the back of the door (normally "What to do in case of fire"), and this is the same - except that Rule Number One is "Weapon, ammunition or explosion bringing into the guesthouse is prohibited". This is no different to any other guest house and hotel in Cambodia, but it is a reminder that we're not in England any more! The guidebooks are full of dire warnings about the risk of robbery in the city. The Rough Guide cheerily says "Gun crime is actually more frequent in Phnom Penh than anywhere else in the country", and gives advice on not carrying too much with you, and "If you are robbed, do not resist and do not run". Although there's always a risk (I wonder what the guide books say about Oxford Street?), it seems that Cambodia, with its reputation for lawlessness and chaos, has a special place in the Street Crime League Tables.



The streets are a mix too, with wide avenues dotted around, lined with old French-influenced colonial houses. The one on the left is the headquarters of UNESCO, and has been restored, while the one on the right is lived in, but a wreck! But the side streets are just dust bowls - many of them are just dirt tracks, or pitted tarmac tracks lined by apartment blocks (in the centre) or low-level concrete houses.

During the day we didn't do very much - Charlotte has a mild ear infection, and just wanted to stay in and around the guest house, and Emily was more than happy to watch Cartoon Network all day (every room here in Cambodia seems to have a television with 65 cable channels on it). Phnom Penh is also in the middle of a heatwave, and is going over 40-degrees in the middle of the day, so cooling off in the air-con room between short trips out was definitely a good idea.

In the evening, before a power cut that reduced the streets to a black hole (we should have been staying in the guest house on the left, with its own backup generator!) we went to a small backpackers café that was showing The Killing Fields on a big screen - Charlotte has heard so much about the time of the Khmer Rouge, that she was really engaged by the film. Its not really made with children in mind, and it contains a fair amount of bad language and gruesome scenes, but over the last year, both girls have got used to being constantly around adults, and recognising that while many adults use bad language, they shouldn't use it themselves. And the gruesome scenes? Well, tomorrow we're going to the infamous S-21 prison camp and one of the killing fields, and we've already talked about some of the recent history of Cambodia, so it's another piece of the jigsaw.

Thursday, April 29, 2004

The gruesome side of Cambodia

There are lots of different ways to get around Phnom Penh - on the back of motorbikes; in cyclos which are chairs mounted on the front of bikes ridden by old, skinny men; on moped-powered tuk-tuks, or in saloon cars acting as taxis. For the many aid-workers in town, the vehicle of choice is a brand-new white Toyota Land Cruiser, with the organisation's logo on the side. For us today, we chose the taxi option - hiring a car for the whole day to take us around lots of sights in one go.


The Tuol Sleng Genocide Musem
We started at Tuol Sleng, now a genocide museum, but formerly the Khmer Rouge S-21 Prison. Before the reign of the Khmer Rouge, and the abandonment of the city, it had originally been a secondary school, and from the outside, the buildings looked just like any other school we'd seen in Cambodia - except for the high barbed-wire fence surrounding it. Cambodian bookshops are full of fake copies of books, telling the stories of the Khmer Rouge days, and we've been able to read more about the history of Cambodia than other countries. After reading 5 books on the history, visiting Tuol Sleng provided a way to visualise some of the things we'd read about (just like driving past the French Embassy on the way into town, which had a pivotal role in the survival of many foreigners when the Khmer Rouge took over.

Approximately 12,500 prisoners were kept here, and all but seven were then taken to the Killing Fields to be killed and buried between 1976 and 1979. The tour of the prison, accompanied by a guide, highlighted the madness of the system, and also the systematic way that the genocide was carried out. Each victim was photographed and recorded as they were sent to their deaths, and many of these photographs survived, and are displayed inside the cell blocks. Alongside are photographs of some of the Khmer Rouge soldiers, many of them young boys and girls aged 10-20.

Perhaps one of the oddest parts, was the cell block A, in which the special prisoners were kept. On the ground floor, we large individual cells which were used for 'VIP' prisoners - high ranking government officials, and Khmer Rouge cadres who were suspected of being traitors - as the regime matured, it started to devour itself in a frenzy of paranoia, imprisoning, torturing and killing many of its own high-level officials and their families - including the man that ran the prison.

You might ask "Why would you take small children there?" After all, Charlotte is 8 and is able to understand much of what she is seeing, but how will it affect her? We felt it important to explain it to Charlotte in terms that she could understand, but without hiding it from her - after all, it is part of the reality of Cambodia, and everybody we have met in the country has been affected by it, and told stories of it (97% of the population are believed to have lost a close relative during the rule of the Khmer Rouge). Charlotte found some of the details from the guide were a bit "yucky", and came away with a strong sense of the unfairness of it all - especially that the perpetrators "got away with it". While some of leaders of the Khmer Rouge are still in jail, none have been tried, and most are free - including most of the prison's guards. In fact, the current prime minister is a former Khmer Rouge soldier. Who knows what Charlotte will remember of this in a year's time, but at the moment she has a fairly balanced view of it all, and is as equally horrified as anybody would be of what happened.

The Killing Fields of Choeung Ek

After the genocide museum we carried on out of the city to view the Killing Fields. This was where the prisoners were taken, before being killed and buried in mass graves. 9,000 skeletons have been uncovered, but a further third of the graves remain untouched. The burial pits themselves, just look like a building site, except for the signs identifying them and the scraps of clothes uncovered from the mud each rainy season. Alongside the area of the graves is a large stupa, with glass walls, containing the thousands of skulls and some of the clothes found on the victims.

We'd left Emily in the car with the driver, as she'd been asleep when we arrived, and when we got back to the car it was surrounded by the small children who beg and sell things at every tourist site in Cambodia. They were all peering in the window at Emily, who'd woken up and was reading her book. Every time you arrive and step out of your taxi or tuk-tuk, you're immediately surrounded by a horde of children asking you to buy their postcards/fans/chopsticks/t-shirts or just begging. I would imagine that would be frustrating for tourists who are just here for a week or so, and haven't had time to adjust to the hassle of Asia. Fortunately, we've now been here long enough to get used to it, and although it was initially quite daunting and confusing for Charlotte and Emily, they've learnt to cope with all the pushing, shouting and touching that goes on.

The other grim side of Phnom Penh

Before heading back to the guest house, we visited the other grim place in Phnom Penh - the shores of Boeng Kak lake, which used to be a pleasant area of lakeside backpacker guest houses in the north of the city. Now though, the buildings have encroached over much of the lake, and sewerage from them flows straight into the lake untreated. We wanted to see it, to know what we were missing by staying in the city, but now we know we missed staying on the shores of a malarial cesspit which makes Bangkok's Khao San Road look like a row of 5-star hotels, we feel much better about our guest house!

The grin side of Phnom Penh

For dinner, we went to 'Friends the Restaurant', run by the Mith Samlanh charity which works with street children - running anti-drug campaigns, and helping to build their skills and education to rescue them from life on the streets. The restaurant is staffed by children learning restaurant skills - cooking, waiting, managing - and had the best service we've experienced in Asia, as well as the best food! Even the décor was fantastic, with brightly painted walls, and subtle music and flowers. Both Charlotte and Emily, who is sometimes fussy over her food, tucked in and ate enormous amounts of food that had us ordering extra dishes. In the end, it turned out to be one of most expensive meals we've eaten - at £12 for 4 of us - but it was worth it, and besides, we wrote it off as 'all for a good cause'. Phnom Penh isn't an attractive city, and doesn't seem to be blessed with lots of cafes or restaurants which are nice and within a backpacker budget, but Friends turned out to buck the trend. Emily spent the evening drawing pictures of our waiter, and then playing shy every time he wanted to look at one her art!

It was a nice evening to a day full of grim sightseeing.

Friday, April 30, 2004

Phnom Penh or Beirut?

Sometimes, when you get up in the morning, its easy to be confused about where we are - the streets here seem just like the scenes of Beirut we used to see in the 80's. Everything just seems a charm-less mess. And it also seems that everything is improvised - take the Toyota Camry on the right - when you've got a car, you can't let it just sit around doing nothing all day - this one appeared to double up as a washing line and a drying rack for left-over rice. The Toyota Camry is the workhorse car of Asia, just like Peugeots used to be the car in Africa. The Camry's are all over Asia, and seem to be able to withstand the rough roads pretty well - despite the atrocious condition of the dust road between Poipet and Siem Reap, our Toyota had belted along at 60mph, bumping over potholes and rocks without seeming to notice them. I'm amazed we've not seen them broken down beside the road all over Asia.

The other vehicle that is everywhere is the motorbike, most popularly the Honda Dream. We don't really see them so often in England, but here in Cambodia there are probably 10 times more bikes than there are cars. And they are used to carry the most ridiculous loads, often stacked high and wide behind, under and in front of the rider. This bike was on its way to deliver a load of flat-pack cardboard boxes for recycling (they're collected from shops on the street, and then collectors earn a quarter dollar for every 25 kilos).

It’s our last day in Phnom Penh, and after seeing the Royal Palace (architecturally very similar to Bangkok's Grand Palace, but smaller and without thousands of people blocking every view), we wandered through some of the run-down temples in the district. During the rule of the Khmer Rouge, monks were either killed or forced to abandon their robes and return to normal peasant life, and the temples were left to ruin or systematically destroyed. The evidence is still to be seen in the conditions of some of the temples, while others have been restored and repainted in garish colours.

For our last evening, we ate at the famous Foreign Correspondents Club on the banks of the Mekong. During the 90's it was the hang-out for the many journalists covering the Cambodia story, and I guess it was a pretty nice place to come after a dusty, hot day. Sitting on the balcony, watching the sunlight fade on the wide Mekong River, and with a beer in our hands, we could imagine the scene inside was pretty much unchanged over the last years. The menu even transported us home, with roast chicken and mash, spare ribs and steak sandwiches on offer (and came in portions sooo huge we ended up wasting over half of it).

Saturday, May 01, 2004

Overland to Vietnam

Another day, another long bus trip! For our trip from Phnom Penh to Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam, it’s the usual story of waiting around, unexplained delays and that feeling of not quite being sure of what's going on. We'd been told the bus would collect us from our guest house at 6.45am, and that it would take 6 or 7 hours to get there. But it was no surprise that we weren't picked up until 7:15, and then spent the next hour driving around the city - picking up from one more guest house, and then filling up with petrol from a shack alongside the road (from plastic barrels of fuel, tipped into the tank through a funnel - right outside my window).

By 8:30 we were crossing the bridge out of the city, having driven past one temple three times, and heading south and east to the border. At 10:30 half the passengers got off to catch a ferry down the Mekong to the border, while we took a ferry over the river to continue along the road. On the ferry we bought some snacks - we passed on the fried crickets, and instead bought a coconut and some lotus seed heads (fresh, the seeds taste like butter beans, but in England we'd normally only see dried heads, used for flower arrangements).We stopped three or four times for drinks, and toilet stops, and eventually reached the border with Vietnam at 12 o'clock.

We were all dropped at a small roadside restaurant for lunch, and then walked across to the border. It was hot, dusty and we felt like refugees as we traipsed through the dirt, first to the Cambodian exit booth, queueing up in the sun waiting for our turn to be stamped out, and then walking the 500m to the Vietnamese entry point.

We quickly got a bit of an idea for Vietnamese bureaucracy - after the passport bit had been done, we then had our bags searched by customs. Or would have had, if they could be bothered - instead we just lifted our bags onto the table, the customs man had me open the top of mine, to see the bag of laundry on the top, and that was it. Then we went to the health point, where our details were filled in from our passport on a form by one man, who then passed it across to another man, who filled in the details in a book (I looked over his shoulder - his reading of passports wasn't great, as all he was writing down was our first name - Mr Raymond, Mrs Sarah etc). We then had to hand over 2,000 Dong (about 8p) and handed a form which declared us to be free of infectious diseases. We then had to hand the form over to the third man in the row, and off we went - now officially inside Vietnam. All of this took us 2 hours!

Things were looking good at this point - the bus arranger didn't have enough seats in his minibus, so he said he'd ordered the four of us a taxi to the city, which would get us there a bit quicker. But first we had to take a little trip down the road, so that everybody else didn't see our good luck. So he hopped us all onto the back of motorbikes, and dropped us off at a shack with a few Vietnamese. He told us that the taxi would be there in 10 minutes, and the Vietnamese there would make sure he took us to the right place, while he went back and sorted out the group at the minibus. At times like this, you have to decide whether you trust what you're being told - after all, we were now on our own, without a guide, and just having to trust what we were being told. In situations like this, we tend to be more trusting than we would normally be, because of the girls. In Asia people are very family oriented, and they make a big fuss of the girls - so we guessed that it would be very unlikely that they'd abandon a family with small children, in the middle of nowhere (okay, a taxi driver in Koh Samui, Thailand, had done just that, but it was fortunately an isolated incident).

After a while it became clear that the Vietnamese were trying to flag down a car for us - hoping to get one bringing people from Ho Chi Minh to take us back to the city. In then end, after almost an hour of no luck, they piled us all into their car, and after an argument about who was going to pay, and drove us into the city themselves. The fixer was there to meet us at his office, paid off the car and apologised profusely for the problems. It was now almost 5 o'clock - our 6-7 hour journey had turned into a ten hour one, exacerbated by the mess-up at the border. We realised that it was an honest mistake, perhaps caused by the fact that it was a public holiday, and few people we making the border crossing today, so we just shrugged and put it down to Asian-travelling-phenomenon (what normally goes slowly, goes even slower when foreigners are involved).

Despite our fatigue, and the whirling buzz of motorbikes that fill the streets in the city, it seemed quite a nice city to arrive into - not as foreboding as people had warned us it was, and we soon found a clean and modern guest house to check into.

Read part one of our Cambodia diary - Siem Reap and Angkor Wat.