Phnom Penh. Before I got there even the name itself sounded dangerous.
6 years ago when I was in Thailand Cambodia was pretty much off the
map, and Phnom Penh was not a place to vist of you wanted to leave
healthy. The Khmer Rouge, civil war and reports of opium dens and
illigal shooting ranges all added up to a place which was to be
avoided. And while it may still be a place you don't want to walk
around on your own late at night, and I still get asked if I want
"girls, marijuana?" every time I leave my guesthouse ( and the
occasional whisper "You want to shoot AK47? Fire granade?") I love it
here. Some places I have an immediate reaction to, and the one I had on
arriving here one was totally favourable.
While alot of the city is the same bland concrete buildings
selling mobile phones, cameras and all the other usual things you can
find in any other Asian city, there is a decaying charm to parts of the
city, expecially along the river, where you can see the French colonial
influence seeping though in the buildings, the street names, the bread
being sold on every corner. The traffic is more motorbikes than cars,
bikes and pedestrians fighting for space along the side of the roads.
Along the river in front of the Royal Palace people still wash in the
water, sell coconuts, sell caged birds to be set free for good luck,
and monks walk calmly through it all on their way to the various Wats around the city.
And the girls are fit too.
The actual sights to see are pretty thin on the ground, I
visited the Toul Sleng museum, better known as Security Prison S-21,
where between 1975 and 1978 more than 17000 people were detained by the
Khmer Rouge before being taken to Choeung Ek to be exterminated. Every
person who was detained there was photographed and their pictures are
on the walls of what used to be classrooms when it was a school, nearly
all of them were killed. By the time the Vietnames liberated Phnom Penh
only 7 people were still alive, the bodies of 14 others who had been
tortured as the vietnamese approched were still lying in the rooms
where they were killed, and are now buried in the grounds of the
museum. All in all pretty miserable really, so I decided to leave the
Killing
Fields of Choeung Ek for another day, and went to the Russian Market
instead. Apparently you could have bought any kind of weaponary you
liked here in the 80's, but it's all just food, CD copies and clothes
now.
After 3 days in Phnom Penh I decided that it was time to head up
the Mekong to the northeast of the country, for a start I was getting
bored of mile after mile of flat rice paddys and fancied seeing some
hills for a change. I was planning to catch the express boat up to
Kratie until I found out the night before that it no longer ran, so
instead had to catch the bus to Kompong Cham and spend a night there. The only interesting part of the trip was a stop-off in the town of Skuon, where I had an encounter with the famous local delicacy - platters stacked high with tasty deep-fried.......spider. Good size, about 4-5 inches accros, but black, like they had been cooked in the dirtiest chip pan. I have to admit that I didn't try them. Later, talking to someone who had, I found out that whatever they could have tasted like it was hidden under the taste of engine oil that they appeared to have been fried in.
For a Saturday evening not much was going on, the Cambodian national
pastime of karaoke not having a great appeal to me, so I just sat on
the balcony of the hotel overlooking the Mekong with a German guy I met
on the bus. I was pretty happy to get on the boat at 7am the next
morning, that was until I got to Kratie and realised that it was going
to be even more boring that Kompong Cham. The main, and indeed only,
reason for coming here is to see the rare freshwater Irrawaddy
dolphins, and admittidly it was very pleasant to watch them from a boat
as the sun set over the river, but that was only for half an hour and I
had 24 of them to kill.
I ended up back at the guesthouse talking to an
English guy who lives in Tasmania, and who has to be the most boring,
patronising person I have ever met. For some reason for a couple of
weeks most of the people I met were taking traveling so seriously, all
their conversations were about serious, weighty topics, or how much of
a 'real' traveler they were as they saved half a dollar on a bus
journey. Either that, or "what happy, simple lives all the poor people
here have, and when I get home I'm going to throw away all my
belongings and have a simple life as well" No, you are just
simple. The fact that these 'poor, happy' people are living lives spent
working every day in the fields, with no access to clean water,
medicine, education, with high infant mortality rates or any basic
amenities seemed to escape their notice. I'm sure that most of the
people they were talking about would have been just as happy to swop
and have all the things which are apparently making us Westerners so
unhappy. Well, I like TV's, computers, being able to drink clean water
straight from the tap and not dying of diarrhoea, and I appreciated it
as much as anybody. This man was an idiot, and I was glad to go to bed
(at about 8.30!) to avoid him.
The next day I wasn't looking forward to the next stop of Stung
Tren as I'd heard it was even quieter than Kratie, so I upped my budget
abit and spent 5 whole dollars on a proper hotel with cable tv, so at
least I could watch CNN and the Animal Chanel. As it happens I didn't
need it, as I met a couple of from England who were actually normal,
and spent the evening talking to them. The next morning I had to find
transport to Ban Lung, the aim of my travel up north. Over breakfast I
met a Dutch guy called Peter (good traditional Dutch name) and a French
couple, who in the way of the French were idiots and refused to pay $5
dollars for the taxi and said that they would wait around and see how
much cheaper they could get the price. Well, Peter and I got the taxi
and it was 3 fairly uncomfortable hours bouncing around to Ban Lung,
where we met the French couple later. By waiting around for another
hour, and sitting in the back of a pick-up in the dust and sun for 5
hours, including an hour spent waiting while the driver had to pop the
axle back in, they saved A Dollar! And they were soooo proud of
this! General consensious around the guesthouse was that they were
idiots....
So followed 3 days in Ban Lung, possible the most dusty place in
the world. None of the roads are sealed and as it's the dry season the
slightest movement bring forth a cload of red dust. Peter and I rented
motorbikes for the 3 days and spent our time bumping along roads with
pot holes up to a meter deep, breathing in tons of dust every time we
were overtaken and struggling to see where we were going. It was great
fun and I enjoyed every minute of it. There are several waterfalls
around the area and a crater lake called Boeng Yeak Lom, crystal clear
water surrounded by jungle and just perfect for a swim at the end of
the day to wash of all the dust. Although 2 days later I was still
trying to get it out from my ears and under my fingernails.
It was at the lake where I met a boy from one of the minority
villages around Ban Lung, he was learning English and asked if I could
help him work through his textbook. It was then that I realised that I
may be a native English speaker but when it comes to picking out the
past passive tense in a sentence that I knew less than him. Still, I
managed to give him the English words for parts of the body, and taught
him that 'did not' and 'didn't' are the same thing. The children are
incredible friendly around Ban Lung, and many times one of us nearly
fell of our bike as we waved to the invisible owners of the voices
shouting Hello through the dust.
After 3 days I realised that if I didn't leave soon I would
never be clean again, so I headed back to Stung Tren to catch the boat
back to Phnom Penh. Unfortunatly myself and a few other were stiched up
and instead of getting a taxi back we had to get a pick-up. And of
course I drew the shortest straw and ended up in the back for the most
uncomfortable ride I can remember. The 5 people in the front weren't
too comfortable but I was crammed in the bed of the truck with 10
locals with all their luggage, luckily not including livestock. Asian
people do not seem to understand that most westerners are rather larger
than them and we can't fit into the same spaces.After an hour of being
in the feotal position and wandering if I would be better if I cut my
legs off I turned around and sat facing out of the truck, balacing the
slightly increased confort against the fact that if we hit a particualy
nasty pothole I would be launched out of the truck and into the jungle.
3 hours of this would have been ok, 4 at a stretch, but 6 was just too
many. I wasn't just sore but properly bruised as well, not having much
padding on my butt I had trouble sitting down for a few days afterward. And the amazing thing was that I had to think myself lucky when we passed a car going the other way with 13 people in/on it, 7 inside (including 4 westerners) and a family of six on the roof, who looked abit puzzled as to why we all jumped up and started taking photo's of them. Hopefully I'll have some to post soon...
We also had an hour waiting while the driver popped our driveshaft back
in as well, seems to be a comman problem. I can't understand how stupid
the French couple must have been to deliberatly choose to travel like
that, I'm sure none of the local people were doing it by choice and if
they could have afforded it they would have traveled by taxi.
Spent the evening in Stung Tren sitting in a restuarant with 2
girls who had been teaching English in South Korea, they were completly
normal people and very pleasant to spend time with, and they didn't
know what a past passive tense was either. The boat back to Kompong
Cham was slightly quicker than going up as we were heading downstream,
and with the minibus from Kompon Cham to Phnom Penh meeting the boat we
managed to arrive back in the city for about 5pm. After all of that, I
decided that it was time for some serious beach action....
|  | 
|
