Siem Reap to Phnom Penh

Siem Reap

We were unbelievably happy to reach Siem Reap after three hard days on the road and after our life-threatening experience in Mario Andretti’s taxi. After we had checked into our guesthouse, and as I unpacked and prepared to wash my muddy clothing, two things struck me – our bed sheets and the printed sign posted on the back of our door. The bed sheets made me laugh. They were mustard-yellow and covered with Oscar Mayer hotdogs on wheels, with the phrase that ran: “Oh I wish…I were…an Oscar Mayer wiener”! The sign was a bit less funny, warning: “Using and Selling Weapons, Explosives, Drugs are Illegal.” It reminded me of the signs that we had passed on the road: “We don’t need Weapons Anymore,” with a picture of guns broken in half. These signs were vivid reminders of Cambodia’s all too violent recent past, which is still not completely swept away. There is a still a large stock-pile of arms in the country (mostly in Phnom Penh).

The second-largest city in Cambodia with a population of 85,000, Siem Reap is charming and seems to have preserved its provincial character. Indeed, until very recently, it was a quiet, sleepy town. The influx of tourists to nearby Angkor has started to change the face of the town, however (you may read more about Angkor – reputed to be the most beautiful site in southeast Asia – by clicking on “UNESCO sites” under the Cambodian flag).

The stream of tourists has brought air-conditioned tour buses, international restaurants, Internet cafes, travel agencies, Thai-style massage parlors, and five-star hotels that can cost up to $340 per night. Next to these are the boulevards bordered by trees, the lazily-winding river, the small bridges, and old colonial-era French boutiques. Many of the roads are still unpaved and unlit, and the roadside food stands and restaurants, along with the motorcycle vendors who sell food and drinks from side-carts remind one of Thailand. There are many temples in Siem Reap, and one can often see the orange or saffron-colored robes of the monks hanging out to dry. The monks in orange are a common sight on the streets.

We frequented the market in Siem Reap. A lot of tiny restaurants were to be found there, the already-prepared food in dishes behind glass panes. You could eat a meal for about $0.55. For the exact same meal – prepared in exactly the same manner – in a Western-style restaurant, you would pay between four to ten times as much. If we ever left anything on our plates, one of several young boys who were hanging about at a distance would come over to our table after we had left and empty our leftovers into a plastic bag and take it to eat quietly on the street. These children do not usually beg, but they were always happy for a piece of fruit if we had it. On the other hand, some of the amputees who were actively begging refused the fruit; they were interested only in money.

Behind the roadside restaurants, in a covered warehouse and alleyways were aisles of vegetables and fruit, such as the eggplant, pumpkin, mangosteen, lychee, dragonfruit, durian, coconut, mango, and pomelo. Then there are the pigs’ feet, the chickens and chickens’ feet, dried fish (sliced into Medusa-like pieces to dry), live, writhing fish in shallow buckets of water, shrimp, lobster, and clams. Next to the food and dried goods are stands of clothing, purses, silk scarves, and tablecloths. In the midst of their wares and food, vendors lay on the wooden tables or rested in hammocks that hung from the ceiling.

On Cambodia’s Main Road…
We left the peaceful and charming town of Siem Reap and continued on to Phnom Penh, the capital city, which is located in the southeastern corner of the country. We had heard that this road was supposed to be in an unbelievably poor condition, but to our immense relief, we found that it was newly paved. Woohoo!!! What a great boost to the morale!

The scenery was much the same as from the border to Siem Reap, with pigs on motorcycles, lily pads and pretty pink flowers in ponds, houses on stilts, food-on-wheels motorcycles, people planting rice, and humped bulls that pulled wooden carts in the streets or worked in the fields. Boys or men sometimes stood atop the bulls or horses with reigns in hand. Pick-up taxis were still common, and those trucks that were not used as taxis often had hammocks strung up in the back, where a passenger or two might sleep. If there was no hammock, men or children sometimes slept atop towering piles stacked on top of the trucks. We still saw the omnipresent signs for the “Cambodian People’s Party” and to a lesser extent, the “FUNCINPEC Party” or the “Sam Rainsy Party.” There are dug-outs in front of most houses, filled with water and occasionally canoes, where buffalo and young children swim. Channels of water run alongside many houses, back into the chartreuse rice paddies, which stretch as far as the eye can see. It is a flat country, with only a few sugar palms on the horizon.

We often ate at the local village markets – noodle soups or boiled rice and grilled meat. Customers at the market sat on tiny plastic stools around a wooden table about 1 ½ feet off the ground, while a woman sat in the middle of the table, handing out her bowls of soup.

Because of the stifling heat, the heavy rains in the evenings, and the fact that Cambodia has the largest concentration of unexploded landmines in the world, we were reluctant to take out our tent and camp. So we stayed in guesthouses, except for the evening that a young man in a village invited us to stay at his house for the night. On this particular evening, we stopped at a karaoke bar and restaurant to ask directions to the nearest guesthouse, when a man invited us to share a beer with his friends. Everyone around the table, the police officers included, took turns singing karaoke at ear-shattering decibels. While we were there, a young teacher with a couple of his English students entered and asked me to join them so that they could practice speaking in English. So I switched groups, while Stephane stayed with the initial one.

Narin, the English teacher, then invited us to stay at his house for the night, even though he seemed a bit embarrassed because of his “house that is very small and poor.” First, we sat in on his English class, which he taught with the aid of one dim light under his house (Cambodian houses are on stilts). He makes 39 USD per month teaching at the local school and teaches in his home privately on the side. There were about a dozen people at his house, including his family, friends, and two students. Before dinner, when the family squatted around bowls of vegetables, soup, eggs, fish, and rice placed on the mat bed, we had the honor of taking a bath in front of the whole group, who looked on curiously.

In the Cambodian countryside (and oftentimes in the cities), there is no indoor plumbing, and people bathe by dumping bowls or buckets of rainwater from a big vat over themselves. They bathe in full public view. To preserve modesty, women wear a sarong, which is a piece of cloth with an elastic band around the chest that falls to the lower leg or ankles. Men wear a “kamma,” which is a checkered cloth that they wear around their waists. Soap is not used.

Because it had been such a hot and humid day cycling, I didn’t want to turn down the chance to clean up, but I turned my back, anyway, as I could feel a dozen pairs of eyes watch me as I shampooed my hair and tried to bathe. The group was just curious. I suppose they wondered if we bathed in the same mannerr as they did! When it was Stephane’s turn and he exited the small kitchen dressed in his kamma – short and very sexy – he did a little dance for the expectant crowd, at which point everyone gave a whoop of delight and cheered, the men all commenting on his strong muscles. When the “strong muscles” comments continued, he flexed for their better appreciation!

Just as we were getting ready for bed, two police officers showed up to inspect our passports. Cambodians are required to tell the police if they have any foreign guests in their homes. It took over one hour for them to write down the information and call it in over their radio! It was obviously the first time that they had ever seen a foreign passport in their lives, and after a good ten minutes inspecting the front page, they had to ask the English teacher to tell them what our names, ages, and nationalities were!

Halfway to Phnom Penh, we stopped at a city called Kompong Thom. From there, we spent an afternoon visiting the temples at nearby Phnom Suntok. It is the most important sacred mountain in the region, and its hillsides are dotted with pagodas and 99 Buddha statues – mostly sculpted in the rock. We climbed the 980 steps to the top, bordered all the way by thousands of statues of men and women holding a naga (mythical serpent). At the summit, we found a polychrome temple, very colorful, with many small sanctuaries surrounding it. Monks – mostly women – sat reading and studying inside the small sanctuaries, which were adorned with Buddha statues, candles, and small flags. We spent a large part of the afternoon speaking to a young monk who is studying English and Pali (the language of the Buddhist scriptures).

Eighty kilometers north of Phnom Penh, we passed through the town of Skon, which is known because its inhabitants raise and eat large fried spiders. Stephane was so excited at the prospect of tyring spiders that we bought a few to eat as a snack later on in the day. They were large and black and ugly, but I tried them, too, and they tasted like any other fried meat. More like grease, really, because there was so little to eat that you could hardly taste the meat itself (Only the legs are eaten. You peel the fried skin from the legs to extract the tiny amount of meat on the inside.).

Then, 50 km. north of the capital, we arrived at the Mekong River. The Mekong is the longest river in Southeast Asia, and –after the Amazon – has the largest fauna diversity of any river in the world. When we saw it, it spanned several kilometers in either direction, and we crossed many bridges above its fast-flowing, muddy red waters. The river was high enough that many trees were half-covered. Some of the houses built on the water could be reached only by canoe.

The traffic picked up as we neared Phnom Penh, which was a shame because up until about 45 km. north of the city, the road had been pretty quiet all the way from Siem Reap. Certain stretches of the road – the main road / highway in Cambodia – had almost no traffic at all!

Restaurants and hotels with flashy lights lined the last several kilometers into the city, and we finally crossed the long, scary bridge into Phnom Penh at nighttime and navigated one or two kilometers of bumpy side streets to our guesthouse in the backpackers’ quarter, where we were happy to find a place on the lake that served good food to the Eagles’ “Greatest Hits” CD.

Phnom Penh
Phnom Penh is not like other cities. It was obvious from the first look at the large billboard hanging in our guesthouse reception. “TOUR AROUND THE CITY,” it said in block letters. And the first three places to visit, listed before the Royal Palace and the markets, were the must-see “Killing Fields, Genocidal Museum S-21, and the Shooting Range.” What a city!

The Genocidal Museum was a high school that was transformed into a prison during the Khmer Rouge years. It became the country’s largest center of detention and torture. Over 17,000 victims were killed between 1975-78, and over 100 were killed each day during the beginning of 1977. Several walls are covered with photos of those who were afterwards killed.

The Killing Fields is the location where people were taken after being detained and tortured at the S-21 prison. They were often beaten to death at the extermination camp in order to conserve bullets. Skulls are displayed behind the Memory Stupa, classified according to age and gender. Signs indicate where women and children were buried, where those that were beheaded were buried, and where children and babies were beaten against the trees.

The Shooting Ranges were transformed from military bases in the 1990s, attracting tourists who wished to try out an AK-47 or a B-40 grenade launcher. Because this hurt the country’s image, the government decided to stop the activity, but soldiers, – perhaps pushed by poverty – came up with a new acivity that some tourists were eager to try: the shooting of live animals!

We skipped the horrific shooting ranges and genocidal museum, but opted to visit the Killing Fields and the Royal Palace, which looked a bit like the Grand Palace in Bangkok, but on a much smaller scale. We visited several markets, too. Typical products that could be purchased at the markets included Cambodian silk scarves and tablecloths, wooden Buddha sculptures, and opium pipes and pots.

The hallmark of Phnom Penh, besides its genocidal memories and its shooting ranges for tourists, is its chaotic traffic. The traffic in the city is definitely the craziest of any urban jungle that we’ve ever navigated! Although there is no congestion or traffic jams at any time of the day, and although there are no animals on the road like in some countries, the drivers are by far the worst-disciplined and least skilled. Most vehicle traffic is motor scooters, and they – along with the bicycles, cars, and push-bikes (a sort of rickshaw that has the passenger carriage in front of the bike instead of behind) – come at you from every which way, regardless of what side of the street they are supposed to be on. They disregard the flow of traffic, red lights, and even other vehicles. They never bother to look before pulling out into traffic, and if they almost hit someone else, that person will swerve, and the person to their side will swerve, and so on and so on. Traffic will invariably continue flowing through an intersection a good 15-20 seconds after the light has turned red and vehicles will often go through the red at any other time, forcing vehicles that are passing on the green to slow down, swerve around them, or stop completely! Driving in this city requires constant attention and alertness, plenty of experience and patience, and a lot of luck thrown in for good measure!