Back in Phnom Penh

Before we left Sihanoukville we (of course) bumped into Marty and Jochem again, who were (of course of course) staying in the same hotel again. This time we weren't staying in a place reccommended by the Lonely Planet, in fact this place wasn't even in the LP; it was well out of the way and not somewhere you would easily stumble across. Now I had all the proof I needed: Jochem and Marty were spies! Now I just had to work out who they were working for and how best to kill them.

Anyway we returned from Sihanoukville to Phnom Penh, where we retrieved our passports complete with (expensive) Laos visas. [Excuse any excess of typos above average; many of the keys don't work reliably on this keyboard]. This time we stayed at the cheaper, grungier, backpacker part of town where the lake is. "The Lakeside" to me sounded quite upmarket and romatic, but in fact is seems only to have been developed at all recently; as backpackers' accommodation, and also somewhere for large international corporations to dredge sandy silt to use as (I assume) building materials. I later read in the Phnom Penh Times (I think it was) about the scandal of international companies doing this (surprise surprise) without Cambodians seeing any benefit, despite the ecological damage it causes. Anyway, it seems until recently, the Lakeside was substanard housing with quite a lot of Indian immigrants. We took advantage of this by having a rather nice Indian meal the night we arrived back in PP. The guesthouse we stayed in (Number 9 Guesthouse, for anyone thinking of staying there) was absolutley disgusting.

Later research revealed that we should have given Sihanoukville a miss and headed for the less touristy beach resort of Kep, then spent as little time in Kampot. Oh well, next time!

The following day we moved to a much nicer hostel (Number 9 Sister Guesthouse) then organised a day of culture around Phnom Penh. Culture here, it turns out, is quite depressing. First we stopped off at a shooting range, where I declined the $40 fee to shoot 30 rounds from an AK47; even when he offerred me half a clip for just $20 I wasn't even half tempted. I don't really know why we went except it was part of the standard tourist route and I was curious. The LP claims you can possibly maybe shoot cows with AK47s, or indeed shotguns or anything else you are willing to pay for, after all in Cambodia money is king.

The above reminds me... I forgot to mention before, I think, one of the reasons I suspect Cambodia is so expensive is that everything is in dollars. At first I thought, OK, this is just to make tourist feel comfortable, so I'll just draw some local currency and get the "real" prices. The ATMs dispense dollars! Apparently you can choose if you have dollars or Riel if you have a Cambodian cash card, but a foreign card dooms you to dollars. I even went as far as working my way through the menus in Khmer to see if it would give me the option, but it wasn't my choice of English that had been deciding the currency. Now, when dollars are the currency, most things seem to cost one dollar minimum; in Vietnam we rarely spent a dollar on anything.

Which, in turn, reminds me about the Khmer language. Vietnamese had been a relief after Cantonese: roman script and only 6 tones instead of 9. Khmer was a mixed blessing. And to my shame I did not make it any easier by deciding not to get a phrasebook; I hadn't used it much in Vietnam, so why get one here? A mistake! It's worth it even for the few times you use it. Khmer is unusual in the region in that it is not a tonal language, however it uses its own script. The script is quite similar to Thai, although it predates it by some time (the Thais copied Khmer), the Khmer culture being the oldest of the dominant cultures in Indochina. Anyway, back to difficult to read, easy to say in theory. In practice, tourism is all they have in Cambodia, so everything that needs to be for tourists is in English; and it's not that easy to speak: the language is full of elisions and glottal stops (aspirated according to wiki). The roman translitteration contains loads of dashes and apostropes, which mean you have to sound like the power is cutting out on your microphone. Compared to the surrounding languages it sounds much harsher and truly weird. Anyway, I was lazy with Khmer and didn't bother at all.

Monument at the Killing Fields

Clothes are still scattered everywhere in the Killing Fields

So after the shooting range (which the driver had advised us to go to before), the Killings Fields, which is as depressing as you might expect: a large monument full of human remains, surrounded by the pits from which they were recovered. I don't know if they've done it for dramatic effect, out of respect, or just because the clean up would be far too much work, but all around the area where the mass graves have been exhumed, there are raggy old worn out clothes, half-buried in the earth. Nowhere did it say why, but I assumed that these were the clothes of the dead. In the monument they had a small pile of clothes recovered from the graves and these looked just the same. In a triumph of capitalism, you now have to pay to see this genocide monument; the money does not even go to the Cambodian people, or relatives of the victims, but (presumably) to the highest bidder, who in this case is a Japanese company. As far as I could gather they are doing none of the things you might expect in return for patronage of such a site; just pocketing the money I think.

Cells at Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum

As if not depressed enough, we carried onto the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, which is just the Khmer Rouge's Security Prison 21 (S-21), preserved as a museum. It was previously a high school then, when everyone was evacuated from Phnom Penh to work in Pol Pot's communist agrarian utopia, they converted it to a place of torture and imprisonment. Respect for the dead prevents me from making any comparisons to its previous use. Bizarrely they have "no laughing" signs everywhere. I woudn't have seen anything funny under normal circumstances, but a no laughing sign is about the best thing I can imagine to get people laughing; especially in a school.

No laughing sign at the Genocide Museum

So we spent half the day finding out about how the French screwed things up, then the Americans made everything worse, then took communism as the signal to commit human rights abuses and atrocities galore. A familiar story in the region, although in this case they would have had a better case against the regime than in Vietnam, were it not for the complete hypocrisy displayed by fact they (and the rest of the UN) then went on to support the Khmer Rouge after they were defeated and forced into the bush by the Vietnamese army. Apparently they were afraid of communist expansionism. Well it's clearly much better to support the brutally genocidal communist than the liberators from that, isn't it?

Rules from S-21 prison camp (at Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum)

Back in Phnom Penh we met a couple of South African girls who had been refused visas for Vietnam. We couldn't work it out.

written by

The Happy Couple on March 1, 2009 from Phnom Penh, Cambodia

from the travel blog: Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon

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