Cambodia

Julia and I have lived in Thailand for almost a year, which means that we're starting to have repeat experiences (like the school Sports Day that's coming up, which I'll save for another entry). It's crazy to think that we're coming up on our second birthdays and second holiday season here. This also means that I may start repeating things in my entries that I'm not sure I've said before. So forgive me for anything that's been said a thousand times already. And with the usual disclaimer, Cambodia here we come!

Fortunately or unfortunately, flights to virtually anywhere in the world are cheaper out of Bangkok than Chiang Mai. As a result, most out of country trips involve a 12 hour bus or train ride down to BKK, and while it's apparently the world's most visited city, it's actually not a fun place to be if you 1. Don't live there or 2. Have been there before. And 1. is just me throwing Bangkok a bone because even that is a bit of a mystery to me (I'd like to emphasize that this is also an extremely biased view of someone who has lived in Chiang Mai for a year now, which is scenery that is completely the opposite of Bangkok's bustling city environment). Many of us here in CM have independently come to the conclusion that the only thing to do in Bangkok during the time between the arrival of our bus and the departure of our plane is to stay in the air-conditioned shopping malls, possibly seeing a movie. But even that is a hassle because the buses don't drop you off anywhere convenient, like near the metro. You have to take a taxi to get to the main part of the city. Additionally, the cheaper of the two airports in Bangkok is about an hour outside of the city center, which of course is where the malls are. So the idea of taking a taxi then metro to get to a shopping mall at 6 am after a groggy night's bus sleep was quite unappealing when we could just take a cheaper taxi to the airport and sleep/eat/rest there. Hence, the beginning of our Cambodia trip was spent sleeping, eating, and resting in a remote part of the airport until we could finally check in 3 hours prior to our flight. We also played around with the slow motion video on my camera, which makes everything seem either majestic, weird, or gross. We touched into Phnom Penh around 5 pm and were immediately consumed by the political rally for candidate number 4 (Cambodian People's Party), which included a lot of blue, a lot of cheering, crazy motorbike driving, and large groups of people standing in the truck beds of moving trucks. Even though Julia informed me that we'd be traveling there during the week of the elections, I soon realized how little I knew about the current politics of Cambodia, something I made sure to amend later with some trusty googling and conversations with a local. After securing a fairly cheap hostel, we set off to find a delicious dinner, which didn't take long since there was an awesome street food/restaurant combo right on our corner. Julia and I ordered the barbecue, which tasted oddly sweet. Jules summed it up perfectly when halfway through the meal she realized it tasted like beef dipped in pancake syrup. We also tried one of the local beers, Angkor, which admittedly tastes exactly like all other local beers in all of Southeast Asia. A good night's rest and the next morning was a tuktuk tour of Phnom Penh.

The day started off heavy with a trip to The Killing Fields, which are about half an hour outside the city. An audio tour really helped me to attempt to grasp what it may have felt like to be a political prisoner brought here in the '70s. Something I have to constantly remind myself is that some of the harrowing history we learn about today hasn't happened that long ago. It's difficult not to feel pain or regret when I'm only one generation away from the time when this was occurring. The tour through the field was mostly empty save for the signs and structures that were added when the area became a memorial site. When I say empty, I mean that it is mostly nature and trees, rather than buildings or pathways. This is perhaps the most chilling part; knowing that there was and still are thousands upon thousands of unidentified bodies piled into mass graves, and nothing else. The one building the prisoners were housed in when there were too many people and not enough executions was quickly torn down after the fall of the Khmer Rouge. I realized it's easier to commemorate something with something else; a statue, a building, a museum. But it's so difficult to understand and to acknowledge when the reminder is that there is nothing there. Not only are you surrounded by emptiness, you are also surrounded by nature, a conflicting feeling of beauty and pain.

Though the fields are pretty far away from the nearby town, there were still farmers around the area. That, and the fact that guns and ammunition were expensive during the war, meant that the soldiers used other methods to execute the prisoners, including blunt weapons, axes, thorns from branches of trees, trees themselves, you name it. And to avoid the neighbors' suspicions, they played music over loud speakers to cover up the screams and cries of the people. At one point during the tour, they play the sound of a generator paired with the sound of the music they most likely heard while they were unknowingly waiting for their death. That was the second most chilling part of the journey for me. As an auditory person, that sound was all I needed to make me feel like I was there, cramped in a cold dark room, wondering my fate and the fate of my family, and all for what? For being an academic? For being falsely accused by a neighbor? For breathing? The tour also reminds us that we may think it could never happen in our country today, but they never thought it could happen in Cambodia either. As with anything, it starts slow and picks up speed. What begins as an attempt by the government and the people to improve the economy eventually becomes a "weeding out" of anyone who doesn't "support the cause," which leads down a chaotic and dangerous path. We learned that there were a handful of foreigners amongst the prisoners as well; another connection that makes it all the more difficult to process what occurred there. Finally, a haunting image that I had difficulty getting through, was that of the Killing Tree, which executioners used as a post against which they'd beat young children and babies. They would grab them by the ankles, swing, and then toss them into a nearby mass grave. Even typing this makes me shake a little, perhaps moreso now than when I was there, because it's just too much for the brain to process. Too much pain to know that this happened and that you are standing where it happened. Throughout the site, there are bracelets made of thread or beads. I'm not sure where all of them come from, but I had one on my wrist for quite a while that I received from a monk in a wat in Chiang Mai. It somehow never fell off after almost a year. I felt that was where I should leave it. So I hung it on the tree with the rest of them. My small prayer. My acknowledgement. There are still many pieces of clothing, bones, and items left to be discovered around the site. While some graves have been excavated, some remain undisturbed. About 5,000 of the skulls that were found are now inside of a multi-leveled memorial stupa, organized by gender and age. A sign on the outside reading, "Would you please kindly show your respect to many million people who were killed under the genocidal Pol Pot Regime." One of the final facts they tell you in the journey is that Pol Pot went on to live a long, healthy, and happy life. Unlike a handful of the guards who are being prosecuted for their crimes, Pol Pot himself never had to feel remorse or truly face consequences for his leadership of a mass genocide in his own country. It hurts to hear someone who has directly suffered from the Khmer Rouge tell you about their loss and Pol Pot's gain. Yet another bitter pill to swallow.

A quick lunch at a nearby restaurant, some iced coffee, and we were soon on our way back to the city to go to the Security Prison S-21, a school that was taken over by the Khmer Rouge, turned into a prison, and is now a genocide museum open to the public. Since the prison was a former high school, it was even more eerie walking down the halls that were once filled with children learning. Some of the levels had rooms that were turned into crude jail cells made of brick or concrete blocks. There is an exercise bar in the courtyard of the school that was turned into a torture device to get the prisoners to confess to their crimes. Like the Salem witch trials of the 17th century, anyone could accuse anyone and the torture was designed to force people to confess for crimes that they probably didn't commit. Another unsettling part of the genocide was the letters that prisoners were forced to write. A section of the museum contains booklets of copies of letters from prisoners that all follow the same construct: True facts about the person's birth and life, including information about their parents and where they lived. Then about why they were in Cambodia and what they were doing at the time they were arrested. And only the last paragraph or line or word, it will say something relating to how they are a part of the CIA or how they planned to overtake the Pol Pot Regime. Perhaps the strangest one for me was that of an Australian expat who was arrested and most likely taken to the Killing Fields. His letter talks about his parents and his loved ones, how he lived in San Diego and moved to Los Angeles. It describes a life that could have been my own and only at the very end, as its own paragraph, it says CIA agent number 324 (I made up the number, but you get the point). It made it that much clearer about how the Khmer Rouge forced these "confessions" out of people. Many of the foreigners who went through S-21 were merely traveling on a boat to somewhere else when they accidentally drifted into Cambodian waters. Of all the prisoners that went through Tuol Sleng, only 12 are known to have survived. Because of the extensive record keeping of every prisoner, there were many, many, many pictures lining the walls of the museum, every one as anonymous as the last.

Thankfully, the weight of these two sites was gradually lifted off of us as our next stop was the royal palace, which looked a lot like Bangkok's royal palace. It was filled with the usual gilded throne halls, libraries, silver-lined floors, shrines, and artfully detailed architecture. As it started to thunderstorm when we were here, we decided to cut our journey short and finish the tour the next day.

Refreshed from a night of margaritas and delicious food, we set out the following morning to Wat Phnom which is on "a tree-covered knoll" that is "the only hill in town." I love any place that is called a knoll. When does a knoll become a hill? We'll never know. Though I've seen my fair share of wats/temples/mosques by now, this beautiful, cozy wat actually had a little uniqueness to offer, my favorite being the sculptures of Buddha inside.

From here, the combination of getting slightly lost and being incredibly cheap meant a 2 hour walk to finally arrive at one of my favorite parts of our Phnom Penh trip: Eating tarantulas. The restaurant, Romdeng, is part of the TREE alliance and Friends International which sets out to train street children in the art of hospitality, cooking, and all skills needed in running a restaurant. I got more and more excited as I learned about the various components of the program, which is extremely successful and only getting bigger. I'm going to go on a quick side-rant here because programs like TREE, Friends, and Global Medical Brigades (which I had the opportunity to participate in while in college) have always reminded me of exactly what I want to do with my life. It's something that I haven't otherwise been able to explain and it's also something that's not easy to find. Learning about self-sustaining programs that work to improve the lives of communities, not by coming in and telling them what's what, but by working with them and through them to better them. I never find myself more inspired or more excited than I do when I hear or talk about these successful programs that implement innovative and genius strategies to get communities interested and be successful in revolutionizing a city or country for the better. Again, difficult to explain, but at 22, I'm happy to have even the vaguest ideas of where I'd like to go in my career.

Okay, back to the spiders. You can order the fried tarantulas, or you can get a salad with red ants. Opting for the crazier choice, the four of us readied our stomachs and our minds to consume something I never thought I'd learn the taste of. If you're more of a Type B and don't desire to do this yourself, but kind of wonder what it's like, it tastes like french fries that are a little bit fuzzy. It's actually pretty good, if one can overcome the fact that they're eating a tarantula. Of course right after we ate them, the waiter came out with a live one, which, when I held it in my hand, immediately went into a stance that looked really threatening. Maybe it smelled its brother on my breath? (ew) As if that wasn't enough, after we asked where they get the tarantulas from (we were debating about whether they caught them or bred them themselves), he asked if we wanted to see. And that is how I found myself staring at a plastic bag filled to the brim with creepy crawly hairy live tarantulas. Just a plastic bag. With tarantulas. That are about to be cooked and eaten. If I could only keep two memories of Cambodia, this would be one of them (the second, if you haven't guessed already, would be Angkor Wat, but that's a different story for a different city).

At night was when we finally got to see the main opposition party to CPP (number 4), which is candidate number 7, the Cambodian National Rescue Party. Meeting up with a friend of a friend who was born and raised in Phnom Penh, we learned a lot more about what the two parties mean to the people. CPP has been the ruling party of Cambodia for about 30 years now and has been successful in uniting the country and moving forward. That being said, the CNRP is the Obama of Cambodia. In fact, their main motto is "Change or no change? Change!" The CNRP is more likely to be supported by the youth, who have not had to feel the pain of having a regime in power that destroys your people from the inside out, and feel that change is what will spark the economy and create jobs for the people. The CPP is more likely to be supported by the elderly, who rightfully feel that it has been good and stable, so let's keep it that way. We also learned that the CPP is government funded, and people who rally for them get tons of free swag to support the campaign. CNRP on the other hand is only supported by the people, which explained why they had much fewer t-shirts, hats, flags, and, well, people driving around on motorbikes. At the end of the day, I'd probably be voting for 7.

And here we set out to Siem Reap with a morning bus ride through the lusciously green countryside. [Side note: Siem Reap means "Siam defeated" in Cambodian. That's just hilarious to me. A big middle finger to good old Thailand.] The bus ride also included some Cambodian TV, which involved a lot of people talking on stage and pulling really weird stunts that usually made fun of children. For example, I spent 5 minutes watching two kids break dance and then freeze when the music stopped and the host would put them in embarrassing positions, often with sexual innuendos. 5 minutes of that was enough for me. Since pretty much every person traveling through Cambodia either goes from Phnom Penh to Siem Reap or vice versa, many hostels have connections in both cities. It's one of those systems that is set up to hook a tourist from the start, but it's not actually shady or annoying. Everybody wins. So we had a tuktuk waiting for us at Siem Reap to take us to the sister hostel of the one we stayed at in Phnom Penh and since Siem Reap is the size of a thimble, the location was perfect (it takes about 5 minutes to walk just about anywhere in the city). Our trip to the supermarket for snacks and water was what led us to discover the glory of cheese cupcakes. Yes. Cheese cupcakes. Now I don't know if you're the type of person who's immediate reaction is intrigue or disgust, but 3 of the 4 of us on this trip responded immediately with the former. Which is why I can tell you now that they taste like the best version of a synthetic cheesecake topped cheese frosting filled vanilla cupcake that you'll ever have. Also, alcohol is incredibly cheap in Siem Reap. The lowest prices we've seen in all of Southeast Asia. I was half tempted to buy a Corona (oh how I miss those), but resisted and stuck with the local Ankor beer.

With the multitude of tour books, tour guides, and sites on the internet talking about the Angkor Temples, it's easy to get overwhelmed by all of the stories and suggestions of the best way to explore Angkor, including the time of day (Should you see the sunrise or sunset? Which temples should you go to for each? Should you try to avoid the times when all the tour groups will be there? What about cloudy days?), the order you should see the temples in (Should you jump in head first and go straight for the Angkor Wat? Or should you start small and build up to it?), the transport you should use (Should you do the small circuit by bike and the big circuit by tuktuk? Should you get a tuktuk in town or hire one later on?), right down to what you should wear (Are these ruins or active temples? Should I bring footwear I can climb in? What about shorts are those okay?). Times like these I remind myself that a little bit of planning is good, but sometimes it's better to let things fall where they may. Luckily for me, that's exactly how it happened. I finally decided that it would be best to start small and get big (I got this idea from the time I went to Six Flags Magic Mountain with my friends who had season passes and they took me from the smallest ride to the biggest and the day ended up being the best ever), because after seeing Angkor Wat, I'm sure every other wat will be uneventful and small. As I mentioned, there's a small circuit and a big circuit. Since Angkor Wat is on the small circuit, which can be biked to, the next decision was obvious: We'll take a tuktuk tomorrow for the temples on the big circuit, then do the early morning bike ride to see the sunrise at Angkor Wat on the small circuit. The group was on board and I think it turned out to be a great plan.

You can buy a 1-day, 3-day or 1-month pass to the wats. The pass is super official and includes your picture. Coming from someone who loves to collect movie stubs, this was an awesome souvenir. I won't go into too many details about each temple itself, since that can be looked up online. Instead, I'll describe what it was like to visit all the temples in general. One of my favorite parts about the temples of Angkor is that every single one is different from the last. There are some that are high above ground and look out upon green trees and forest. Others remain on the ground but are covered by the shade of the trees and have more of an Indiana Jones feel to them. Some have huge pathways that are lined with immense sculptures that tell stories with their expressions alone. And still others are surrounded by water, an oasis of history. With no two temples alike, it's easy to get lost in the ruins, imagining buildings where there's rubble, climbing on stones that represent years of an ancient history of kings and battles. With multiple rulers and varying religions taking over the area, some temples will have a Buddha that was added later. One of my favorites include the Lingas, which are a phallic representation of the Hindu deity Shiva. One of these replaced a sacred Buddha in the temples. My other favorite is the god who had an appetite so ravenous, he ate his own body. His face is often seen above the entrance or exit of the walkways. And lastly I love the apsaras, which are mostly prominent on Angkor Wat itself, more than 3000 unique "heavenly nymphs" with a multitude of hairstyles.

After the first day, we went back to the city to get some "Traditional Cambodian Massages" which is about as much of a marketing ploy as any "Traditional (insert Southeast Asian country here) Massages." It ended up being a woman kind of doing whatever on our backs, legs, arms, and neck for an hour. It didn't really seem like they had a plan while they did it but it was still pretty fun because it was the four of us with four Cambodian women all together. So there was a lot of, "Oh do you have a boyfriend?? Why nooot? You are beautiful!" If you are not a girl or if you haven't lived in a foreign country, you should know that, at least in my experience, this is a very common way that locals and expats try to relate to each other when either party knows little of the other party's language.

One thing that comes with tourism is locals trying to sell you things. Depending on my mood, I either feel frustrated that such relics are being taken over by modern-day consumerism, or intrigued by the idea that, though these temples were once sacred, they're now something I can freely roam around in as someone who has no relation whatsoever to their history, and that comes with people trying to make a living. At the end of the one of the temples was a group of children, about 5-8 years old, with their trays of postcards, keychains, and other kitschy items. One of the girls came up to me and in what seemed like one breath, asked if I wanted to buy postcards and proceeded to count to me in English, French, and Spanish. When I tried to turn her down, she asked if I wanted to play tic-tac-toe in the dirt with her. She was one of the more persistent children and it was clear that she easily gets customers with her cutesy appeal. There were a lot of places in Cambodia that had the children working instead of/in addition to the parents. With a population of almost 40% under the age of 14 and 60-70% under the age of 30, the amount of children in general is astounding. I felt an immediate response of feeling like these children should be in school instead of working; the immediate white man's burden of witnessing child labor and wanting to change it. But I realized that I probably have it backwards. Not only are these kids getting real-world experience in the field of tourism and hospitality, they're doing it in 4 languages. They know more at age 5 than I probably do now. Not only that, but it's clear they aren't suffering it all. In some cases, they obviously enjoy it. They've learned by now how to choose someone to sell to, how to schmooze them into buying your items, and how to make a profit. If anything, Cambodia's figured it out more than much of India has. The children of India can fend for themselves, but in a very different way; one that involves more begging than working. And sometimes it felt like Cambodia was happier because of it. Their poverty does not mean they're struggling to have things, they're just trying to have nicer things. They don't need a roof and some food, they just want a TV and maybe some toys. It's poverty, but it's different poverty.

The next morning we left around 4 am on $2 bikes we rented the night before in order to make the sunrise coming over Angkor Wat. This may have been one of the crazier things I've done, since the bikes didn't have lights or reflectors, and sometimes the road didn't either, and it was definitely still very dark outside. Luckily the route is as easy as it gets, go down the street and straight on 'til morning. It took us about 40 minutes to get there and we made it just as the sky started to get a little lighter blue. And though the road was fairly empty during the ride, when we got there, as my dad always says, "Heeeeere's everybody." There were probably about 150 people or so, but this is during the low season. I easily imagined what it could look like during the peak of traveling season. We got some street sandwiches (isn't it great when the French occupied a place? Always delicious food left behind) reminiscent of Vietnam and made our way to a lake in front of the main entrance to the Wat. We've had a few, "Get up for the sunrise you don't want to miss it" attempts in our lives, Julia more than I, and this one was definitely one of the best, if not THE best I've experienced. The gradual change in color from purple, to midnight blue, to the orange color of the twilight hour (the time when everybody's eyes look as beautiful as they'll ever be, and everybody's skin is a glowing gold color), to the sunny yellow and blue of day. All while the Wat is reflected on the water. The wat itself has an insane amount of detail. Every pillar, stone carving, bas-relief, and ceiling was intricately worked on. My favorite story, and the most popular, was the Churning of the Ocean of Milk, which showed up throughout the temples of Angkor, particularly along the walkways to the entrances (gods on one side, demons on the other). The Bayon, another wat that's part of the small circuit is awesome (used in its original sense) in its own right. It's covered in faces pieced together with the stone and makes you feel like you are in a Tomb Raider/Indiana Jones movie. We hung out on the third tier for a bit, people watching the weird tourists and snacking on pineapples.

I mentioned before that no two temples were the same, but if I had to pick one common thread that united them all it was so. many. stairs. It felt like the stairs kept getting steeper too. For some of them I had to use my hands to climb my way up. Each temple has at least two levels, but more often three or four. Angkor Thom, which is North of Angkor Wat, was once a bustling city, which means it has an endless amount of buildings that you get to walk up and down. With the bike ride there, the walking, the STAIRS, and the bike ride home, I had had enough exercise to last me for some time, and the legs of a Tour de France champion. Since the temples in Angkor are a UNESCO world heritage site, there has been a lot of restoration to reinforce the structure as well as recreate some of the sculptures to show how they may have looked when the temples were in their prime. They're using a method called anastylosis (in Greek, "to erect again") which restores/reconstructs a ruin by using the materials that were used at the time it was built, or the closest thing to it. It's a compromise between not rebuilding at all and rebuilding completely so that nothing resembles what it would be today. I have to say I highly approve of the process. Every once in a while there will be a statue that is in ruins on one side and its counterpart will have been restored. You get to walk on the ruins while easily imagining what the site once was.

That evening we set out to explore the Siem Reap night life which consisted of a lot of 50 cent beer and briefly entering but quickly avoiding places like Angkor What? Which is a bar that sports the motto "Promoting irresponsible drinking since 1998" and has artwork that is just graffiti all over its walls. Definitely a backpacker's heaven.

The next day we were able to explore the town a bit more and do some shopping. Some places on the outskirts of town have the same annoying vendors constantly yelling for the 5 minutes it takes you to pass them, "Hey lady! You buy my stuff! Lady! I have bags for you!" But once you get into the main market area, you can quietly wander the aisles to find the usual t-shirts, trinkets, and gaudy jewelry.

I hope I didn't miss anything! While writing this entry I made sure to go back and enter any details I could remember along the way, so you definitely got a thorough entry. And there you have it, my take on our Cambodia trip.