Phnom Penh

It's been a great 2 days in Phnom Penh. The hotel (Kambuja Inn) we are in (recommended by these 2 girls we met in an internet cafe in Siem Reap) is one of the nicest, cleanest places I've been in a while, and a bargain at $20/night for the room. Huge bathroom, a/c and fan, 14 foot ceilings, and very very clean.

When we got in yesterday we went to the Vietnamese embassy and dropped off our passports... very efficient, and only $30, w/ less than 24 hour turnaround (and they came through, we picked them up today!)

Our tuk-tuk driver then offered to take us out to the Killing Fields (Cheong Ek), so we took him up on it. Little did we know that the road there was unpaved, incredibly bumpy, flooded in places, and practically impossible to drive with a tuk-tuk. We saw tens if not hundreds of motorcycles, a few cars, and precisely 2 other tuk tuks making the journey. Our insides were jostled and at one point I hit my head hard enough that I was mildly worried about a concussion.

The Killing Fields are not at ALL what I expected. The grounds are green and serene, and there are lots of trees with beautiful flowers. The grounds are almost hilly, because of all the mass graves that they discovered and dug up. There is a very tall tower (I don't know what it's called) that's a sort of memorial temple, and there are 8 stories of shelves with thousands of skulls of victims on them.

Signs mark where all the buildings and execution sites used to be, but nothing is there anymore. The fields are near the river, and there are cattle grazing everywhere.

It was very sobering, and just hard to fathom that such atrocities took place there. Additionally, at that particular site most of the people were clubbed to death--I think to both save ammunition, and to keep people in the area from knowing what was going on.

After a bumpy ride back, we cleaned up and walked around the corner for dinner. We stopped to kind of look at the menu at "Chilli's" and about 15 waitresses, who were inside behind the bar and around the pool table, enthusiastically greeted us and ushered us in... it would have been rude to walk away at that point!!!

We were the only patrons, and it turns out that place is kind of a Cambodian version of Hooters (there was also a Hooter's around the corner... and I think it might actually be a real Hooter's, but I'll have to check their website to be sure). The waitresses at "Chilli's" all wore microscopic blue stretch mini-skirts and hot pink tank tops.

We sat upstairs and ordered and then 2 of the waitresses asked if we wanted to play pool, so we played a few rounds while waiting for our food, which was awesome (albeit a little odd). The one insisted I looked Cambodian, which was kind of funny.

This morning we slept in for the first time since I got here, and then hired tuk-tuk for the day. We had lunch visited the temple Wat Phnom up in the French Quarter, and there were monkeys in the trees! We then visited the Genocide Museum, which was unreal. The museum is housed in a former secondary school that was used as a detention center where the Khmer Rouge imprisoned and tortured thousands of people, coercing false confessions.

Probably the worst part was the rooms and rooms of pictures of victims. The Khmer Rouge took photos of everyone they imprisoned... it's just awful to look at all these faces, some resigned, some scared, some defiant, and know that they all died. I think the statistic is something like only 7 of the prisoners at that facility survived and were rescued when the Vietnamese invaded and liberated the country.

There really just aren't words.

We left the museum and went to one of the markets. We bought some bootleg DVDs, some jewelry, etc. then we went and procured bus tickets, because tomorrow we leave for Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City. We had thought about taking a boat through the Mekong Delta, but the way the route is set up, you end up having to spend the night in a town along the way, and take a bus for the last portion. We decided to instead take a day trip to the Mekong from Saigon once we're there and just take a bus to Saigon from Phnom Penh.

We left the hotel to walk to dinner, and stopped at this awesome boutique. 1 hour and $100 later we walked out with some deals of the century on silk purses. Every item in the store was gorgeously made, very cute, and supremely inexpensive. $5 for a beautiful silk evening clutch? It was hard not to buy everything in the store.

We finally made it to dinner, and soon we're heading back to pack because our tuk tuk driver is going to pick us up to go to the bus station at 7am.

Phnom Penh is a pretty neat city. There are gorgeous temples and buildings (and then rundown ones of course), vibrant bustling markets, crazy busy streets with thousands of people on motos, and gorgeous riverfront (though the water is gross) and parks where people gather to just sit outside and fly kites, and lots of restaurants.

Unfortunately there is also a lot of poverty, tons of street kids and beggars, and the worst of it is that many of them are amputees of some variety due to landmines and the war.

Cambodia has somewhere in the neighborhood of 40,000 amputees!!!! Also 45% of the population is under age 15.

For as horrible of a RECENT past as this country has suffered, the people for the most part are super-friendly, very helpful, and seem content.

The trip so far has been very eye-opening, and has also made me realize some of the limits of my own adventurism. I've lived in, and experienced much worse, but I'm unwilling to now. I mean... I lived in the slums of Nouakchott, but I won't consider a hotel room without A/C, and I freaked out when we found a few small cockroaches roaming in our room in Bangkok. Being here tears at your heart and your conscience. It's horrible to be purchasing something frivilous, like a necklace, while a woman with a young child is begging you for money. It's hard to eat dinner on an outdoor patio when a child without legs tries to sell you books you don't want or need. And yet you do, and you wonder what that says about you...