Phnom Penh, Cambodia

9/28

The rain hasn't let up for a few hours. I'm eating my second slice of cake for dinner. Lipton Tea. I feel like I'm coming down a bit. Too much sugar in the vanilla cake. I shouldn't of had that second slice.

The name of the establishment is the Kiwi bakery. About 100 feet from the hotel, it was established by the locals a few years back after they returned from their sojourn abroad in New Zealand. We probably eat there at least once a day in our current four day stay in Phnom Penh. They have everything you would ever want. Fresh coffee, rolls, and eggs and bacon, although the later makes you run to the W.C. quite quickly.

We are staying in the nice part of town, nearby the river. It reminds me of a Cambodian Embarcadero as in San Francisco. Huge promenades, cool breezes, choppy waters, save the Tuk-Tuk hecklers and paraplegic vendors. We spend most of our evenings strolling the river, trying out different foods and drinking cheap Angkor Beer. I drink it more for the body cooling than the alcohol.

If you enter any Cambodian restaurant here, the first item you will most likely see is Amok. Amok can best be described as a coconut curry, egg-like dish with your choice of meat, served on a bed of rice and banana leaves. It's great going down, but they like to add their helpings of MSG.

If you turn the page on the menu, you're most likely going to find a dish called Luk-Luk. A tasty meat treat, it's usually a roasted stir-fry beef dish served with roasted tomatoes. Probably my favorite over the Amok, but still a bit greasy on the stomach.

The best item on the menu so far has been the Cambodian shakes. Coconut, Papaya, you name it just drink it. The two of us have drank down at least one a day, and by far it's been the most satisfying. Being in the tropics, Cambodian serves up some of the best fruits around. In addition to the above, street vendors crouch along the sidewalks serving everything from sliced pineapple to watermelon to banana halves. Don't worry about trying to look for it, as all you need to do is to walk on the main street before you get bombarded from the locals with offers.

----------------


9/27

Phnom Penh is to Siem Reap as New York is to the Catskills, L.A. to its Disneyland, or Washington D.C. to its Colonial Williamsburg. Phnom Penh, being the country's capital brings an urban feel. The buildings are taller, the traffic is more dense, and the noise is louder. We take a walking tour on our first day. Here are some things that stood out in my mind:

• The first thing is that all the streets are numbered and are arranged in a gridlike fashion. The Odd Numbers running North-South, and the Even Numbers running east-west. The problem is that half of the street signs are missing, so you basically think in terms of landmarks, such as "Take a right after the Cambodian Post office, then take a left after the Fruit stand", either way it's not too hard to get where you need to go.
• There are two markets in town, an old market and a new market. Here are some comparisons:

Style/Decor
New Market: 6 tiered dome with air conditioning
Old Market: An Old wooden dome with no a/c

Customer Service
New Market: modern; Escalator trainees available
Old Market: Vendors and touts available on site on site even if you don't want them

What to buy
New Market: Obnoxious clothing at expensive
Old Market: Not as obnoxious clothing prices by Cambodian Standards at cheaper prices by all standards

What to eat
New Market: Swenson's Ice Cream; Organic meats, A/C inside the grocery store
Old Market: Fried rolls and stinky fish, no A/C for eating

-Both markets have their advantages. I successfully buy a polo shirt for $6. For some reason, I begin to wonder if I've bought the real thing, or if I've just contributed to sweatshop labor.

• We visit Cambodia's Royal Palace, which looks a lot like Thailand's Royal palace. There's lots of statues of Mr. Morodon, Cambodia's first king. Lots of Garudas and Snakes. The highlight is this place called the Silver Pagoda. Fair enough, Lisa and I walk through the complex looking for the Pagoda. We pass various beautiful temples, concert halls and the like. We see a beautiful temple with many buddhas, one of them Emerald, a few of them golden, one from Myanmar (or Burma, or whatever you call it right now), and a few from Thailand. We walk to the end of the palace confused, wondering where the silver pagoda was. At 10 minutes to close, we realize that we had just walked through it. The silver pagoda is not silver on the outside, but has 15 panels of silver flooring on the inside. So much for bait and switch advertising. All and All, a beautiful set of temples.

-------------------
9/28

Shooting it up at the Killing Fields

Today is going to be an interesting day, although I wouldn't say today will be fun.
Today we step back in time to roughly thirty years ago to the height of Cambodia's Khmer Rouge. Officially started in 1975 by Pol Pot, Brother #1, The Khmer Rouge took the lives of roughly two million people. He started quite popular, to be a man of the people as he ousted the quite unpopular American Backed General Lon Nol. Like most dictators, paranoia and xenophobia give in, as Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge begins to kill anyone even remotely skeptical of the establishment. Soon he turns on his own soldiers. It's not until the Vietnamese invade in 1978 until Pol Pot is ousted. Even so, another decade of turmoil and famine would follow until elections would take place and a sense of stability returned.

We have a tuk-tuk driver lined up through the hotel, who will take us to two places: The Tuol Sleng Museum (a high school that was converted to a maximum security Khmer Rouge prison), and Choeung Ek (the mass killing field graves of the Khmer Rouge victims).


The Tuol Sleng Museum

It's quite hard to describe this place with simple words. I would imagine that it would be similar to the Nazi camps of Auschwitz and Dachau. The best way to describe it would be to list some of the rules of the prison:

• Do nothing. Sit and wait for my orders. If there is no order, keep quiet. When I ask you to do something, you must do it right away without protesting.
• While getting lashes or electrification you must not cry at all.
• If you do not follow all of the rules, you shall get many lashes of electric wire

You get an eerie feeling walking along the grounds of Tuol Sleng, knowing that it was once a high school. We see interrogation rooms with pointed rods and gallows, where prisoners would be tortured. The "sleeping establishments"are no more than 7 feet by 3 feet in dimension. We watch a movie about some of the people that live through it. One of the survivors was a painter who luckily was forced to paint, although shackled, and managed to survive the regime.

The killing fields of Choeung Ek

About 10 miles outside the city, we reach Choeung Ek, where thousands of people are said to be bludgeoned to death and buried. We walk in, and the fields are strangely quiet and serene, like nothing ever happened. Until you reach the stupa where some of the remains lay. One thing that strikes Lisa is the killing tree, where they would attach a radio loudspeaker to the branches to prevent excessive crying noises from permeating throughout the area.

After an hour's time, we've had enough. We hop back into the Tuk Tuk and get ready to drive back. He then turns to us with a serious question, and asks us if we'd like to go shooting now. I guess in Cambodia, some of the old rifle ranges are now tourist attractions where tourists can have their luck shooting up some of the old livestock. A surreal moment in the trip, Lisa and I turn to each other and respond with a firm "no". We've had enough death for one day.

---------------------

So the bus is rolling out of the station once again bright and early to Ho Chi Minh City. Stay tuned.

Travelling Sherman

PS. Cambodia pictures should be up by tomorrow or so. Check the "Travelling Sherman's pictures" link --> Cambodia by then.