Red Zebra Labs

On to Phnom Penh. What an interesting place. From the second we stepped off the bus it felt like a big 3rd world city. I guess that’s an odd thing to say after being in the 3rd world for the past month, but it did. Then again, this was the second “big city” we’d been to in the past month, well, 3 if you count Singapore (Bangkok being the other one). Right after we got off the bus a hoard of tuk-tuk drivers came up to us and wanted to take us to our guesthouse. Only when we told them where we wanted to go the drivers tried to get us somewhere else, saying “It’s closed” or “This place is same same”. Then we’d have to bargain for the price. Eventually we got to where we wanted to go, for the right price.

Phnom Penn has no public transportation system. The city has roughly 1.5 million people. To get around you walk (which can be tedious in 40 degree heat), you rent a motorbike or you get moto drivers, tuk tuk or taxis to drive you around. Many taxis don’t have metres, so you need to agree on a price beforehand, which for westerners is often inflated. Bargaining is key. While I’m talking about getting around, most 4 way intersections do not have stop lights. Or even a UK-style roundabout. Really. Imagine the intersection of Peel and St Catherine street, or Sherbrooke and Guy/Cote des Neiges. Now imagine them without traffic lights. Now replace the cars with many motorbikes. Now try and cross the street. Jody told me he’d read somewhere there are about 6 traffic deaths a day in Phnom Penh. I can believe it.

When we weren’t bargaining or dodging motorbikes, we saw a few sights. We took a moto-taxi to the Killing Fields, 20 minutes out of town. The is the site of the mass graves that the Khmer Rouge dug in the late 70′s. Like Hiroshima, this was not an easy place to visit. Various spots around the site were marked with signposts, like “In this grave 240 bodies of women and children were found here” or “This is where the truck from S-21 would park and the prisoners would be led out and killed”. In the middle sits a memorial stupa with skulls, bones and scraps of clothing. Not easy to take in.

We headed back into town and saw the National Museum, which wasn’t super interesting to us, and then headed towards Toul Sleng Museum, or S-21, a school that was taken over by the Khmer Rouge and used as a prison. Prisoners were tortured and imprisoned here for months or years before being taken for execution at the Killing Fields. We could actually walk into the former classrooms that had been partitioned into cells. In some rooms photos of people being tortured and in the middle of the room would be the same torture devices and shackles. Once again, not an easy place to be. I left the place shaken from the atrocities human beings are capable of doing to each other.

While we were going from place to place, people would be coming up to us for money, tuk tuks, and trying to sell us things. We’d leave one place and would be asked “You go Killing Fields? Shooting range?” Women would come up to us with naked babies and empty bottles, and even the baby would have their hand out asking for “dolla”. Kinda surreal, in a way. And yet they wouldn’t take food from us, or ask any local people for money. Only the white people.

Our next destination was to be Vietnam. We found out that for the same price as a bus to Saigon (Ho Chi Mihn City) we could take a boat into the Mekong delta. Since we were thinking about going to that area anyway, it worked out nicely. There were 2 Dutch girls who were doing the same. WE took a van about an hour out of Phnom Penh on sometimes paved sometimes dirt road, then got on a a small wooden boat. We passed by many fields and small homes near the water.

After lunch at an overpriced restaurant at the border crossing we got on another, larger boat bound for Chau Doc. What a difference between the 2 sides of the river. The Vietnam side had more people, better boats, more infrastructure. Small children would see the boat and wave and yell “HELLO! HELLO!”. I was not expecting such a warm welcome from the locals.

After a bit of an adventure in trying to get money from several bank machines and figuring where we were relative to the centre of town, we started walking. We were followed by 2 riskhaw drivers who kept trying to get us to ride with them, but kept changing the price (first they said 10000 dong, then 10000 each, plus a second one for our bags). After half an hour of being nothing but useless pests they left us be. Finding where we were trying to go was a bit of a pain to, since many buildings had 2 numbers on them, the building number and the unit number. Eventually we found where we wanted to go.

Once we settled in Jody decided to take a bike ride out to a mountain and I decided to stay in, relax and eat. I had my first bowl of Pho, aka noodle soup. After Jody returned we made travel plans for the next few days. We discovered the guesthouse also booked tours and onward bus transportation. For about 25$ each we got a tour of local fish farms, silk markets, vermicelli “factory” and local villages, the floating market outside Cantho, one night accommodation and ground transportation. We went to bed excited to begin our Vietnamese leg of the trip.

(We were in Phnom Phen April 8-10, 2010)