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)

Our first experience with Cambodia and scams occurred before we even crossed the border. We had lunch with a guy from Hong Kong, then the 3 of us got a tuk-tuk to the border. Only the tuk tuk didn’t take us there directly. Instead we were taken to a shack-like, well, shack where some men in uniforms gave us Cambodian immigration papers, then told us it would cost 1200 baht (about 40$) to get our visas. Jody and I already had our e-visas, but the guy we were with had to pay before they’d drive us the rest of the way to the border. Once we got there, I noticed the actual price of the visa on arrival was closer to 20$. Jerks.

After a long wait at immigration we got through were in Cambodia. Unlike Thailand and Laos, Cambodia doesn’t have any government-run public transportation system. Or maybe they do and we didn’t see it. In any case, we had to find our way to Siem Reap, about 2 ½ hours away. We got on a free shuttle from the immigration checkpoint to the bus station with 2 other white couples, where a local guy stood up and said that we should change all our money into riel (the national currency) because no one takes baht. We could use the US dollar but everything would cost more, because they can’t give change in US money (ie if we paid for something that was 2000 riel with a 1$ bill we wouldn’t get change. 4000 riel = 1USD). And of course, when we got a bottle of water from the bus station and Jody paid in baht he got a terrible rate. But we kind of expected this, right?

Have I mentioned Cambodia is notorious for ripping of white people?

Once we got to the station, we had a choice of taking a shared taxi, or a bus. The guys were trying to get us into a cab for 48$, and we said it was too much, even for 4 people (12$). We were told this was the best rate in town. The bus wouldn’t be leaving for 3 more hours. After threatening to leave, we got it down to 40$, all the way to our guesthouse. The rest stop we fuelled up at told us we could only use the bathroom for free is we bought something. Once we were near Siem Reap the driver stopped, said cars were not allowed into the city proper, and that we could take a tuk tuk for free into the city. The catch was, we had to book a temple tour with that tuk tuk driver the next day for 20$, or he’d charge us 5$ each. We argued, then decided we’d take the ride, then change hotels. The driver took us to a guesthouse, but I really liked it so we decided to stay (dumb move on my part). We told the driver we wanted him to pick us up at 9am, thought Jody and I already decided we wanted to go for sunrise. So we arranged with our guesthouse a tuk tuk driver to come very early, and a whole day for 15$. Sounds good so far.

So, at the hour of super-early we woke up and met our driver. We bought our tickets and headed to a small reservoir for sunrise. We heard Angkor Wat was great to see at sunrise, but had a tendency to be really crowded. So we decided to save it for last. When we arrived at Sras Sorong we were greeted by a crowd of children trying to sell us coffee, books and trinkets. They were pretty relentless, and when we politely declined whatever it was they were selling they would ask “Why you no buy?” Heart wrenching. The kids would even ask where we were from, and then reply “Canada, capital city Ottawa”. Great, but you probably can’t read the words Ottawa or Canada, or point out either on a map.

We visited about a dozen sites during the course of the day. We found the temples that had the most decay to be the most interesting. We saw temples with so much decay trees were growing around them. Amazing. Another, the Bayon, had all these faces carved in it. Angkor Wat, our last stop, felt anti climatic after everything we’d seen all day. The main facade was also under renovation, making it a bit of a eyesore to photograph. Fortunately, the back is very similar to the front, so we went there for pictures.

We headed back to the guesthouse for food and drinks. In one of the guidebooks we saw a bunch of pizza places that had names like “Happy Angkor Pizza” or “Ecstatic Pizza”. I wasn’t sure if Jody believed me when I told him it’s not uncommon to put marijuana on pizza here. In any case, we decided pizza would be a nice treat. The menu didn’t say anything outright, but when we made our order the guy asked if we’d like our pizza “happy”. When in Rome…

At around 6am the next morning I woke up and noticed Jody wasn’t in bed. He was at the door telling someone “It’s 6am, come back later and we’ll talk then”. It was the tuk tuk driver from 2 days ago! He’s come by the previous day and someone working at the guesthouse told him which room we were in. Needless to say, we changed guesthouses!* The driver was trying to tell us we owed him money because he’d come the day before and we weren’t there. I can’t remember what Jody said to him but we gave him a few dollars and he buggered off. That is, after we declined his offer to take us to a different guesthouse. WTF?

Once we find another place we visited a silk-production workshop. It was really neat to watch people prepare silk and use the looms all by hand. It was with a group that does fair trade artisan crafts. I picked up a small camera case, my old one had fallen into the depths of Lumpini stadium a few days earlier. That evening we walked around the night market and the appropriately named Pub Street. For a city of its size Siem Reap has a lot going on. Then again, it’s mostly for tourists.

Part 2 – Phnom Penh is coming up.

** The guesthouse was the European Guesthouse. It’s mention in Rough Guide, not Lonely Planet.

(We were in Cambodia April 4-9 2010)