Whilst I found Cambodia interesting it was not a country I necessarily enjoyed being in too much. It has a very dark recent history, someone did point out to me just the other day that everywhere has a dark past, too true but this was so recent and the current corruption and its effects so visible that every day it left a little weight in my heart.
From a practical point of view i.e. cycling, the only surfaced roads run around the Tonle Sap to Phnom Pehn and on to Vietnam. The road is straight and flat, you might think this makes for nice easy cycling but in reality its just dull, dull, dullity dull, dull, dull, oh hell its so dull. When you get a glimpse through the strip developement of ramshackle homes on stilts and naked children running around at the side of the road there is nothing but flatness as far as the eye can see. To get into the hills and villages you need to leave the tarmaced roads, which, it being the wet season, would have meant us carrying our bikes through knee deep mud along tracks, not an option which appealed as we can barely lift our bikes at the best of times. We did meet an American girl who had gone 40km along one such road, carrying her bike through knee deep mud, getting filthy, being taken in by villagers for the night, they killed a chicken for her, she gave them a photograph, then the next day she had to turn back along the same muddy road as there was no way she could get through. I have to say I am just thrilled that wasn't me, and not only because I'd have felt guilty about the chicken.
Cambodia is also a bit slim in the forest and wildlife department... if it walks, jumps, crawls, swims or slithers, its eaten. I'm not blaming the Cambodians here, when I was a child they were starving to death in their millions. However it does impact on wildlife, time and again we would pass stalls with live minah birds strung up by the legs for sale whilst there were none in the sky...really, how much eating can there be on a minah bird? For those who don't know the average minah bird is about the size of a starling, i.e. not very big at all. And the Cambodians have plastic sheet and strip light contraptions for catching all manner of minibeasts for frying in chilli sauce (though I've know idea how they catch the spiders, James reckons they're being bred for the pot...yum yum).
I learned a lot about the Khmer Rouge whilst I was there (considerable cause of my heavy heart) and it was disturbing to know that many of the people regularly smiling and waving at us from the side of the road had lived through the horrific hunger, torture and genocide (or were perpetrators of that genocide). If you ever want a snapshot of what life was like under the Khmer Rouge read "Stay Alive, My Son" by Pin Yathay, tis not a cheery tale but you'll get the picture. The current government is still one of the most corrupt in the world. The very wealthy few pay the powers that be to ensure they have a monopoly on goods and services (food imports, roads, national treasures etc) meaning they can fix really high prices on everything, however the average Cambodian earns such a tiny amount of money that they can never afford to buy anything, and the tourists don't hang around too long as it relatively expensive considering the relative abundance of its neighbours.
On the upside though the people of Cambodia have come through all this with their beautiful smiles always at the ready, possibly the smiliest people we've encountered to date, and the children, awwwwwww man, they were really cute, really, cutest children in the world, even in a bad mood you couldn't help but smile at them and their giggly cries of 'ello, 'ello, 'ellooooooo!!! At times we couldn't even see them as they'd be hidden in trees or bathing in ponds but we could hear them giggling and calling and so found ourselves just waving in the general direction of the cry and hoping we were seen. Aside from the heartwarmingly welcoming people of Cambodia, who treated us to smiles and waves all along the road the road itself was frequently fringed with beautifully abundant Lotus flowers which never fail to make me smile.
But on to the journey...we cycled from the border via Sisophon (little to comment on there) to Battambang which was a surprisingly lovely town where time was spent eating nice food, feeling sorry for the fish, frogs and other miscellaneous live 'foods' in the market and learning the finer points of Cambodian cookery, watch out for my veggie amok and spicy salad coming to a dinner party near you.
Whilst in Battambang we also hired some motorbikes (including drivers but sadly no helmets) to take us out along the dirt tracks to the killing caves and temples nearby. This is not something I would normally choose to do and for good reason, its a dark place which left me sad, empty and at a loss for words.
From Battambang we took a boat to Siem Reap, home of Angkor Wat. The boat trip itself, although conducted by a teenager with steering issues, gave us a good peak into the lives of people on the river and their floating homes, schools and shops. People punted from home to home selling fruit and veg, whilst others dressed in their finery were steered to wedding parties. They even had a floating water hyacinth craft centre, water hyacinths introduced to the area are blocking up the waterways at a worrying pace, as they do, so people using them to make stuff is just grand as far as I'm concerned.
Angkor Wat is THE attraction in Cambodia, infact I think many tourists only go to Angkor Wat, staying in five star resorts and so must come away with a really warped idea of what Cambodia is like. Anyway Angkor Wat is the centre piece of a huge complex of temples and palaces at the heart of the Khmer Empire of old. Angkor Wat itself I wasn't blown away by but this could have been to do with the renovation work and scaffolding which seems to dog most attractions I turn up to (I'm all for preservation and renovation though it does marr the view sometimes. I also went right at the end of the day so my brain was probably totally fried in the heat).
However Ta Phrom I just loved, the place has been swallowed by (and reclaimed from) the jungle, huge tree roots hug the ancient masonry, I just love it, the way nature just consumes humanities greatest with such elegance and disregard, blows me away it does, Ta Phrom is so atmospheric and beautiful, you can even escape the other tourists for a few moments by ducking through old passageways in which its easy to become disorientated but hey ho, I spend half my life disorientated, its not that great for navigating round cities but otherwise its a state I'm happy with.
After a bout of illness in Siem Reap we hoofed our way to the capital Phnom Penh stopping only to check out the spider snack capital en route but J bottled it and couldn't eat one (that time). Personally I love being veggie...'Nope, I can't eat that, I'm a vegetarian'. Brilliant excuse! Anyway it was an odd entry to a capital city, the closer we got the worse the road condition became, unusual as in most countries roads around capitals are pretty smart even if the rest of a country is falling to pieces but not Phnom Penh, and as you ride through the dust, grit and pollution the road is lined with brothels...there's nothing like a good first impression. Anyway Phnom Pehn is a weird one, it has prettiness and granduer in parts, you can promenade down the river and watch people doing some kind of dancercise which is clearly all the rage.Its main attraction though is the Silver Pagoda, temple of the Royal Palaces and the palaces themselves which were indeed very, very lovely. The other main place to visit (I'm not sure I'd call it an attraction) was the S21 prison camp, where Cambodians were detained and tortured. Alongside the killing caves we visited near Battambang this is the darkest place I have ever been. This will suck the light out of your soul. Prior to the Khmer Rouge's take over of Phnom Pehn this was a school but is now a museum to the horror that was their 3 years in power and the victims of the prison itself. The classrooms were converted to cells which have been retained as a have the torture devices the Khmer Rouge used and photos of the victims. All of these are disturbing but particularly so were the images of the many small children there, all scared, all killed yet meticulously documented. It was harrowing there's not much else to be said about it really, its crushing to realise how brutal the average human can be.
But despite its darkside, I'm glad I went to Cambodia, there is beauty and culture if you look for it, the people are just lovely (if partial to the odd grasshopper) and I learned a lot. It has a long way to go, and sorting out the corruption everywhere would be a good start (I saw a land mine charity building with hugely ornate electric lamps lining a road to an ostentatious building acting as its offices in the middle of NOWHERE, really if i was donating to that charity I'd be well pissed off, would they not have been better spending that money actually ridding the country of the land mines which injure and kill approx 30 people per month?!
tx
