Colors of Cambodia

Today's Thoughts...


A few weeks ago, as a belated Valentine’s Day/anniversary/why the heck not? trip, Dylan and I plodded (literally) our way to Cambodia, just across the Thai border. Now, I’ve never considered myself one for overland adventures (I mean, who wouldn’t rather enjoy a nice bag of crisp pretzels, pop on some headphones, and snooze while your airbus traffics you across the skies?), but travel ain’t cheap on a Thai budget, so the bus and train and taxi and bus (you get the picture), it was.

The journey started on Friday night with me hopping on an overnight bus to Bangkok from Chiang Mai at around 6:30pm. Running my usual half hour behind, I raced to the street outside of my apartment, threw my bag into a songtaew and got ready to race to the bus station at 6pm. Then he said something about nurng roi ha sip baht (150 baht!) and I was like: Hol-la, Hol-la, Hol-la, not happening. So my cheap self and bag jumped out of the moving songtaew and hailed a tuk tuk to a much more favorable price. We flew to the bus station. Not an overstatement considering that we made the 30 minute journey in about 17. Now that’s what I call service.

Okay, so I’m on the bus, snug in my seat with 4 minutes to spare, ready to get a move on. Then a group of unidentified Euro tourists race up, a mother and two girls around my age. Look, now I know I’m not one to say anything about the farang backpackers through Thailand, but sometimes I swear they exist merely to make life more complicated. It irks me to no end. Either they’re stumbling around piss-drunk in their Chang and Singha beer tank tops or they’re practically shouting in insultingly rudimentary English as if the members of the Thai hospitality service are either deaf, dumb, or some combination of the two. I promise you, never in my life have I been nor do I ever hope to be one of such people. This was a group of the latter sort. They rushed up, with thickly accented English I barely understood, gesticulating madly that the bus had to wait. Kindly, the Thai workers agreed and helped them to load their belongings. We are now 12 minutes off schedule. As the women unstrap their sweaty packs, men half their size hoist and tug to get the oversized bags to squeeze into the luggage under compartment. The women are still babbling in nearly incomprehensible English. 18 minutes behind. I press my ear to the glass to hear them better. I hear something about fodder. Ah, they are hungry. No wait, that is incorrect. Father. Yes, there is a father. Someone is shouting about gum. The Thai ticket checker appears nonplussed; she might actually be flushing. Gum? What gum? Oh, no, come. The fodder is coming. 25 minutes. The worker is shaking her head and pointing at a watch, the universal symbol for GET A MOVE ON!

Now don’t get me wrong. I don’t want to leave behind the fodder anymore than they do, but time is money and I’ve got a train to catch in Bangkok at 5am, so we need to move. They’re already late just getting to the bus. There are two more buses tonight. As if on cue, a tuk tuk speeds up to the curb and a very large, very red man steps out. The fodder! There are hugs, kisses, and stern fingershaking, laughter (GET ON THE BUS PEOPLE!) and people start to clamber aboard. Bags are being rearranged with painstakingly slow care. But wait, there is still a problem. Wrong seats. They have not been assigned seats together and this is a problem. The mother is now over-gesticulating again with that maddeningly loud voice trying to explain how they had purchased seats together. The now pinkish red attendant finds two pairs of seats and they appear contented at last. The bus pulls off… 37 minutes late. I jam my earphones into my ears and settle back for the nine and a half hour trek.

At 4:30am, I arrive in Bangkok at the Mochit bus station and race to the platform where Dylan is waiting. Sometime during the night it was decided that it was foolish to take the long train, however scenic, and instead we would zip into Cambodia by government bus #999. Best choice ever! You know all those fake border scams and detours on the way to Poipet from Aranyaprathet main station? Well, not at all thanks to some good ol’ guvment cheese! We got a tip off, got on the early 5am bus and rolled into Poipet, at the border no less, around 10am. After being certain we were being scammed, and wasting half an hour wandering around in the hot sun, sweating, we realized that we were in fact at the real and true border. Passports at the ready, we left the Thai side with no hiccup at all. Once we made it to the border and the Visa on Arrival table, again we circumvented reality, certain that the Cambodian official who demanded 1,000 baht was scamming us. Well, he was. The visa is $20 and $20 only no 100 baht processing fee or any other processing fee for that matter. So we coughed up the $20. How the swindler managed to nab two ten baht coins from my otherwise bare coinpurse is another matter. Anyway, be firm, look confused, smile, and explain that you have changed all your baht and have only the $20 USD fee and then get your stamp and off you go!

So we posed beneath the border sign, avoided the yellow shirted oh-so-friendly-and-helpful guides around, and managed to get our visas stamped in the Visa Arrivals chamber (after you get the actual visa on arrival and pay at the booth with the Cambodian officials), took photos outside of some of the HUGE casinos in the border limboland, and then got into a taxi we got for ourselves after walking just a short ways from the visa terminal. DO NOT take the “government free bus” they offer. We saw where it dropped folks off— at an empty terminal along the road to Siem Reap with only a few expensive hawking cabbies around. So for $35 USD, we assured our driver that we would NOT pay for gas/petrol, that we wanted to go to Siem Reap, that we did NOT want to stop at all, and that we would ONLY pay $35. After a brief stop for the driver to take a leak where Dylan was propositioned through the window by a young girl offering to show him the toilet, we made it to Siem Reap! 21 hours over land and counting… ;P



We stayed at the Shadows of Angkor II the first night with its tiny pool and good Wifi and then Popular Guesthouse our second and third nights to save on some much needed cash. Good choices all around. Clean and that’s the number one priority. Both had good food in their restaurants. The city of Siem Reap is small, but cute and I loved it. Extremely relaxing, albeit overrun by tourists, but filled with friendly Cambodians who speak remarkably great English many of them (at least in comparison to other parts of Asia… not saying any names), thanks of course to the overflow of tourists each year. We loved loved the deliciousness of the appetizers and cheap beer (Angkor Smooth so smooth! So smooth!) at the Khmer Family Kitchen. And then there is the temple complex. What to say? Profound, moving, absurdly well-crafted, impressive, awe-inspiring, worthy of the Ancient World Wonder that it is. We saw several of the temples in the complex, making the most of a three day pass by seeing two full days, a sunset, and a sunrise (a total of four actual days in the park). We visited: Bayon Temple, Angkor Wat itself, Ta Phrom, Kabal Spean, Bantey Srei, and the minor temples of the Leper Kings and Elephants. By far not a comprehensive view of everything, but I loved it all just the same.



Bayon— one of the older sites in the whole of the Angkor complex. Impressive for the featured heads of the king who commissioned its building that took place over decades in phases because he feared he would die and never see the full completion.



Ta Phrom— the Tomb Raider complex. The temple here was Dylan’s favorite because of the ridiculous jungly vegetation sprouting out of it all over. Trees literally consuming the temple. Has to be beautiful at night in the moonlight. Below: Dylan as Larry Croft, Tomb Raider.





Kabal Spean— not actually in the Angkor Complex, though included in the pass. For this, a 1500 meter hike up a shaded mountain slope to the River of a Thousand Lingas running at the top. So a linga is an ancient symbol of the penis and a marker of fertility carved often near the center of some temple complexes. It’s all over Kabal Spean and is matched with a female symbol that is shaped like a box. Promotes fertility and abundance.





Bantey Srei— also not in the Complex, but included in the three day pass is this beautifully carved gem, certainly my favorite. They say it had to have been designed and sculpted by a woman because no man could accomplish the intricate details adorning it. Far more of a site of ruins than some of the other sites, less intact, but beautiful with its clay reddish hue and incredible patterns and designs. So much life in it!



Angkor Wat— finally the big Mama temple herself. Angkor Wat does live up to her hype, let me say that. She is impressive for sheer scope and size, diversity, and majesty. Not my favorite of the temples for character and charm, but it is impossible not to be wowed or at least humbled in her presence. Thinking of these builders centuries and centuries ago, bringing stone from a quarry some 500 km away. Ridiculous. I was blown away so we went here twice— at sunset and at sunrise. Sunrise over Angkor— well worth the wake up. Unbelievable and the pictures don’t do it half the justice.



This is a shot of bullet holes in the temple, hold-overs from the brutal Khmer Rouge days when people fled for their lives into the womb of the Temple for sanctuary. Apparently nothing is sacred in war.



This is my proof that I have found the missing link. Black people in Asia. She's called an Apsara. Look at those lips! Don't even get me started on the hips. Goodness gracious. I'm bout to write me a book on that one.

And thus we came to part ways with Angkor and Siem Reap and make our journey southward to Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia. After six fairly pleasant hours, we arrived. It’s hard to imagine how just a few decades ago, this same capital city was sacked by the Khmer Rouge, turned into the focal point of their operations of detention and torture, “liberated” (a term here used loosely) by the Vietnamese, and then occupied by the same until 1989. Talk about history. You can see it on the faces of its people. Because it’s not enough to merely witness the beauty of man, it is necessary to observe the treachery of the same, so we went to the Killing Fields and the museum of Tuol Sleng at S-21, the primary torture facility in Phnom Penh during the bloody short-lived rule of the Khmer Rouge. You see, socialist in inspiration and fanatics in execution, the Khmer Rouge had a well-worn plan in the history of political upheaval— the poor keep getting poorer, so let’s oust the rich and develop a Marxist liberation of the proletariat. Well, the Khmer Rouge took the Marxist doctrine to the purist of states, determining that other nations had missed the point of the revolution. It was not necessary merely to extract high society, it was necessary to exterminate high society from father to son and mother to daughter. Let not that apple fall too far.

So the campaign began. Return the people to their pure state of agricultural life. Turn the economy into an inwardly focused unit, excluding much contact with the outside world, and focus on the production of rice. Move everyone from the overly urbanized cities into the countryside into forced labor for their nation. Everyone, as in communist belief, will look the same— dark trousers or skirt and top, red neck scarf, and simple shoes made of reused tires. Anyone educated or affiliated with the former government and ruling class— abolished, eradicated, wiped clean. If you wear glasses, get rid of them. If you have a pot belly, suck it in so you look bone thin. If you speak other languages, silence your tongue. We will start again.



Thus the conversion of a beautiful high school into a torture and killing facility where classrooms were fitted with bars and desks and chalkboard replaced with electric prods and stool buckets: S-21.



When prisoners were sufficiently broken and tortured, if not dead, they were then passed on to Cheong Ek, the Killing Fields just outside of the city. But be sure to turn up the volume on the loudspeakers in the “Magic Tree” a euphemism for a tree whose sole purpose was to bear the speakers that blared marching music to distort the sounds of the screams of people as they were bludgeoned to death and tossed into crude pits once their throats were slit. Bullets were of course too costly. Same fate for babies and parents. Children, most easily done away with, were held by their ankles and bashed against the Killing Tree once or twice until their precious skulls leaked red. Others were tossed and speared on bayonets. Clothing was taken from bodies to be reused for the next victims. Now at the site a monument stands erected of 8, 895 of the skulls found at this site alone, not counting many graves that have been left untouched at Choeng Ek and elsewhere in the country. So much for the revolution.



Our trip was memorable, if nothing else, and eye-opening. Including the experience of spending our last night in the capital sleeping on a converted massage mat in a massage parlor. I would not trade the experience for either Siem Reap with its ancient wonders nor Phnom Penh with its gory past. Cambodia is an ever-changing country, making its way in modern society and with a history like that of Cambodge, it’s not hard to imagine what glory may one day be restored.