The driver asked for $5 for the trip to our hotel, which was $3 or $4 more than I heard from people that it was supposed to cost, but he did load our bags for us and we aren't really talking about a lot of money. Like I said in earlier posts, I really don't like the whole bargaining thing. He also came across as a little slick, which made me a little nervous.
On the way he of course wanted to see if we needed to go anywhere else that day, and he suggested the Killing Fields. I knew that the Killing Fields of Choeung Ek site was a little ways outside of town and I thought we would be doing that the next day, but Lisa agreed with the driver that we should do it this day since it was already afternoon and too hot to walk around the city. I asked him how much to go to the Killing Fields and he told us $15. Again, he wanted about twice as much as I heard it cost other people. But we knew it would be a long ride, about 30 minutes each way, on a hot day so we didn't really want to argue over a few dollars. Besides, even if he asked a lower amount we would probably end up paying him that much or more anyway because we always tip really well, especially in poor countries.
Despite our tuk-tuk driver assuring me he knew where out hotel was when we hired him, he had no idea. He turned around several times and had to stop to look at the address again, which luckily had printed out at home before we left and also had it marked on our map. Eventually he found it. He dropped us at the front door of what turned out to be the walled compound of our hotel and told us he would meet us back outside for our trip to the Killing Fields.
The bellhop took our bags and led us into the Pavilion Hotel. I couldn't believe my freaking eyes when we saw this place. Inside some walls in the middle of the city was this little resort villa, complete with a pool surrounded by tropical trees.
And with a poolside bar/cafe where breakfast was served in the morning.
As well as secluded lounging areas in the middle of the little jungle.
The whole design of this place made me feel like I was in one of those old black and white movies featuring rich white people hanging out at a resort in one of their country's colonies. I felt like I should have been wearing one of those gray safari outfits, speaking with an English accent and sipping Cognac in the library.
We checked in with the manager, a French woman with a complete lack of personality, and we were shown to our room. The rooms at this place are actually separate cottages, we even had our own secluded seating area outside of our room door.
This was costing us $50 a night.
We headed back outside the walls of the compound to meet our driver and we were off to the Killing Fields.
Up to this point in our trip we had managed to avoid taking tuk-tuk rides, and now here we were doing it in the middle of some of the craziest traffic I'd ever seen (at least until we would get to Vietnam). The only real way to describe the way people drive in Phnom Penh is to imagine what it looks like when you see a colony of ants on the ground zig-zagging all around with no real semblance of order. Yet somehow they manage to not kill each other. Intersection were just massive groups of motorbikes and cars criss-crossing, all coming within inches of hitting each other. There were times I had to make sure to keep my knee away from the edge of my seat because it would be able to touch the side of a car that was next to us!
Going through a large roundabout intersection on a tuk-tuk in Phnom Penh was more exhilarating than riding the Cyclone at Coney Island
The road to the Killing Fields was dusty and busy. My mouth was pretty gritty by the time we got there. Most of the places to buy gasoline along the way were roadside stands with glass bottles full of fuel. Often sitting in the direct sunlight.
We got to the Killing Fields and spent about 45 minutes there. A place where mass graves were found with thousands of victims of the Pol Pot regime. It consist mostly of large pits where they found bodies with signs stating the numbers of men, women and children found there. There are still a lot of bone fragments scattered about. An eerie place.
Obviously we didn't really take any pictures while we were there. It seemed like it would be both distasteful and disrespectful. The only shot we took was of the Memorial Stupa, and we only felt OK about doing that from a distance. Inside here were about 8,000 skulls, piled all the way up to the top on all four sides behind glass panels. There's not really much you can say about that.
We made our way back to town and had our driver drop us off in the downtown area by the waterfront. He kept wanting us to commit to more rides the next day, but we said we would be walking around the rest of the time. We weren't actually sure that was going to be true, but we didn't want to commit to this guy as our driver the whole time.
We told him that we needed to go buy our tickets for the boat to Vietnam and he offered to take us there, but we declined. I wanted to find the place to get tickets on my own instead of trusting a tuk-tuk driver to take us. He did tell us that the boat left everyday at 12:00 noon, which was different than I heard, so we were concerned about that. We thought the boat left in the morning and were a little worried about it leaving so late.
Anyway, we walked up the waterfront and saw a little tourist shack with signs for bus and boat tickets. We walked up and started talking to the guy sitting there, who turned out to be a German ex-pat. Lisa got to use her German with him and we asked a bunch of questions about the boat and eventually bought the tickets from him for leaving Phnom Penh two days later.
We then went to find food. We went to an Indian restaurant a few blocks away that was in the Lonely Planet book. They only had two vegetarian items on their menu and they were out of one of them, which happened to be the curry. Not being in the mood for just sauteed vegetables, we left to find another place.
Their lack of anything for us to eat turned out to be the best thing that happened to us that day.
We went to another Indian restaurant, probably the highest rated one in Phnom Penh and one of the most expensive restaurants there. I wanted to go there originally but it was a heck of a lot farther away, that's why we tried the other place first. We walked in to this very fancy looking place and got shown to a table. It was still pretty early so there was no one else in the place except for one guy, seated all the way on the other side of the dining room from us. He had a buzz-cut and a really long gray beard, like down to his belly.
At one point I looked over his direction and he said hello. We started chatting across the room about where we were from and where we were traveling and Lisa invited him to join us. We were in the small table next to the front window with no room to slide another one next to us. We moved to the table next to ours with the intention of pushing it up against another table. Seeing what we were about to do, the waiters ran over and slid the tables together for us and moved all of our stuff.
The man was from West Australia and his name was Roger. Roger was on a two-and-a-half month trip throughout Asia. He told us he was 56-years-old and recently divorced after 34 years of marriage, and this was the first time he had ever been outside of Australia. He was hitting a ton of great locations while he was traveling, Nepal, Tibet, Vietnam and many others. He had already been in Vietnam and was going back the next day to spend three weeks doing volunteer work in a village north of Ho Chi Minh City.
Roger is a Tibetan Buddhist, which had a lot to do with his choice of itinerary for his first ever international trip. He was in the Indian restaurant for the same reason we were, a place where you know you can get vegetarian food when on the road. He's a full-on vegan. Over the course of the night we learned that he had been an organic farmer for years, though he had recently sold his farm.
So in a nutshell, Roger is a Tibetan Buddhist, vegan, organic farmer from West Australia.
There can't be too many people that can claim all of those terms at once. Roger might very well be the only one.
We talked all night with Roger about just about every topic you can think of - religion, politics, poverty, travel, philosophy - and had a grand time. We had been the only three people in the restaurant when we started, the dinner rush came and went, and we were the only ones in the place at the end of the night. We had been talking to Roger for something like four or five hours. The best night on the trip so far. We were having such a great time just gabbing away that we forget to get a picture with him, which is too bad.
We did give him my email and we finally heard from him right before Christmas. He was back at home but getting ready to leave again to go back to Asia, staying with friends in Chang Mai, Thailand. This time I think he is spending something like six months over there, staying for a while in a monastery in Kathmandu and seeing a bunch of India before going back into Tibet.
He is certainly making up for all those years of staying on his farm.
I know Lisa and I both hope we get the chance to see Roger again. He is one cool, fascinating man.
Next - Tuol Sleng and the FCC
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