I have been lucky enough to travel to a decent number of places in my life, especially in recent years. I love to travel. There is nothing else I love as much as traveling and travel planning, save for maybe going to concerts. Like a lot of Americans I love to travel to Europe because, let's face it, Europe is by and large so much cooler than America. But I also love to travel to countries outside the "Western" world.
My wife and I have traveled to SE Asia twice now, most recently this last autumn when we took our 5-year-old daughter with us. It is an amazing part of the world to see, beautiful with a rich history and very lovely people. It is not like we are the only travelers who know this secret. This part of the world sees an amazing amount of tourism now. You walk down the streets of Hanoi, Luang Prabang, Phnom Penh, Siem Reap, among other cities, and you will be surrounded by a lot of other white people. Generally this is really god for the local economies as we bring a lot of money with us to spend in restaurants, on hotels, museums, and gift shops.
But a lot of Westerners bring something else with them besides their money: Asshole-ish behavior. Ass-hattery may be our biggest export from america and Europe.
Siem Reap, Cambodia is one of the most special places on Earth. It is the closest town to the wonders of Angkor Wat and a nice little city to hang out at night. It is also overrun with tourists. It really was amazing to see the difference in the six years between our trips there. The number of hotels they have there now was shocking. So was the number of tourists walking the streets and partying in the bars at night. Not just the numbers are what's shocking, but the number of hipsters. It appears Siem Reap has become an "it" location for the young hip people from The U.S. and Europe. This wouldn't really be a problem if they didn't bring their asshole behavior with them.
An example: We were in an ice cream and coffee shop in downtown Siem Reap around an area called Pub Street and "The Passage" where a ton of restaurants are located. These are all places that are generally cheap for us but your average Cambodian cannot afford to eat or drink at them. All of central Siem Reap caters to tourists. There were a couple of very Eurotrash-looking Italians who ordered espressos. When they got thir drinks they were not exactly what the guys wanted and they got very angry with the young girl serving them. They basically yelled at her that this was "not what I wanted" and to "take it away."
They acted like a real couple of dicks. Both parties are speaking a second language to their own, English. The fact that you can travel to a place like this and not have to try to converse in Khmer is really convenient and things will be misunderstood now and then. Is it really necessary to act like an ass about it? This is vacation after all.
I think travelers need to show a little more deference and patience when in a country where the main language is one you don't know. I'm a guest places like Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam yet somehow I am able to do all my business with hotels and restaurants in English, my language not theirs. I should appreciate the generosity of that. We had a mistake happen in a restaurant in Luang Prabang. My daughter wanted basil on her pizza and it took a while to get the waiter to understand it. When the pizza came it had black olives on it instead. We didn't send it back and my daughter ate it, though we picked off the olives. It just is not a big deal. I'm in a country where I don't speak their language which means the language barrier is my problem and not theirs. I'm really happy about my kid learning that lesson that day. She's already a more mature and respectful traveler than some of the people we came across.
Like this middle-aged English woman in Hoi An, Vietnam.She ordered a caffe macchiato at a nice restaurant we were having lunch. she got all pissy with the waiter when her drink came because it was a shot of espresso with just a dollop of foamed milk. You know, a caffe macchiato. She then lectures the waiter on what a macchiato is, telling him there should be a lot of milk in it, that it is a big drink. She makes him take it back to fix it. And the very stupidest thing about this is that she was wrong! She learned her coffee lingo from Starbucks back at home, she is the one who didn't know what she was ordering.
After the waiter left to "fix" the "mistake" the tone in her voice to her travel companions was one that said, "stupid foreigner," not realizing she was the stupid foreigner, not the waiter who brought her the right drink in his home country.
The rudeness you can see sometimes toward people whose country in which we are guests is stupefying. So is the inappropriate behavior.
In Siem Reap we would see a lot of girls and guys walking around in short-shorts and tank top shirts Now, if you've done even the most minimal bit of research on Cambodia - like 3 minutes worth - you know that they are culturally a very conservative people who dress modestly and that revealing clothing is a big no-no. But apparently hipsters can't be bothered with learning anything about where they are going. Even worse, they would go to Angkor Wat that way. Sacred holy ground. Signs that actually tell you that kind of dress is inappropriate.
I'm not one to hold a lot of respect for religion, certainly. But a traveler must have respect for the people whose country they are visiting. Their culture is still theirs no matter how much money we spend there. The problem with some of these Western travelers is they treat these countries as if they are in the SE Asia section of Epcot Center at Disney World and not in a country where people live, work, pray, raise families, and try to live a life. If your only goal is to party and get drunk in bars with a bunch of other white people then what the hell is the point? I can get drunk with fellow American at home.
They not only embarrass themselves, they also embarrass those of us that try to travel in a way that honors and respects the place we are visiting.
This is not to say I don't think people should go to places like this or that they are ruined for travel. Despite its crazy crowds, the asshole-ish behavior of some, and the inevitable scams that go along with crowds of richer people being in a poor country, Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, and the rest of the countries in SE Asia are truly wonderful places and I'm that much richer for having visited. I would encourage everyone to go there some time in your life.
But don't bring your asshole behavior with you.
Showing posts with label Cambodia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cambodia. Show all posts
Wednesday, March 19, 2014
Friday, December 13, 2013
Dodging Motos in SE Asia
I was recently in SE Asia with my wife and daughter for what has become our annual international vacation. We started taking these trips with our daughter a couple of months before she turned two and she would celebrate her fifth birthday on this last one. As we were anticipating this vacation and telling people about it we were often greeted with a look shock from many people and even a "wow" every now and then at the idea that we would take a five-year-old to Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. Some people were impressed by us, others thought we were crazy. I think the ones who thought we were crazy didn't think we had really thought it through really well. But we had quite a bit. Before this trip our girl had been on four foreign vacations and in a total of eight countries, all in Europe but having taken a step in to Asia by being in Istanbul.
In all the traveling we've done with her she has been fantastic and easy on the flights and pretty much all aspects of the trip. Sure she gets tired and cranky on occasion but that can happen at home, too. Having done the 12-hour flight to Istanbul and back with no problem we figured we were ready to up our game with our choice of vacation destinations. And my wife, who traveled much more than me when she was younger, really wanted to get out of the Europe trend we'd been in since our daughter was born..
My wife and I had gone to this part of the world as our last trip before trying to have a kid, six years earlier, so we knew what we were getting in to. Sure SE Asia is a hectic place, but it is also so beautiful and full of wonderful people.
But there was one part of the trip that maybe confirmed our craziness for taking a five-year-old to this part of the world. They drive like lunatics over there.
It is really hard to explain to people who have never been to this part of the world just what the driving is like. If you go to cities like New York, Chicago, or Boston and think that the driving is insane there you have no idea how much worse it can be. The best description I've ever been able to come up with is imagining you are on a crowded New York City sidewalk with all the people weaving back and forth and going around each other, coming within millimeters of one another, getting out of an oncoming person's way just before you would bump in to each other. Now imagine that with everyone on cars, motorbikes, and bicycles instead of walking.
Nowhere that I've been is it any worse than Hanoi. And it got worse since we were there six years ago. Sure traffic was bad with all the motorbikes but when you got off the main thoroughfares you could usually find some breathing room on small streets like in the charming Old Quarter. Not any more. Traffic seems to be a constant flow on those small streets just like in the more urban looking parts of the city. And a lot more of the vehicles are cars (as opposed to motorbikes) now that more and more Vietnamese can afford them.
This makes crossing the street very tiring, especially when you are trying to do it with a five-year-old. We spend so much time as parents trying to train our kid the rules of crossing the street only to have to throw them out the window. I explained to her that we she had to hold our hands and when we said "go" to just start walking and don't stop for any reason. Telling her that when there are motorbikes and cars coming at us they will swerve around us. Rightly, she looked at me like I was crazy.
I had such a great memory of how charming Hanoi was when I visited before but that's been replaced by sheer hatred of the place. It is just exhausting to be there. Luckily we were only there for one day as a stopover on our way to Hoi An. We were staying away from the bigger cities on this trip and after the stay in Hanoi I knew we made the right decision. And a big reason that Hoi An was one of my favorite places - on top of the fact it is a charming town with lots to do and see - is that for several parts of the day the Old Town section is closed to motorized vehicles. The calm it creates in contrast to the chaos of the traffic is as wonderful as being in a typical European pedestrian plaza.
It is as crazy as Hanoi all over this part of the world. There is no sense that there are any rules to follow. Major roads are clearly marked with solid or broken lines to indicate a passing or no-passing zone but they are completely ignored. Drivers will pass going in to blind curves without giving it a second thought. They will also begin an overtake even if there is oncoming traffic only 100 yards away. The right-of-way rule seems to be whoever is bigger gets their way. It is like the bully on the playground method of traffic control. For instance, there was an oncoming truck that started flashing his lights at the car we were in on a trip between Hoi An and My Son, telling our driver to make way from about 200 yards away. Except that the truck was the one that was passing and was in our lane. But if we hit him, we would lose.
This applies to pedestrians as well. No way should you assume that if crossing the street at an intersection with a stoplight that the cross traffic will stop when they have the red. You should assume they won't.
This of course was not new to us since we had been there before. We knew the traffic and driving there would be crazy, that people in these countries were nutty and aggressive drivers. But one thing did change in the time we had last been there:
They all have freaking smart phones now!
Holy shit, if you thought driving under the influence of smart phones was bad in the States...well...you ain't seen nothin'. I was biking between the beach and town in Hoi An and a guy came by me on a motorbike while casually texting, face buried in the phone, while within centimeters of me. This was a common sight, drivers texting while swerving around pedestrians and other vehicles, sometimes while driving a motorbike with their toddler child between their legs.
Probably the most bizarre/hilarious/frightening example was during our ride between Phnom Penh and Siem Reap in Cambodia, for which we had hired a driver to take us on the four-to-five hour trip. While our driver was in the middle of passing another car at about 60 km/h on the patchy narrow highway (I use that term lightly) with oncoming traffic in sight he decided that would be a perfect time to take a picture of the sunset happening to our left. I suppose it is nice to see someone still appreciates the beauty of his country enough to snap a photo of a nice sunset. It was a really nice sunset.
There is something about traveling that makes you throw your usual rules out the window. "Why yes, we can have gelato for dinner." You know, things like that. This time we threw out pretty much any standard we have at home for transportation safety for our kid (except that we did do several of our trips by boat to avoid buses on the highways in Vietnam). At home we always make sure to have her booster seat if we are going to be in a car, we make her wait for the light at intersections, always cross in a crosswalk, etc. You know, responsible middle-class American parents.
In Cambodia we rode tuk-tuks so many times every day. If you've never seen a tuk-tuk, this is it:
It is basically a trailer hooked on to the back of a motorbike and then a guy drives you somewhere in the previously described traffic. My daughter loved this more than just about anything else we did on the trip. She begged to take a tuk-tuk every time we left the hotel. And so we did.
At one point during out trip I was telling our daughter about how when I was a kid that we would just pile in the back of a pickup truck but how that wasn't allowed anymore because it wasn't safe. And then in Luang Prabang we went on a hiking and kayaking trip with a guide. And how did we travel the 40 minutes to where we were trekking? In the back of a pickup truck, of course.
When in Rome, I suppose. Even if it is the most dangerous thing you can do.
One tries not to judge the culture of another country while traveling. But on both trips to this part of the world I could not help but think that there must be a decent amount of people who don't like the status quo. There must be a high number of people that have lost children to accidents because of the insane lack of traffic rules that would like to see a change. I just wonder what it will take to change the madness. Looking at the situation it seems impossible to change. But it wasn't that long ago that there weren't any drunk driving laws in the U.S. Or seat belt laws, car seats for kids, and helmet laws.
There is, I discovered, a helmet law in Vietnam that came in to effect just a few years ago. So there seems to be the beginning of an effort to change things there. And I noticed a lot more traffic lights than when we visited before.
Some drivers even stop for them.
In all the traveling we've done with her she has been fantastic and easy on the flights and pretty much all aspects of the trip. Sure she gets tired and cranky on occasion but that can happen at home, too. Having done the 12-hour flight to Istanbul and back with no problem we figured we were ready to up our game with our choice of vacation destinations. And my wife, who traveled much more than me when she was younger, really wanted to get out of the Europe trend we'd been in since our daughter was born..
My wife and I had gone to this part of the world as our last trip before trying to have a kid, six years earlier, so we knew what we were getting in to. Sure SE Asia is a hectic place, but it is also so beautiful and full of wonderful people.
But there was one part of the trip that maybe confirmed our craziness for taking a five-year-old to this part of the world. They drive like lunatics over there.
It is really hard to explain to people who have never been to this part of the world just what the driving is like. If you go to cities like New York, Chicago, or Boston and think that the driving is insane there you have no idea how much worse it can be. The best description I've ever been able to come up with is imagining you are on a crowded New York City sidewalk with all the people weaving back and forth and going around each other, coming within millimeters of one another, getting out of an oncoming person's way just before you would bump in to each other. Now imagine that with everyone on cars, motorbikes, and bicycles instead of walking.
Nowhere that I've been is it any worse than Hanoi. And it got worse since we were there six years ago. Sure traffic was bad with all the motorbikes but when you got off the main thoroughfares you could usually find some breathing room on small streets like in the charming Old Quarter. Not any more. Traffic seems to be a constant flow on those small streets just like in the more urban looking parts of the city. And a lot more of the vehicles are cars (as opposed to motorbikes) now that more and more Vietnamese can afford them.
This makes crossing the street very tiring, especially when you are trying to do it with a five-year-old. We spend so much time as parents trying to train our kid the rules of crossing the street only to have to throw them out the window. I explained to her that we she had to hold our hands and when we said "go" to just start walking and don't stop for any reason. Telling her that when there are motorbikes and cars coming at us they will swerve around us. Rightly, she looked at me like I was crazy.
I had such a great memory of how charming Hanoi was when I visited before but that's been replaced by sheer hatred of the place. It is just exhausting to be there. Luckily we were only there for one day as a stopover on our way to Hoi An. We were staying away from the bigger cities on this trip and after the stay in Hanoi I knew we made the right decision. And a big reason that Hoi An was one of my favorite places - on top of the fact it is a charming town with lots to do and see - is that for several parts of the day the Old Town section is closed to motorized vehicles. The calm it creates in contrast to the chaos of the traffic is as wonderful as being in a typical European pedestrian plaza.
It is as crazy as Hanoi all over this part of the world. There is no sense that there are any rules to follow. Major roads are clearly marked with solid or broken lines to indicate a passing or no-passing zone but they are completely ignored. Drivers will pass going in to blind curves without giving it a second thought. They will also begin an overtake even if there is oncoming traffic only 100 yards away. The right-of-way rule seems to be whoever is bigger gets their way. It is like the bully on the playground method of traffic control. For instance, there was an oncoming truck that started flashing his lights at the car we were in on a trip between Hoi An and My Son, telling our driver to make way from about 200 yards away. Except that the truck was the one that was passing and was in our lane. But if we hit him, we would lose.
This applies to pedestrians as well. No way should you assume that if crossing the street at an intersection with a stoplight that the cross traffic will stop when they have the red. You should assume they won't.
This of course was not new to us since we had been there before. We knew the traffic and driving there would be crazy, that people in these countries were nutty and aggressive drivers. But one thing did change in the time we had last been there:
They all have freaking smart phones now!
Holy shit, if you thought driving under the influence of smart phones was bad in the States...well...you ain't seen nothin'. I was biking between the beach and town in Hoi An and a guy came by me on a motorbike while casually texting, face buried in the phone, while within centimeters of me. This was a common sight, drivers texting while swerving around pedestrians and other vehicles, sometimes while driving a motorbike with their toddler child between their legs.
Probably the most bizarre/hilarious/frightening example was during our ride between Phnom Penh and Siem Reap in Cambodia, for which we had hired a driver to take us on the four-to-five hour trip. While our driver was in the middle of passing another car at about 60 km/h on the patchy narrow highway (I use that term lightly) with oncoming traffic in sight he decided that would be a perfect time to take a picture of the sunset happening to our left. I suppose it is nice to see someone still appreciates the beauty of his country enough to snap a photo of a nice sunset. It was a really nice sunset.
There is something about traveling that makes you throw your usual rules out the window. "Why yes, we can have gelato for dinner." You know, things like that. This time we threw out pretty much any standard we have at home for transportation safety for our kid (except that we did do several of our trips by boat to avoid buses on the highways in Vietnam). At home we always make sure to have her booster seat if we are going to be in a car, we make her wait for the light at intersections, always cross in a crosswalk, etc. You know, responsible middle-class American parents.
In Cambodia we rode tuk-tuks so many times every day. If you've never seen a tuk-tuk, this is it:
 |
| The family on a tuk-tuk in Siem Reap |
It is basically a trailer hooked on to the back of a motorbike and then a guy drives you somewhere in the previously described traffic. My daughter loved this more than just about anything else we did on the trip. She begged to take a tuk-tuk every time we left the hotel. And so we did.
At one point during out trip I was telling our daughter about how when I was a kid that we would just pile in the back of a pickup truck but how that wasn't allowed anymore because it wasn't safe. And then in Luang Prabang we went on a hiking and kayaking trip with a guide. And how did we travel the 40 minutes to where we were trekking? In the back of a pickup truck, of course.
When in Rome, I suppose. Even if it is the most dangerous thing you can do.
One tries not to judge the culture of another country while traveling. But on both trips to this part of the world I could not help but think that there must be a decent amount of people who don't like the status quo. There must be a high number of people that have lost children to accidents because of the insane lack of traffic rules that would like to see a change. I just wonder what it will take to change the madness. Looking at the situation it seems impossible to change. But it wasn't that long ago that there weren't any drunk driving laws in the U.S. Or seat belt laws, car seats for kids, and helmet laws.
There is, I discovered, a helmet law in Vietnam that came in to effect just a few years ago. So there seems to be the beginning of an effort to change things there. And I noticed a lot more traffic lights than when we visited before.
Some drivers even stop for them.
Sunday, April 26, 2009
Still Searching For Roger
In this age of email, Google, MySpace and Facebook it seems that you can find anyone you ever knew at any point in your life. This usually means that people can find you as well, and that may or may not be a bad thing, depending on if you want to be found and who might be looking for you.
But like I said, it only "seems" like you can find anyone you want. Sometimes it just doesn't happen.
Not everyone is on a social network site. Not everyone you know has done anything that got them mentioned on the Internet or has their own blog. Some people you used to know have really common names or match the name of somebody famous that makes a Google search impossible (my old friend from high school in Illinois is named Lee Baca, the same name as the sheriff of Los Angeles, so I will never have any luck Googling him).
I've been thinking about this mostly because there is someone I've been trying to get in touch with for over the past year. My wife and I went to SE Asia in November of 2007 for about three weeks, a trip that I blogged extensively about after we got back. (Here, scroll to the bottom and hit "older post" if you are interested in reading all 29 long-winded posts. Lots of pictures.) While there we met several great people, a really sweet gay dentist from San Francisco, a German guy traveling alone and a fun fifty-ish couple from Australia. But there was one person that we really, really loved meeting during our trip.
We were in Phnom Penh, Cambodia and we ate dinner at this great Indian restaurant. We ended up striking up a conversation with this really cool guy from Western Australia named Roger. The extensive post about that night is here, so I'll just do a quick rehash.
Roger was this large guy with a buzz cut on his head and a long gray beard that went down to his belly. Seriously. At the time we met him he was 56 years old, just divorced after 34 years of marriage, recently sold his organic farm that he had owned for years, a fairly recent convert to Buddhism and he was on his very first trip outside of Australia. And he's a vegan, which has a lot to do with why we met him in an Indian restaurant. We had a grand night talking to Roger for about four or five hours, a fascinating and charming man. We had such a great time talking to him that we never thought about pulling out the camera for a picture. He was on a two-and-a-half-month trip through a huge section of SE Asia, including Tibet and Nepal. A huge spiritual journey for him. And he was planning on returning in early 2008 for another six months or so, staying with a friend in Chang Mai, trekking through India and spending time in a monastery in Kathmandu.
We had given him my email address that night when we left and I heard from him shortly before Christmas. I responded to his email a couple of weeks later, waiting until I had time for a proper response. But it bounced back as not a valid email address. I'm not sure what happened, if he changed email addresses, decided to go off grid, lost his account or if something happened to him.
I have tried the email address (kevinswatch@bigpond.com) many times since then with the same result. I've googled him and searched for his blog, which also seems to have disappeared. I've checked to see if he is on Facebook. Nothing.
I'm dying to reconnect with Roger, and it seems that I never will. I'd love to hear about his travels and experiences in Asia.
All this technology and you can still lose touch that easily. Sigh.
So if anyone reading this ever comes across a bearded, sixty-ish, former organic farmer, vegan Buddhist from Western Australia named Roger Williams (also why the name is hard to Google) who has lots of stories about adventures in Asia; please let him know that Deni and Lisa would love to hear from him again.
But like I said, it only "seems" like you can find anyone you want. Sometimes it just doesn't happen.
Not everyone is on a social network site. Not everyone you know has done anything that got them mentioned on the Internet or has their own blog. Some people you used to know have really common names or match the name of somebody famous that makes a Google search impossible (my old friend from high school in Illinois is named Lee Baca, the same name as the sheriff of Los Angeles, so I will never have any luck Googling him).
I've been thinking about this mostly because there is someone I've been trying to get in touch with for over the past year. My wife and I went to SE Asia in November of 2007 for about three weeks, a trip that I blogged extensively about after we got back. (Here, scroll to the bottom and hit "older post" if you are interested in reading all 29 long-winded posts. Lots of pictures.) While there we met several great people, a really sweet gay dentist from San Francisco, a German guy traveling alone and a fun fifty-ish couple from Australia. But there was one person that we really, really loved meeting during our trip.
We were in Phnom Penh, Cambodia and we ate dinner at this great Indian restaurant. We ended up striking up a conversation with this really cool guy from Western Australia named Roger. The extensive post about that night is here, so I'll just do a quick rehash.
Roger was this large guy with a buzz cut on his head and a long gray beard that went down to his belly. Seriously. At the time we met him he was 56 years old, just divorced after 34 years of marriage, recently sold his organic farm that he had owned for years, a fairly recent convert to Buddhism and he was on his very first trip outside of Australia. And he's a vegan, which has a lot to do with why we met him in an Indian restaurant. We had a grand night talking to Roger for about four or five hours, a fascinating and charming man. We had such a great time talking to him that we never thought about pulling out the camera for a picture. He was on a two-and-a-half-month trip through a huge section of SE Asia, including Tibet and Nepal. A huge spiritual journey for him. And he was planning on returning in early 2008 for another six months or so, staying with a friend in Chang Mai, trekking through India and spending time in a monastery in Kathmandu.
We had given him my email address that night when we left and I heard from him shortly before Christmas. I responded to his email a couple of weeks later, waiting until I had time for a proper response. But it bounced back as not a valid email address. I'm not sure what happened, if he changed email addresses, decided to go off grid, lost his account or if something happened to him.
I have tried the email address (kevinswatch@bigpond.com) many times since then with the same result. I've googled him and searched for his blog, which also seems to have disappeared. I've checked to see if he is on Facebook. Nothing.
I'm dying to reconnect with Roger, and it seems that I never will. I'd love to hear about his travels and experiences in Asia.
All this technology and you can still lose touch that easily. Sigh.
So if anyone reading this ever comes across a bearded, sixty-ish, former organic farmer, vegan Buddhist from Western Australia named Roger Williams (also why the name is hard to Google) who has lots of stories about adventures in Asia; please let him know that Deni and Lisa would love to hear from him again.
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
Vietnam Afterword - Communism? What Communism?
Overall the trip to Southeast Asia is one I would suggest for anyone from the West. To see these cultures that are so vastly different in so many ways from ours is a valuable, and dare I say life-changing, experience.
To see the people in this part of the world make their way in some incredibly hard circumstances and keep so much of their kindness and grace is something I can't imagine from your average American. I've seen New Yorkers act like it is the end of the world when their subway train is rerouted for the weekend. They really need to go see the people in Cambodia who are missing limbs that were blown off by landmines (many of them from the U.S.) deal with their lot in life with a smile and without the anger that they would be completely justified in having towards Americans.
I hope we get to back someday, especially after our still gestating son or daughter is old enough to appreciate this kind of experience. Hopefully these places won't be completely overrun by McDonald's and Starbucks by then.
With Vietnam specifically, I was struck by one thing. This was my first time in a country that called itself "communist." I wasn't really sure what I expected but I certainly didn't expect to see what basically amounts to an unfettered free market everywhere we went. It seems like almost everyone has their own business in this country, from the fishermen to the rice noodle factory to the sidewalk bars and restaurants to the souvenir sellers and cyclo drivers. Everybody is free to make a buck however they can.
Yes there are high taxes, at least if the tour guide on our boat, Khoa, is to be believed. But according to him they don't really get anything for it, beyond a military. There is no unemployment insurance, no social security, no free health care and no free higher education.
So the working class pays an extremely high tax rate that goes straight to the country's war machine, none of it goes to a social safety net, capitalism runs amok with no regulation and the powerful elite reap all the benefits of this system.
Communism my ass. Looks a lot more like a Karl Rove and George Bush wet dream.
But through it all the people seem to persevere. And despite the crazy traffic, the crowds and the fact that all Vietnamese men in restaurants suck their teeth incessantly after a meal, we really loved being there.
For those of you that actually made it through all of these posts in my travelogue...um... congratulations? Thanks for indulging me and I hope you didn't get too bored. More than that, I hope I even encouraged someone to want to go to Southeast Asia. It was worth every minute and every cent of my wife's money.
To see the people in this part of the world make their way in some incredibly hard circumstances and keep so much of their kindness and grace is something I can't imagine from your average American. I've seen New Yorkers act like it is the end of the world when their subway train is rerouted for the weekend. They really need to go see the people in Cambodia who are missing limbs that were blown off by landmines (many of them from the U.S.) deal with their lot in life with a smile and without the anger that they would be completely justified in having towards Americans.
I hope we get to back someday, especially after our still gestating son or daughter is old enough to appreciate this kind of experience. Hopefully these places won't be completely overrun by McDonald's and Starbucks by then.
With Vietnam specifically, I was struck by one thing. This was my first time in a country that called itself "communist." I wasn't really sure what I expected but I certainly didn't expect to see what basically amounts to an unfettered free market everywhere we went. It seems like almost everyone has their own business in this country, from the fishermen to the rice noodle factory to the sidewalk bars and restaurants to the souvenir sellers and cyclo drivers. Everybody is free to make a buck however they can.
Yes there are high taxes, at least if the tour guide on our boat, Khoa, is to be believed. But according to him they don't really get anything for it, beyond a military. There is no unemployment insurance, no social security, no free health care and no free higher education.
So the working class pays an extremely high tax rate that goes straight to the country's war machine, none of it goes to a social safety net, capitalism runs amok with no regulation and the powerful elite reap all the benefits of this system.
Communism my ass. Looks a lot more like a Karl Rove and George Bush wet dream.
But through it all the people seem to persevere. And despite the crazy traffic, the crowds and the fact that all Vietnamese men in restaurants suck their teeth incessantly after a meal, we really loved being there.
For those of you that actually made it through all of these posts in my travelogue...um... congratulations? Thanks for indulging me and I hope you didn't get too bored. More than that, I hope I even encouraged someone to want to go to Southeast Asia. It was worth every minute and every cent of my wife's money.
Thursday, February 14, 2008
Cambodia Afterword - Colonialism Is Alive And Well
Since we just left Cambodia in my seemingly never-ending epic series of posts about our trip to SE Asia, I thought I'd take a bit of space up to write about my impressions of our too short stay there.
Although we only spent about a total of four-and-a-half days there, Cambodia seems to have stuck with me more than anyplace else we visited on this trip. I think it has something to do with the abject poverty, landmine victims, Aki Ra's museum and the street children working so hard to sell us trinkets. As well as the amazing sights of Angkor Wat that encompassed these harsher realities. I was also fascinated by the resilience of a country that is still emerging from fairly recent unfathomable horrors. They are a damaged people but their perseverance left quite an impression on me. They are survivors in every meaning of that word.
I was also struck by how well we were treated there. It seemed so amazing to me that the Khmer people could actually be nice to Americans and the French, people whose past governments played such a large role in the destabilization and devastation of Cambodia that directly led to the rise of the genocidal rule of the Khmer Rouge. I'm not sure that if the roles were reversed the Americans would be as forgiving. I've found that the citizens of other countries around the world seem to be better at knowing the difference between the people and their government than most Americans. Lucky for us Americans who like to travel, especially over the last seven years.
It probably does help how they feel about us that we go there and spend money. And tourism in Cambodia seems to be booming, which appears to be helping a lot of Cambodians. Unfortunately it seems to be helping a lot of foreigners even more.
I think if you plopped me down in the middle of Cambodia and I did not know anything about the country, I would probably assume I was in a place that was controlled by a colonizing or occupying nation. From the things we observed with our own eyes and things we were told by people like our driver Mr. Ya, I realized that a lot of the wealth being gathered in Cambodia is not being done by Cambodians.
Both hotels we stayed at in the country were French owned. The roles of the native people at both properties were that of the bellhops, maids, waiters and cooks. I cannot speak to how well they are paid or treated. From Mr. Ya we learned that most hotels in Siem Reap are owned by foreigners - mostly French, other Europeans and a lot of Koreans. The Irish bars in Siem Reap and Phnom Penh are owned by expats. The FCC restaurants and hotels are either European or American owned, and from the visits we made there it was obvious that a white man was the manager.
The Cambodian people have to fight for the scraps that fall to the floor from colonial table. Reagan's trickle-down economics at its finest.
And so many of the tourists seem to get snippy with the poor people who are trying to make a few cents off of them. The same people that happily pay for overpriced beer at the FCC or a $50 hotel room get uppity with the poor tuk-tuk driver that just wants to make a dollar or two for a valuable service or the girl that is asking for a nickel for a banana.
At Angkor Wat an older woman was selling various souvenir trinkets by the exit. She would ask everyone if they would buy something from her. Granted, she would stand right in your way and try to really get your business. A young British guy who, like everyone else there, had been asked probably a million times that day to buy something decided it would be funny to make fun of the locals. He answered her question with, "Do you have any happiness?" in a really snarky way. She seemed confused, not understanding the joke of course, and he went on that if she didn't have any happiness for him then he didn't want anything. He found himself really amusing and had a really nice smirk at the expense of someone just trying to eke out a living. I wanted to smack his smarmy ass.
You know, it got exasperating for all of us, facing the onslaught of hard-selling at every stop. But there is no need for that kind of nonsense. When you are guests in someone else's country you should act like it. I saw many tourists wave off the sellers with a flick of a silent hand. This seemed to be the most common among the French who, along with us Americans, should be the people that are the most empathetic to this country's condition.
Sitting in a restaurant in Siem Reap one night I watched a young tuk-tuk driver trying to pick up a fare from people walking out the door. Most would not even acknowledge his existence when he asked if they needed a ride. He was doing it in such a polite way too. I felt so bad for him.
I already wrote about how some of the girls selling snacks on the boat from Siem Reap were treated by some people.
These were just a few of the instances we saw in only a few days.
It might be the dire need for money that is why they put up with so much from tourists. But I'd like to think it is the unbendable spirit of a people that have overcome so much.
Hopefully, one day that same sprit will help them break the chains of colonialism that ended on paper but has far from disappeared in reality.
Although we only spent about a total of four-and-a-half days there, Cambodia seems to have stuck with me more than anyplace else we visited on this trip. I think it has something to do with the abject poverty, landmine victims, Aki Ra's museum and the street children working so hard to sell us trinkets. As well as the amazing sights of Angkor Wat that encompassed these harsher realities. I was also fascinated by the resilience of a country that is still emerging from fairly recent unfathomable horrors. They are a damaged people but their perseverance left quite an impression on me. They are survivors in every meaning of that word.
I was also struck by how well we were treated there. It seemed so amazing to me that the Khmer people could actually be nice to Americans and the French, people whose past governments played such a large role in the destabilization and devastation of Cambodia that directly led to the rise of the genocidal rule of the Khmer Rouge. I'm not sure that if the roles were reversed the Americans would be as forgiving. I've found that the citizens of other countries around the world seem to be better at knowing the difference between the people and their government than most Americans. Lucky for us Americans who like to travel, especially over the last seven years.
It probably does help how they feel about us that we go there and spend money. And tourism in Cambodia seems to be booming, which appears to be helping a lot of Cambodians. Unfortunately it seems to be helping a lot of foreigners even more.
I think if you plopped me down in the middle of Cambodia and I did not know anything about the country, I would probably assume I was in a place that was controlled by a colonizing or occupying nation. From the things we observed with our own eyes and things we were told by people like our driver Mr. Ya, I realized that a lot of the wealth being gathered in Cambodia is not being done by Cambodians.
Both hotels we stayed at in the country were French owned. The roles of the native people at both properties were that of the bellhops, maids, waiters and cooks. I cannot speak to how well they are paid or treated. From Mr. Ya we learned that most hotels in Siem Reap are owned by foreigners - mostly French, other Europeans and a lot of Koreans. The Irish bars in Siem Reap and Phnom Penh are owned by expats. The FCC restaurants and hotels are either European or American owned, and from the visits we made there it was obvious that a white man was the manager.
The Cambodian people have to fight for the scraps that fall to the floor from colonial table. Reagan's trickle-down economics at its finest.
And so many of the tourists seem to get snippy with the poor people who are trying to make a few cents off of them. The same people that happily pay for overpriced beer at the FCC or a $50 hotel room get uppity with the poor tuk-tuk driver that just wants to make a dollar or two for a valuable service or the girl that is asking for a nickel for a banana.
At Angkor Wat an older woman was selling various souvenir trinkets by the exit. She would ask everyone if they would buy something from her. Granted, she would stand right in your way and try to really get your business. A young British guy who, like everyone else there, had been asked probably a million times that day to buy something decided it would be funny to make fun of the locals. He answered her question with, "Do you have any happiness?" in a really snarky way. She seemed confused, not understanding the joke of course, and he went on that if she didn't have any happiness for him then he didn't want anything. He found himself really amusing and had a really nice smirk at the expense of someone just trying to eke out a living. I wanted to smack his smarmy ass.
You know, it got exasperating for all of us, facing the onslaught of hard-selling at every stop. But there is no need for that kind of nonsense. When you are guests in someone else's country you should act like it. I saw many tourists wave off the sellers with a flick of a silent hand. This seemed to be the most common among the French who, along with us Americans, should be the people that are the most empathetic to this country's condition.
Sitting in a restaurant in Siem Reap one night I watched a young tuk-tuk driver trying to pick up a fare from people walking out the door. Most would not even acknowledge his existence when he asked if they needed a ride. He was doing it in such a polite way too. I felt so bad for him.
I already wrote about how some of the girls selling snacks on the boat from Siem Reap were treated by some people.
These were just a few of the instances we saw in only a few days.
It might be the dire need for money that is why they put up with so much from tourists. But I'd like to think it is the unbendable spirit of a people that have overcome so much.
Hopefully, one day that same sprit will help them break the chains of colonialism that ended on paper but has far from disappeared in reality.
Thursday, February 07, 2008
Day 8 (Part 1) - Cruising The Mekong Out Of Cambodia
We spent our last morning in Phnom Penh very lazily hanging around the pool/garden drinking coffee and writing in our journals. We had a long day of traveling ahead of us, so we didn't really do anything until we had to go catch our boat. It was now November 16th.
Would have left and gone to do something if I knew I was going to have to listen to the yuppie dickhead (still keeping his poolside laptop vigil) bitching to a poor travel agent over the phone. He was complaining about the price of a ticket to Singapore he was trying to buy for two days later. International yuppie businessman didn't seem to understand the concept of last-minute plane tickets being more expensive.
We caught a tuk-tuk up to the boat dock and went into the restaurant/bar that doubles as the waiting area. The German expat who sold us our tickets had told us to get there a half-hour early and he would meet us there to walk us through the paperwork we needed to fill out. This was an international boat trip we would be taking this time, so there were entrance and exit forms to complete. We already had our Vietnam visa, as you have to have it in advance if you want to travel there.
We didn't really need anyone to help us with the paperwork, but Lisa figured the German was fishing for tip. It didn't really matter since he ended up not showing anyway.
After the paperwork I went across the street to a shop and bought some water, beer, soda and bananas for the trip. It cost something like $8.50 and I gave the guy a ten. As was usual while we had been in Cambodia I got my change as a combination of U.S. Dollars and Cambodian Riel. Anytime something had cents in the price we always got paper riel instead of American coins. It is amazing how many bills it takes to equal 50 cents. The only reason this sucked was that we were about to leave Cambodia and I didn't want to have any more riel since I wouldn't be able to spend or exchange it.
The time came and we headed toward the boat. Lucky for us they had two boats going that day since they had more people than could fit on one. We ended up on the less empty boat with five middle-aged French tourists, a young Australian couple and a Vietnamese girl. So we had plenty of room to spread out. This boat was about a quarter of the size of the one we took from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh and much more comfortable.
The trip down the Mekong River was pretty uneventful. There didn't seem to be as much life along this part of the Mekong as there had been on the Tonlé Sap.
A couple of hours later we got to the border. We pulled up to the Cambodian border checkpoint and we all had to unload.
Just like leaving a country by air, we had to stand in line to have our passports checked.
For some reason, when I got my passport checked the guy gave me somewhat of a hard time. He kept flipping through my passport really carefully. He then asked me why my Vietnam visa was only stapled in my book and not pasted on. By way of example he showed me the way the Cambodian one was glued on the page in my passport. I told him I didn't know and, "That's just the way Vietnam did it."
This really weirded me out in a few ways. First, my wife had gone just in front of me and her visa from Vietnam was in there the exact same way as mine. He didn't ask about hers at all. Second, how the hell would I know why it is only stapled? Does he think I put the visa in myself?
But mostly I was asking myself, "Why the fuck does this guy care about my Vietnam paperwork? He's the damn Cambodian border agent. This really isn't his problem or concern."
I think the guy was just in the mood to bust balls. Gets kind of boring sitting there checking passports all day long.
On our way back to the boat there were young girls selling drinks and snacks. Aha! A way to get rid of some riel. I bought us a couple of bags of some chip-like product and managed to unload the rest of my riel.
We jumped back on the boat and it pulled away. Well that's it for Cambod.....
Wait! Suddenly the French passengers start going crazy and run up to the front of the boat yelling at the driver. They were down a man it seemed.
The guys running our boat didn't appear to take a real close count, nor did the French people. We turned around and went back. There he was, standing on the dock.
All passengers now on board, we cruised down the river out of Cambodia. One of the crewmen took down the Cambodian flag that had been flying on the boat, leaving only the Vietnamese one that was flying from the other end.
Next - Afterword on Cambodia and then on to Vietnam
Would have left and gone to do something if I knew I was going to have to listen to the yuppie dickhead (still keeping his poolside laptop vigil) bitching to a poor travel agent over the phone. He was complaining about the price of a ticket to Singapore he was trying to buy for two days later. International yuppie businessman didn't seem to understand the concept of last-minute plane tickets being more expensive.
We caught a tuk-tuk up to the boat dock and went into the restaurant/bar that doubles as the waiting area. The German expat who sold us our tickets had told us to get there a half-hour early and he would meet us there to walk us through the paperwork we needed to fill out. This was an international boat trip we would be taking this time, so there were entrance and exit forms to complete. We already had our Vietnam visa, as you have to have it in advance if you want to travel there.
We didn't really need anyone to help us with the paperwork, but Lisa figured the German was fishing for tip. It didn't really matter since he ended up not showing anyway.
After the paperwork I went across the street to a shop and bought some water, beer, soda and bananas for the trip. It cost something like $8.50 and I gave the guy a ten. As was usual while we had been in Cambodia I got my change as a combination of U.S. Dollars and Cambodian Riel. Anytime something had cents in the price we always got paper riel instead of American coins. It is amazing how many bills it takes to equal 50 cents. The only reason this sucked was that we were about to leave Cambodia and I didn't want to have any more riel since I wouldn't be able to spend or exchange it.
The time came and we headed toward the boat. Lucky for us they had two boats going that day since they had more people than could fit on one. We ended up on the less empty boat with five middle-aged French tourists, a young Australian couple and a Vietnamese girl. So we had plenty of room to spread out. This boat was about a quarter of the size of the one we took from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh and much more comfortable.
The trip down the Mekong River was pretty uneventful. There didn't seem to be as much life along this part of the Mekong as there had been on the Tonlé Sap.
A couple of hours later we got to the border. We pulled up to the Cambodian border checkpoint and we all had to unload.
Just like leaving a country by air, we had to stand in line to have our passports checked.
For some reason, when I got my passport checked the guy gave me somewhat of a hard time. He kept flipping through my passport really carefully. He then asked me why my Vietnam visa was only stapled in my book and not pasted on. By way of example he showed me the way the Cambodian one was glued on the page in my passport. I told him I didn't know and, "That's just the way Vietnam did it."
This really weirded me out in a few ways. First, my wife had gone just in front of me and her visa from Vietnam was in there the exact same way as mine. He didn't ask about hers at all. Second, how the hell would I know why it is only stapled? Does he think I put the visa in myself?
But mostly I was asking myself, "Why the fuck does this guy care about my Vietnam paperwork? He's the damn Cambodian border agent. This really isn't his problem or concern."
I think the guy was just in the mood to bust balls. Gets kind of boring sitting there checking passports all day long.
On our way back to the boat there were young girls selling drinks and snacks. Aha! A way to get rid of some riel. I bought us a couple of bags of some chip-like product and managed to unload the rest of my riel.
We jumped back on the boat and it pulled away. Well that's it for Cambod.....
Wait! Suddenly the French passengers start going crazy and run up to the front of the boat yelling at the driver. They were down a man it seemed.
The guys running our boat didn't appear to take a real close count, nor did the French people. We turned around and went back. There he was, standing on the dock.
All passengers now on board, we cruised down the river out of Cambodia. One of the crewmen took down the Cambodian flag that had been flying on the boat, leaving only the Vietnamese one that was flying from the other end.
Next - Afterword on Cambodia and then on to Vietnam
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Day 7 - Tuol Sleng And The FCC
We got up and had breakfast by the pool of our French villa-style hotel. As we ate our bread & jam and our fruit I noticed a couple sitting a table away from us. They both had laptop computers open and were typing away. The guy would get on the phone every once in a while, he was obviously doing some sort of business. From what I could gather, he was some sort of young American businessman and she was his foreign girlfriend along for the trip, as whenever they spoke to each other it was in some other language but when he was on the phone it was English with an obvious American accent. There would not be a time that we went by the poolside bar, either in the morning or evening, that they were not at that very same table with their computers open. I don't think they ever left the hotel grounds. How very colonial.
I often wondered who the heck these people were that could go someplace like Jamaica and spend their entire time in a Sandals Resort, their only contact with the native population being the ones who bring their drinks. Now I know. Blond, yuppie businessmen in khakis and sandals.
After breakfast we made our way to the National Museum. Continuing our theme of Lisa having her picture taken in front of elephants, there happened to be a statue of one in front of the museum entrance.
Most of the museum was all of the different rooms with metal beds set up like they were when prisoners were chained to them for torture.
That was nothing compared to when we hit the rooms with the photos. There must have been three or four full rooms covered in the pictures the Khmer Rouge took of the prisoners. So many of them were so young. There were several of young mothers holding babies. It is absolutely heartbreaking to see. Everyone in the pictures we saw were tortured into "confessing" crimes against the regime, which was documented by the Khmer Rouge and I believe involved forcing the victim to sign.
They were then shipped off to Choeung Ek to be executed or were tortured to death right there at the prison. We know this was the fate of every person in the pictures we saw.
Couldn't really talk much during the tuk-tuk ride back to our hotel.
I went for a swim in the pool while Lisa wrote in her journal and the yuppie couple typed away on their laptops in their fashionably casual clothes.
We then walked back to the FCC for dinner. The place was absolutely hopping in the evening. There were groups of people at just about every table, including huge tables pushed together in the back rooms for big tour groups. The pool table seemed to be taken over by guys who looked like they might actually be genuine foreign correspondents. It kind of looked like the tables were where the tourists were sitting and eating, and the bar was where the journalists were drinking. They seemed to be regulars in any case.
Since it was evening the geckos were out in full force. They were all over the walls of the FCC. Big ones, little ones, baby tiny ones. I pretty much lost all attention of my wife for the evening, as when there is a cute animal around she got stop looking at it and smiling. And the baby geckos were damn cute.
I felt kind of guilty about going to the FCC for dinner, rather than supporting a smaller business owner. But Cambodia was a little more tricky when trying to be sure you are getting actual vegetarian food and the FCC had vegetarian specific items.
It is the only time on the whole trip that I had pizza.
Next - The boat out of Cambodia and my impressions of the country
I often wondered who the heck these people were that could go someplace like Jamaica and spend their entire time in a Sandals Resort, their only contact with the native population being the ones who bring their drinks. Now I know. Blond, yuppie businessmen in khakis and sandals.
After breakfast we made our way to the National Museum. Continuing our theme of Lisa having her picture taken in front of elephants, there happened to be a statue of one in front of the museum entrance.
The museum had lots of ancient Khmer art that was really cool to see. It also had a collection of more contemporary art and some of it was really nice. The sad part was that most of the contemporary Cambodian art was done by artists who were killed by the Khmer Rouge.
The museum building itself was quite beautiful. It is an open-air building with tall, traditional looking rooftops. The four main exhibit areas are arranged in a square to form a lovely courtyard.
After the National Museum we walked down the block to go to the Royal Palace and Silver Pagoda. But, as seems to happen in a lot of countries that are not the United States, they were closed for the midday break.
We decided to go and find a store that Lisa had read about. It is a retail store run by the National Centre of Disabled Persons, where they sell items made by disabled people. In Cambodia, of course, a great number of the disabled people are victims of land mines. They had some really excellent stuff to buy as well. We walked out of there with several scarves and more than a few handmade silk toy elephants (back to our trip theme) among other things. I think they were the most expensive souvenirs we got on the whole trip, but it was the happiest we were about spending money. If we had even a little bit to do with the nice girl, missing half an arm, who rang us up keeping her job in the store instead of having to beg for money on the streets, or much worse, then it was money more than well spent. A great organization, doing the great work that their government seems to not want to do. You can even order items from them through the NCDP website (click on RO Project then click on handicraft catalogue ) and they'll send them to you. They really do have some great stuff, especially for kids, (check out the great elephant mobile) and the money goes to a really worthy cause.
On one of our walks too or from the NCDP we saw a monkey on the street picking through garbage. I wanted to get a picture of it but Lisa thought we should let the poor guy have at least a little semblence of his dignity.
We then went to the Foreign Correspondents Club for lunch. The FCC is somewhat of a famous place in Phnom Penh. It really was started with the aim of having foreign journalists as its main clientele. With its third floor restaurant/bar (with another bar on the fourth floor) having sweeping views of the river and the streets below, and its international menu, it obviously attracts all kinds of white people. In the evening it is full of tour groups.
Not the kind of place we usually like to go when traveling in a foreign land, but seeing the balcony tables from the street below the day before really made me want to go eat and have a beer at one of them.
After a lunch of a Cambodian curry and some french fries with garlic aoili, washed down by an Angkor beer, we made our way toward the Royal Palace.
Along the way we sneaked another picture of monks.
The Royal Palace was closed for the day, so we only got to see the Silver Pagoda area. Funny, that didn't seem to make a difference on the ticket price though, as we had to pay full price even though we weren't going to get to see half of the place.
Either way, the area around the Silver Pagoda was very cool.
And there were more elephant statues.
As well as an exhibit of a traditional Tonlé Sap stilt house, complete with musicians inside the house, who we tipped but didn't take a picture of, and a woman outside the house weaving cloth, who's picture we also didn't get.
We decided to instead go with a picture of me acting like a dork in the window.
After the Silver Pagoda we figured it was time to finally go see the infamous Tuol Sleng Museum. We got a tuk-tuk driver to take us there because it is a little farther from the center of town and we didn't have much time left.
Tuol Sleng was a former high school that the Khmer Rouge turned into Security Prison 21, or S-21. It became the largest detention and torture center in Cambodia during Pol Pot's insanity. We read that between 1975 and 1978 more than 30,000 people (according to former staff at the prison) were held and tortured here before being shipped off to execution, which took place at what is now called the Killing Fields of Choeung Ek, which we saw the day before.
What you learn by visiting here is that the Khmer Rouge seemed to take a lot of their modus operandi from the Nazis. They kept very specific records of the prisoners, which included mug shot-style pictures of the victims.
There were rules for the prisoners written on a big board in the courtyard (English translation is a little messy):
1. You must answer accordingly to my question. Don’t turn them away.
2. Don’t try to hide the facts by making pretexts this and that, you are strictly prohibited to contest me.
3. Don’t be a fool for you are a chap who dare to thwart the revolution.
4. You must immediately answer my questions without wasting time to reflect.
5. Don’t tell me either about your immoralities or the essence of the revolution.
6. While getting lashes or electrification you must not cry at all.
7. Do nothing, sit still and wait for my orders. If there is no order, keep quiet. When I ask you to do something, you must do it right away without protesting.
8. Don’t make pretext about Kampuchea Krom in order to hide your secret or traitor.
9. If you don’t follow all the above rules, you shall get many many lashes of electric wire.
10. If you disobey any point of my regulations you shall get either ten lashes or five shocks of electric discharge.
Most of the museum was all of the different rooms with metal beds set up like they were when prisoners were chained to them for torture.
That was nothing compared to when we hit the rooms with the photos. There must have been three or four full rooms covered in the pictures the Khmer Rouge took of the prisoners. So many of them were so young. There were several of young mothers holding babies. It is absolutely heartbreaking to see. Everyone in the pictures we saw were tortured into "confessing" crimes against the regime, which was documented by the Khmer Rouge and I believe involved forcing the victim to sign.
They were then shipped off to Choeung Ek to be executed or were tortured to death right there at the prison. We know this was the fate of every person in the pictures we saw.
Couldn't really talk much during the tuk-tuk ride back to our hotel.
I went for a swim in the pool while Lisa wrote in her journal and the yuppie couple typed away on their laptops in their fashionably casual clothes.
We then walked back to the FCC for dinner. The place was absolutely hopping in the evening. There were groups of people at just about every table, including huge tables pushed together in the back rooms for big tour groups. The pool table seemed to be taken over by guys who looked like they might actually be genuine foreign correspondents. It kind of looked like the tables were where the tourists were sitting and eating, and the bar was where the journalists were drinking. They seemed to be regulars in any case.
Since it was evening the geckos were out in full force. They were all over the walls of the FCC. Big ones, little ones, baby tiny ones. I pretty much lost all attention of my wife for the evening, as when there is a cute animal around she got stop looking at it and smiling. And the baby geckos were damn cute.
I felt kind of guilty about going to the FCC for dinner, rather than supporting a smaller business owner. But Cambodia was a little more tricky when trying to be sure you are getting actual vegetarian food and the FCC had vegetarian specific items.
It is the only time on the whole trip that I had pizza.
Next - The boat out of Cambodia and my impressions of the country
Thursday, January 17, 2008
Day 6 (Part 2) - Eating Indian In Cambodia With A Man From Oz
We arrived at the boat dock in Phnom Penh around 1:00pm or so on November 14th, about five-and-a-half hours after leaving the boat dock south of Siem Reap. As we pulled up to the dock, dozens of tuk-tuk drivers gathered at the railing above the landing. A couple of them even managed to jump on the boat and make their way through the cabin asking if anyone needed a tuk-tuk. We kind of got corralled by one of them. The guy was pretty persistent, and we did need a ride anyway. We told him we had big bags and we might need an actual taxi, but he was sure he would be able to take us. So after giving a 10,000 riel note (unloaded another one!) to the guys that carried our bags off the boat, we loaded up in the tuk-tuk.
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
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
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
Day 6 (Part 1) - Life On The Tonlé Sap
Another early morning on our trip. We had to get down to breakfast right when they started serving at 6:00 because Mr. Ya was going to pick us up at 6:20. We had learned over the last couple of days that he was not one to be late either. This is one of the travel arrangements I was pretty excited about since we first planned the trip, taking the boat down the Tonlé Sap to Phnom Penh. I love any time travel involves something besides a road or a plane.
We climbed into Mr. Ya's car and he drove us down the dirt road toward Tonlé Sap lake, the main body of water in Cambodia, in fact the largest freshwater lake in Southeast Asia. We passed through villages along the way, as well as dozens of kids in uniform on foot and bikes on their way to school.
We loved having Mr. Ya as our guide in Angkor. A gracious and friendly man who, like many living in Cambodia, lost family members during the Khmer Rouge rule. We didn't want to pry too much, obviously, but we know that he at least lost his brother during that time. He had been a school teacher before Pol Pot took over and now seemed to be someone who would do whatever he needed to survive and thrive. We know that one of his previous jobs was selling motorbikes in Phnom Penh, and now he was a driver/guide and probably a little bit of a jack-of-all-trades kind of guy.
He also seemed tuned into everything that was going on in the area. He knew what was being built where and the nationality of who owned it (French, Korean, etc. - rarely Cambodian).
We pulled up to the boat dock area and we were, again surrounded by people wanting to sell us stuff. A couple of guys were going to grab our bags and Mr. Ya stopped them so he could ask us if we wanted to have them carry our bags to the boat for $1 each. Our bags were heavy so we had problem to that idea. Good thing too, when we got to the boat there was just a flimsy plank to get on, which was hard enough to cross without carrying anything except my shoulder bag.
We said goodbye to Mr. Ya and boarded the boat.
On the boat there were several young girls selling various food products - bananas, cheese wedges, little baguettes, water soda, etc. - before we departed. Their selling tactics were the same as what we had been seeing the whole time, keep asking you until you agree and then ask some more.
Granted, it can be a little frustrating to say no to buying some bananas only to have another girl ask you five seconds later, "Bananas sir?"
But that really didn't excuse how rude some of our fellow tourists could be to them, especially the French ones on the boat. One would think that with the history of how our two governments (French and American) royally fucked this country for several generations, we should be the last ones to be rude to the Cambodians. They are poor and this is their country, goddammit. And its not like they were begging. They were offering decent goods at a fair price, all of it stuff you might need for a five hour boat ride.
And this is their country, goddammit. Guests should act like guests.
I'll speak to this a little more, and a couple of other things, later. After I get through my Phnom Penh posts I plan on adding an afterword on Cambodia before moving on to Vietnam.
Anyway,Lisa and I bought some of those wonderful tiny bananas while we waited for the boat to leave.
Now the boat itself was a pretty decent size, about 100 seats inside the cabin. What they don't tell you is that they will sell many more tickets than that. So for many of the people that came later, like the ones that took the ride in the back of the pickup truck that was included in the ticket price, there were no seats left inside. That meant they had to sit on the roof of the boat.
Now I spent a lot of the trip on the deck of the boat myself, but it was nice to be able to take a break from the wind and sun every once and a while. Even with that, one of the guys I met on the deck said it was still worth the extra cost ($25 vs $4) to avoid the bus he had taken the other direction a few days earlier.
We finally pulled out, later than our scheduled 7:00am departure time, and made our way past the floating and stilted villages on the Tonlé Sap.
Once we hit the open lake the driver gave it the full throttle and we really started to move. This is where the wind factor became an even bigger problem than the sun beating down, though it was pretty bright and hot already.
Looking at the lake on the map doesn't really prepare you for how huge the Tonlé Sap is in reality. It wasn't too long before we couldn't see any land whatsoever. It was just massive. And even when we way out in the middle of it we saw fisherman hard at work.
Then we slowed up and we aimed toward a small fishing boat that made its way toward us. They pulled up alongside and one of our crew member went out and tied on to them. He gave them a plastic bag, they filled it up with some sort of fish and handed it back. They untied and away we went.
They actually stopped and bought fresh fish in the middle of the lake!
While all of us dorky tourists snapped away with our cameras, of course.
After about a good hour or so of not seeing much in the middle of the lake, we finally came to the southern end where the Tonlé Sap transitions from a lake into a river. We started to see the mountains of southern Cambodia.
As well as more signs of life and community.
Watching the people who live off the water go about their daily routine was really interesting. And hard to imagine, as someone who lives on land, what it must be like. A lot of the villages and houses we saw were not built on any kind of shore. They really did float on the water or stick out of the river on stilts. There was not always any real piece of land nearby. People got up in the morning and jumped in their boat to go to work, which I imagine for just about all of them would be fishing, spent their day on the water, and then went home to their house on the water. I imagined that it was possible for many of them to go days, or even weeks, at a time without ever touching land.
I don't know this for sure, as we didn't actually spend any time in these villages.
But we saw many boats full of children on their way to or from school (hard to know which since it was about noon), that was more than likely also one of these buildings on the river. So you could see why I would imagine that.
The kids cheered and waved every time we went past one of their boats.
Our boat actually did stop at a couple of these villages to let off the few Cambodian passengers that were on board. We didn't dock, a small boat would buzz out to meet us, the family would jump on and they would zoom back to the village.
We wouldn't have seen any of this stuff on the bus.
We finally arrived in Phnom Penh, and on to yet another mode of transportation.
Next - The Killing Fields and the coolest Aussie I've ever met
We climbed into Mr. Ya's car and he drove us down the dirt road toward Tonlé Sap lake, the main body of water in Cambodia, in fact the largest freshwater lake in Southeast Asia. We passed through villages along the way, as well as dozens of kids in uniform on foot and bikes on their way to school.
We loved having Mr. Ya as our guide in Angkor. A gracious and friendly man who, like many living in Cambodia, lost family members during the Khmer Rouge rule. We didn't want to pry too much, obviously, but we know that he at least lost his brother during that time. He had been a school teacher before Pol Pot took over and now seemed to be someone who would do whatever he needed to survive and thrive. We know that one of his previous jobs was selling motorbikes in Phnom Penh, and now he was a driver/guide and probably a little bit of a jack-of-all-trades kind of guy.
He also seemed tuned into everything that was going on in the area. He knew what was being built where and the nationality of who owned it (French, Korean, etc. - rarely Cambodian).
We pulled up to the boat dock area and we were, again surrounded by people wanting to sell us stuff. A couple of guys were going to grab our bags and Mr. Ya stopped them so he could ask us if we wanted to have them carry our bags to the boat for $1 each. Our bags were heavy so we had problem to that idea. Good thing too, when we got to the boat there was just a flimsy plank to get on, which was hard enough to cross without carrying anything except my shoulder bag.
We said goodbye to Mr. Ya and boarded the boat.
On the boat there were several young girls selling various food products - bananas, cheese wedges, little baguettes, water soda, etc. - before we departed. Their selling tactics were the same as what we had been seeing the whole time, keep asking you until you agree and then ask some more.
Granted, it can be a little frustrating to say no to buying some bananas only to have another girl ask you five seconds later, "Bananas sir?"
But that really didn't excuse how rude some of our fellow tourists could be to them, especially the French ones on the boat. One would think that with the history of how our two governments (French and American) royally fucked this country for several generations, we should be the last ones to be rude to the Cambodians. They are poor and this is their country, goddammit. And its not like they were begging. They were offering decent goods at a fair price, all of it stuff you might need for a five hour boat ride.
And this is their country, goddammit. Guests should act like guests.
I'll speak to this a little more, and a couple of other things, later. After I get through my Phnom Penh posts I plan on adding an afterword on Cambodia before moving on to Vietnam.
Anyway,Lisa and I bought some of those wonderful tiny bananas while we waited for the boat to leave.
Now the boat itself was a pretty decent size, about 100 seats inside the cabin. What they don't tell you is that they will sell many more tickets than that. So for many of the people that came later, like the ones that took the ride in the back of the pickup truck that was included in the ticket price, there were no seats left inside. That meant they had to sit on the roof of the boat.
Now I spent a lot of the trip on the deck of the boat myself, but it was nice to be able to take a break from the wind and sun every once and a while. Even with that, one of the guys I met on the deck said it was still worth the extra cost ($25 vs $4) to avoid the bus he had taken the other direction a few days earlier.
We finally pulled out, later than our scheduled 7:00am departure time, and made our way past the floating and stilted villages on the Tonlé Sap.
Once we hit the open lake the driver gave it the full throttle and we really started to move. This is where the wind factor became an even bigger problem than the sun beating down, though it was pretty bright and hot already.
Looking at the lake on the map doesn't really prepare you for how huge the Tonlé Sap is in reality. It wasn't too long before we couldn't see any land whatsoever. It was just massive. And even when we way out in the middle of it we saw fisherman hard at work.
Then we slowed up and we aimed toward a small fishing boat that made its way toward us. They pulled up alongside and one of our crew member went out and tied on to them. He gave them a plastic bag, they filled it up with some sort of fish and handed it back. They untied and away we went.
They actually stopped and bought fresh fish in the middle of the lake!
While all of us dorky tourists snapped away with our cameras, of course.
After about a good hour or so of not seeing much in the middle of the lake, we finally came to the southern end where the Tonlé Sap transitions from a lake into a river. We started to see the mountains of southern Cambodia.
As well as more signs of life and community.
Watching the people who live off the water go about their daily routine was really interesting. And hard to imagine, as someone who lives on land, what it must be like. A lot of the villages and houses we saw were not built on any kind of shore. They really did float on the water or stick out of the river on stilts. There was not always any real piece of land nearby. People got up in the morning and jumped in their boat to go to work, which I imagine for just about all of them would be fishing, spent their day on the water, and then went home to their house on the water. I imagined that it was possible for many of them to go days, or even weeks, at a time without ever touching land.
I don't know this for sure, as we didn't actually spend any time in these villages.
But we saw many boats full of children on their way to or from school (hard to know which since it was about noon), that was more than likely also one of these buildings on the river. So you could see why I would imagine that.
The kids cheered and waved every time we went past one of their boats.
Our boat actually did stop at a couple of these villages to let off the few Cambodian passengers that were on board. We didn't dock, a small boat would buzz out to meet us, the family would jump on and they would zoom back to the village.
We wouldn't have seen any of this stuff on the bus.
We finally arrived in Phnom Penh, and on to yet another mode of transportation.
Next - The Killing Fields and the coolest Aussie I've ever met
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
Posts
