Days 106-108: Phnom Penh, Cambodia

We’re back in the land of right hand side driving again, and it’s almost gotten us killed. Since leaving home, the only other place we’ve been in with people driving on the right was Lao, but even that was more of a “drive on either side of the road” kind of place. Not that Cambodian driving is more predictable, but many of the drivers at least honk before they start driving on the wrong side of the road! So all of our training to look right first before crossing a street has to be unlearned now; but in reality you have to look both ways several times before crossing, and having 2 people to look both ways simultaneously really helps given how erratic the drivers are (and how bad the roads are in places).

Phnom Penh is in remarkably good shape considering its history. The modern city was built up by the French, whom were forced out in 1953. Then the city was flooded by two million refugees from US bombing and Khmer Rouge fighting. When the Khmer Rouge won, they forced everyone out of the city and it was abandoned for four years, as part of their radical agrarian vision. When the Vietnamese invaded, they too let the city disintegrate, which lasted until around 1992. And for all that, some of the original French buildings are still in decent shape (after how much reconstruction I don’t know), and the Royal Palace is still beautiful.

The aftereffects of the war are still visible in the people and the economy. More so than any other place we’ve been, there is a large homeless population in Phnom Penh. Many of the cyclo and motorbike drivers sleep on their vehicles at night – the cyclo drivers get a MUCH more comfortable bed! And where there aren’t people asleep on their vehicles, there are people on cardboard sheets covering large swaths of sidewalk. I’ll try to never complain about a hard bed again. The offers from the motorbike drivers here also reflect the poverty – instead of the usual offers of just women, here I get offered “Weed, ladies, cocaine, heroin?” And the weed is offered in the open – the have “happy” pizzas with it as a topping in some of the restaurants here. Illegal but unenforced, apparently.

Mary and I spent our first day there walking through the Royal Palace, the Silver Pagoda, and the National Museum. The king still lives at the royal palace, and a section of it is cordoned off to give him some privacy. Cambodia is a constitutional monarchy, but the king still (usually) revered by the people. The palace is beautiful, replicating in stone and concrete what was originally done in wood. Next door is the Silver Pagoda, which sadly is closed, but apparently contains some amazing treasures and artifacts including a Buddha covered in nearly 10,000 diamonds. Nearby is the National Museum, which contains artifacts from other Khmer archeological sites all over the country. Sadly, many of the artifacts were looted from other sites around the country, or recovered from looters. It’s fun to walk around, but without the surrounding buildings or any explanatory text, the statues and friezes seem extra-lifeless.

Since arriving in Cambodia, I’ve been reading a fair bit about the Khmer Rouge and the Cambodian Genocide, after realizing that I didn’t know that much about such a sad chapter in world history. I visited the Killing Fields and the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum (S-21) to get a real world dose of what I’ve been reading about. They not surprisingly reminded me a lot of the extermination camps in Poland – a very peaceful feel in the air, shattered by horrific thoughts about what happened there. Neither site is as well documented as it might be, but tour guides and guide books fill in the gaps well. It all made me think of Darfur a lot and how badly we’re all doing at stopping this kind of thing from happening again.

One final note in an already too long entry; monks are people. I’ve always thought of monks as being rather removed from the world, meditating in their monasteries. But throughout Asia, and particularly in Lao and Cambodia, we’ve seen them in all aspects of their lives. They take the bus, go shopping, chit-chat, and even visit non-religious sites and take photos, like any other tourist! The monks aren’t ordinary people, in that they always sit higher than everyone else, women can’t touch them, and they’re less likely to strike up a conversation with you, but they’re definitely still people.