Holiday in Cambodia

Before I start, you might notice that this edition of the blog is a little bit text-heavy. Well... that's because my camera got stolen (I think) about a week ago! I know, I know. I'm pretty heartbroken, and I lost 300 photos from the last month which I won't be able to replace, but in the big scheme of things it's not too big of a deal. So, scattered around this post are a few links to other people's pictures on Flickr if you're having trouble picturing anything.

One of our last two days in Kuala Lumpur took us on a day trip to the nearby Batu Caves, which are home to the climax of a yearly celebration where followers of Lord Murugan (a Hindu God) complete an eight-hour procession across the city dragging large wagon-like idols, which are painfully attached their skin with what look like fish hooks. At the end of what must be an excruciating journey, the masochistic followers climb a final 272 steps up into the massive cave complex for a final celebration along with 1.5 million pilgrims and tourists who turn out every year to cheer them on.

Although Gerni and I missed the let's-injure-ourselves-for-god festivities by about a month, we still enjoyed checking out the enormous statue of Lord Murugan which towered over us as we made our pleasant and painless climb up the stairs. We entered the cave itself, which soared above us like a majestic European cathedral, only to be brought back down to earth by the cave's inhabitants: sketchy-looking gangs of monkeys fighting with each other and trinket hawkers who tried hard to sell us photos of ourselves with his lackadaisical iguana (thankfully, not a euphamism).

Our remaining time in KL was spent eating Swedish meatballs and going through the design-on-the-cheap maze at Ikea, getting one last hit of curry in Little India, and waking up early and joining the long line to see the views from the 41st floor sky bridge at the Petronas Towers. We caught the bus in the afternoon to the airport, where we checked into our Air Asia flight to Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia.

After a surprisingly great flight on an amazingly cheap airline, we arrived in the tiny Phnom Penh airport, handed over $20 for an on-the-spot visa, and headed out into the heat of the dusty city. The only way to really get around in Cambodia is on the back of a motorbike, so the two of us we sped off into the chaotic and crazy streets of Phnom Penh, hanging on for dear life. On first impression, Cambodia reminded me a little bit of India in terms of chaos and street crossings. I've really grown to love the third world, and I had a big smile on my face and butterflies in my stomach all the way to our guesthouse.

On our first day in Phnom Penh, we hired a tuk-tuk and driver for the day and went around town exploring the major sights of the city, which mostly revolve around Cambodia's truly horrific recent history. Our first stop was Choeung Ek—better known as The Killing Fields—where some 17,000 people were taken and brutally executed during the reign of the Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979. Like the Nazi concentration camps spread throughout Eastern Europe, the Killing Fields were the site of torture, starvation, and murder. As we learned more about the killing fields, it seemed almost more horrific than the Holocaust because the Khmer Rouge didn't believe that human life was worth the cost of a bullet, so prisoners were often beaten to death with rudimentary tools and farm equipment. We took a quiet walk around the remains of the camp including a tree where children were tied up and beaten, large mass graves where bodies were haphazardly strewn and buried, and a temple housing thousands of human skulls, which stands as a somber reminder of the countless people killed by the Khmer Rouge regime.

Our next stop was to check out the equally horrifying Toul Sleng Genocide Museum, which was formerly one of many prisons spread throughout Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge regime before prisoners were transported into the countryside to be killed and buried. It is hard to say exactly why the government imprisoned and killed so many people — most were accused of treason, and it sounds like a 1984-esque situation where you could get sent to jail for doing just about anything that was considered anti-government. Throughout the museum are mug shots of thousands upon thousands of prisoners, ranging from little kids to the elderly, as they first arrived at the prison. Some of the faces looked frightened, some looked defiant, and some looked as if the light within their eyes had already faded. Although the exact number is debated among historians, somewhere between 1.5 and 3 million Cambodian people were killed in prisons just like this one over that four year period.

For me, the most interesting part of the museum was the collection of quotes and photos they had from former prison guards, many of which are still alive today. The exhibit showed photos of the prison guards then and now and included a quote from each. Many of them were only teenagers when they served as guards, and all were very apologetic for what they did, but claimed they had no choice. Most of them said that the Khmer Rouge, led by the dictator Pol Pot, was so brutal that the only way to protect yourself from getting killed was to become one of the government's henchmen. The exhibit was angrily and repeatedly vandalized in the Khmer language by Cambodian visitors, but I thought it was an interesting perspective that really added to the experience of learning about the history of the genocide.

Throughout the day, we made some less depressing stops as well. We visited the pleasant National Museum, which houses a lot of Cambodia's best sculptures and art from the Angkor period, which was a good introduction to our Angkor Wat visit a few days later. Gerni and I also wandered through two local markets which were crowded with locals and packed to the gills with amazing sights and smells. Gerni bought some t-shirts so he doesn't have to do laundry, and I bought a couple of expertly-photocopied fake Lonely Planet guidebooks for three dollars each. The Cambodian currency (Riel) is so unstable that people just stopped using it and started using the US Dollar instead. The handful of ATMs in Cambodia spit out US cash, and you pay for almost everything with it. Change is often given in both US dollars and smaller denominations of Riel, which made for some seriously confusing purchases along the way.

That night, we went out to experience our first in a string of about twenty phenomenal meals we had in Cambodia. Due to a big French influence from the colonial days, Cambodian food is crazy-delicious. Not only that, but they prepare incredibly good western food as well — without a doubt better than anywhere I've been so far on the trip. Gerni and I went to a classy French restaurant and splurged on a feast: we ordered a bottle of wine, three types of paté, two scrumptious beef fillet steaks, dessert, and coffee. All this for around fifteen dollars apiece for a meal which would have cost easily 75 dollars plus tip at a restaurant back home. Cambodia is truly cheap culinary heaven.

Since our time was limited in Cambodia, we decided to leave Phnom Penh and head down to the southern beach town called Sihanoukville. At the end of our six hour trip, we were dropped off in a chaotic flurry of hostel hawkers and motorbike drivers, who swarmed around us shouting and waving pamphlets in our faces hoping we'd go with them to their hotel. We waited until it had calmed down, then took off on a mototaxi to a guesthouse of our own choosing. When we arrived, I noticed that my camera was missing, and I think that it must have been taken from my pocket in the chaos right after we got off the bus. Oh well... life goes on. After seeing some horrific and humbling poverty over the last six months, I'm having a harder and harder time feeling sorry for myself when things go wrong.

Camera-loss aside, the beach town of Sihanoukville was really fun and relaxed, and was a world away from Thailand in terms of development and tourism impact. Along the beach, Cambodian people outnumbered foreigners by about 30 to 1, and we loved strolling along the sand watching families play in the water, teenagers light off makeshift fireworks, and kids build impressive Angkor Wat sandcastles as the sun went down over the clear water. One thing that surprised me was how modest Cambodian people are — most of the people in the water were fully clothed, and the few bikini-clad tourists looked uncomfortably out of place.

We spent two days relaxing and reading in Sihanoukville, which was exactly what we needed after all the traveling we'd done. Our hotel, in typical Cambodian style, cooked up insanely good food, including a night with a Thanksgiving-like English Sunday dinner, and a night with delicious Mexican food. We did ocassionally leave the room however. One day, we dropped by a wonderful Western-run place called the Boom Boom Room, which will transfer pirated copies of popular records to iPods for 75 cents each. They had thousands of albums to choose from, and even had some relatively obscure indie albums that just came out in the States. It's really illegal to be sure, but I was itching for some new music to listen to after six months on the road. Another day, I went across town to a bar called Snake House, where you can get drunk surrounded by about 50 live pythons, cobras, and vipers. They are in cages and everything, but it was still a tad bit sketchy. I've met some crazy people on this trip, but the idiot who decided to combine poisonous snakes with getting sloshed surely takes the cake.

In order to get insurance money for my stolen camera, I needed to go to the police station to file a police report. I asked the helpful staff at my guesthouse, and they recommended I go sometime between 9 and 9:30 in the morning because — and this is a direct quote — "that is the time the policemen are least likely to be drunk." Yikes. So, the next morning I headed to the station on the back of a motorcycle and arrived to find the officers stubborn and surly, but sober enough to help me file a report. They needed a copy of my passport, but didn't have a copy machine at the station, so I hired another motorbike to take me across the city to the nearest copy machine and back to the station. Still sober when I returned, they had my report prepared and I was off on my way. Whew.

Later that day, we left the relaxation of the beach town for a quick stopover in Phnom Penh, where we filled up on another multi-course fiesta of delicious French grub. The following morning, we were on another bus, this time headed north up near the top of Cambodia to the country's largest tourist attraction, the Temples of Angkor. If you are a fan of terrible movies, you may remember the temples—often called Angkor Wat by travelers—as the place where Angelina Jolie scurried around dodging lasers or whatever in Tomb Raider. If you're into history instead, you may know Angkor Wat as the largest temple complex on Earth, and one of the globe's most amazing and best-preserved archeological sites.

We bought a three day pass, and started out our first day getting all of the major stuff out of the way so we could spend the next two checking out minor temples. First was the Bayon, which was a temple topped with slate-grey spires which is popular for its 216 massive carvings of faces which smile down upon visitors. The place was packed full of mostly Japanese tour groups, but we still managed to find a corner or two of solitude where we could really enjoy the temple. The Bayon sits in the middle of a much larger walled city called Angkor Thom, which in the early 13th century at the height of the Angkor period, housed almost a million townspeople. The gates at the entrances to Angkor Thom were a highlight and were also carved with enormous smiling faces. We found some off-the-beaten-path areas where the spiderwebs outnumbered the visitors, then ended up in Ta Prohm, one of the most famous temples in Angkor (and the filming location for Tomb Raider). The temple looks like it's fighting an eternal slow-motion battle with the surrounding trees, which undulate as they grow from the temple's crumbling walls. We finished our day as Indiana Jones wannabes at the mother of all temples, Angkor Wat. The temple lives up to the hype, and made for a really fun visit. Gerni an I enjoyed sitting by the nearby ponds and watching the sun's last light of the day strike the five large spires of the temple.

Each night after the temples clear out, everyone heads over to hang out in the nearby town of Siem Reap, which is full of outdoor restaurants, bars, and shops catering to the masses of tourists who visit the temples of Angkor each year. Siem Reap was really fun, almost like Khao San Road in Bangkok minus all the asshole meathead party dudes. Plus it was full of amazing restaurants. Did I mention Cambodia has amazing restaurants?

After our second day soaking in all there was to see in Angkor Wat, I started to have my second major medical issue on the trip. My leg had felt numb for about three days, like it wasn't getting circulation or something, and after asking around online and doing some thorough research, it became clear that it might be a potentially fatal blood clot. Every article I read ended with, "call 911 or visit an emergency room as soon as possible." I dug through my guidebook and it said that despite all the tourism in Siem Reap, no hospital exists of decent quality. Faced with the Cambodian reality of no 911 service and the nearest high-quality medical care a 14 hour bus ride away, I started to freak out. Gerni helped calm me down, and I relayed my syptoms over the internet to my friend Tara back in America, who contacted a doctor for me. Still not sure what to do, we spent the night trying to find some Asprin to thin my blood for the time being. We were lucky enough to stumble upon a pharmacist who had lived in Colorado, who had Asprin and a lot of good advice. He also knew much more about blood clots than I had found out online, and seriously doubted that I had one based on my symptoms. However, since a numb leg could be easily be misdiagnosed, I made the quick decision that I should forfeit my final day at Angkor Wat and get on a bus to Bangkok as soon as possible. Luckily, there were seats left for the morning bus, and I headed through the Cambodian countryside toward the gritty border town of Poipet, and reached Bangkok later that night.

After a few days here in Bangkok, and I've been to three different doctors in the best and most well-organized hospital I've ever seen in my life. While they're not sure exactly what's wrong with my leg, they assured me that it is definitely not a blood clot or anything serious. At this point, the numbness has all but gone away, but they're keeping me medicated for a couple of days on antibiotics and a few other things, and they said it's safe for me to keep on traveling.

Gerni arrived here last night, and we both spent all day today tying up loose ends, doing laundry, and running errands (like buying a new camera!) before our flight tomorrow morning to Yangon, Myanmar. The country of Myanmar—formerly known as Burma—is very secluded from the outside world, and while there are a handful of places to access the Internet for basic contact, the blog will definitely be on the back burner until we get back to the well-connected world around February 10th.

Thanks for reading everybody, and we'll catch up with you here when we're back from Myanmar!

Ryan (& Ryan)