Monday, March 3, 2014

Not the best. But not bad!

A lot of people hear “Cambodia” and they get a vague impression in their minds of an unpleasant and unfortunate place. There are good reasons to have this impression, because for the last half of the 20th century, that's exactly what it was. The history is of course, complex.

After dealing with French colonization in the 19th century and a Japanese occupation in the 20th century, the American - Vietnam War pulled Cambodia into the conflict. When the North Vietnamese moved their supply lines into Cambodia, Cambodia got bombed. In 1970, a military coup took over the government and successfully ran the country into the ground. As refugees flooded into a crumbling economy, food became sparse and people starved. When the Khmer Rouge stormed the capital city Phnom Penh in 1975, people believed that fortune was finally turning around. Instead, the military dictator, Pol Pot, went about transforming Cambodia into his ideal society, killing a quarter of the population in the process. When Pol Pot was finally driven into the jungle in 1979, again, circumstances stood to get better. However, Pol Pot left behind devastated rice fields and stocks had been decimated. A two year famine followed. Throughout the 80's and 90's, the Khmer Rouge continued to operate near the Thai border waging military resistance, littering the country-side with landmines. Fighting would continue until 1998.

Taking all of this into account, it shouldn't come as a surprise that Cambodia can look a little rough around the edges. But it's not true that Cambodia is an unpleasant place today. It is a wonderful place to travel. From the perspective of a tourist, it's a safe and cheap destination. The people are friendly, the landscape is beautiful, and Angkor Wat stands on its own.

Cambodia 2013
Life in Cambodia today is hard to describe. There is definitely the sense of a middle class emerging. The cities are dotted with people doing well for themselves and smartphones are finding their way into the hands of teenagers everywhere. But it's wrong to believe that everything is now OK. There are still many people in dire economic circumstances. One unpleasant indicator is the staggering amount of child sex trafficking. Organizations that are trying to combat this issue say that children are often sold into brothels by family members. Desperate faces are everywhere.
Cambodia 2013

Of course where you have lots of people barely getting by, the competition for getting a little bit of business from tourists like me can be fierce. This is one of the more frustrating aspects of traveling in Cambodia. I call it “begging-for-business” and it can be maddening. For example, If five tuk-tuk drivers are parked on the same corner, you will get asked 5 times if you need a tuk-tuk. It doesn't matter that the last driver just heard you turn down 4 other offers. And of course it's not just tuk-tuk drivers, it's anyone who has something to sell. The constant stream of offers while walking down the street can be hard to handle. Politely declining each offer is an unsustainable approach, but blatantly ignoring everyone feels rude. It's frustrating, but it's hard to know how to feel about this. For people who don't have a lot of options nor a lot of business, what else can they do?
Cambodia 2013

For all the frustration of the “begging-for-business” brings, every now and then it turns out to be something endearing. One woman comes to mind, bringing a smile to my face every time I think about her. We were touring Angkor Wat, where arrays of food stalls are situated in designated areas. You don't want to get near one of these places unless you're committed to sitting down and having a meal. Otherwise, it's not worth the onslaught of people who are are begging for business. We happened into the parking lot of one of these places on our way to a temple and were met by a cheerful woman to let us know that her stall was #9, and that if we wanted anything at all, to make sure and give stall #9 a visit. It was still too early for lunch and no one was eating, which made us an easy target. But I was hungry and so took her up on her offer. As she let us through the parking lot, I tried making some conversation and threw her a softball question, “So, is YOUR food the BEST food?” “Noooooo,” she sang. “Not the best,” she declared definitively. “But not bad!”
I had to laugh. Maybe the right follow-up question would be, “Where can I find the best food?” But I could live with “not bad.”
Cambodia 2013

Less endearing are the small children selling sunglasses and old woman offering massages on the beach, which is where we found ourselves after crossing the Thai border. This where we met up with Stacey, Sabrina's college friend, who was parlaying her work trip to Hong Kong into a personal one-week vacation. Beachfront properties were ramshackle, serving local beer on tap for $0.25 during happy hour, which can last late into the night before the price quadruples. The first night we went out, I ordered a beer and handed over a dollar. The bar-tender said it was still happy hour. I looked at my watch and it was 10:45pm. “Ok....so I'll guess I'll have 4 beers then??” At that price, beer is literally cheaper than water (and barely discernible from it). Loud music plays from distorted speakers into the wee hours of the morning and balloons filled with laughing-gas are popular bar snacks.

Many of the hostels and bars advertise for Western staff, offering a place to stay and food to eat in exchange for working the bar a few nights a week. It's an arrangement where backpackers can go and lose themselves for a few months without taking a hit on their travel budget. One of the more memorable characters who had temporarily parked himself on the beach was Richie Rich from California. Within minutes of meeting him he was sharing his story of being near death as a heroin addict and how his dad saved his life through a little bit of tough love. He was an entertaining guy with a lot of stories, hitchhiking across the U.S. One time a young woman picked him up late at night, with a baby in the backseat. Turns out her husband was off serving in Iraq and she was feeling lonely. Richie told her how much he appreciated the ride, but under no circumstances should she ever, ever, pick up a hitch-hiker with a baby in the car. Too many weirdos out there.

We met Richie Rich on Christmas Eve, on the late-night boat driving us to a little beach party happening on some uninhabited island, somewhere in the middle of the ocean. It was just your typical Christmas Eve beach rave. The DJ was interrupted a few times by an uncooperative generator, but there was a bonfire to light the sky and lots and lots of cheap drinks. We made some friends from Sweden, had a midnight toast, and tried to remember that it was Christmas.

Cambodia 2013

The next day, Christmas day, we spent a groggy few hours in the airport to make quick flight to Siem Reap, the city just outside the great Angkor Wat temple complex. Our friend Stacey was tight on time, so we afforded ourselves the luxury of a short flight vs another 12 hour bus ride. Coincidence would have it that one of my old college friends, Brandon, would be in Siem Reap at the same time as us. So there we were having a little college reunion of sorts in a very unlikely place.


Cambodia 2013
Walking around town was interesting for me, mostly because I was comparing the very busy and social atmosphere to the sleepy town of my memory. So much has changed. Before Cambodia's long period of violence, Angkor Wat was of course a tourist destination, but the world was less mobile back then, so it saw relatively few visitors. Tourism picked up again in the late 90's, but even when I visited in 2003, there was still an empty feeling. I remembered being astonished that I basically had the place to myself. I also remember telling people, to go now, because it's not going to stay like this forever. And it hasn't.

I did a little research and it looks like the number of annual visitors has increased six-fold since I last visited. Plus, I was there during the sweltering summer months, the tourist low-season. This time around it was the week between Christmas and New Years, one of the busier periods of the year. All this to say that we did not have the place to ourselves. It was crowded almost everywhere we went. This was a little disappointing for me because what I loved about my first visit was the sense of discovery, of being alone, turning the corner and seeing something unexpected. That's something you can't experience when you're shuffling behind a line of people. Instead, you're standing there, waiting for the scene to clear out for just one second so you can snap a picture that isn't filled with a crowd of Japanese tourists. Fortunately it's possible to arrive before the morning light and enjoy an hour or two of serenity and pleasant photography before the hoards descend upon you.
The quintessential sunrise at Angkor Wat
Cambodia 2013
Behind the Photo:
The crowd of people getting the quintessential Sunrise shot.
Hoards of tourists or not, Angkor is still an impressive place. The heyday of Angkor was between the 9th and 13th centuries and was essentially abandoned by the 15th century. It wasn't “re-discovered” until the 19th century, by which point the jungle had reclaimed most of the temples. Archeologists have reconstructed many of the ruins and in some cases, have left some of the jungle behind, leaving a real Indiana Jones ambiance.
Cambodia 2013
Cambodia 2013
Cambodia 2013
After a long day of touring the temples, we met up again with Brandon and his wife, drinking our way up and down “Pub Street”, a commercial heaven of restaurants and bars. Brandon, by the way, was also in my electrical engineering class, and is an incredibly smart person. By 2am we had planted ourselves firmly at the cleverly named bar, “Angkor What?” where the party had spilled out onto the street. A very sober Sabrina was was engaged with a very drunken Brandon.
“I'm 32, I don't have a job, I don't have a house, I'm not married,” Sabrina lamented.
But Brandon put things into perspective, “Thirty-two is a beautiful number.”
“It is?”
“Yeah, it's two to the power of five.”
Let me interrupt for second to explain to the mathematically challenged. Brandon is saying that “32” is the number “2” multiplied by itself 5 times (2*2*2*2*2). In the digital world of computers, circuits are either on or off, which mean counting in binary is useful. A five-digit binary number then, has 32 possible values.
Anyway, Brandon was saying, “ Yeah, it's two to the power of five. You have 2's on each side, a 2 in the middle, and another two 2's.”
“Huh?”
“Yeah, it's a beautiful number. Think about it.”
“I AM thinking about it!”

Stacey spent her last day in Cambodia feeling a bit under the weather, which meant we had to cancel a few plans. She apologized profusely and felt bad that we were just sitting around all day, not doing much. I had to explain to her that a day of doing nothing was more than alright with us. We have time to do nothing. After she left, we would spend a few more days of doing nothing, and enjoying it.

Cambodia 2013
Cambodia 2013
Sooner or later though, doing nothing has to give way to nailing down some actual plans, and so we went to Phnom Penh to arrange visas for Myanmar, my one travel goal for this trip.

For a sobering history lesson we visited the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, known as Security Prison 21. The prison was actually just a regular high school, converted into a prison by Pol Pot. This haunted place is where prisoners were questioned, tortured and killed for fabricated offenses, usually nothing more than political suspicion against the regime. Anyone with an education was automatically suspect. Wearing eyeglasses or having soft hands was sometimes enough to be picked up and disposed of.


Cambodia 2013

From Wikipedia:
Prisoners were routinely beaten and tortured with electric shocks, searing hot metal instruments and hanging, as well as through the use of various other devices. Some prisoners were cut with knives or suffocated with plastic bags. Other methods for generating confessions included pulling out fingernails while pouring alcohol on the wounds, holding prisoners’ heads under water, and the use of the waterboarding technique.

The "Medical Unit" at Tuol Sleng, however, did kill at least 100 prisoners by bleeding them to death. Medical experiments were performed on certain prisoners. Inmates were sliced open and had organs removed with no anesthetic. Others were attached to intravenous pumps and every drop of blood was drained from their bodies to see how long they could survive. The most difficult prisoners were skinned alive.
The story of Pol Pot is fascinating. A somewhat privileged upbringing allowed him to study in Paris, where he flunked out of school and joined an underground communist club. He returned to Cambodia and inspired by the Cultural Revolution happening in China, he gained support from the North Vietnamese and raised a rural army, decrying the corruption of the upper class. When he overthrew the current military installation, it was seen as a win for the common people. But Pol Pot had his own ideas for transforming Cambodia into his ideal society. He wanted to lived in an isolated, independent Cambodia, something akin to the great Angkor empire that existed before him. He believed that dignity existed in the working class and that an isolated independence could be achieved by sending everyone out to the rice fields. Almost immediately he declared all personal property to be the property of the state, declared the calendar year to be year zero, and exiled the urban population of Phnom Penh to the rice fields. Anyone who was uncooperative or even suspected of being uncooperative was immediately killed. In the hard-labor conditions of the rice fields, anyone who couldn't work was killed. Many who survived execution fell victim to starvation and disease. The property and stockpiles of traditional farmers were seized, leaving the families of generational farmers to starve. An estimated 2 million people, a quarter of the population, died in a four year period.

Once prisoners were tortured enough and coerced into signed false confessions, they were loaded into the back of a truck and driven just outside the city to be executed in one of the many infamous killing fields. Since bullets were too valuable to be used on prisoners, executions were carried out with machetes or various farming tools. Executioners would sometimes use the sharp edge of the sugar cane stalk to slit the throat of their victim. Once a blindfolded prisoner had been either clubbed or slashed they were shoved into the mass grave before them.
Cambodia 2013
Killing fields have been found all over Cambodia, but the most symbolic one has been turned into a large memorial. Individual audio tours are available, which have stories told by the few people to survive imprisonment. The grave sites are now little more than indentations in the earth, but bone fragments continue to resurface during the rainy season. The central memorial houses the skulls of more than 5,000 victims.

Cambodia 2013

Phew. After some heavy-duty history lessons, we tried to just enjoy the city. The riverfront area is a place for eating, drinking, doing some outdoor aerobics or reading a book on the lawn outside the royal palace. We had some time to kill as we waited for our Myanmar visas to get sorted and so we stocked up on afternoon coffees, French pastries and a few late-night clubs. Of course while we were sipping coffee, large demonstrations were happening just outside the city. Garment workers were demanding better pay and working conditions. Between collapsing factories and low wages ($80/month), it's easy to see why there is such discontent. Several protesters were killed by the police and many more were injured. It will be interesting to see what tomorrow holds for Cambodia. Just down the street from our hotel was a German style beer garden, sporting a small microbrewery and serving Chinese style hot pot. I think this is a good sign of a reinvention happening, hopefully bringing a brighter future. 

Cambodia 2013

Cambodia 2013

Cambodia 2013