Things Betwixt
James here with my first attempt at a country summary post. Why do we write these? Well, personally I think it’s because Alex wanted to write a bit more about her beloved Peru at the start of this trip and now we’re stuck needing to write one for each country! On a more serious note… Partly it’s because we want to remember some extra details that don’t fit naturally into a blog post. Sometimes it’s things we remember after publishing. In some ways it’s because it’s these little pieces that make up the jigsaw puzzle of travel or dare I say it, even the soul of a country. Finally it’s because it’s these memories, snapshots of time that hit you out of the blue years later. It’s easy to remember the sight of Machu Pichu or the silhouette of the Fuego volcano erupting into the night sky. But years down the line, my subconscious mind will remind me of shopping for walking shoes in a Colombian mall with Gojo our friendly taxi driver; the leathery old man asking us for money on the Isla Del Sol or get hit by his cane; that horribly sweet “Churchill” drink in Costa Rica; trying and failing to ride a manual motorbike while a Filipino man with three teeth shouts “DOWN” “DOWN” over and over again; the fact that Bruno Mars was spotted as an Elvis impersonator in Honolulu. Etc.
We rushed through this little sibling of Thailand in just five nights, staying in only two locations. A mere blink of an eye on the scale of our trip. The reason was partly because I had been here before and Alex only really wanted to see Angor Wat. Mostly though it’s because the thermometer was easily over 40 degrees from around 8am to 6pm every day and barely cooling down at night. Add in the high humidity and lack of any cool breeze and it’s a recipe for boiled Westerners. So without further ado, here are our favourite moments, random musings, odd sightings and mild frustrations from Cambodia.
Rule of Three
Highlights (Alex): finally getting to experience Angkor Wat, amazing accommodation, guide Collins planning everything for me
Highlights (James): the hotels we stayed at, much more luxurious than where I stayed last time I was here. Being tour guide for Alex. Rooftop drinks and a nice Indian curry.
Lowlights (Alex): old faithful – the heat, learning new ways humans can commit horrific acts against their own kind, bus journey between Siem Reap and Phnom Penh
Lowlights (James): Songkran continues (dodging constant water fights is only fun for so long). The heat, I feel like we always complain about this, maybe we should have toured the Antarctic. Uncomfortable bus rides.
Takeaways (Alex): Same atrocities, different countries, different moments in time, still going on today. In hindsight, it’s obvious to identify the oppressors in these countries, but this is becoming harder and harder with our inability to trust anything we see or hear, how many lives will be lost due to misinformation and people trying to figure out what is true? The genocide was only 50 years ago, what Cambodia has managed to achieve despite it all is really impressive
Takeaways (James): Memories can be deceiving. Regimes appear to start with good intentions (usually in response to foreign intervention) but they quickly become extreme, tunnel visioned and very paranoid, often descending into unspeakable violence. In a country with a lot of poverty we still felt welcomed and safe.
Description (Alex): Beautiful and tragic history, touristy but not in an aggressive way, weirdly more expensive than Thailand (but still cheap by England standards)
Description (James): Sweaty. Great temples, the best in SEA. Sad history which should be recognized.
Entertainment
TV: Fallout ☢️, Clarkson’s Farm 🐄
Books: The Drawing of the Three, The Women
Podcasts: [the usual], The Rest is Entertainment
Where We Stayed
Residence 1960: 5 ⭐
Khmer Surin Boutique Guesthouse: 4.5 ⭐
Cutting Room Floor
- What I don’t remember from Cambodia is that US dollars are widely accepted, in most places prices are either entirely shown in USD or USD and Cambodian Riel are side by side.
- If you pay in USD you’ll likely get your change in Riel. Leading to much confusion over how much change we should be getting. 4000 Riel is around $1.
- ATMs can give out $100 bills but it’s risky. You might get a ripped or damaged bill which definitely won’t be accepted and even if it’s new and crisp, that’s a lot of change for a $6 lunch.
- Grab (similar to Uber) thankfully saves on any awkward Tuk Tuk negotiations. Without the app you’ll be quoted at 3-4 times the price of what locals would pay and you end up bartering to somewhere in-between. Usually it gets to the point where you end up arguing over a 20p difference which isn’t worth the hassle.
- In a similar vein, this also happens at the markets where there is no app option. Nothing has a price sticker and instead there are many calculators lying around which are used to show you a made up price. A fridge magnet price starts at $1.50 and before you know it, with minimum negotiating you’re being offered two magnets for $1.
- The money we “saved” on the fridge magnet was almost immediately donated to a poor lady on the bridge who was severely disabled. It’s hard to imagine there is much support for people unable to work here and she gives me a heartwarming smile as I hand her the small amount of change.
- While in the Killing Fields I spot Alex waving at someone. I assume it’s a small child but it is actually the Canadian couple we saw two days ago on the Angor Wat tour.
- Like in most SEA cities, the traffic is mental. Traffic lights are rarely obeyed and a system of vehicle size and/or confidence seems to be the rules of the road.
- While there are occasionally pavements, these are often filled with street sellers, plastic seats from a nearby eatery, lines of parked scooters or giant 4×4 cars taking up the entire width.
- Another country with huge wealth disparity. Locals hack away with machetes at coconuts (dangerously balanced on their knees!!) in the sweltering heat, often adjacent to humongous high rise offices or flats, no doubt air conditioned to a fridge like temperature.
- Local beer is often as cheap or in fact cheaper than soft drinks. Half a pint of coke or half a pint of beer, which is less healthy?
- Mr. T takes great pleasure in telling us about “Happy Soup”, essentially chicken soup with marijuana added for “flavour”. “Happy pizza”, “Happy cookies or brownies” will mean they also contain extra “flavour”.
- While marijuana is technically illegal, like in a lot of countries it’s not particularly enforced. Usually though locals would not smoke it but digest it through edibles.
- Sticking with taboo practices for a moment. There is a problem with an illegal sex trade here. Women of all ages are often forced into it against their will or out of sheer desperation. Thankfully a charity called “Daughters of Cambodia” exists to help women escape this trade and instead learn skills for safer work environments.
- The delicious food we bought outside the Phare circus also goes towards helping local poverty.
- The mincy and flamboyant circus performer who certainly seemed to be in tune with his feminine side made us wonder on the attitude to LGBTQ minorities here.
- In the hotel pool a local family try to prevent their infant daughter from joining us in the swimming pool. Toddlers are very determined though and she eventually sneaks a toe, then a foot, then a leg onto the pool steps. Watching her with curiosity her parents/minder observe then jump in when she inevitably face plants into the deep water.
- The Cambodia border where a security guard yells at us to go ahead, to then have a security guard ahead yell at us to go back. Everyone yelling at us. Us unable to communicate. Thankfully the first guard manages to tell the second guard he’s wrong and we make it passed his barking. To the next person who yells at us for not knowing where to go.
- The horrible bus journey from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh where 5 of us are cramped into the back row of the bus, that means the seats don’t recline, and are above the engine, so we’re sweating and sticking to one another, whilst a few seats in front they are chilling in their cool, reclined seats. Probably for the same price. We just lucked out on getting the final two.
- As with pretty much every country we’ve been to (except Hawaii) headphones don’t seem to be popular. Everything from phone calls to games, movies, TikTok and beyond is blasted out at full volume. The people seem not just unbothered but also unaware that the entire bus/public space may not want to listen along with them. I don’t think it’s a cost thing as all of these people obviously have phones. Just a complete lack of self awareness I guess!
- The woman in Phnom Penh walking down the middle of a busy street with a pre-recorded screech advertising her wares. What is she selling? Snails covered in oil and chili.
- “Thank you” in Cambodian is “O Kun”. Much easier to pronounce than “Khap un kah” in Thai which usually came out in a mix of krap/krab/kun/uhn/kar.
- Fast food prices here can quickly reach $10 per person. Basically Western prices. Only foreign visitors would go to KFC etc as locals can get their street food for $1 or less.
- No one has a Fitbit charger in Cambodia. The search continues.
- Porridge oats for $11 in the “Super value Mart”
- A heartbreaking line from a child beggar in Angor Wat: “I don’t have money for school”. Whether this is simply true or a line he’s been told to say to make tourists feel guilty is equally rotten.
- Giant spiders on sticks. Horrendous to look at. Even more horrendous to wonder where they are sourcing these from.
- Speaking of which, apart from the odd horror seen in the wild. We’ve not had any eight legged room intruders across our trip. (Please don’t curse it now).
- We really do need to have a list of guide sayings at some point. Some of Mr. T’s favourites… “Ok family …”, “Chop chop” “Lovely jubbly” as well as “Take a foe-tow” his best attempt at a British accent.
- Dogs playing around at the side of the lake
- Breakfast in the minivan on the way to Angkor Wat
- Some last bits about the Khmer Rouge… the leaders included people who were educated in France. Enticed by Marxist theory, promising an equal society.
- However, only they were allowed to be educated, ordering all ‘educated’ people to death.
- One of the leaders even wore glasses, one of those other deadly ‘features’ for the public that would identify you as an ‘intellectual’ and get you killed.
- Their idea was, seemingly, was to restart the country from scratch, they called it year 0, starting anew without the problems of the past, apparently brought about by imperialism and capitalism.
- And there were a lot of problems with society pre-Khmer Rouge, the disparity of wealth was huge. They had been under French rule for decades. The rural people had been bombed away from their farms by the USA, living in poverty in the cities, whilst the wealthy elite enjoyed luxury lives.
- There are, of course, a bunch more complicated reasons, which involves understanding the Indochina war, something I didn’t know existed until this trip.
- The Khmer Rouge promised to re-empower its people, to redistribute the wealth, to create an equal society once and for all, to defend its people from the imperialists who had been destroying and ransacking their country for decades. You can understand why so many joined up straight away and supported the cause.
- The start was to get everyone into the fields, focusing on crop production. When everyone is a farmer you don’t need to many of your intellectuals… do you?
- However, how do you re-level the playing field without taking from those that have? Their approach, to kill them and eliminate the problem. Seen as enemies of the state benefiting from the situation of old.
- Here come three huge failures in their plan. City-folk don’t know how to farm, sending them to farms to produce food will not yield good results. Farming-folk don’t know how to be doctors, or engineers, that were actually needed to make the country run. Having killed all the educated who did know how to do these things, they were left with uneducated trying to run things in the same poor way a bunch of educated tried to run a farm. The third folly was that not all land is suitable for farming, but the Khmer Rouge demanded the same output from every single area. If you didn’t produce, you were clearly against the state’s plan, and would therefore be killed.
- Paranoia became a huge issue, which led to many more than the “original” enemies of the state being slaughtered (this all sounds very familiar to Chile).
- A large contribution to the famine that wiped out so many people was that the food they were producing was being sent to China (also reminiscent of the Irish genocide during the famine where they were producing plenty of food, but were forced to sell it all to the UK).
- The product more valuable to the Khmer Rouge than food to feed their people?… guns.
- Perhaps the plan could have worked were it not for Cambodia trading so much of its produce to China, and starving and killing so much of the population. But how do you force people to follow your deadly regime without guns? And how do you invite Vietnam without them?
- Note to leaders, if you have to kill and threaten people to fall in line with your ideals, you need to look at them again. Perhaps they aren’t as good as you thought.
- When Vietnam came and liberated the people from the Khmer Rouge, the UK was one of many countries that refused to recognise the new leadership, saying the Khmer Rouge were the rightful rulers of the country. Whether they knew what the atrocities were going on in the country at the time, I don’t know, but in hindsight it was a huge error on our part.
- Sometimes an invading force is the better force. But I’ve got to say that this does seem to be in a minority of circumstances when the current leaders are committing a genocide.
- That being said, apparently the reason the Vietnamese took a stand wasn’t because of the genocide, but because they were attacking their borders and trying to take back old territory. It’s scary to think how much longer it might have gone on had they stuck to their own borders.
Foe-tows
1 Comment
A great summary, the food and pictures are amazing, as usual 😊. This must have been an emotional and tough leg of your journey for you both , for many reasons – but also filled with some amazing temples and sunsets X