Not even including my ridiculous run, Cambodia is a strange place. It's hard to feel comfortable there and almost one an hour Tarik and I would be absolutely completely confused as to what was happening. It is dirtier than Thailand, less busy but more chaotic and although it's not that big, everything seems difficult to get to and it's very noisy. In Phnom Penh at least.
We arrived back in PP last night after taking a bus from the coast. The bus was excellent - they gave us water and a snack and a cold towel to wipe our faces with. However, when we got off the bus, we were thrown back into the deep end of the busy city full of pesky tuk-tuk drivers. It felt like we were the chum that attracts sharks. As we got off the bus there was a gate around the area to allow the passengers to gather their bags that were stored underneath. As soon as I grabbed my bag (I was the last person off the bus) the tuk-tuk drivers were allowed in. They had been shouting and pushing to get our attention the moment the bus turned onto this street. Now they swarmed all the foreigners. I did my best to ignore them and the 4 men around me mostly gave up on me. Tarik was talking with some Germans to find out where we were and the men were shoving maps in their faces and pointing to pictures of hotels saying they'll take them their for "real cheap." Once we found out we were a block from the riverfront we booked it out of there, much to the dismay of the drivers. One actually followed us in his tuk-tuk for 2 blocks until he finally gave up on us. It was over-whelming, clostrophobic and annoying.
The rest of Phnom Penh isn't nearly this bad but I still didn't love the city. The market just as crowded as Thailand but the owners are less aggressive and the smell of fish is everywhere. There were chickens laying around waiting for their heads to be chopped off when a customers purchased one, live crabs being put in bags for people to take home, and fish everywhere. Live fish, dead fish, dried fish, fish paste. It smelled awful!
Also, there are beggars everywhere. The beggars here are different from Bangkok because many of these people have be injured by mines and have lost limbs. Some are just begging and others are selling sunglasses or books that nobody would ever want to read.
The Tonle Sap river is pretty to look at - much cleaner than the rivers in Thailand and the riverfront is frequently occupied by games of soccer. We met up with a friend's sister, Jui, who has been working for an NGO in PP for 18 months. She took us out to dinner and then to a bar for her friend's birthday. We then went to the casino. This was a very strange site. It was just like any casino in the states, but when placed in the poor struggling city of PP it felt very out of place.
The following day we took a history lesson at S21 prison and the "killing fields" were victims of the Khmer Rouge were first held captive and tortured and then executed. It was a very sobering day learning about the thousands of prisoners killed during the civil war that nearly destroyed the country. It was similar to going to Dachau, the concentration camp outside of Munich, except that I knew much more about what happened there than I did about the Khmer Rouge reign.
We are now in Vietnam. The trip here was much easier than getting into Cambodia. The bus company took care of almost everything. I nearly had to kneel when they wanted to take my picture at the border because the camera was set to the height of Cambodians.
I'll blog about Cambodian beer soon.
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