Cambodia is a strange place

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.

Abbot and Costello go to Cambodia

Are we going to see a temple now?
A wat.
A what?
A wat.
What what?
Angkor Wat.
Angkor what?
Yea, it's a big buddhist temple.
What is?
Exactly.
Exactly what?
No, Angkor Wat.
What's the name of the temple.
Angkor Wat's the name of the temple.
That what I asked you.  And why are you calling me Angkor.
I'm not calling you Angkor.  I'm calling Wat Angkor.
You're calling who Angkor?
No.  Wat.
What?
Exactly.

I was going to blog about going to Angkor Wat and watching the sunrise over the temple and seeing its reflection in the pool, but I forgot my notebook so here's the quick synopsis:

We woke up at 4 to be at the temples before sunrise.  Angkor Wat is the biggest (just the moat around it is 200m wide!) and best preserved of the dozens of temples in the complex.  It was built in the 1100's and is still in great shape.  We watched the sunrise over it and then went to 7 other temples that morning.

Angkor Thom: the old city housing many of the temples.  At one point 1 million people lives within the wall.  Now the walls are pretty crumpled but the gates are still in tact and have monkeys climbing around on them.

Bayon:  Really cool temple that you could climb all over.  The king who built it ordered the face of one of their gods to be etched into the four sides of all of the 54 spires in the temple, but apparently those faces look more like the king than the god.

Temple of 1000 elephants:  I don't know if there were 1000 but there were a lot carved into what was left standing of the front wall of this temple.

Ta Prohm:  Where parts of Tomb Raider was filmed!  Awesome temple that has been overtaken by the jungle.  The trees have their roots all entangled in the walls and our over 100 ft tall.  I got lost and way off the path that I was supposed to be on which made this temple way cooler than it might have been otherwise.

Other highlight:  A girl selling drinks and painting struck up conversation with me and when I told her I was from the states she began listing all of the states and their capitals!  This was impressive.  Then she started grilling me about state capitals and their largest cities!  Luckily I'm pretty good at geography.  I was so impressed I bought a cocunut from her for 2000 riel = $.50.

I also went for a run in Siem Reap but barely last 2.5 miles as it was hot at 10AM and the exhaust from motorbikes made my lungs burn.  I ran along the river running through the city, which is incredibly dirty: brown, stagnant and filled with trash.  I also (accidentally) ran through a markey along the river selling everything from clothes to fish to TVs.  The market took plpace in front of the people's homes so they had a storefront and behind that was their 1 room home.  This looked very impoverished until I realized many of the houses had TVs and computers in them.  Strange.

In Phnom Penh now.  It's big and dirty and smelly, but has some cool neighborhoods and a semi-clean river that's pretty.  Will detail more later.  Headed to the beach tomorrow for the weekend!