Phnom Penh, Days 3-6 (May 16-18th)

Disclaimer: All of the most gorgeous images below were taken by Katie Heil and Tayler Ireland. The not-so-great ones are mine. ;)
At the end of our day of Cambodian genocide history, we felt a bit low.




Fortunately we found Katie (above, playing the guitar), one half of the fun pair we'd met the night before. We went out with her and some other traveler friends of hers for pizza and dancing in Phnom Penh's downtown. Desperate for air-conditioning (which we didn't have) in heat beyond that which even I could stand, we ended up crashing in the extra bed in her room that night and moving our stuff up there the next day to split costs. The three of us spent the next day putzing around, finding sneakers for me, and sorting out Tayler's dilemma of where to go next. To Burma, or not to Burma? That was the question. That night, T and I hit up a rather tame Couch-Surfing meeting and then met up with Katie and an old friend of Tayler's for some infamous Cambodian pizza and a few strong drinks.
Disclaimer #2: Somewhere in this week, I have lost two days. I know we arrived in Phnom Penh on a Sunday and left on a Saturday. But the middle is all very piecemeal in my mind. What did we do with these mysterious missing days? I have no idea. I seem to remember a lot of chilling in the tattered guesthouse lobby and in Katie's room, but it's all a bit fuzzy, to be honest. So let's just pick up with Friday, shall we?
On Friday, Tayler went to the Indian embassy to secure his visa, only to be rebuked for not having filled in his middle name on his application. After he returned to Katie and I with this disappointing news, we decided there was nothing for it but to hop on a local bus to a hilltop temple in Udong that we'd heard about. And that, for this adventure, Tayler should wear a ridiculously large, lemon-yellow foam cowboy hat.




The locals LOVED this. I cannot stress this enough. LOVED it. Some local girls we saw as we climbed into the tuk-tuk to the bus station? Loved it. The men standing around the bus station when we arrived just in time to climb aboard a bus leaving that very minute? Loved it. The kids on the other-than-us entirely Khmer-populated bus? Loved it.




The motorbike drivers we hired after much haggling? Loved it.




Basically, T was the most popular guy around. Even this monkey?




Well, no. That monkey just looked pissed off. Probably depressed about her obesity. But the hoard of school kids who alternately followed and led us up to the temple? You know it... They loved it.




And they took to passing it around between themselves.




We reached the landing beneath the newer of the two temples now perched upon the town's eponymous peak.




Despite the muggy, drizzly weather, the view was lovely...




... simians included.




The ornate temple reflected the recent growth of the Cambodian economy.




But as always, the little things fascinated me far more, particularly the gigantic beetles around the base, like the one this little guy pocketed as a snack for later.




Across a small bridge leading from the new temple...




... stood the original, where we spent some time entertaining the kids with stories...




... and being entertained by them.




Katie and Tayler practiced their superior photographic techniques with the kids as their subjects, while I thought of ways to use our nearly worthless 100-note Cambodian riels.




Eventually, we descended, tipped the oldest of the kids on behalf of the whole group for legitimately providing a heap of historical information, hopped once again onto the backs of the bikes of our waiting drivers, and just managed to catch the last bus back to Phnom Penh. I spent most of the journey playing peek-a-boo with the adorable kid in front of me.




And Katie proved to be the prettiest bus-sleeper I've ever seen. (I, on the other hand, cannot sleep sitting up without my head rolling back and my jaw gaping open.)




That night, we chilled out in the room, Katie and Tayler trading photog knowledge and me attempting to improve my shameful guitar skills.




Katie left for Laos before dawn the next morning, despite my best attempts to detain her in Cambodia, and I headed south to do volunteer work in a small school/orphanage, Tayler tagging along to wait out the requisite three days to reapply for his Indian visa.
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:Phnom Penh, Cambodia

Phnom Penh, Days 1-2 (May 13-14th)

We took local transit from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh and found ourselves the subjects of much curiosity, being the only fair-skinned folks on the bus. Or it might just have been Tayler's hairstyle:




When I smiled at the woman beside me, she took that as a welcoming sign, picked up my arm, turned it back and forth inspecting it, and finally wet her finger with her tongue and tried to rub off my freckles one of them practiced his English with me, but soon the novelty had worn off. The day was overcast and drizzly and the ride long and monotonous, providing little excitement besides my first glimpses of Central Cambodian stilt houses.




When at last the bus pulled into Phnom Penh, Tayler bargained with a tuk tuk driver who took us to the hostel at which we had a reservation. When the hostel turned out to have overbooked, I was livid. We spent the next hour riding around trying to find a decent spot.




We settled on a less-than-ideal but affordable room with no windows on the ground floor of a place that seemed centrally-located. And the day didn't really get much better. We tried to satisfy Tayler's curry cravings at a nearby Indian restaurant, but the food proved unexceptional and overpriced. We wandered along the promenade by the river, but the weather was foul, the streets were muddy, and the place we stopped for beer didn't impress either of us. Meeting a pair of fun travelers when we returned to the hostel lobby turned out to be the lone highlight of the night.
The next day we began afresh. The tuk tuk driver who had helped us find our hostel had so badly wanted the job of driving us to the local sites, that he arrived at 7am and waited until we emerged from our room at 10. Tayler and I agreed that such dedication merited the job. Moments later, we set off.
I had never partaken in what I might call "political horrors tourism" before and had no idea what to expect from our visit to the Killing Fields, where so many innocent Cambodians had met their ends at the hands of the fanatically extremist Communist regime who ruled the country in the late 1970's.
A solemn pall lay over the one-time farm and Chinese place of burial, despite the beauty of the land itself. Few of the structures used by the Khmer Rouge still stood. Instead, simple wooden signs told of the ways in which soldiers had transported, caged, and murdered their own citizens-- usually simply by beating or hacking at them with whatever blunt farming instrument remained about the grounds, in order to save bullets-- in straightforward, unflinching language, the lack of emotion or embellishment mirroring the cold, calculating manner of the killings themselves.




I had elected to rent the audio tour headset and as I listened to the stories of the place, many told by survivors or the relatives of the deceased, I repeated to Tayler the horrors they detailed. When he could see that my revulsion and empathy threatened to overwhelm me, he would squeeze my hand and pull me away to the next area.




Of course, in such a place, no relief exists. One area, a mass grave for 400-some victims, had been cordoned off with a wooden fence.




But most of it lay open, with a path snaking between craters from which dozens of corpses had been pulled to be identified and memorialized after the regime had broken up. Tiny bits of clothing and human bone and teeth could still be found in the grass.




At one end of the field stood a large tree, massive and beautiful, against which babies heads had been smashed. Pol Pot had believed it better to dispose of the children of his victims than to risk them growing into his enemies, and no method of doing so, it seems, had been too grotesque.




At the rear of the complex, a group of local kids called us over and recited a litany of facts about our home countries. They concluded by standing in a line and singing, in perfect synchronicity, "Please. Help us. We need money. Give us money." They so bowled us over with the routine that we did, in fact, oblige.




As we closed our loop, we listened in disgust and astonishment to the taped testimony of one KR ringleader confessing to having personally sanctioned nearly 15,000 executions. Finally, we arrived where we had started, outside of the memorial.




Between the beige pillars, a simple set of glass-encased shelves stood, viewable from any side, and on those shelves sat over 8,000 skulls excavated from the surrounding graves.








Each shelf housed those of one age group of one sex, like these of boys only 15-20 years-old.




We paid our respects and left, somber and disillusioned but with a far deeper sense of the sorrow and loss suffered by the Khmer people.
But our education was not yet complete. We went next to Tuol Sleng Museum, otherwise known as S21, the most important and infamous of the Khmer Rouge's prisons. Outside of the buildings, which had housed a high school before their penal conversion, the gallows and vessels used for water torture still stood beside the graves of the last prisoners to die in the complex-- their bodies discovered by the soldiers who liberated the city.




Beside the gallows, large boards listed the didactic, catch-22 regulations.




The interrogation rooms, in which unspeakable tortures had been administered, remained unchanged in all ways but one. On the walls hung graphic photographs of the fresh emaciated corpses originally found there.




In other wings, makeshift cells butted up against one another, barely large enough for someone to lie down in.




The last of the main buildings served as a simple memorial, and each ground floor room housed dozens of boards, covered front and back with the photographs of those incarcerated and killed at S21-- thousands in total.




Men and women, boys and girls looked back at me from under glass. Some had smiled at the camera, perhaps not fully understanding the danger. Others had looked into the lens with something resembling resignation.




Interspersed with these portraits of people still healthy upon their arrival were photos of prisoners in the unrecognizable, wasted state in which they typically died, their skin stretched tight over their bones, their finger nails removed through torture, their faces distorted in pain.
By the time I'd reached the last room, I could hardly function. My mouth stood agape and tears rolled silently down my cheeks.




I took a moment before we walked up to the last area of the museum, where exhibits displayed the forced confessions of the victims and posters advertised the work of peace coalitions to increase awareness of the tragedy in hopes of preventing similar events in the future.The most affecting were of course the paintings of local schoolchildren.




I was glad we had come, but I left emotionally decimated. As we walked toward the tuk-tuk, Tayler wrapped his arm around me and said pacifyingly, "You want to go back and watch a romantic comedy?"
What could I do but smile?
-Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:Phnom Penh, Cambodia

Siem Reap and the Temples of Angkor, Days 5-6 (May 12-13th)

Following our day of rest at the pool, we thought to set off for the pre-Angkor pack of pagodas known as the Rolous Group bright and early on Friday. But rather than refreshed, we felt sluggish and stayed in bed longer and set off later than advisable when biking in the Cambodian summer. (Part of me wanted to take an elephant, but I didn't like the look of those heavy metal seats on their tender backs.)


The ride proved longer than we'd estimated, but we enjoyed it nonetheless. Somehow, the unrelenting heat didn't seem to bother either of us as much as it had when biking to Aqua the previous day, although I did miss the delightfully refreshing rush of air on our skin as we'd motored between sites; we'd started calling it tuk-tuk a/c.


After stopping twice for water and cashew breaks, we made it to Preah Ko, a small set of orange-stoned towers guarded by petrified lions.


Along the walls, someone had made dozens of neat little piles of stone, calling to mind the many rock collages I'd seen in South America.


We stayed only a short while before biking on to Bakong. We locked up our bikes by the ticket taker and proceeded across the dirt pathway, on which we passed three adolescent monks returning from some sight-seeing of their own.


(Perhaps it's the traditionalist in me, but I'll never quite get over the sight of a monk on his Iphone.)


No sooner had we crossed the threshold than a pair of irresistibly adorable little girls approached us, the older sticking by our sides stubbornly for the next half an hour.


As they had at so many of the temples, disabled musicians serenaded us at the foot of the first staircase. We offered a few Riel in thanks, but no sooner had the bills hit the basket than they stopped playing!


Inside the temple, hundreds of lines of Khmer-- no different from its modern-day form-- were scrawled upon the walls. I loved knowing that any literate Cambodian could walk into any temple in Siem Reap and read a piece of history for themselves.


We paused for a time atop the temple, sharing some snacks with our young Cambodian shadow and indulging in the cool breeze.


But as we descended, my stomach began to rumble uncomfortably.


We took a stroll around the rear of the grounds, but I could hardly appreciate the view, so quickly had my stomach turned on me. I tried to hurry our exit along subtly, but when Tayler didn't take the hint, I told him outright that I needed a bathroom immediately, and we hopped on our bikes. I could barely pedal, but somehow we made it the kilometer's distance to the WC.

Bear with me, while I take a moment to praise the unexpectedly pristine public bathrooms of the Angkor temples. The temple ticket fees weren't cheap, but they were well worth it, if only for the relief of being sick in a bathroom whose state didn't worsen my own.

I was struck with a sudden fever, which hit me and broke, covering me with sweat, all within the 30 minutes spent inside the cool walls of the restroom. When I emerged, Tayler sat grinning at me and devilishly began asking foul questions about what ailed me. Despite my best attempts at ladylike discretion, his goofy persistence got me talking and distracted me, and soon we'd hopped back on the bikes.

We stopped at the last of the Rolous temples, where I let him do the sight-seeing for both of us while I rehydrated with water and coconut juice in the shade of a vendor stall.


Again, I must make an aside, this one a shout-out to the hawkers of Siem Reap. They are everywhere. Soda salesgirls outside the temples. Artists inside. Little kids begging for food or proffering postcards. Young students offering a plethora of facts about the temples and about the home countries of Westerners, in hopes of procuring a donation for their tuition. The amputee musicians. Monks and nuns with their incense sticks.

But by far, those who set up shop just outside the entrances take the cake, as far as insistence and persistence. The minute we set foot to ground, be it from bike or tuk-tuk, young girls swarmed us shouting, "Water! One dollar! Cold drink, cold drink! You buy coconut! You buy from me, you have good luck, bring good luck for me and my family." If you had the inclination and fortitude to make it into the temple without having purchased something, they would simply try another tack, shouting at your back, "You come out, you buy from me, yes? You promise." Sometimes they would even grab your finger and twist it into an involuntary pinky swear of future loyalty.

Some, however, did not react so well to refusal. Invocations of good fortune withered into curses. One girl swiped the air in Tayler's direction, shouting, "Bad luck! Bad luck to you!" Another threw up her hands and heaved frustratedly, "GOD!"

But as long as you bought something, you fell into their good graces, so I sat quite contentedly sipping my coconut as I waited for Tayler to return from the final temple visit. He had offered to find us a ride back, but I felt the need to at least attempt to bike some of the way. Thank goodness I did because the ride did me good. By the time we'd returned our bikes to the rental shop, I felt like a new person.

That night we returned to the tourist mecca of Pub Street.


We ate at the market at the stall of a riotously funny little woman who ruled over her family/servers with an iron fist. (She's the one waving in the background.)


We tried to get to Dee the lady-boy's show, as we'd promised when we'd met him earlier in the week, but we confused the time and missed it. We also waited too long to shop the market itself, so I left town with much lighter bags than if I'd gone on the dress-hunt I'd intended.

The following morning, we called our moms and grandmas for Mother's Day, said our goodbyes to the staff at Palm Lodge, and bid farewell to the clamor of Siem Reap.


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Location:Siem Reap, Cambodia