PhotoStream | Blog | Contact

A monk walks directly into the throngs - off camera - of tourists

Vietnam and Cambodia Trip Report

Thursday, May 11, 2006

So I got back home on Tuesday morning with a little more and a lot less in tow than I'd had when I left for Vietnam and Cambodia two weeks ago. The extra stuff was not much more than a few shirts, some pictures and about three kilos of dirt. The missing stuff was the contents of my stomach, intestines and about a kilo of body fat.

Aside from the food poisoning, Cambodia was a lot of fun. We stayed in Phnom Penh on the first night at the California 2 Guest House right on the edge of the river. The guest house was crazy with nutty girls and older men that should know better, but the food and beer was great. I haven't seen $0.75 beer since college or great Mexican food since Anna's.

In the afternoon our personal Tuk Tuk driver took us to the S21 prison and the Killing Fields. S21 is a school that was converted into a prison by the Khmer Rouge in '75. In the next four years more than 10,000 men, women and children were passed through S21, to be tortured for long periods, on their way to the Killing Fields. Once the prisoners were released they were bludgeoned to death and buried in mass graves at places like the Killing Fields. Even more disconcerting than the before-and-after pictures of the prisoners were the still partially buried clothes at the Fields.

The government also put many of the skulls on display in a mausoleum like structure at the mouth of the Killing Fields. The skulls are on shelves mostly surrounded by glass at the center of the structure. You could actually touch the skulls if you wanted to ignore the placard requesting that you don't. Apparently some Cambodians believe that the spirits of the dead need to be able to get back to their bones on occasion, so they must not be completely encased, which may explain why it's possible to touch them.

After the fields and S21 we went back to the hotel for lunch; the best tacos I've had in a long time. I'm glad that I had a chance to get Mexican food again, but I regretted it when we took a stroll up the street and found that all the restaurants in the area serve great western food in addition to the Khmer staples.

Anyway, next day we woke up early for our 45 minute flight to Siem Reap. There's not much to say about Siem Reap other than it is clearly growing due to the tourist industry. Five star hotels surrounded by dirt fields and shacks are kind of surreal. We found ourselves a hotel and headed out with our new personal Tuk Tuk driver to explore some temples. Angkor Thom and Angkor Watt were our primary stops for the first day.

What can I say about the temples? Not much as temples don't intrigue me enough to learn the vocabulary that would enable me to analyze them. They were impressive and different from anything temples I've seen before. Each one definitely has an atmosphere of its own.

At the end of the day we ended up on a boat in the middle of the Floating Village, which is apparently occupied by hundreds of immigrant Vietnamese. They seem to make their money from fishing and begging. One woman sent her two naked children out in floating buckets without clothes to request money from passing tourists. Another group of three kids maneuvered their long boat along side ours as we passed and latched on as if they were pirates about to board us. The hung on for a while looking sad and destitute while holding out their hands. The poverty in this area and the shanty town on the bank of the river is apparently horrendous. Strangely enough that didn't stop someone from installing a television in their shack for the rest of the town to use.

Day two took us to a few smaller temples and Ta Prohm (the same temple in the Tomb Raider movie). It also took us to whatever restaurant gave me food poisoning, yummy!

Day three saw me out of bed and the bathroom long enough to catch a flight back to Phnom Penh, into bed at the new hotel and asleep whenever I wasn't driving the porcelain school bus.

So now I'm back, mostly free of illness and ready for my next trip to somewhere with poor sanitary conditions! All in all I enjoyed Cambodia (even the food) more than Vietnam. I would, however, like to go back to Vietnam and explore more than just Hanoi. I imagine that getting off of the tourist track would bring better food and a bit more fun. Well, that's not fair as diving head first off the top of the boat in Halong Bay reminded me a lot of West Virginia (懐かしかった). My entries from Vietnam are here:

My pictures from Vietnam are here: http://www.siulacre.org/.../72057594130548973/

And my pictures from Cambodia are here: http://www.simulacre.org/.../72057594130544830/