Asian Calmination - Cambodia

Cambodia

I was excited to cross the border. Besides Hong Kong to Shenzhen, real land crossings have been missing from my life. The process didn't meet expectations though, with lots of waiting time in no man's land and no interesting bits, save the exchange of crisp US dollars. In Cambodia, the ride was very rural until suddenly crossing the Mekong River, urban Phnom Penh arose with little warning. My hostel, 19 Happy House Backpacker, was a couple blocks away from our dropoff point, at #59 Street 13. A wrong turn and a dozen blocks later, I was lost with the early afternoon sun really weighing down on me and my red backpack. When I finally reached the hostel, the staff could not find my booking. Minutes of awkward confusion later, I realized I was at Happy Backpacker, a separate establishment. I circled around even more confused, as Street 13 was somehow between Street 15 and Street 5. I came across #60 Street 13, which was some Malaysians' home. Malays speak English which is great, but they had never heard of Happy House Backpacker despite my protests that it must be next door. Some venting later, I kept walking down the street and finally saw the sign for 19 Happy House several blocks away. I learned the hard way that street numbers have absolutely no meaning in Cambodia.

Spark - eccentric establishment

My first night in Phnom Penh included pickup ultimate with the young athletic Swa players on a barebones mini turf pitch, followed by many beers at a concert hall/beer hall/replica Italian plaza/microbrewery/cafeteria called Spark (complete with sinks specifically designed for pukers in the bathroom) with Asian Ultimate legend Jared Cahners. I learned that the fellow Newton native has been living in and out of Asia since the 1990s, coming to Cambodia for his PhD but quitting shortly before we met, and had various histories of fluency in Mandarin, Vietnamese and Khmer. In between, I met a Japanese/Chinese/Thai Wellesley College graduate Clinton Global Health employee looking for someone to analyze malaria data, a Peace Corps volunteer and some of the pioneers in Cambodian ultimate. I always enjoy entering a new city and observing the makeup of the economy, and the makeup of the foreign population.  Throughout Asia, English teachers abound, but in Cambodia I met many aid workers/NGO veterans. This influx gives Phnom Penh a distinctly non-traditionally Asian feel. The downtown is awash in bars and pizza/Chinese food joints with stories traded in English and French.

I didn't have the best time in Cambodia. Everywhere I felt like locals were constantly trying to fleece the last buck out of me, and it really wore me down. Sure, this vibe was prevalent in all the former communist countries I visited (Vietnam and Laos) but most evident in Cambodia.  Ironically, while I attribute communism for the uninspiring aspects of Cambodia, a better understanding of the rise of communism is my best takeaway from the country. While Phnom Penh dates back to the 15th century, and was called the Pearl of Asia in the 1920s, it doesn't feel like an old city. The French and the Communists had left a grid of dusty and sweaty streets, old architecture too rundown to exude any colonial charm and a skyline dotted by a handful of uninspired modern high rises. There are some golden Wats scattered throughout the city and a major boulevard with a pretty monument in the center, but it struggles to compare to the temples of neighboring Thailand. And though I did not find Khmer cuisine bad per se, my palate was so well primed before and after in Vietnam and Thailand.

The ugly legacies of communist rule, and specifically the bloody genocidal Khmer Rouge regime, are thus still very tangible. The government was brutally anti-intellectual, killing most anyone with glasses, education or foreign language knowledge. The country's genocide caused the deaths of around a quarter of the population, an astounding culling of 8 million down to 6 million. When you lose an entire generation of cooks, architects, bureaucrats and writers, cultural devastation is inevitable.

I never really understood communism in history classes. We studied so much about its deleterious effects that it never made sense how such extreme practices took hold in the first place. I read Lenin in high school and Marx in college and still had no idea. But my second day in Phnom Penh involved visiting the Killing Fields outside the city, where hundreds of skulls are prominently shown, and the S21 school-turned-prison-turned-museum, which documents accounts of the atrocities that occurred there. Walking through history, I learned that Pol Pot as a frustrated failed man, who despite an education in France, rode a populist ideology that villainized the educated elite, foreign influences and minorities. The Khmer Rouge promoted rural ethnic Khmers as the backbone of Cambodian society, preaching self-reliant isolationism. If any of that sounds familiar and scary, reread what the regime did after they got into power and be even more scared.

I had planned to be in Cambodia for a brief two stops, before reaching Bangkok for an ultimate tournament. However I mistook the tournament to be a week earlier than it was, giving me another week to explore Cambodia. I'm not much of a beach person, but I figured a southeast Asian trip was incomplete without one, and so I ventured south to the resort town Sihanoukville. There awaited miles of pristine beach facing the Gulf of Thailand, and a bizarre mixture of expensive restaurants and hotels, dirt-cheap bungalows and hammocks, and a bunch of nothing in between.  Young Europeans who were lazing around the hostels for weeks on end seemed to outnumber any other demographic. They were apparently not my group, for in a backpacking rarity, I actively tried to  go out hard and have a good time and came out with no memorable stories whatsoever. Maybe it didn't help that I spent the day reading research papers in my air-conditioned bungalow and was looking for people with whom to discuss global income equality. Sorry I'm just not a beach person.

I quickly moved on to Kampot, a river town that was much more my kind of place. Just two hours away, the demographics could not be more different, with a local economy grounded on its famous pepper rather than tourism. The city's key attraction was an enormous durian sculpted into the middle of a major traffic circle. A conversation the previous day with friend John Johnson alerted me to an abandoned town between Kampot and Sihanoukville, but it was tough to verify on Google. Exploring a charming collection of expat-friendly riverside bars on the east side of the river, I found some seasoned expats engaged in academic research. I asked them about this abandoned town, and the expats enlightened me about Bokor Hill Station. One of them showed me the Google streetview, and pointed at himself standing next to a church. "I was there when the Google Earth guy was walking around with all the cameras!" I resolved to go the next day. 

Curious about the opposite riverbank, I explored a bridge closed to traffic and found a hole in the barrier, evidently used by pedestrians. I snuck over to the west side and found a decidedly more local scene. At an outdoor club blaring Khmer music, I ordered iced beer and cow entrails. On the way home, I passed by the durian, took one sniff of its imaginary scent, and threw up the entrails.

The next morning I was back on a motorbike for the first time since my Sapa fall. From a purvey of Googlemaps, the trip seemed like a 40 minutes straightshot on one major road. However at the 40 minute mark I reached the ticketed entrance to the mountain road, and I realized that the Hill Station was of course, up on a hill, and that Google hadn't quite charted that winding Cambodian mountain road. I drove up into the unknown, made a sharp turn around a bend and nearly fell off my bike. The mountain sloped into the Gulf of Thailand to the south, and the ocean winds crashed down unimpeded. The winds affected me mostly on the hairpin turns, when I slowed down dramatically. More daring motorcyclists zoomed past me on those turns, but I wasn't shamed out of braking - my nerve had left with my palm skin in the mountain gravel of North Vietnam. Finally I reached the top of the mountain, past the construction of a monstrous modern casino, a budding tourism park, some sanitation pump stations. Hiking up a grassy clearing, I found a solitary stone church. A bench that could have been lifted right out of Paris sat undisturbed in front. The church's stonework was definitely weathered, but otherwise everything was in remarkably good shape.  The doorway arch was doorless and I walked into an eerie interior. The multi-scripted graffiti covering the walls and the flower pots in front of religious statues reflected a dichotomy between disdain and worship. A small Jesus on the crucifix still hung overlooking it all, silently witnessing decades of good deeds and sins.

There were no explanatory plaques, but the area had been settled by the French in the 1920s, providing a cool getaway from the stuffy Phnom Penh. It was abandoned by the French twice, ultimately to the Khmer Rouge, and was even used by their remaining forces after a Vietnamese invasion overthrew the regime into the 90's. Now Cambodia has been stable enough that the area is being developed, and the ghost town may itself ghost away. The lack of historical preservation is understandably not a focus (any cultural preservationist would be busy further north), but it still saddens me that so many stories there go untold. With no public information, I had very nearly missed this site.

I had already spent way longer on this hill escapade, and hurried back, driving past the large abandoned Bokor Palace Hotel that was apparently even cooler. The ride down the steep mountain slopes was interminable and I couldn't wait to never drive a motorcycle again. Returning to Kampot in the late afternoon, I was stunned to learn that there were no more bus options returning to Phnom Penh. Turns out the start of the Chinese New Year affects commerce in Cambodia as well, and buses simply stopped operating. The Super Bowl was the next day and definitely watchable in Phnom Penh. Wikitravel did list one alternate form of transportation - car pool. And so I found a bunch of drivers and agreed to pay $20 USD to join an unknown number of people for the 4 hour ride to the capital. I waited in the park for 2 hours, and finally there were 3 other Cambodians joining. The sedan driver and I made 5, and as we hit the main road, I thought to myself this wasn't so bad - Wikitravel had warned that these carpools often crammed 7 into the same car. As soon as I counted myself lucky, our car slowed down and I had to scoot in for another passenger. And then we stopped again, and two woman were sharing the shotgun seat. As the 7 of us drove down the road, imagine my surprise when we slowed again. I shuddered to think of 5 of us fitting in the back, but instead the driver got out and then essentially sat on the new passenger's left lap. And the 8 of us in this clown car of a sedan made our way up to Phnom Penh for the start of the year of the monkey.

Watching the Super Bowl in a Texas-themed bar in Phnom Penh was an experience, but the game sucked and I moved on to take a minibus to Siem Reap. Here again I was a victim of Cambodian capitalism. The minibus was run by a minor agency and not easy to find, and my desperation at potentially missing the ride was showing when I asked a tuktuk driver for help. He ended up taking me for a $1 ride, and literally drove around the block back to where we started and pointed out the agency. Upon landing in Siam Reap, I luckily had saved my hostel location on Googlemaps and realized it was a 3 block walk. I was harassed by tuktuk drivers anyway, and I gave one the address as a test. A $1 ride would have been generous, but this guy brazenly asked for $5. I was more than willing to contribute to the local economy, but such shameless disrespect honestly infuriated me. I told him to fuck off and walked.

No place on my path was as touristy as Siam Reap. In contrast to the well ordered geometry of the nearby ancient sites, the modern city felt like a disorganized cantina of businesses clumped every which way to mine that tourism gold. Hotels and restaurants catering to tourists of all types face each other with services advertised in English, French, German, Chinese and Korean.

Hostel owners advised me it was possible to rent a bicycle at 5am. Indeed it was, but I had to jump over the locked gate of the hostel first. Though I'm not much of a morning person, I biked the 8 miles out of town and reached Angkor Wat an hour before sunrise. The classic view of Angkor Wat at dawn is usually taken in front of a lake, but a tenth of humanity was camped out on that spot. I thought I could take an equally impressive shot from a different angle, and jostled with a separate large group of people for position. I failed to capture any decent photos from the front, except perhaps this one of the crowds. I raced through the temple and tried to process everything. The palace was immense yes, but each column was still intricately carved, the stonework carefully laid. Statues and murals were so commonplace that negative space was a rarity.

Angkor Wat from the back

Nowhere was I more negatively affected by hype than here. I had heard so much of these ruins and even the previous night, a hostel mate had talked about the spiritual experience of witnessing the sun rise in Angkor Wat. In front of the building, surrounded by thousands of people, I did enjoy the bright hues of the morning sun...but I was not spiritually moved. Perhaps my favorite part of the experience was reaching the back of the complex, the sky still in the later stages of dawn, and looking out into the relative peace of the jungle. Whether I like it or not, preconceptions heavily influence my enjoyment, and it is no surprise that some of my favorite experiences on this journey were ones that I had no expectations of at all.

The whole set of ancient temple complexes is often collectively referred to as Angkor Wat, but Angkor Wat is only the biggest of the temples in the Angkor ruins (Angkor means capital city, Wat means temple). Angkor is undoubtedly the largest and most famous of the many temple ruins attractions in Southeast Asia (of which this trip included 2 others), all with a Buddhism-appropriating-Hinduism shared history. Dating primarily from the 12th century, the city is believed to have been the largest pre-industrial city in the world, spanning 390 square miles, before essentially being abandoned and lost to the jungle for centuries. Angkor Wat is so impressive, reaching the height of a 20 story building, and so revered, being the only building in the world to be featured on a national flag.

I biked over 40 miles that under that brutal Cambodian sun, stopping for coconut water whenever possible. I saw a temple in a marsh, a temple with a giant tree growing through it, and the temple that Lara Croft/Angelina Jolie had run through. By the early afternoon, I was unable to appreciate the ancient wonders around me - I had had my temple run.

There were plenty of temples I didn't get to on my one day of biking, but I didn't go back out the second day. Sure I felt bad, drinking beer in a cafe in the vicinity of some of the worlds' greatest treasures, but I was so tired it was a no-brainer of a decision. Even worse I was cognizant that my lack of appreciation of the temples was a product of my western education. I've learned enough about gothic arches and flying buttresses to admire European cathedrals, but I don't know the first thing to look at when staring at the Hindu/Buddhist temples. I don't know the difference between a temple dedicated to Vishnu or Rama, and the murals tell stories that make no sense to me. Clearly the course of action is to study this history, but I prefer to blast the parochial scope of my education. I explored the rest of Siem Reap that day, and was surprised to find a functioning town with some non-tourist economy, and a very touristy street creatively called Pub Street. Wandering through town, I got hassled nearly every block by a tuktuk driver offering to take me to the temples. Unable to find a respite, I walked straight to the bus station and bought a ticket to Bangkok the next day.