Phnom Penh

31st December – 3rd January

Despite all we’d heard and read about Phnom Pehn, nothing prepares you for the capital of one of the worlds poorest countries. It was civilised (especially after Vietnam!), efficient and very clean and shiny! A lot of money had clearly been ploughed into the city in recent years and the public buildings and monuments were almost as shiny as the 4x4 vehicles that ruled the roads. The motorbike was no longer king here and you could at least cross the road in relative safety. Having said that, there were so many children and disabled adults (mostly amputees) on the streets, mostly begging but some selling their wares in an effort to scrape together a living. So all was not well after all…

There is very little in the way of benefits in Cambodia and the wealth gap is widening dramatically, in part due to the increasing corruption of the government and upper classes. We heard about how the government is selling off much of its land to foreign investors for short term monetary gain, necessitating the relocation of families from their homes to slums outside the cities. It was all quite distressing and depressing and unlike Vietnam where you felt less inclined to open your purse the more you got hassled to buy something, here we felt we genuinely wanted to help but didn’t know where to start, such was the scale of the problem – and so guiltily did very little other than (stomachs talking!) try to eat in some cafes where profits fund street projects to help the disadvantaged. For anyone with skills and time to spare there is however a number of projects you can get involved with. We later met a woman Sue who was a dental nurse working with children from the slums and local orphanages.

New Years Eve
Anyway, enough of the moaning… we’d arrived much later than anticipated but still several hours earlier than if we’d caught the “slow” boat and not the speedboat we’d been upgraded to! It was New Year’s Eve and seemingly every guesthouse in town was full, including the “Top Banana” we’d had good recommendations for. We ended up in the Okay guesthouse with some of the guys we met on the Delta tour. It was a fun sociable place and we settled in for food (having not eaten since the night before!) and beers before hitting the town.

Seven made our group and we cheekily piled into one tuk tuk built for four (westerners) insisting that seven Cambodians would have travelled this way! Nobody was surprised when the rain suddenly started lashing down and we hurriedly had to pull down the sides of the tarpaulin to avoid a complete soaking. After much deliberating as to where to go (the trials of travelling in a mixed group of ages – the youngest three were just nineteen!) we ended up in Phnom Penh’s premier nightspot – the Heart of Darkness.

We later read how this was the place to see and “be seen” and was frequented by the darlings of Cambodia’s elite and their entourage of minders, who weren’t afraid to throw their weight around. Thankfully we didn’t see any trouble, despite Mark falling off the stage where we were dancing, onto a table of drinks, not once but THREE times! In fact all the “kids” were incredibly pissed and clearly couldn’t keep up with us! Amusingly it took us back to when we were teenage clubbers, though the snogging that suddenly started (between them all…not us!) made us feel pretty old! Drinks were surprising reasonable though; we celebrated with a large bottle of Stoli, several tequilas and a bottle of something that was supposed to be champagne, feeling, for one night only, less like backpackers and more like the new “flashpackers”! The midnight countdown took place a bewildering ten minutes too early (according to each of our seven watches) and to the sound of (we think) Abba’s “Happy New Year”. To the amusement of the locals we celebrated our own “second” Happy New Year at the official midnight, accompanied with raucous Auld Lang Syne.

New Year’s Day itself was a bit of a write off and embarrassingly, we didn’t make it further than the nearest English pub for some comfort food – pie and mash – the first in nine months! Ady insisted he didn’t enjoy it and would have preferred something local so Sam scoffed down what he left, smothered with tons of Heinz ketchup!

S21 and the Killing Fields
Our next and final day in the city was more productive and we set out early with Chloe and Anouk to visit the Genocide Museum “Tuol Sleng” and the Killing Fields. As usual, wanting to avoid the day tours offered by the guesthouse, we hired a motorbike and persuaded the girls to do the same, Ady as on hand motorbike instructor as the girls grappled with riding a geared bike for the first time.

Tuol Sleng, the former “security office” S21 of ruling party “Democratic Kampuchea” was directed by the Khmer Rouge Brother Number 1 – Pol Pot (Salut Sor). On April 17th 1975, the site was opened for the detention, interrogation, torture and eventual killing of prisoners (the few who were not sent to the Killing fields) who resisted the new party’s communist regime. In an effort to break down social classes and promote equality, people in their thousands were driven from the city into surrounding countryside and forests. Communes were established where people worked on the land as virtual slaves. Those who resisted the regime in any way and intellectuals generally, people who spoke a second language or even wore glasses were arrested and taken to S21 where they were held between two and four months. Political prisoners (those suspected of leading the uprising against Pol Pot’s revolution) were detained separately and treated to such comforts as a bed and blanket but were held for up to seven months, before being sent to their deaths.

Eerily, the site was constructed from enclosing both a primary school and a high school with two fold corrugated iron sheeting, covered with dense barbed wire. Buildings were also covered in dense barbed wire to prevent suicide attempts by jumping from the upper levels. In the yard a wooden pole used formerly for students to exercise was turned into a place of torture and interrogation. The interrogator would tie the prisoner’s hands behind their back and lift the prisoner upside down with a rope. After repeated action the prisoner would lose consciousness; they then dunked the prisoner’s head into a bucket of filthy water to regain consciousness before continuing the interrogation process.

The detention centre was turned into a museum in 1979, immediately after the collapse of Democratic Kampuchea. Evidence in the way of photographs, torture instruments and prisoner and worker confessions were collected and documented so vividly that one could never forget the oppression and exploitation of the Khmer Rouge regime.

After visiting S21, it was a short journey on the bikes out of town to the Killing Fields of Choeung Ek. Many of the pits have been excavated and the bones of the victims removed. This leaves a field with lots of shallow holes, now covered in grass, but clearly showing where each of the pits were located. There is a large monument to the victims, housing inside the skulls of some of the people found.

The whole experience was very chilling, and even harder to take in given that it happened only 30 years ago.

Wanting some light relief we stopped at Lucky’s department store on the way back. Stocking every conceivable luxury brand under the sun, all at imported prices, we splashed out and bought some of the things we’ve missed from home. Unfortunately on the way out, Anouk lost her ticket for the motorbike park and the jobsworth attendant wouldn’t let us leave, even though she clearly owned the key to fit the bike! Even funnier still, he explained that if someone found the ticket lying on the floor, legally they could claim the bike, even though if they couldn’t produce the key. Bewildered, we had to call out the guy from the rental shop to bring the original registration certificate as even our documents detailing our rental agreement weren’t enough!

Top Traveller Tip #12 – When parking your motorbike outside a shop you may be given a ticket for the bike by a security guard. Treat the ticket as a $1000 bill. If you lose it, you can’t get your bike back, even if you have the key! You have to present the registration certificate and then masses of paperwork follows.

Finally in possession of the bike we hit the city centre just in time for rush hour. The streets were in chaos and amongst the gridlock caused by the many large vehicles that rule the roads of Phnom Penh we took to the pavements with all the other bikes, mowing down unsuspecting pedestrians!

The following day we begrudgingly boarded a bus for Siem Reap having once again abandoned plans to tour Cambodia on motorbike. We gone as far as mapping our route and agreeing a price for a weeks rental of a dirt bike, but enthusiasm waned when we couldn’t, for love nor money, find a pair of helmets worth putting on our precious heads! The quality was strangely better than Vietnam and at least full faced helmets were available here – well… for men anyway. Sam was horrified when told that women’s helmets were not as expensive as men’s and though it wasn’t said as such, implying that women, as mere mothers and housewives weren’t really worth protecting!!! Annoyingly the road to Siem Reap was fairly quiet, well sealed and not at all scary. Our six hours on the bus was one of the most frustrating we’d spent.