Cambodia…what to say about it? As we drove out of Phnom Penh to catch the boat to Vietnam, we once again found ourselves on an incredibly bad stretch of road. This highway – a major road in the country – is completely in ruins. Long stretches with no pavement, just red dirt road. The dust coats everything. The giant plants by the roadside are mere emerald suggestions under their thick cake of red dust.

But this road is nowhere near as bad as the road on which we arrived. We crossed the border from Thailand at Poipet. The highway there takes you to Siem Reap, the premier destination in Cambodia and one of the largest tourist attractions in Southeast Asia. Forgive the hellfire and brimstone talk, but that road there is an abomination. It can scarcely be called a road. It’s mostly gravel – large gravel – and EXTREMELY bumpy, with a detour about every five minutes. The detours dip riotously down to the right, over huge dirt humps, before you come back on the “road.”  I was wearing only a regular bra, not a sports bra, and my boobs bounced so uncontrollably I had to hold them still the whole way. There were no lights – no street lights, no traffic lights. No signs. No gas stations, only roadside stands selling 1 liter bottles of petrol and diesel in old Johnnie Walker Red or Pepsi bottles.

There is a persistent rumor afoot in Cambodia that an airline in Thailand pays the Cambodian government to keep this road in such horrible condition. That way, many travelers will choose to pay the outrageous flight prices from Bangkok to Siem Reap. Hooray for corruption.

We undertook the four 1/2 hour, 90 mile journey at dusk, sharing a taxi with a very nice traveler we’d met along the way. We’d had to give a dirty old Austrian man the boot from our group for making the jack-off motion to me and suggesting that my “skills” were why Ramon wouldn’t need to go to a prostitute. Thanks, mate! Another in a string of dirty old white men in Southeast Asia.

Even though it was almost dusk when we arrived in Cambodia, we could tell right away, within minutes, that Cambodia was poor. POOR poor. Poor in an overarching, all-inclusive kind of way that I’d never seen before. The state is poor. The big cities are poor.  We stayed in Battambong, the third largest city in Cambodia for a couple of days.  This is what it looked like outside of our downtown window:

 

Phnom Penh, the capital city, though much wealthier than the rest of the country, is poor. We stayed in a very nice neighborhood in Phnom Penh, and at night people set up cots with mosquito nets everywhere, all over the sidewalks, at the gas station even, on the cement right in front of the pumps.

In Thailand, we had seen many many people living in shacks. In my naivete about shacks, I thought these people were poor. And they were – I don’t want to understate their suffering in any way. But I didn’t realize that corrugated metal and old Coca-Cola tarps were a step up in the shack world. A coveted step up. Outside Siem Reap and all along the riverbank to Battambong, we saw people living in much, much poorer shacks than these.

 

   

Mostly made of leaves and sticks, with thin sheets of clear plastic billowing out around them. Certainly no electricity or plumbing. Many surrounded by heaps of garabge and naked children. And in the midst of it all, Cambodian people – the smiling-est, friendliest, warmest people we’d met.

This is particularly amazing given their history. I, in my limited education, had little understanding of Cambodian history. I didn’t realize the degree to which the Khmer Rouge regime devastated the country. I didn’t know about the US role in the war leading up to the KR regime. While here, I read that right before the KR came to power, as part of the ongoing war in Vietnam, unauthorized US carpet bombings killed 250,000 Cambodians. Then, the US pulled out and the KR came to power. They killed another 2,000,000 more – a quarter of the country’s population. Those who survived were brutalized, starved, beaten, raped.  We visited Choeung Ek, aka the Killing Fields, shere mass exectuions and burial were held.  Some 20,000 people were killed here and about 8,000 have been exhumed.  Bits of their clothing are still scattered the grounds.

 

We visited a Khmer Rouge prison, Tuol Sleng, that housed and tortured Cambodians before they were killed.  The museum showed pretty graphic depictions of the torture.  Among them?  Water boarding.

 The KR especially killed those with prior political experience and the educated. As a result, the literacy rate in Cambodia is about 38%. On the streets in Phnom Penh, there are printing stalls – places where you can go and pay someone write a letter or card for you if you are not able to write yourself.

We stayed with a family in Kampong Cham, the mother of which was 6 years old during ‘Pol Pot time,’ as she called it.

   

She was recruited at 6 years old to build a dam in the region, a difficult task even if all of the engineers in the country hadn’t been executed. One day she took us for a walk and showed us what she ate during that time. How they first ate the young leaves of plants beacuse, although they were bitter, they were easy to chew and nutritious. As time went on they had to eat to eat the older, tougher leaves that were to hard to chew. They had to rub them in their hands to break them down first. 

 

Then they would catch bugs, snap off their heads and eat them raw. I cannot imagine.

Because of the poverty, there are many many beggars in Camobodia, each population different depending on which city you’re in. In Siem Reap, it was almost exclusively children. Not begging, though – selling postcards or bracelets or what have you. Usually pretty dirty, barefoot, desperate, but incredibly sweet. And AMAZINGLY good at English. These children all self-taught English in order to be able to sell more. It really was quite incredible. I think they must be geniuses, at age 9 or 10 to have taught themselves enough English to have a perfectly composed, if selectively sales-oriented, conversation with a native English speaking adult.

The situation is so dire that the child sex industry has become a huge issue.  There are ads everywhere directed at Westerners:  Please Don’t Have Sex With Our Children.   Our hotel in Siem Reap had this anti-child prostution policy posted in our room:

In Phnom Penh, it is a combination. Lots of straight-up begging from people of all ages.
The National Museum there houses the premier collection of Khmer artifacts from Angor Wat and other sites in the area, but the museum is open-air, allowing birds to fly in and shit on the walls. Outside this museum I saw a family of about 15 living on the sidewalk. The grandma was out front, passively panhandling while in the back a boy of about 6 scrabbled in the dirt for bugs. By the riverside, there are many children, women with babies, sleeping right on the street. Filthy, no shoes, no mats, no nothing.

I had another grandma in Battambong come begging by standing next to me and pinching me gently, repeatedly, wiping her eyes and belly in a pantomime ‘I’m sad & hungry’ way. This same woman had come and pressed her face to the window right where Ramon and I had been eating lunch just a few moments earlier. She stayed that way, her hands and face mashed against the glass, looking at us, for about 5 minutes. It was pretty disturbing…

There are a bunch more stories to tell about Cambodia – we had an amazing time there and we found the people to be incredibly generous and open and warm. We will post more soon about our venture into bug-eating in Battambong, monkeys, Angkor Wat and my journey with the Asian toilet. For now, I just needed to process a bit the overwhelming poverty & suffering we saw there. It was intense.