So we spent nearly 2 weeks in Cambodia. Amy wrote already a bit about how difficult of a place it is. The poverty really is overwhelming, and any westerner with a pulse is constantly reminded of their privilege, and your heart is always breaking a little bit. It sounds selfish to say that the hardship of others is directly responsible for your own inability to enjoy yourself “Why don’t those starving street children just leave me alone so I can have a good time?…” But the truth is it does have a weighty impact.

That being said, we had some amazing times in Cambodia. Our first stop was Siem Reap. Siem Reap is a small town about 5 miles from Angkor Wat and the rest of the ancient Khmer ruins, and it’s where everybody stays who goes to the temples. Our first day there we rented bicycles and set out to see them. Just before arriving at the moat surrounding Angkor Wat, we bumped into some more monkeys.

This is the 3rd or 4th time on the trip that this has happened and I swear I don’t get tired of it. As we learned in the ensuing days, these particular monkeys do a good business preying on the curiosity of tourists and as a result remain well fed and unbothered by our proximity to them. We stayed with them for a few minutes and then pedalled the final 1/2 mile to the grandaddy of all temples, the largest religious monument in the world, the Khmer temple of Angkor Wat.

  

Mostly built in the 12th and 13th centuries, this thing is incredibly impressive. There is a ton of detail in every structure, with particular attention paid to the Apsaras and their boobs and crazy hair.  One unfortunate thing is that the sculptures were extensively looted by the French in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the result being rows and rows of headless sandstone buddhas.

                

Shortly after entering the grounds, we heard some very hypnotic music being played, so we followed our ears to the source and encountered a really excellent band of orphans who live on the grounds under the care of monks.

 

After checking them out for a few minutes, we headed back in towards the main temple. We got in to see the libraries, old pools, and interior surrounding walls which all have thousands of years of Khmer history carved into them in the form of pictures, but unfortunately we were denied access to the main towers.

      

After several hours touring the area, we left Angkor Wat, hopped back on the bikes, and headed to Ta Prohm. Apparently you’ll recognize it if you’ve seen Tomb Raider (though I haven’t) but it seems like a great place to film some action scenes. Ta Prohm is a vast set of ruins that has been completely overrun by the jungle. In particular huge spung trees which are able to grow on and between the rocks. It is gorgeous, and thrilling to walk through, and we are really loving being here.

             

The next day, we’re back on the bikes and head past Angkor Wat to the ancient city of Angkor Thom. Angkor Thom was a walled city that was designed with a special entrance to allow important figures to enter on elephant. Inside the walls, the city was inhabited by 100,000 people and at the center is the most beautiful of all the temples. Bayon has 160 huge serene faces carved into it, and I can’t find a way to articulate how incredibly fucking cool it is. It just is. Look at the pictures and you’ll see.

 

In the process of constructing other lavish buildings on the grounds of Angkor Thom, King Jayavarman VIII essentially wiped out all of the resources available to the Khmer people, and instigated the downfall of the civilization. It wasn’t until early in the 20th century that sandstone could be used again as a construction material, it had all been used up!

The big downfall of being in Siem Reap is that it is just impossible to get off of the tourist track while you are there. The city exists exclusively because of the tourist industry so there’s no way around it if you want to see the temples. In an attempt to strike out on our own a bit, we decided to take a boat trip to Battambang. BAD IDEA! Only tourists are dumb enough to make this trip during the dry season. The river was so low, that what was advertised as a 4 hour trip actually took upwards of 9 hours on an extremely loud (and extremely crowded) boat full of people who were mostly seeking to get away from each other.

Well, Battambang is a pretty beat up city. In what was still a Khmer Rouge stronghold up until the late 90’s, Battambang is, like most of Cambodia, pretty bombed out and pretty poor. After checking in to an overpriced and lousy hotel, we were determined to have a good time. We started out by going to a fantastic bakery recommended to us by this guy

 

and then wandered around the tiny downtown area. As it began to get dark, we met a local moto driver named Chandra. We became fast friends and all decided to go to Bopha Tip, the local nightclub.

    

Bopha Tip was an amazing cultural experience. We were the only westerners there and I’m not sure we could have coped if not for Chandra. Immediately after sitting down, a waitress came up to me and offered me an Angkor beer. I said, “No thanks, we’ll have Tiger beer.” Again, she offered me Angkor Beer and again I tried to tell her we wanted Tiger. I turned to Chandra for help and he explained to her that it was Tiger beer we were after. This sent her into a cursing tirade and she really let the table have it (or so it seemed, I’m not so up on my Khmer swears) before storming off. Wondering what the hell just happened, Chandra explained to us that each drink company has a representative at the bar (AKA a ‘beergirl’), and they all try to sell you their brand. Recognizing us ‘farang’ as an easy mark, the Angkor beer lady was quite upset at being thwarted. Shortly thereafter, the Tiger rep came over and set us straight.

The drink situation settled, we turn our attention to the club. For the moment there’s not a whole lot going on. There’s plenty of neon lights though, and live music karaoke. There’s a houseband playing Cambodian pop favorites and during the early part of the evening, people climb on stage and sing along with them. As it gets later, the rehearsed singers come out and it’s a whole revue. There’s a male and female lead singer and a whole host of backups all doing very simple choreographed dance moves. We got up to join in on the circle dances, which are these strange dances that accompany specific traditional songs. The dance consists of everybody walking around in a circle, very slowly, and making slight gestures with their hands as they do so. I asked around if there were specific gestures with attached meanings but the general answer was no, you just wave your hands around gently and that’s that.

After a couple of circle dances the freeform dance party began and we got down to boogeying. We were a real hit, and person after person came up to dance with us, copy our moves (we have moves?), shake our hands, or, depending on how drunk they were, just stare slackjawed. Good times!

    

It felt really wonderful to experience local culture as a local would. You get stuck on the backpacker or tourist circuit and it can be really difficult to get off, because there’s an infrastructure in place to make money off of you, and to keep you on it. If the language barrier weren’t so great, it wouldn’t be quite so hard but it is. So this nightclub experience, one i’m sure I’d have little interest in at home, ended up being a really special night for us.

The next day we took off for a small village outside of Kompong Cham called Srey Siam, to do a homestay we learned about online. This was a valuable experience, but a bit of a mixed bag. We were there for a day and a half, had a great walking tour of the farms in the village which Amy wrote about, and had some great food and tried palm sugar wine which was kind of like 7-Up but with a little bit of rotten egg smell. The first night there we played a couple of songs for the family which was especially nice for their kids who had never seen music performed live before.

They had a pretty sizable fruit and vegetable garden, and lots of chickens, and it was quite beautiful. On the other hand, there was no electricity, and the pump for the well was on the fritz, with the likelihood of repairing it in the near future seeming slim. It was, in a word, simple.

    

Our homestay mom, Kheung, is a terrific woman, and we had a great time meeting her. We were also able to meet and talk with her sister (a schoolteacher in the neighboring village), and her mother (a farmer still in her 70’s).  We also had quite a bit of fun trying to keep up with the kids, Ra and Na.

            

The sad part about the homestay, because everything else was quite nice, was that the homestay dad was unwilling or unable to refrain from criticizing and cursing at his wife and children. It was constant, and he was menacing, and while he never directed any of his venom towards Amy or myself, the discomfort felt by his family, and us, was everpresent.

Relieved to leave Srey Siam, Amy and I headed for our last stop in Cambodia, the capitol Phnom Phen. We’re excited to be back in a major metropolis, and see our friends Jon and Anna who are in town working on a story about the tribunals for the few Khmer Rouge officers who are still living, and get back to eating good (non-insect) street food.

We got settled into Phnom Phen around lunchtime, and head to Friends, an NGO restaurant which is run by, and is a training ground for, street children in Phnom Phen. The food was quite good and, while more expensive than the pennies we’ve gotten used to paying for meals, we’re happy to pay the extra as by all accounts, the restaurant, the program, and the children seem to be thriving.  From here we head across the street to the National History Museum to help us get a little context on everything we saw in Angkor Wat.

The pieces are beautiful, but the exhibits themselves are poorly organized and information on what we’re seeing, even with a guided tour, is often incomplete or non-existent. The museum is open air and much of what we’re looking at is exposed to the elements and it shows. This is a country that is still trying to get back on it’s feet after all of the violence it’s been through, and the museum is just another in a string of endless signs that it hasn’t happened yet.

We spend the next few days going to the Killing Fields memorial & S-21, the high school which was converted into a Khmer Rouge prison and large scale torture chamber, and wandering around the city and it’s markets trying to soak up as much vibe as we can. A funny thing about Cambodia is that you can get pirated copies of anything here. There are music stores where you can go in and download any 10 new release cd’s for 10,000 riel (about $2.50). My apologies to the publishers of the lonely planet guide book series but we couldn’t pass up photocopied versions of the Cambodia and Laos Lonely Planets at a cost of $4 a piece. One night, back in our hotel room, we watched Sweeney Todd (terrible movie by the way) on national Cambodian television, while it was still out in the theatres in the US. Every 5 minutes or so , a notice would appear at the bottom of the screen saying something to the effect of “Intended for use by Oscar awards committee. Unauthorized showing of this video is prohibited” Hilarious! How they get away with it I have no idea.

We also took in an Apsara dance show while we were there. Apsara is a traditional classical style of Cambodian dance.

    

We even made some friends at the show.

 

During the reign of the Khmer Rouge, an attempt was made to wipe out all of the arts in Cambodia. A big way of doing this was by killing all of the artists, dancers, musicians, etc. So while there was still an interest in Apsara after the Khmer Rouge was defeated, there were very few people left who could perform or teach it. Only now, nearly 30 years later, as a new generation of dancers are learning the traditional pieces, is Apsara becoming a regular part of the fabric of the culture again.

An incredible thing about Phnom Phen is the number of people living in the street. As soon as it gets dark in the city, cots with mosquito nets start appearing all over the sidewalks, in gas stations that are closed for the evening, in front of embassies, everywhere. And it doesn’t seem to change whether you’re walking through the slums or the ritzier parts. It’s so common that it’s seen as normal, and people will nod to you and say hello as they’re climbing into their hammocks to retire for the evening.

So this all sounds quite bleak, but the truth is there’s quite an energy in Phnom Phen, and while times are very hard, they are no where near as bad as they once were. The people here are tough and resilient, and have somehow managed to stay warm, outgoing, enthusiastic, and friendly. There are old buildings being fixed, new ones being built, and a real sense of togetherness in the neighborhoods. It feels like things can get better and that it can start here. To that I say I certainly hope so.