Cambodia in a nut shell (maybe quite a large nut, a walnut maybe…)
We’ve been here for a couple of weeks and are flying to Lao tomorrow, so an overview:
A very different place indeed.
We started in Phnom Penh, which impressed me far more than I was expecting. A much more western city than any in Vietnam, close to China in road conditions; large numbers of very expensive cars, though this time most Landrovers or other large 4 by 4s (and we’ve definitely worked out why after a little travel round this country!); adverts for expensive gadgets, shops selling beautiful furniture, clean flat pavements (an absolute luxury in Vietnam!), and lots of very smart buildings, old and new.
Once you get outside Phnom Penh though the story is very different. We’ve stayed in 3 towns so far since PP; Pursat, Battambang and Siem Reap. Each a little larger than the last, but all similar in their almost complete lack of western influence. The only exception to this is the emergence of decent hotels and lots of restaurants and bars in Siem Reap in the last 2/3 years to cater for the tourists now flooding there. The roads in the very centre of the towns are sealed, but after that it’s mud/gravel tracks apart from a few exceptions which is apparently very recent development. There are few cars, most people preferring the moto, and of course many tuk-tuks wherever travellers are. The Cambodians only tend to use them when transporting the entire contents of their house (I kid you not!) or more family members than can fit on a couple of bikes (4/5 up is not unusual). Oh, and oxen are still used to pull carts all over the place.
Virtually everyone we’ve seen lives very simply.
If they live and work in town, their place of work also doubles as their home with cooking/playing/sleeping usually taking place in a back room or sometimes upstairs. Shops are very simple and restaurants/cafes, apart from ones in tourist areas, look like greasy spoons with plastic chairs and tables (except nothing has a glass front here, they all just open to the street), or are often just on the pavement with what we would describe as kiddie chairs and tables and an open stove to prepare the food.
Anyone not living in a town, or even those just a road or 2 outside, lives in a house on stilts as Cambodia floods extensively in the wet season. 90% of these are about as basic as a home gets. Most have one room inside, hammocks or maybe chairs and a table underneath, but rarely anything permanent there as rivers swell massively when the rains come. Mosquito nets divide the sleeping areas, cooking often takes place outside, most huts in the roads we walked through at night had electricity, but some did not, and I would imagine that the percentage would be much lower in the countryside. You can smell wood fires burning everywhere, chickens and cows wander freely everywhere, as do 
feral cats.
Differences in the wealth of the families can be easily seen in the house construction: The most basic have walls made from palm leaves strapped down with wooden slats. Sometimes only one or two pieces of horizontal wood hold them down, more usually it is crisscrossed at maybe 6 inch intervals. More smart homes have planks of wood instead of the palm leaves but the majority are palm, corrugated metal is sometimes used. Roofs of all of these are usually palm thatch or quite regularly sheets of corrugated metal. Concrete stilts are being used more in modern buildings as termites are a big problem. Once the houses are made of wood they start to get bigger and ultra posh ones are painted brick or concrete but these are the exception and I’ve only seen them very near the large towns. Basically this country is incredibly poor.
The countryside is charming though. We’ve had quite a few journeys through villages and along very small country roads on bikes, and the journey has always been just as enjoyable to me as the sights we’ve been seeing. I’m not sure how to describe it though! Red clay dirt tracks; winding rivers everywhere; rice paddies; palm trees; clusters of stilt houses; beautiful temples everywhere (they are the most elaborate buildings you see - painted brick, colourfully tiled roofs, elaborate colourful tombs, surrounded by pretty walls and gates); fruit bats, geckos, happy cows wandering freely everywhere; gaggles of tiny children yelling hello at you as you pass… I’d like to spend more time just randomly driving around this country but unfortunately our rather tight schedule won’t allow for that.
So, what we’ve been doing!…
As with Vietnam, Cambodia has bee a very turbulent country in very recent history and along with the wonderful sites like the magnificent Angkor Temples there are often incomprehensibly awful Khmer Rouge sites such as the prison S21, where thousands were tortured and either killed on site, or taken to the killing fields to be executed.
Phnom Penh
In Phnom Penh we visited S21 as mentioned and the killing fields just outside. The S21 museum especially had me in tears: It was originally a school which the KR crudely converted into a prison and has been left as it was, complete with torture instruments in each tiny cell and piles of victims’ clothes in corners. The larger rooms are now used for exhibitions like mug shots of hundreds of victims, old and young; text describing in detail what happened there, one room from the testimonies of KR fighters, forced to kill or be killed - they were as much victims themselves as the inmates, and regularly became one later - we heard the stories of 15 or so who made it out alive and now have to live with what they did and the life-long stigma from society; a room full of skulls showing bullet holes and other lethal damage. They were things that had to be seen if visiting this country, but I think enough about that in here.
We hired a bike again for the 3 days we were there and drove out to the fields, so that part was fun, and gave us our first glimpse of rural Cambodia as signposting in this country is non-existent so we drove about 20km too far before deciding we’d definitely passed it and turned back! We also visited the Royal Palace which is a walled enclosure with beautiful manicured gardens and grand buildings… more beautiful roofs of a completely different style, I love the traditional roofs everywhere we’ve visited, Tishy makes fun of me for photographing yet another roof! The Royal Family still live in the palace, so there were large areas we were not allowed in, but the buildings we could see had the most wonderful decadent decoration inside (unfortunately no photography allowed): ceilings with beautiful paintings; gold leaf everywhere; pretty tiles on the floor, or in one building sheet of silver! All sorts. And this country loves its Elephants and they are depicted in the art everywhere and used in processions and all sorts, which is great because I think they are wonderful animals!
Pursat
We were hoping to head into the jungle from here for some trekking and wild Elephant/tiger/bear spotting, but this is a tiny town with no tourism or even people who speak English really, so I have no idea how the Lonely Planet managed it, but without any Khmer under our belts, or at least just lots of time to feel around and find our way, it was mission impossible. So we gave up on that idea and left town the next morning for Battambang, We did have a very enjoyable evening slowly strolling a long way down one side of the river and up the other though which made the stop worth while. The road on the far side of the river was flanked by stilt houses with families cooking, eating, watching TV (generally quite communally), cows grazing by fire, and many cute kids desperate to say hello to us! We were definitely the only westerners in town, and probably the first in a long time to make it to their side of the river opposite town. We also found a yummy local desert type food in a roadside cafe made up of crushed ice, condensed milk, a couple of other unidentified liquids and small Indian like sweets all mixed up in a bowl. Sitting down with the locals was good fun 
Battambang
We spent 3 days here as there turned out to be more here than expected and we liked the feel of the town in general. We hired a bike again the first day and headed out to see Phmon Sampeau. The limestone caves up the hill were great fun to explore, though a little creepy at times and sad as they were another KR killing spot and all had little shrines at the entrances or a little way down, and one in particular had a very large shrine, a box of remains and a rather nasty story to go with. At the top of the hill was a fabulous pagoda and temple (this country is full of temples!) and a couple of excitable monks fascinated by and determined to pull off Tish’s beard and to make us join them praying to Buddha!
The driving here was interesting to say the least! Our moto driver guide the following day said Cambodia had 3 types of road: bad, very bad, and really fucking bad! And the road to Phnom Sampeau was at least the 2nd. A compacted mud or gravel track, wide enough for a couple of lorries to pass each other, but the compacted ridges and pot holes made it almost impossible on a bike, the only place you could drive was on the larger gravel pot holes and tracks down the very edge of the road, which made overtaking really slow lorries horrible. Tish did a pretty good job, especially on the way back, weaving in a out trying to 
get the best lines through. The locals were pretty amazing at it and we always went fastest following their lines!
The following day we had a tour with 2 moto drivers as guides and saw and other temple, Phnom Banan, this time mostly in ruins as the Khmer Rouge had used it as an artillery base - lovely views from the top again; an Indiana Jones style suspended wooden bridge - very cool! Fruit bats nesting in a tree - they are HUGE! And the last stop of the day was a ride on the only railway tracks trough Cambodia, and not on what you could exactly describe as a conventional train!…. The train tracks are very old and completely unmaintained, and are in such bad shape that only one train a week runs along them and that only carries cargo as carrying passengers is too dangerous. So the locals use the tracks to carry produce to and from market on what they call ‘Bamboo trains’, which are basically a square wooden platform attached to the rails with an engine at the back. They go at 15-20 km/h and are fantastic fun! Although not the safest feeling ride! At one point we were being chased by another palate loaded with two cows. As there is only one track and no crossing points the ride can take considerably longer if there are lots of people using the line, as every time trains in opposite directions meet, they decide which is the heavier and lift the other off the tracks to pass each other!! I was very disappointed that we didn’t see this happen!
Siem Reap
Our last stop was Siem Reap for the famed Temples of Angkor, one of the 7 Wonders of the World and every bit as impressive as we’d been led to believe.
The other cool thing about Siem Reap was bumping in to Kim! It was kinda planned, but still somehow surprising to see him walk up to us on our guesthouse balcony! We had a fun evening exchanging stories and generally chatting. On the road you are always doing initial getting to know you chat, and don’t get me wrong, I meeting lots of new people, but occasionally it is lovely not to have al those ‘where are you from, where have you been?’ questions! Unfortunately we didn’t bump in to him again in SR after he left our guesthouse to join his parents, but may do in Laos.
We spent about 3 days looking at the temples, the third unfortunately get cut short by a combination of monsoon (I now know what that word means - ‘raining cats and dogs’ doesn’t touch it!) and dodgy food playing silly buggers with Tish’s insides but we still saw a hell of a lot. We opted for the extravagance of a guide for the first 2 days which we both really enjoyed. It helped us understand the temples so much better; see and understand a million details we may well have overlooked, or just looked at pretty blankly. Every single surface Angkor Wat, the largest and best preserved temple of the area, is covered in intricate frescoes, patterns, statues, all sorts, it is quite incredible to see. Angkor Thom is a huge walled compound which housed one King;’ palace as well as all sorts of small temples. Each structure had a very distinct and different style from every other and was amazing. Of course a lot could have been read in the guide books, touted by hundreds of little kids who surround you ever time you set foot out of your Tuk tuk, but our enthusiastic guides brought it to life.
At the beginning of the second day we visited Ta Prohm, the temple made famous by Lara Croft in Tomb Raider, as all the guides were proud to tell you every possible second! Although it was considerably smaller than Angkor Wat and less complete than anything in Angkor Thom it had a wonderful character and was actually one of our favourites. All of the temples were abandoned centuries ago and forgotten about and discovered very recently. As a result jungle had grown up around all of the temples, but none had been claimed back in quite such a way as Ta Prohm. The way the trees had grown through the temple was beautiful. The temple must have been beautiful in its own right, a lot of it is still standing so you can get a good feel for it. There is a big reconstruction project underway, but a large part of me thinks it should be left exactly as it is. The goal of the reconstruction is to put the temple back together as it was originally, which will mean removing all the trees etc. But I think the trees are a part of its history now and it is beautiful and fascinating as it is and should be left. The reconstruction will take another 25 years to complete though apparently, so there’s still time to see the jungle captured version!
The other trip of note in Siem Reap was the land mine museum. It is part museum, part orphanage run by a fascinating man. He has led a very troubled life, orphaned himself at the age of 5 by the Khmer Rouge then recruited to fight for them as one of their child soldiers at the age of 10. He was used by them initially as a land mine canary, ie sent out in front of the officers to determine a safe route through land mines (canaries never fare well in the mines - tishy), he also planted tens of thousands of them for them. He was then captured by the Vietnamese and planted land mines for them, then the Cambodian army. Since the war has been over he has cleaned thousands of mines, off his own back and then as part of a UN programme. The museum we saw was his second incarnation as first museum he opened in Siem Reap, with all the artifacts he’d collected over the years, was shut by the government for ’scaring tourists’! This man is incredibly lucky to be alive, and how he has the mental and moral fibre to do what he does after his childhood is an unanswerable question, but Cambodia has a huge landmine problem - millions still out there and 7 people a day being maimed or killed - and he is doing an amazing job.
Verdict on Cambodia? It is a very scarred country, physically and mentally. An American who’s lived here for 18 months in a remote village told us that the normal ‘hello, how are you?’ type greeting here is ‘have you had rice today?’ no matter what time of day it is, stemming from the awful times when it was a lucky thing if you had eaten. So now it is seen culturally as a sign of happiness and prosperity, the basic fact that you have eaten today…. The schooling system is a shambles, education is seen as a priority by few. All the educated population were killed or fled so there is a huge shortage of all the sorts of people needed to build the country up again. People are generally happy with their very small lot in life simply because it is so much better than the awful times in their recent past so any progress is very slow. Neither the education nor the will is there in the majority of the population. Cambodia has a lot of natural beauty and some wonderful sites, but it is very sad that it is such a 3rd world country. The legacy of the brutality at the time we were born makes it likely that it will stay that way for a very long time yet.
