Our
second week in Cambodia is marked by an Unfortunate Case of Burning Bum.
Traveller’s Trots. Delhi Belly. Whatever you want to call it. I spent about 3
days in our rented apartment clutching my stomach and doing sicky little burps,
watching episodes of The Inbetweeners
on YouTube and feeling VERY sorry for myself.
It does
turn out that your stomach can adapt pretty quickly to less than hygienic cooking
standards, (once the pain of being poisoned is over) but I’m still going to
avoid the place where I saw a rat running between the table and chairs and the
place with dead, squashed cockroach in the loo.
Then
when I feel better, I go out and get drunk on super strong margaritas. The
resulting hangover is far worse than the stomach bug I’d endured earlier. Never
again! Oh, that looks like a nice bar…..
We’re
in the town of Siem Reap, which is the North West of Cambodia and probably best
known for the famous Angkor Wat (which shamefully, we still haven’t visited
yet.)
The
town was under French control in the late 19th century, and the influence
is clear in the architecture. The central tourist area, commonly referred to as
‘Pub Street’ is set out on a grid, with many little alleyways coming off the sides.
The buildings and narrow alleyways have a very French feel to them; often two
storey, open verandas, an ‘open’ upper floor where you can sit and watch the
hustle and bustle of the markets and street vendors.
Our
first impressions are not good though. We take a $7 taxi from the airport to ‘downtown’.
The taxi driver keeps asking us if we have booked anywhere to stay yet. It’s a
mistake to say that we haven’t, because he tells us he can take us to a hotel
he knows. When we respectfully decline, he gets in a mood, and tries to drop us on a
dirt road just off the highway.
‘We
wanted to go to the town centre,’ TC says. ‘we’ve paid $7 to go to the town
centre,’
‘This
is town centre,’ he says.
‘No it’s
not, this is a dirt tack off the main road,’ says TC. ‘can you at least take us
to a pub, or a coffee shop?’
‘You
can get coffee in there,’ he says, pointing to a squat yellow building that
looks like a Shell garage.
‘I don’t
think we can get coffee in there,’ I say doubtfully.
‘I’m
only supposed to do one stop,’ the driver grumbles. ‘this is it,’
‘But we
aren’t anywhere,’ I say.
Huffing
and puffing, he drives a bit further down the road and stops outside a grim
looking café.
‘You
get out here,’ he says, and starts unloading our cases. He drives off without
saying goodbye. As I look around, I think, we
have made a dreadful mistake.
We sit
in the grim café and have $1 cans of coke, book up a place, and then find a
friendly tuk-tuk driver who takes us to ‘Pub Street’. It’s all a bit garish and
loud, and reminds me a bit of the main strips of party towns on Grecian
islands. It’s actually only two streets that are really like this. Once you
find your way to the quaint alleyways, with the quirkier bars (like the Asana,
a roof-top bar we went to last night – you wouldn’t know it was there unless
you’d deliberately gone looking for it.) the place has a much nicer, homier
feel to it.
We
spend 3 days in a hotel, then find a longer term hotel apartment let. It’s a
family run place – they live in the flat downstairs. Their children are very
sweet and speak perfect English.
Its
here you notice a marked difference between Thailand and Cambodia. The children
here in Siem Reap seem to go to school, for a start. There are two schools
right by our apartment. The children always want to engage you in a
conversation, probably to practice their English, and will follow you down the
street, asking questions, or simply spy you from a distance and yell, ‘HELLO!
WHAT’S YOUR NAME?’ and then dissolve into fits of giggles. They all ride
pushbikes, though we’ve seen some kids that look about 8 or 9 gadding about on
motorbikes.
Our
apartment is about a 20 minute walk from Pub Street, down a couple of dirt tracks
and then along the main ‘river’ road that splits the way in and out of town.
Cambodia
to me seems more organised than Thailand; there’s still rubbish piled up here
and there, but less of it, and the buildings are less ramshackle and higgledy-piggledy.
We didn’t see any of the shanty-town road side slums that we saw in Bangkok.
That
said, this is still a country recovering from a long and bloody history of
conflict and genocide. The BBC website explains it simply and well:
The
brutal regime, in power from 1975-1979, claimed the lives of up to two million
people.
Under
the Marxist leader Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge tried to take Cambodia back to the
Middle Ages, forcing millions of people from the cities to work on communal
farms in the countryside.
But
this dramatic attempt at social engineering had a terrible cost.
Whole
families died from execution, starvation, disease and overwork.
When
he came to power, he and his henchmen quickly set about transforming Cambodia -
now re-named Kampuchea - into what they hoped would be an agrarian utopia.
Declaring
that the nation would start again at "Year Zero", Pol Pot isolated
his people from the rest of the world and set about emptying the cities,
abolishing money, private property and religion, and setting up rural
collectives.
Anyone
thought to be an intellectual of any sort was killed. Often people were
condemned for wearing glasses or knowing a foreign language.
Hundreds
of thousands of the educated middle-classes were tortured and executed in
special centres.
The
most notorious of these centres was the S-21 jail in Phnom Penh, Tuol Sleng,
where as many as 17,000 men, women and children were imprisoned during the
regime's four years in power.
Hundreds
of thousands of others died from disease, starvation or exhaustion as members
of the Khmer Rouge - often just teenagers themselves - forced people to do
back-breaking work.
There
are still an unknown number of landmines in the countryside – no one knows
where they are, because no record of them being planted was ever kept. It’s
estimated that landmines have claimed 63,000 victims in Cambodia alone. Most of
these causalities are men, and it’s a common to see amputees begging or
trying to sell things to make money.
We go
to Genevieve’s Fairtrade Village, a shop that sells bags, clothes and jewellery
made by land mine victims. Of course, I HAVE to do my bit to help, and buy a
bag, that’s made of dark green silk and old bike tyres. Sounds hideous, is
actually lovely. So lovely I'm afraid to use it.
Cambodia’s
official currency is riels, but they mostly deal in US dollars. You’ll often
find you get your change as a mix of both currencies; the riels tend to make up
the US cent portion of change.
I’ve
been reading a lot about how Cambodia is a country full of work-shy, violent thieves
who see tourists as walking piggy banks. We haven’t experienced any of this
personally. There does seem to a thread of sadness running through Cambodian
people, mixed in with hope that things will get better. It seems options for
work are limited.
We got
a tuk-tuk back from town today, and the driver thanks us for giving him work. He’s
been there two hours with no fare. He travels 20km to get to Siem Reap, and
spends 4 days at a time in the town, sleeping in his tuk-tuk. The look on his
face when we ask him to take us home almost breaks my heart, and I feel weighed
down with a sadness I didn’t feel in Thailand.
Again,
I’m reminded of my good fortune, the money in my bank, the good chances I had
in life that I wasted.
