Phnom Penh, a Whitewash of History

February 29, 2012

The first impression was correct, Phnom Penh has become a playground for international bon-vivants, well-dressed first-class hotel dwellers, globetrotters and backpackers and everything in between. There are accommodations, eateries, watering holes aplenty, for each kind.

I am loving it even though it rides roughshod over the waistline I'd hoped to reduce in this "forlorn backwater" of my memories.

Although near the end of the dry season, Phnom Penh days are sweltering hot and dripping humid. It looks like I am not alone in seeking a midday refuge in an air conditioned or fanned room. Around that time the streets become deserted. As if popping out of hibernation, masses of humanity re-emerge from their hidden daytime shelters as soon as the sun drops behind the haze in the west.

Just as it was when I thought catching up a bit with world news was a possibility in Rangoon, when CNN, and other news channels, blabbed about nothing besides the important life achievements of Witney Houston, I got duped again. My cheap Phnom Penh digs, besides air-conditioning, also had a little TV. When checking in, they assured me CNN was available - and it was - but with a bummer discovery. This time Afghanistan, Syria, Egypt, Republican primaries, record cold spell in Europe and what Berlusconi's girlfriend had for breakfast, all of it was replaced by the Red Carpet parade of "glitterati" making their way to the Academy Award ceremonies. I watched for a while and came to a conclusion: Most of the Cambodian women who try to entice you into their restaurant for a two-dollar dinner look infinitely better with their winning smiles than the dolled up, fake, modified, transformed, "Babes" and "Dudes" who strut the red carpet on the way in to the Academy Awards ceremony.

Day before yesterday I picked up a (pirated, photocopied) book from a street seller, FIRST THEY KILLED MY FATHER, A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers. By Loung Ung.

That story would definitively qualify better for having the title of my blog HITTING THE HEAD WITH A HAMMER than my actual blog. While reading it, in my air-conditioned room (the Academy Awards still dominated the TV news!), it felt like exposure to constant head hammering, in this case Cambodian heads. It tells the story of one family under the unspeakable brutality of Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge.

I chose the blog title to facetiously illustrate how good it feels when one stops hammering, but under Pol Pot's reign, for the countless people who had their heads bashed in with hammers, there was no such relief, they were dead, about two million of them, out of a population of a little over ten million.

On my last visit to Phnom Penh, about eighteen-years(?) ago, I visited the Killing Fields and the S-21 prison torture headquarters where daily about a hundred people got bludgeoned to death. It was a shocker then but since the town in those days had already put you into a mood of doom, with it's dark, forlorn alleys, and general depressing allure, the impact was not as great a contrast as reading the book now, in comfort during the midday heat, knowing full-well in the evening you can go out to hoot it up and be merry - options joyfully offered by the people who had endured the Khmer Rouge horrors.

I got an invitation to spend time in a village yet two reasons kept me from accepting.

Life out in the country, as described in the book, was so depressing, I didn't want to be reminded, but ... in reality there was another, more important reason why I declined.

Teth, a very beautiful, twenty-nine-year old woman I got to know rather well during my six-day stay in Phnom Penh, was married in her village when she was twenty. Her husband, ten month after the wedding, died in an accident, almost the same day as her daughter was born. When I asked how her husband had died, she started to cry. Of course, under the circumstances I didn't pursue the question. I'd read in the Cambodia Journal, a small English newspaper I bought from a pint-sized newspaper boy in the street, that this year already eleven people, mostly farmers, had died from stepping on land mines. After her husband's death Teth tried to make a go as a widow with a young child, but that was difficult in her rural village.

She left her daughter with her mother and came to the city, "to make enough money to assure a good education for my child," she said.

Right away she started taking English lesson. To finance her living and school expenses she worked as a masseuse, Khmer massage that has not much similarity with the — probably more lucrative — massage  with "happy ending" available all over southeast Asia. While we strolled in the market early one morning, it turned out she knows the English names of all the vegetables, fruits and meats, a good indication that her English comes from a school where one learns these kinds of words as opposed to the chit-chat girls pick up from working in bars. For her lodging, she pays thirty-dollars a month and the school costs a grand total of three-hundred a year.

After the total feel-good experience in Mandalay, where a lousy thousand dollars from me helped in creating a doctor, a dentist, a computer programmer and an electrical engineer! I paid her tuition for the year. She had been paying month by month.

As in Mandalay, the show of gratitude (the Mandalay version is described in a former posting) was totally embarrassing. She cried, prayed and bowed to me, and prayed and bowed again, and again. Whether in a restaurant or in a Tuck-Tuck, my arm that happens to be next to her gets totally over-massaged. When we eat in restaurants together, she requests hot water to clean my eating utensils. She prepares and improves the meals with condiments and supplied extras. She keeps crying and laughing.

Yesterday her younger sister, a real farm girl with rough, calloused hands, came to visit her in Phnom Penh. Even at universally known words, like "thank you", she looks to her sister to find out what I said.

Teth invited me to come with them to the village for a few days. With what looked more and more like infatuation, even though born from gratitude, I was reluctant to encourage that — a beautiful young woman with a potentially fulfilling future and me, an old man, me — just didn't seem right. I gave her my e-mail address and said I had to leave Phnom Penh. She cried a little. Were I to stay longer, my inevitable departure would become more difficult.

I booked a bus ride to Siem Reap. A Canadian backpacker couple from Calgary, said Siem Reap looked now like a hippy heaven blended with a free-for-all wild west town and Disney World. Twelve years ago, at me last visit, Siem Reap, like Phnom Penh, was a rather quiet backwater.

The bus journey, even though mostly through a beautiful, emerald green rice paddy landscape, interspersed by Lotus ponds, fish farms, mango groves, lush vegetable plots, and cow pastures, was depressing. The whole country side is decorated with plastic bags, styrofoam containers, and, and, and ... whatever else should, in the best case,  be seen only in a garbage dump.

I was in Siem Reap, ages ago with Emilie. From there we took a boat across Tonlé Sap lake and, past floating villages and countless fishermen, floated down on the Tonlé Sap River to Phnom Penh. Tonlé lake and Tonlé river are reputed to be the world's most productive fresh water fish habitats.

The reason lays in a rare configuration. Tonlé Sap River, along with the Casiciares in southeastern Venezuela, are two planetary abnormalities. Both rivers flow both ways, depending on which end the water level is higher. During dry season, Tonlé Sap river leads out of Tonlé Sap lake into the Mekong. During rainy season the Mekong water level rises tremendously and thus reverses the flow of Tonlé Sap which fills up the lake, like a huge reservoir. That river water is very rich in nutrients.

The Casiciares is a river way out in the Amazon jungle between the upper reaches of the Rio Negro (Brazil, Columbia, Venezuela) and the Orinoco (Venezuela). The Casiciares flows east to west when the Orinoco is higher and west to east when the Rio Negro carries more water.

Now I have done both of them, in both cases from West to East.

Observations / vignettes.

In Phnom Penh, kids with heavy baskets, full of books, DVD (pirated stuff), newspapers and trinkets, ply the streets, the river promenade, cafés, bars and restaurants, trying to sell their wares. Some, to judge by the looks barely out of kindergarten, have incredible language skills. They usually try their sales pitch in English, when they get no response they switch to French, German, Spanish, or Italian. On people with an oriental appearance they try Japanese, Korean and Chinese.

That reminds me of my first encounter with English words. It was: "Chewing gum, please."

After the war American GIs came to Switzerland for R&R. I would hang out where they could be found; in the streets, the Limmat river promenade, cafés and restaurants. I hunted and pestered them just as the Phnom Penh kids did with me. I tugged at their pants and pleaded: "Chewing gum please".

Chewing gum, the American invention, in those days was the coolest thing to possess. A big wad in your mouth, even if it was days old and had absolutely no more flavor, could be traded for a day in exchange for a hokey stick, a bike or whatever one wanted from some chewing gum-less kid. A strict rule was that no food or drink could be in the mouth while the borrowed wad was being masticated.

In the US a large portion of heavy construction machinery have names like KOMATSU, VOLVO, names of foreign brands. Here in south-east Asia, much closer to Japan than the US, I see almost exclusively Caterpillar machines. What gives?

On the bus I had to (silently) commiserate with an Austrian woman. The man she was with, talked with no interruption, but with a heavy Austrian accent. That prattle went on the whole six hours of the bus ride. Sometimes he forgot to breathe 'til, like a victim of Hypoxia, he had to desperately gulp for air. The subject of his talk was everything, absolutely everything, as long as it was banal. He was one of these people who know absolutely everything about everything and lets the world around him know about it.

I resisted an attempt to strangle him but the woman with him seemed to listen.

Siem Reap.

Last night I ran into a couple from Oregon who had been on the boat from Saigon to Phnom Penh.

First time in Siem Reap, they didn't suffer the same shock as I at the sight of that town. Similar to the bazar the foot of the mountain below the other world famous historical site, Machu Picchu, acres upon acres of souvenir stalls are crowded into, what it is advertised in giant blinking neon signs: DAY MARKET and NIGHT MARKET. They both look the same and both were open day and night. One is on the left side of the river and the other on the right side. Quaint bridges connect the two as if there might be a chance that a potential customer couldn't find what he/she was looking for in either one of them. Future dust collectors (read souvenirs) in Europe, Japan, Korea, China, Singapore, Malaysia, North, Central and South America, are offered in multiples of thousands.

There are streets with wall-to-wall bars and restaurants, one is called Pub and Bar street? There is even a traffic barrier on both ends of the street so that tuck-tucks and motorcycle taxi drivers won't interfere with the masses of drinking, eating and general merry-making of international tourists. Not all offer local Cambodian fare. You get to choose specialities from across the globe, from pizza, over sushi, hot dogs, fish and chips and Röschti to borscht to the ubiquitous Southeast Asian noodle soups. Beautiful local girls smile and coo at you and try to pull you in wherever you pass — for drink, happy hour, "we serve Margarita, Sunrise, Piña Colada, Mojito, half price", for food, "Khmer, Italian, Chinese, French, Barbecue", for massage, "very happy", for fish that nibble on your feet, for buying souvenirs.

Even though in many ways similar to the Khao San area in Banglamphu, Bangkok's backpacker and budget traveler ghetto, a place I really like (as described in earlier posts), this tourist Mecca here in Siem Reap is over the top. It seems like a parody for "cater to tourist excess". Also, since Siem Reap is like a small village compared to Bangkok, the "fancy" people from the multi-star hotels, that also abound in this town, mingle with the backpacker riffraff. Table with pink Safari outfit clad, white tennis garb clothed, tasseled loafers on feet and coiffed hairdos on heads, stand among tables with  — mostly younger — groups. Those sport tattoos, headbands, beards and beads, are wrapped in rumpled, loose fitting, easy-to-wash outfits. There is also a groups of bright blue eyed and so-blond-it-almost-looks-white-haired Scandinavian students. Asian restaurants have mostly Caucasian guests while Asians munch on Pizzas, Spaghetti and Wurst.

Jayavarman II, the Devaraja (god-king), when he started building Angkor Watt in 802 AD, could never have guessed what a gold mine he created for a future Cambodia. Even though I don't plan to visit the ruins of Angkor Watt again — done that years ago — I came to Siem Reap because it is the staging town for visits to the famous of Angkor Watt. With what I had heard about the town's transformation,  my curiosity drew me here.

Food and drink is good, people are friendly — if you manage to see a locals who is not a tuck-tuck or motorcycle taxi drivers, or shopkeepers, or restaurant and bar employees, or masseuses, or hotel receptionists.

Last time we came to Siem Reap on the back of a pickup truck from Thailand. For a long stretch the truck drove far off the road. "There are still mines on and near the road," was the explanation. Our bones bones got shaken out of our bodies when we rumpled over the uneven terrain of eastern Cambodia. I sat on one of the truck's spare tires. I remember thinking how nice it would be if it was less inflated.

Now the town is full of pictures advertising super fancy buses that bring you to Bangkok - and everywhere else you might want to go — in apparent comfort. I"ll ride on one because from Bangkok it is easy to get to almost anywhere on the planet. Maybe I'll end up laying on a tropical beach before getting to cold Europe, to New York and to Vermont.