Sassi Guesthouse, Phnom Penh
Hot, hot, hot
This post was going to be entitled Pol Pot, Pavement Parking and Prostitutes in Phnom Penh, but I decided it was too flippant to lump the Pol Pot regime in with the rest of the Ps. More on that later.
My last post ended with us arriving in Kampot. What a lovely, chilled place that was. We did very little, along with the rest of the population, except wander aimlessly, eat, drink, sleep, repeat. Then we moved onto Kep, all of 24kms away, but with a completely different vibe. Firstly, there was a beach and secondly the town is very spread out with no real 'centre' as such.
The first thing we did was meet up with Katy and Ed, friends of friends, who happen to be in Cambodia at the same time as us, also travelling on bicycles. We chewed the cud over breakfast, all things bicycle touring, and then reunited in the evening for dinner and a few beers. It just so happens we're more or less cycling the same route in Cambodia so while we all ended up in Phnom Penh together the next time we will get together is probably going to be Siem Reap over Christmas. It's a small world!
We stayed at the very lovely Bacoma Gueshouse in one of the round bungalows. The grounds of the guesthouse are jungle that's been tamed and act to keep everywhere feeling very cool. In fact, we rarely used the fan in the bungalow and there was a point one evening when I almost reached for a 2nd layer, but resisted the temptation. We rode around the National Park early in the morning and while we heard a lot of wildlife, we saw very little. Even so, it was a lovely thing to do. On our way back to the guesthouse we took a detour along the new road, that's so wide it really should be called a boulevard, where we found some of the old burned out Modernist buildings.
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Mr Millipede
Signposting in Kep National Park
Kep National Park
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Kep was once a playground for the French elite before the Khmer Rouge came to power, and although it's small and sleepy now it definitely has visions of grandeur. The huge roundabout at the entrance to the town, plus the new 'boulevards' being built, all point to a bigger future.
Two long, dusty traffic-filled days later, we arrived in Phnom Penh. If you arrived in Phnom Penh on a bicycle not having ridden into another Asian City before, you might have had at least one heart attack. It's crazy but it works, somehow. An expat in Kep, when asked about the number of Lexus cars in Cambodia, said (he was Irish) "ah, now in Cambodia you're either a Big Man, or you're nothing and Big Guys drive a Lexus". It turns out they also drive anything that's huge and shiny, has air conditioning and ensures you sit higher than the rest of the traffic. Today I even saw a Rolls Royce. Pavement parking ensures that pedestrians have to walk in the road with the rest of the moving traffic, I have no idea what anyone in a wheelchair or with a pushchair would do.
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| On the way to Phnom Penh |
And so to the Killing Fields (Choeung Ek Genocidal Centre) and The Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, formerly a school that became the notorious S-21 Detention Centre. I'm not sure I can add anything to what has already been said about what the Cambodian people went through during the Pol Pot years, I can only talk about how harrowing I found the experience. Astonishing, is that The Khmer Rouge killed almost a quarter of the Cambodian population (nobody really knows how many) in the relatively short time (between April 1975 and January 1979) they were in power. It happened in my lifetime but I'm ashamed to say I remember very little about it.
What I saw and heard while visiting these two sites was indeed awful. Very little is left to the imagination, and perhaps that's how it should be. Personal testimonies of survivors, photographs, paintings and original torture implements, all paint a very dark picture. There's no smiling or laughing in these places, it's very sombre. It's not an easy place to be an observer, but observe and learn we must. I urge you to do your own research on this subject.
We both came away with a new found respect for the lovely Cambodian people we have met on our travels. It's staggering to think that survivors over the age of 40 will have some experience of this. Equally stupefying is that all the older people we see in the villages we cycle through somehow managed to survive the terrible conditions, starvation and the murder of family members, yet they move on, with dignity.
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| The Pagoda at The Killing Fields, to commemorate those who died |
Another P - prostitutes. There are some notorious bars and clubs in Phnom Penh and today, unknowingly, we had lunch at one of them. BW fancied a felafal and it was only after we'd sat down and ordered we noticed the rest of the clientele. The food was lovely, and it was an interesting lunch, not least because I managed to indulge one of my favourite pastimes of 'earwigging' but my lips are sealed - for the time being anyway!
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| Pavement parking, no room for pedestrians! |
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