Cities in contrast: Phnom Penh & Saigon

Family on a motorbike

I’m quite behind on travel blog posts, but I’ve committed to catching up and so though I’m writing in Washington, DC, on the blog I’m still traveling between Cambodia and Vietnam’s largest cities: Phnom Penh and Saigon.

I first fell in love with Phnom Penh after a chance encounter with the crispiest tastiest grilled squid on earth during a bus stop between Siem Reap and Kep. Upon returning to Phnom Penh, we visited the central market again for the heavenly dish, served with cold cucumbers, herbs and a dash of homemade chili sauce.  This was a no frills spot; just a small roadside stand with food served on melamine dishes.  Yet the taste and the service was five star.  It’s a microcosm of Phnom Penh, a shabby city upon first glimpse yet one oozing with character. Despite being Cambodia’s capitol city, Phnom Penh’s demographic is decidedly rural in nature, in large part because of Pol Pot’s reign of terror over the wealthy and educated classes.  So scenes of life in rural Cambodia are often played out in city streets: people commuting by bicycle, carrying livestock, and selling fruit from bamboo baskets. PP feels more like a small town than a capitol city and in some ways, it seems as if time stands still.  One night we ventured to the local mall, where the top floor contained a roller rink packed with Khmer teens doing tricks and drinking soda pop from glass bottles.  It was as if we were transported back to 1950s America, when life seemed so simple and wholesome.

The Royal Palace of Phnom Penh

Monks flood the streets of Phnom Penh

The Russian Market in Phnom Penh

Man sharpening knives at the Russian Market

One of many street side barbershops

Despite its renewed character, Phnom Penh is still deeply haunted by the days of Khmer Rouge, when an estimated 2 million people were brutally killed.  We visited Tuol Sleng (S21), a former high-school turned prison and place of torture for the Khmer Rouge.  After the regime fell in 1979, 14 bodies were found.  Photographs of the bodies as they were left are hung on the walls of the cell in which they were found along with the bed and shackles to which they were chained.  The stark images are a sobering reminder of the capacity for human beings to be unapologetically inhuman.

S 21 cell block

Portraits of prisoners at S 21

S 21 cell

We continued our journey to Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, still regularly called Saigon today.  It never ceases to amaze me how different a place can be just a few miles across a land border.  A bustling sprawling behemoth of a city, Saigon is everything that Phnom Penh isn’t; It’s a city on a race for advancement.  Streets are nearly impassible due to waves of motorbikes speeding in every direction and construction is everpresent. But the most significant difference were the people, who on the outset were much more cold and aloof than the Khmer, Lao and Thai.  We had only a day in Saigon and it wasn’t an especially memorable one thanks to buckets of rain and a few attempts by locals to rip us off.  But we kept up our hopes high for better days in Vietnam, and fortunately there were many. Stay tuned!

The chaotic traffic of Saigon

Pepper and Beach: Kampot to Kep

Palm trees and rice paddy, the quintessential Cambodian landscape

Little compares to Cambodian bus travel. It takes at least two hours longer to arrive at a destination than estimated. Nine times out of ten a tire blows out and needs to be replaced.  Rest stops are taken at illogical intervals, usually at the whim of the driver who will sit down for a three course hot meal as little as 10 kilometers away from the final destination. Passengers (er, Cambodian passengers) also get a whole lot of say for when the bus stops. One drunk man halted the bus at least five times to take a piss on the side of the road.  Yet the real clincher has to be the deafening tune of Cambodian karaoke DVDs played on repeat.  After a few 8 hour rides, I’d memorized several of the songs, all a variation on the same melodramatic plot-line of unrequited love.

Cambodian rice farmers

Yet the real highlight of bus travel in Cambodia is that it offers a fascinating glimpse of daily life. Westerners tend to live at the end of long driveways, behind fences, walls and in the privacy of homes.  Cambodians carryout their daily life out in the open, often alongside the curves of the country’s main thoroughfares. We see them caring for their children, tending their rice fields, showering, and gathering for a meal.

A view of Kampot province

Aside from the landscape — flat rice fields dotted with coconut and palm trees (opposed to the mostly hilly landscape of Thailand and Laos) — the most obvious scenic difference in Cambodia are the homes.  Few thatch roofed and bamboo houses here. Even the poorest villages are checkered with elegant yet simple Khmer wooden houses with striking carved wooden detail decorating their eaves.

Traditional Khmer house

We made our way to Kampot and Kep, two small towns within a short 30 minute ride from each-other. The former is known for its pepper plantations and friendly provincial town while the latter is known for its ocean views.  We spent a day in Kampot riding around its surrounds by motorbike past salt pans, Cham Muslim neighborhoods and rice fields, to caves with a fifth century Hindu temple.  Nearly every turn provided sightings of smiling locals waving and saying hello.  During a stop for a snack of spicy papaya salad with what we believed to be raw (eek) crab, we were even invited to join some locals for a celebratory birthday drink of homemade palm wine.

The path to the cave, mine free...

The old bridge in Kampot, with the Elephant Mountains in the distance

From Kep we took a choppy boat ride to the quiet Rabbit Island, a favorite of locals.  Two days by the water doing nothing but swimming, drinking coconut water and reading a good book did the trick to cure our travelers’ fatigue.  At night, once the generators died and the island turned pitch black, the ocean became phosphorescent.  Breaking waves looked like lines of stars and a sweep of the arm spawned a trail of diamonds.  Two of the adorable stray puppies that populated the island guarded the door of our simple thatch bungalow that night while another slept under our bed.

Sunset on Rabbit Island

Early morning on Rabbit Island

The beach puppies that stayed with us all night

Our ride back to the mainland

Enamored by Angkor Wat

Dramatic carvings and sky at Banteay Srei

I’ll still never forget the first time I saw the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, gazing at it while sandwiched between hundreds of strangers.  Chatters from the tourists were only amplified by the cavernous chapel, creating a wall of noise. “Silencio”, barked the guard, his pleas going unnoticed. So vast, so detailed and so impeccably to scale were Michelangelo’s paintings that they had an almost transcendent quality, capable of silencing the buzzing of tourists that Italian guards could not.  It’s been almost ten years since I visited the Sistine Chapel and few places have had a such a transfixing effect. That is until we visited Angkor Wat, a stunning 12th century temple complex in Cambodia.

Angkor Wat at sunset

Cows come out to graze after the tourists leave

I’d seen the temple complex in photos before — the imposing towers of Angkor and the smiling faces of the Bayon — but the sheer scale and ambition of the place was unknown to me until I visited.  We were among over one million tourists that visit per year, many of them coming in busloads from China and Japan.  Yet despite these crowds, it was still very possible to take in the temples and to feel at times that we had newly discovered them hidden in the jungle.  Some of it was due to visiting in low season, some due to timing the predictable schedule of the tour buses. But much of it was because of the seductive quality of the extensive bias reliefs that wrap Angkor Wat, the soothing smiles of the Bayon towers, the intricate carvings of Banteay Srei, the tree-laced ruins of Ta Phrom and the 9 square kilometer scale of the ancient city of Angkor Thom.

The smiling faces of the Bayon

A massive tree grows out of Ta Prohm

Roots digging their way into the stones at Ta Prohm

Banteay Srei is full of well preseved delicate carvings

While capable of quieting the crowds, the awe-inspiring temples did not shadow the immense poverty that circled them daily.  Beggars deformed and amputated by the Khmer Rouge and landmines from war reached out for coins while children in tattered clothes aggressively sold trinkets and postcards. “hello suh, one dolla, one dolla, you buy, you buy.”  When we asked why they were not in school or playing with their friends they became quiet and persisted in their sales pitch. Our guesthouse owner, Ponheary Ly, a CNN hero for her work with children in Cambodia has urged tourists not to buy from children as it offers incentive for them to drop out of school to continue selling. Hard as it was, our policy was to purchase only water from adults and to save our money to give to Ly’s foundation, which provides school supplies, bicycles and teacher salaries in order to keep Cambodian children in school.  We reasoned that the money would be best spent by a reliable foundation instead of by handouts, which can promote begging and end up in the hands of scammers.

Cambodian child sits at Angkor Wat

Click through below to see more pictures of Angkor Wat:

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Overland Travel Stops: 4,000 Islands & Kratie

First sunset in Don Khone

The land border between Laos and Cambodia is just a dusty little town filled with dollar noodles and stalls selling batteries and flip flops.  Yet just beyond in each country are two little gems worth a day or two stop whilst traveling overland.  Southern Laos possesses the 4,000 islands, also known as Siphandon. A riverine archipelago in the Mekong, most of the islands were submerged due to heavy rains. Yet the three largest and only inhabited islands remained, all encircled by cheap waterside bungalows adorned with hammocks.  A good book and a fruit shake were the order of the day, a welcome retreat from weeks of daily activity.  Of historical interest, Siphandon was the French’s last attempt to create a trade route between Southeast Asia and China. Some signs of their efforts remain, including an abandoned railroad and bridge connecting the islands of Don Khone and Don Det, which can be viewed during a bicycle ride around the islands.  Relaxing alongside the racing Mekong was a fitting way to conclude our visit in Laos, a country so firmly connected with the mighty river that runs its length.

Second sunset in Don Khone

The bus ride to Cambodia was excessively long, thanks to a two hour stop at the border and a blown tire.  Cambodia’s landscape differs greatly from Laos and Thailand with flat rice fields extending for miles dotted by coconut and palm trees.  Most striking are the acres of burned tree-stumps, a harsh introduction to destructive logging in Cambodia.  After hours on a bus blasting Cambodian karaoke dvds, we arrived in Kratie, Cambodia (pronounced Krachay) with a pink sunset as our much deserved reward.

Kratie locals watch the sunset over the Mekong river

Boat coming in during sunset in Kratie

Tuk tuk driver enjoying the sunset

The riverside town of Kratie is famous its endangered fresh-water Irrawaddy Dolphins, of which less than 75 remain. In early morning, we ventured by boat to their feeding area, where we turned off the motors to wait and listen for the spray of their blow holes and the flash sightings of their flippers or distinct flat-nosed heads.  The game of waiting for the dolphins to appear in the quiet of the river was enchanting. We were surprised to have seen so many given their dwindling populations yet we only managed a few fleeting pictures of them below.

Searching for the Irrwady dolphins

The Irrwady dolphin. Elusive in photos