goodbye phnom penh

Here's a wrap up of my visit to Phnom Penh. It's a small city - around 1 million people. There aren't any tall buildings, I'd say the tallest is around 6 stories. The riverfront area is well presented with plenty of restaurants to choose from. I highly recommend the Foreign Correspondent's Club.

Check out the Raffles Hotel for high class drinking, of course this comes at a price premium: drinks are at least 3 times what you'd pay elsewhere. Any other drinking holes around town are cheap, but you'll have to put up with the bar girls hassling you (oh, the pain! ;-)

Here's a view from where I was working (4 stories up, south end of town).
With a transit through Singapore I decided to spend a few days there exporing. More on that soon.

cat-fish for lunch

Trivia about Siem Reap: it's name literally means "Siamese Defeated". It's a bit boastful really, since then the Thais have been far more dominant than the Cambodians. Thailand even controlled Siem Reap for a hundred or so years until the French took it off them.

Anyway, near Siem Reap there is a small village called Chong Kneas. The village is made of houses on stilts and boats. During the dry season, half the village has to move in to the middle of Lake Tonlé Sap as the lake dries up and drops as much as 8 meters in depth. This is actually quite useful to the villagers as the exposed land can then be used to grow rice. In addition to floating houses, the town also has floating churches, schools, businesses and even a floating basketball court!

The lake provides one of the worlds largest fresh-water fish catches, but the unfortunate downside to this is the size of the fish being caught is dropping. Cat-fish used to be around 6kg, but now it's rare to catch anything over 1.5kg out of the lake. Working around this the locals have started fish farming. We went to one of the farms and were able to have a freshly caught (and killed) 3.5kg cat-fish for lunch. Yum!
I like the Cambodians attitude to food - if it's edible, then eat it. Frogs, beatles, crickets, spiders, and crocodiles are all on the menu somewhere in the country. The fish farm also farmed crocodiles. These were out of our price range though. A full crocodile sets you back around $400.
Yup, you can even buy snakes for eating at your convenience on the lake.

khmer jungle temples

A brief introduction to Khmer history: between the 9th and 14th centuries the Khmers (Cambodians) had a large empire from Burma in the west to Vietnam in the east. The head of the empire were king/gods, and hence each king generally built a temple to show his divine power. As stone was believed to be the material of the gods, and timber the material of man, these temples were built of stone. Houses and towns built of timber have long since rotten away in the jungle.

Over the recent Cambodian long weekend I had the pleasure of visiting some of these temples. The big famous one: Angkor Wat; a weird one: the Bayon; one that was featured in a Hollywood feature: Ta Prohm; and the smaller and more detailed one: Banteay Srei. There are plenty more to visit, but with a tight time constraint these were all we could fit in.

Angkor Wat is big. Very big. And well preserved. It's featured on Cambodia's flag; it's safe to say they're pretty proud of it. Historically it's a Hindu temple to the god Vishnu. What sets Angkor Wat apart from other Hindu temples are the unique bas-relief carvings in the stone work. Particularly the Apsaras: dancing girls.
Apparently what makes these interesting is they aren't portraying angels or gods - but normal people. If you had the time and patience, you can find around 50 different hair styles depicted. Different poses and costumes add to the variety.

Symbolically the temple represents heaven, or the land where the gods live. The bridge over the moat is a link between the real world and the gods. The third level of the temple is quite difficult to get to, with really steep steps, although the steps that the king was able to use were less steep than the rest. Unfortunately our visit was badly timed:
The highest level of "Heaven" has been closed for restoration for about a month now! There's a brand new museum in Siem Reap too - and that opened for the first time on the Monday after we left town. Talk about bad timing.

Next on the hit list of celestial tourism was the Bayon. It's the centre piece of Angkor Thom (that's pronounced Tom, as in Thomas). Angkor Thom is the ancient fortified capital city of the Khmer Empire. Fortified because for four years the Khmer's were without a capital city after defeat by the Cham's (ancestors of the Vietnamese). King Jayavarman VII took the capital back and set about constructing the Bayon.

I really liked the surrealness of this temple. Jayavarman VII's ego was big... really big... there are 216 massive stone carved faces on 54 towers. These faces are supposed to represent the god Avalokiteśvara, but according to legend they look more like Jayavarman! No matter where in the temple you are you're always being watched.
It's not just all large faces at the Bayon, like Angkor Wat there are bas-relief carvings. At the Bayon these tell a few stories as well as depicting everyday life in the 12th century. Raising an army and defeating the Cham's features prominently. A navel battle is shown complete with crocodiles eating men that had fallen overboard. It looks a bit comical actually - not sure if it was intended that way though!

Another famous temple of Angkor is Ta Prohm. Famous in part because it was featured in the first 'Tomb Raider' film.
The jungle has well and truly attacked this temple. Although the trees have been pegged back, some of the temple is only standing because the roots of the trees are holding it together! The green glow through the jungle canopy gives this temple a nice ambience.

I could have easily spent three or more days amongst these temples. They're interesting, and there's always a bit more to see. It reminded me of spending time at Wilson's Prom or the Grampians - never quite enough time to explore everything - or rather, there's always something around the corner to climb on or clamber over :)

independence weekend in siem reap

Cambodia celebrated its independence from France this weekend with a public holiday Friday. Myself and five colleagues decided that it would be a good time to check out Cambodia's cultural heritage around Siem Reap. While I don't have time to write a full post of the weekend's trip right now, I've uploaded some photos - they're worth a thousand words anyway.

sunday in phnom penh

Days off are great! I've been working 6 days a week because the Thai's we are working with do. Last Sunday we checked out the National museum, which wasn't that good, and attempted to check out the Royal Palace, but it was shut at the time. That pretty much spelled the end of last Sunday as I was very tired. This Sunday however, no more tiredness! It was time to check out Phnom Penh in detail...

First up, I needed some cheap market goodies: presents, shoes, "real" Swiss made watches for less than $20! So I went to the Russian market. Not as many Russians there these days, but the name has stuck from the 1980's when the Soviets in town used to shop there. It's a maze in there, but the highlight has to the food court in what I'm guessing was the middle, but that's just a guess - it really is a maze.

Next was far more sombre. A visit to Tuol Sleng museum, formerly security prison 21. Apart from the killing fields of Choeung Ek, this prison is the most infamous example of Khmer Rouge bloodlust. After the rise to power of the Khmer Rouge in 1975, the Tuol Svey Prey High School was converted to S21. It's in the middle of suburbia, along the main road in Phnom Penh. We drive past it every day going to work. The equivalent location in Melbourne would be somewhere along Victoria Parade or Hoddle Street. During the four years of Khmer Rouge rule, approximately 14,000 people were tortured at S21, and only 7 survived.

It's a tragic example of the worst that humans can do to each other. Interestingly, parts of the museum as dedicated to the people who ran the prison. Most of them did it out of fear of death. The régime killed anyone who refused to work the job given to them. They had 12 and 13 year old children as the medical staff in the prison, with no training provided to them. The Khmer Rouge boasted that they estimated that no more than 2 million people were needed for their "new society". This was being broadcast to a population of around 10 million. It's in this light that you can start to understand how something like this can be run, and how the population can be kept in such a state of fear.

It was never going to last, and in 1978 parts of the Khmer Rouge rebelled. After the rebellion it didn't matter how trusted you were within the régime you could be sent to S21 on the basis of any rumor that you were connected with "the enemy". The torturing would last until you gave a confession (true or false, it didn't really matter so long as it was incriminating). It seems that a fair chunk of the world was counted as "the enemy" as well. If tortured prisoners had the following options: admit you were working for the CIA, admit you were working for the KGB, or admit you were working for the Vietnamese.

The outer fences of the prison consisted of corrugated iron, topped with electrified barbed wire. On the wall in one of the buildings is a set of the most basic electrical equations. You can't run an electric fence without these equations. But they were killing all the intellectuals in the society, they must of been afraid of losing this particular piece of knowledge.

Gladly, by 1979 the Khmer Rouge were at war with the Vietnamese, and swiftly lost power.

What to do after that gruesome history lesson? Like any good Melbournian, I went and checked out what sport was on the local stadium. Phnom Penh's Olympic Stadium was hosting a Cambodian League soccer match. Sadly the match was vastly one sided. Siem Reap were losing 6-0 to Phnom Penh Empire when I arrived, and it only got worse from there. Good thing entry was only US$1.

The stadium is actually part of a bigger sporting area, where all sorts of people were playing soccer, basketball, volleyball, cycling and running. It was good to see them out enjoying themselves, despite some occasional rain.

november in cambodia

It's been a long time between blog postings. Two reasons: I got bored about writing about Sydney, and then I stayed in Melbourne for a few months. Now I'm on the road again, this time to Cambodia. Best known for the massive temple complex, Angkor Wat, and worst known for the Khmer Rouge rule in the late 1970's.

I arrived about a week ago, but killed my laptop by corrupting some system files by not shutting down properly. There's a lesson for you all, shutdown your computer gracefully no matter how much of a rush you are in... it'll cost you more time when it breaks! Luckily the locals had a spare laptop I could borrow.

Phnom Penh is a small city, with a population of around 1 million. It's possible to drive the entire length of the city in 40 minutes - and that's not going any faster than 50km/h! The city is build at the point where the Mekong river meets the Tonlé Sap river. The designers of the city made the most of the location by having a nice riverfront area. Flags of many nations (100 at least!) are flown along the river bank. Somehow the Australian flag has prime position next to Cambodia's. The royal palace over looks the area, and there are plenty of good restaurants too.

Cambodia is slightly less developed than Vietnam. For instance, there are no metered taxi's here, in-fact there are no taxi's at all! Want to go somewhere? Hire a tuk-tuk or motorbike (and driver). The US dollar is still the most used currency here, with the local currency used to give small change. ATM's dispense 10,000 Cambodian riel notes (approx US$2.50), or US$20's and $50's. I don't know if large denomination riel notes even exist! Annoyingly the Internet connections here are pretty flaky.

Amusing English translations are very common in Cambodia. My favorite so far is the fire safety notice in my hotel room: "In case of fire, please don't worry. Our hotel is equipped with advanced scattering facilities to ensure you transmitted safely." I reckon they got that from a sci-fi film! I'm glad that in case of fire I'll be transmitted safely!

It's pretty common in Australia pub's to see "No shirt, no service". In one place here, I saw the Cambodian equivalent:
That's right - if you don't have a gun, you can't get any drugs!