Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, and the place where the traffic really started to get manic. Crossroads with three lanes of traffic in every direction, mopeds driving along the wrong side of the road (and there is a central reservation) and a general disinclination to stop or slow down for pedestrians make crossing the road a sprinting exercise. Andy had been recommended the Sunday guesthouse, largely because they had a cheap service to get visas for Vietnam. When we arrived there though, the place was full, so we were put up for the first night in the owner’s sister’s hostel next door.
The sister’s hostel was very new, and more like a hotel than a hostel. Andy was feeling ill again, so I ventured out for dinner to a place recommended for its fish and chips in the Lonely Planet. The restaurant turned out to be on the roof in one of the bar areas of town. The restaurant was nice, but the area itself seemed a little seedy, and the fish was more like Birds Eye fish bites. Being on the roof, it took me some time to find, so knowing I was in the general area, I asked a guy wearing a uniform and looking official. He immediately hailed me a tuk-tuk, so I left. The place was actually just around the corner.
On the next day, we checked out of the hotel and into the Sunday guesthouse. They didn’t have any twin rooms left, so we got a triple, but talked them into charging the same price. The only caveat was that we would then have to move into a twin room the following day.
We decided to walk around the town that day, and visited the Independence monument (independence from the French, I guess), the Liberation monument (liberation from the Khmer Rouge), the royal palace, most of which you can’t visit but you can see its big golden throne room and silver pagoda, the national museum, which contains many treasures from Angkor Wat which were hidden from the Khmer Rouge, where I gave a legless man too much money for a photocopy of “Lucky Child”, the sequel to “First they Killed my Father”, and Wat Phnom. We found a french cafe on the way around, and an excellent restaurant overlooking the river on the way back. After the meal we decided to head straight out for a drink, so, looking for a pool table, we were directed to the Uptown bar. This did, it’s true, turn out to have an excellent pool table, however it turned out to be called the Updown bar, not Uptown, and I spent the 3rd and 4th games being chased around the pool table by a particularly scary ladyboy. He/She insisted on playing a game, then we left, swiftly. The next place we were directed to was Candy bar, which unsurprisingly turned out to be a similar establishment, although at least the women appeared to be women here. After a few games of pool we gave up on finding a place that wasn’t full of hookers, and headed back to the guesthouse.
Our second full day in Phnom Penh was the real gut-wrencher. We started off with a tuk-tuk to Choeng Ek – the killing fields. This is the place where many people from Phnom Penh were taken for execution during the reign of the Khmer Rouge. You can see a brand new stupa they’ve built to house the bones and skulls excavated from the mass graves around it. It’s a glass column and to see shelves and shelves full of skulls is quite chilling. The exhibition hall tells you the story of many of the heads of the Khmer Rouge, many of whom were well-educated – Polpot went to university in France. Behind this you can see the places where the mass graves were, the tree they hung a loudspeaker from playing loud patriotic music to cover the screams of the victims, and the tree they smashed children’s heads against. Beyond this is tranquil fields and lakes. The story of what happened so short a time ago really beggars belief.
From Choeng Ek the tuk-tuk took us to the Tuol Sleng S21 prison, where people were imprisoned before being taken to Choeng Ek. Once a school, a gibbet had been erected in the playground and various exhibitions of torture and photos of people that were kept there are on display. The question that goes around and around your head – “Why didn’t any other countries help?” is answered in a way in one of the exhibitions. It’s by a Belgian ex-communist supporter, and what he saw at the time was an interesting experiment – a possible utopia by communist standards. Noone knew about the horrors that were actually happening.
From S21 we walked back to the guesthouse. I spent a little time on the internet – the hostel was showing “The Killing Fields” film on TV, I didn’t fancy watching it by then.
Tonight Andy and I resolved to hit the town again, different places this time, and avoid the previous night’s street completely. We headed back to the riverside, where the Lonely Planet and Rough Guide say there are bars. It looks like they’ve all been knocked down though. Luckily we had a plan B. We had some drinks and headed in to the Heart of Darkness, a night club. We got there though and it was full of western guys and Cambodian girls. Luckily we had a plan C – head next door to Howie’s bar, so we did and had a great night! We spent the time playing Connect 4 with the bargirls, playing pool with pretty much everyone in the bar and chatting to a Belgian girl who apparently writes the sex column for FHM… , her huge Austrian boyfriend, and a mute Cambodian girl. The bar was owned by Howie, who’s a great bloke and pool extraordinaire, who found our choice of bars the previous night to be hilarious.
While it’s annoying that we found the one decent place in Phnom Penh on our last night there, the next day we’d be heading to Sihanoukville for some beachy relaxation.
