"Holiday in Cambodia" – Part I: the Phnom Penh experience, Saturday 8/9/2008

Ok, first things first. Y'all need to hear this, y'all, before I get started on Cambodia: Leslie's Vietnamese blows my mind. And it blows everyone's mind here. I've listened in on a lot of exchanges that, initially, sounded like gibberish to me. They all start out in some obscure way, with strange sounds and words, and then they inevitably turn into a conversation about how in the EFF this girl from the States knows how to speak Vietnamese. When the vacation is over, this is the only Vietnamese I will know myself because I've heard it so many times.



On to Cambodia. A friend of mind recently described our first stop, Cambodia's capital city, Phnom Penh, as a "dark, nihilistic place." If I remember correctly, he elaborated by saying: "it's just not somewhere you want to be." This is totally wrong. During my six hours outdoors there, I had only glancing encounters with sex tourism and drug trafficking. Phnom Penh was a delightful place ultimately, if terrifying in spots. But the terror really had more to do with me than the city. Case in point: my "heart of darkness" moment. Riding back from the Sovannaphum dance theater recital Leslie took me to in a tuk tuk, I fell asleep briefly suffering from jet lag only to awaken in a dark alley, in motion, to the sight of a shirtless Cambodian man moving toward me out of the shadows. There was also a sweet smell in the air of some Khmer spice and the night's garbage. Needless to say, this was totally awesome.

But not as totally awesome as my introduction to Phnom Penh earlier that day. We arrived by bus, and two delightful gents took us by car to our hotel. When we arrived, the concierge took us across the street into a dark passageway between two buildings. He then unlocked a padlock on some gate type thing, and then pointed upstairs, indicating our room was there. We went to our room. It was spacious and clean. And tricked out with "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" institutional lighting. "Dark, nihilistic place."

So we go to lunch at the restaurant across the way. It's all good. Seriously. People are nice, food is tasty. Then a rabid dog starts getting pissed across the street. And then some warlord type dude walks by our table, dressed in black, packing a pistola and extra rounds on his belt. Leslie caught the reaction shot:


Good times, good times. After this we took a tuk tuk to Tuol Sleng, S21, the museum recounting the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge. This was a valuable experience. I don't know what struck me more, the human element of political terror captured in the photos of the numerous victims of the place (it's a testament to the KR's "confidence" in their project that they had no compunction about recording for posterity the faces of their victims) or the lack of narrative or historical context provided for visitors. This latter feature is likely a result of the fact that today still, Cambodians aren't very interested in making sense of this recent period of their history, largely because virtually all of those old enough were on one or, eventually, both sides of the social experiment called "Year Zero."

I know it sounds rough here, and parts of it no doubt were. But Leslie and I quickly decided this was a place we would come back to. If need be.