What the hell are you smiling at?

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Trip Start May 21, 2007 Previous
Entry Trip End Mar 30, 2008

  Phnom Penh, Cambodia
Tuesday, January 22, 2008

With the sugar rush from the cane juice still coursing through our veins we took another local bus to the capital of Cambodia, Phnom Penh, a 4 hour ride from KCham. We knew we were heading into a city of around 2 million and braced ourselves for a little bit of urban adventure. But as we drew into the city we were amazed  by the total lack of development and the small town-like sprawl of the markets and the streets. There are a few wide tree lined boulevards and a handful of colonial townhouses to be seen, but there is an air of decay over many of them. (Which I guess is understandable when you start to hear stories about the Khmer Rouge's 'evacuation' of Phnom Penh in 1975. Once they'd kindly 'liberated' the city, they promptly sent most of its 2 million inhabitants off into rural labour camps, keeping a few thousand intellectual ne'er-do-wells behind to fill the prisons, detention centres and torture camps.)

In Phnom Penh we started to get a real feel for the incredible evil and extraordinary brutality of the Khmer Rouge regime, and yet we walked around the city being greeted on all sides by laughs and smiles. These people, who through the 1970's survived one of the worst genocidal campaigns in history where an estimated 25% of the population died and who live in one of the worlds poorest countries would seem to have so little to laugh about...and so why are they still smiling?! They just don't stop - to give you an example: there are tuktuk and moto drivers on every street corner, and they are forever waving at you and calling out "want tuktuk?" as you walk by. We learned how to say "no thank you" in Khmer and every time we said this to a group of locals, they would quite literally fall over laughing at us. They would tell their mates, who in turn would laugh, and then we'd get our hands shaken or our shoulders slapped. If there's ever been a secret code to help you run the gauntlet of tuktuk drivers in Cambodia, 'no thanks' in Khmer is it. (and before you ask, yes it did occur to us that we might be saying something like 'I'm a knob' in Khmer, but no...we double checked).

The main tourist draws in Phnom Penh are the Killing Fields memorial and the Tuol Sleng (also known as S-21) Detention Centre. I won't go into any details on either, except to say that visiting both was a profoundly moving and depressing experience. It's hard to accept the scale of the brutalities committed by the Khmer Rouge, but what comes across is the dreadfully sad, almost mundane way that thousands of 'New People' were tortured and slaughtered. It's strange too...the stories told in the museums didn't make us immediately emotionally upset, more drained than anything. It was only when we walked around the town and looked at the locals getting on with life that you got a sense of the true cost of the genocide....and the incredible resilience of the Cambodian people to have dusted themselves off and just get on with life. There's a lesson for me in there somewhere, I'm sure of it...

While I don't want this to be a depressing account of our 5 days in PP, I do have to tell you about the amount of street kids wandering around the city. We both struggled not to empty our pockets for every dirty little smiley face we saw, but the scale of the problem is massive, and every street has yet another round of kids either asking for money, trying to sell something (usually photocopied Lonely Planet books!) or foraging for recyclables. We'd been told that giving cash was the worst thing we could do, so instead we made a small donation to a very worthwhile charity we came across before we left - have a look at what they do at http://www.cambodianchildrensfund.org/index.html and if you're in a generous mood, maybe make a donation yourself? Apparently, $30 will feed one of their kids 3 healthy meals for a month...which you've got to admit is pretty fantastic value for money. Go on....$30 won't hurt a bit.

:)

(The one thing I did like giving to kids was the free toothbrushes that appear in every Cambodian hotel room when the maid comes in to clean. Figure this out for me....we were staying in cheap hotels in one of the worlds poorest countries, and yet almost every day the maid would leave two new toothbrushes with a little tube of toothpaste wrapped up in cellophane in our bathroom. It didn't take us long to start snaffling them by the handful and every time a kid came looking for money, we'd stick our hands in our pockets and give them a toothbrush. Who knows - it might help them keep their smiles a little longer and.they all seemed thrilled with their new toy)

It's funny that in light of all the poverty and the lack of a whole lot of facilities, I think that Cambodia has been one of our favourite places to visit on our trip to date. Maybe it's cliched, but the locals have made such a difference. If you've ever wanted to smile from one end of the day to the other and have definitely ruled out Disneyland as your holiday destination of choice (I think the smiling there is of a slightly more saccharine nature), get thee to Cambodia.

Just don't forget your toothbrushes.

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