Phnom Penh

Wednesday, April 27

We had wanted to get a boat from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh but the boats were not running because we are traveling during the end of the dry season and the water levels are too low for transport. So, we opted for a bus. The hostel offered a van for $1 more that seemed like it could be a worthy upgrade.

The van picked us up at 820am. We picked up 6 more passengers at the van office before making the journey southwest, around the lake, Tonlé Sap (the largest freshwater lake in SE Asia). We stopped twice, once at a restaurant for 25 minutes where we ate marginal noodles, second at a bathroom. Bathrooms in Southeast Asia probably have a bad reputation, but after the ones I saw in Bolivia, everything since has been rating 9/10 or higher.

Siem Reap was very much a tourist town, with many businesses closed from COVID. Phnom Penh, however, appeared to be thriving, with masses of people everywhere you looked. Food stalls lined many streets and there were markets on several corners. Walking along you could smell grilled meat, the sweet rotty smell of durian fruit, an occasional lotus flower blossom, and of course, diesel.

Sidewalks were used for street food vendors and parking, so cars, bicycles, Tuk Tuks, scooters, and pedestrians all shared the narrow streets with few stoplights which were generally ignored anyways. It took a while to figure out the best way to cross streets; we eventually settled on waiting for a Tuk Tuk crossing in the same direction as us to hide behind and run along with them.

When we got to the Phnom Penh van office we were immediately bombarded with Tuk Tuk drivers asking us if we needed a ride. It would’ve been a 30 minute walk, with backpacks, in what felt like 107 degree heat, so we said, ‘yes, please’. We got in a Remork with the cutest little old driver. He drove so slowly that there was barely a breeze and, if not for the heat, we probably could have walked faster. But he got us to our hotel safely.

We stayed at the Vacation Boutique Hotel because it had really high ratings on Agoda and Bookings.com. We walked in to a dimly lit foyer and up to the front desk. The man addressed Carl and was confused that the name on Carl’s passport did not match any in their reservation system. It was fun to call out his bias and say, actually!, I! booked the hotel! I didn’t actually speak loudly and he didn’t seemed phased either way but this did trigger a realization that everyone was always addressing Carl, not me. Since most people on the street are asking us to get in their Tuk Tuk or buy something, it didn’t bother me that I wasn’t being addressed and I let the weight of the patriarchy fall onto Carl’s sweaty shoulders.

We went up two stories to our room that only had a window looking into the hallway and smelled kinda weird, like cigarettes and sewer mixed with a tinge of incense. Instead of a bathroom door there was a heavy curtain. Still, the AC worked and the furnishings were nice. On the bed were towels shaped into swans.

We both felt a little nauseous but my nausea was manifesting as hunger so we headed out to the central market in search of food. Our hotel was nicely located so the market was only a short walk away. Even so, it was sweltering.

We ended up finding a food stall that advertised some kind of noodle dish. The guy cooked it on a big, hot, metal surface right in front of us. As we waited, a woman came by and gave us some pickled vegetables to try. They were good and she wanted us to buy some but in our fragile state we couldn’t risk consuming any quantity of greens from a street salesperson. The noodles though were reallly good and helped heal us a little.

After we got an orange Fanta and a coke and then we felt much better. We went back to our hotel and slept a few hours to avoid the hottest part of the day and try to feel better.

When we woke up in the evening it was dark. We decided to scope out the night market, also within walking distance. Unlike Thailand, the markets in Cambodia seem more focused on objects (clothes, etc) than food. Even at the night market there weren’t as many food stalls. The ones they did have were in the back, encircling bamboo mats that had been laid on the ground. Families were ordering meat kabobs from the food carts and then cooking their sticks on little barbecues shaped like pigs.

We played dumb tourist and pointed to seafood rice on the menu and picked out some fresh spring rolls. Carl also ordered a sugarcane juice. We sat, cross legged, on the mats in the middle of the ‘food court’ and they brought everything to us. There wasn’t a lick of a breeze and we used the napkins (thin and wispy like pieces from a toilet paper roll) to dab at our sweaty faces as we ate. On the walk back to the hotel we got some pork buns that ended up having hot dog and hard boiled egg in them. Different, but not bad.

Thursday, April 28

At our hotel there’s a Remork driver, Sean, who hangs out in front and sometimes inside, offering rides to whoever needs one. He caught us as we were leaving once and we agreed he could show us to some tourist sites. So we met him at 8am and drove about 45 south west of the city, to the Killing Fields.

A brief history for those that don’t know: After several years of civil war and being bombed the heck out of by the US, Cambodians at first welcomed the take over of the Khmer Rouge when they captured the capital of Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975. Communist dictator and certified nut job Pol Pot tried to put into reality the ideals of communism that he had learned while living in Paris when he joined the French Communist Party. The Khmer Rouge forced everyone out of the cities to work in communal labor camps where they starved as the food they produced was sold to China. All the former party military members and their families were killed. All the intellectuals: doctors, lawyers, teachers, even those that just wore glasses, were killed. The Khmer Rouge killed so many people (estimated around 2 million people) that they needed a center to murder and bury the bodies. This area south of the city is now called the Killing Fields. It is estimated that 20,000 bodies are buried in mass graves here. About half the mass graves have been excavated and some of the remains have been cleaned and preserved. In the front of the complex they built a glass-walled memorial stupa that houses 16 levels of skulls. Even seeing this many skulls at once, the human brain cannot fathom such loss.

We had expected to pay $5 for entrance and audio guide but ‘because of COVID’ there were no audio guides so we only paid $2. I was disappointed because I didn’t think we’d understand what we were seeing without an audio guide.

Well, as soon as we entered a man approached us and asked if we wanted him as a guide. He said he was 17 when Khmer Rouge took over and he was able to escape but his whole family was killed. He said he remembers the killing field area because of the very bad smells. He said 20,000 people were killed there. He said Pol Pot was a crazy man. He charged $8 but we agreed to this steep price. He led us a few steps while repeating ‘20,000 people, Pol Pot crazy crazy bad man, bad smells, so sad’. He led us to a sign that was written in English and pointed to it, telling us to read. We did and then walked with him to the next sign, where we read it ourselves again.

At two points during the tour he asked us to wait for him as he walked away to do something. Later he said he had some stomach problems. He was a terrible tour guide but we didn’t really care. There’s only so much you need to learn about such a place. At the end of the tour we bought a lotus flower and some incense and put them in front of the stupa, giving some quiet moments to show our respect.

We left and found our driver, Sean, and decided to go to S21 to get all the depressing sites done in one day. S21, or the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, was converted to a museum to document the Khmer Rouge atrocities after they converted the building (former high school) to a prison and torture center in 1976. It’s crazy to think that my parents were preparing to have their 10 year high school reunion party in their high schools while on the other side of the world people were being brutally tortured in an old high school in Phnom Penh.

Again the audio guides were discontinued because of COVID so the entrance price was cheaper but we were left on our own to figure out what everything was. The first two floors of the first building just had metal cots in the middle with a large photo on the wall of a dying man on the cot. The photos were apparently taken by a Vietnamese journalist when the Vietnamese invaded and followed bad smells to discover the prison. This we learned from Wikipedia after the fact because there was not a lick of information, in English or Khmer.

But then, on the third floor we happened upon an exhibit about a man named Khieu Sakuor. He was born in Cambodia in 1945 and after a series of fortunate events and studying hard he wound up studying economics in Japan. He was struggling to get into graduate school when Khmer Rouge propaganda reached him asking him to return to help his country. He returned and was tortured and killed within a week.

By chance (and through Facebook funny enough) the museum acquired a box of photos and documents that Sakuor had left with a friend in Japan, planning to return someday. So from these pictures and letters the museum pieced together a narrative of this person’s life and revealed him to be very charismatic, smart, and most of all, wanting to do right by his country. It was so moving to read through everything and helped put a face to the victims of the atrocities we were learning about.

We walked through the rest of the museum, notably the cells that had been fashioned out of bricks and wood, and the billboard size posters with dozens and dozens of mug shots of the prisoners.

Feeling nice and depressed we went back toward our hotel. As we pulled up we ran into this creepy white guy with a pot belly that we’d seen around the hotel. He seemed like he either had a strange accent or was brain dead but he had enough communication skills to advise us to go to a nearby spot for lunch, and Sean agreed to take us quickly. The spot was just around the corner.

We ordered two Angkor beers and a Tom Yum soup based on weird guy’s suggestion. The menu was mostly in Khmer so we didn’t know what else to get. The waiter said ‘garlic shrimp?’ to which we nodded yes. The soup WAS really good, so we felt a little bad for making fun of weird white guy. The shrimp was put whole (no peeling) into batter and fried so it tasted good but I’m not used to eating shrimp exo skeleton so it wasn’t my favorite.

We repeated our routine of going back to the hotel to rest during the hottest part of the day and then emerging again for dinner. For dinner we went to David’s Noodle restaurant which I’d read about on a travel blog. We walked there from our hotel and just as we were getting near it started to sprinkle. We ducked into the restaurant and seconds after a tropical rainstorm came wailing down.

David’s is known for their handmade noodles and dumplings so we got pork dumplings and noodle soup with duck. You could definitely taste the homemade noodle! We watched the staff pull and slap noodle dough under the outdoor awning as the storm raged in front of them. Just our luck, as we got full and ready to leave, the rain cleared and we walked back to our hotel.

Friday, April 29

We didn’t have a good plan for the day as the only plans we had made had fallen through. So we went to a nearby coffee shop and got coffees and a surprisingly good banh mi like sandwich before setting out to walk around a bit. We walked to the Royal Palace but found it was still closed to tourists because of COVID.

We got a Remork toward the Russian Market (named so because Russians liked to shop there I guess). We then walked to a place called Daughters of Cambodia which provides recovery programs coupled with job training to women that were victims of sex trafficking. The organization runs a gift shop that sells items made by women in the programs and has a spa. We bought some gifts for friends and family and then I treated myself to a mani/pedi.

We went back to our hotel for our routine of avoiding the sun in the afternoon, this time with some potential food poising symptoms making us not want to do anything.

We emerged at dark, again, and made the trek to another restaurant we had read good reviews of. This time the weather was not on our side and we had to trek through the rain. The place we went to is called 54 and it was advertised as a barbecue beer hall – our favorite! We ordered a tall beer to share and the waitress brought 2 but then put one in a bucket of ice at the end of the table. We looked around and saw all the tables had a bucket or a full cooler of beer cans at the end of their tables.

There were hundreds of things on the menu including steamed cow penis with Chinese medicine and, my favorite, baked pig stomach in can. You’d think mild food poisoning would put us off such a place, but for some reason barbecued meat still appealed to us. We got bbq beef, fried okra, and a thai salad with fried noodle.

They brought each dish one at a time, as if we had ordered three separate courses. The beef was a little over cooked, and the fried okra wasn’t breaded (and it was a mountain of it) but it was good. They also served some veggies and rice and a side of ground black pepper. We had learned to mix lime juice with the pepper to make a delicious sauce. This sauce – on top of a little beef with rice wrapped in a bitter leaf – was the best part of the meal. The Thai salad was a mix of cabbage and veggies with dried noodles and I hated it. It tasted like the smell of an old sponge.

As we ate we watched a huge table of people (work party?) accept gifts and get drunk together as a live band played high-pitched Cambodian music. So although the food wasn’t great, the atmosphere was so entertaining and we had a great time.

On the way back to the hotel it was still lightly raining. I stumbled and my flip flop got caught and I busted a plugger! (it broke). So now Cambodia had taken both of our pairs of flip flops. So it goes.

Saturday, April 30

We awoke and laid out the following goals for the day: get COVID tests (with negative results), get Carl a haircut, buy new flip flops for us both, and get to the airport for our midnight flight to the Philippines.

Sean drove us to a COVID testing center and all went smoothly. We went across the street to get fancy coffees and pastries while we awaited the printed out results.

Then it was haircut time. We walked back to a barber place we had seen before and peeked in the window to see some of the staff asleep in their chairs, so we figured they needed the business! The guy was like Edward Scissorhands cutting Carl’s hair with a comb in one hand and an electric razor in the other. Just when we thought he was done the guy pulled out a straight razor. He trimmed Carl’s beard and sideburns without any soap or water. Carl said he thought the guy was going to slice his ear off. All ended well and he ended up with a nice looking do!

Before walking back to the hotel we stopped for a street meal. We had seen places with baguettes and grilled meat so we stopped and pointed at these items, trying our best to politely indicate we’d like to eat them. They gave us each a mixed meat stick and…a chicken stick? And a baguette that had been toasted on the grill and had a sweet butter on it. Kinda weird, but good.

They served a side of papaya salad that was COLD and sweet, not spicy. It was so refreshing. We put the meat and salad inside the baguette and had ourselves a little street sando. We both agreed this was one of the top meals of Cambodia. And it cost $3.25. Total.

Then we went to central market to look for flip flops. Annoyingly, there were a lot of designer brand knock offs which meant higher prices for the same cheap ish. Carl ended up haggling for some Nike’s and I luckily found a pair of Cambodian brand flops that didn’t make my feet look like the giant German ancestry feet they are (or so I tell myself).

We had accomplished so many of the day’s objectives and yet it was only 3pm! So we decided to squeeze in a trip to the national museum. The entrance fee was $10 a person and it wasn’t worth it. The building itself was beautiful, built in 1927 in Khmer style. Inside they had a collection of really old artifacts like rings, headdresses, etc. and many many many statues of Buddhist and Hindu figures. There were few written descriptions of what we were looking at but it also seemed pretty straightforward.

On our walk back we happened to walk by David’s noodles so we stopped to have one last plate of dumplings and some Angkor beers. Then we loitered in the hotel lobby for several more hours until it was time to go to the airport. Sean was kind enough to drive us and we got there so early that we couldn’t check in for the flight yet. We went to Burger King and got some chikky tendies, a whopper, and two draft sodas. The sodas were SOO good so we chugged them before the questionable ice could melt.

At the check in desk we showed all our paperwork and it was smooth sailing. As we started to go through security the check in staff person came RUNNING after us because she forgot to check whether we had proof of COVID insurance. I got ready to defend our insurance as we’d had to do twice before (health coverage IS COVID coverage guys!!) but she seemed satisfied to see our names on the policy and let us go.

On the flight they served a meal at 1:40am. The options were beef or fish. We overheard a woman ask if there were vegetarian options and the man said no. She asked what kind of fish it was. He said fried. She said “no, what is the name of the fish?” And he replied “Dory”. Carl and I looked at each other and said “not Dory!” and cracked up.