Getting There
Painfully I awoke in the morning to my friend Kelly banging on my room door yelling for me to get up because the mini-bus was waiting. I felt like I had only slept a half hour that night and when I fell out of bed and eventually got up I was stumbling all over the place like I was drunk. That was because I did go to bed about a half hour before and I was drunk...very drunk. I had stopped drinking just before I went to bed.
I began stumbling around collecting all my belongings and stuffing them in my backpack in a mad panic, which I`m sure to a sober person would have looked like a drunken guy bumping into walls and fighting to keep his balance. I was in no condition to be packing let alone vertical or getting on a bus for an hour then a boat to Phnom Penh for 6 hours. I managed to do it though without seriously injuring myself. My friends Kevin and Adam were not so lucky. They were in worse condition than me so Kelly had to pack for them.
We all crammed into the overcrowded mini-bus and found 4 very sober and very unhappy people on it. I guess having to wait 20 minutes for us may have had something to do with their mood. I`m sure we made a great impression stinking of booze and barely able to stand at 6 a.m. After the hour bus ride none of us were any more lucid/sober. The bus dropped us at a small pier and we were told to walk out to the end of the pier where our boat was waiting. I wouldn`t really call it a pier it was more like a dock about 5 inches wide but it did have the kind of traffic you would see on a large pier. This traffic going both ways, the width of the pier, our present condition and our heavy backpacks was for sure going to give one or all of us an unwelcome early morning dip in the septic tank of a river below. Amazingly we made it down the 50-meter long plank without falling in. Kevin did fall off but luckily a boat cushioned his fall rather than the water. His Oakley’s fell in the water though but he paid some guy $30 to jump in and find them.
I don`t remember much of the boat ride other than some kids asking for money otherwise our backpacks could get ‘lost’. We arrived in Phnom Penh around noon and found a nice place with a patio for breakfast and a nap.
Phnom Penh
There is a very dark side to Cambodia spawned I think from decades of exploitation, war, violence, genocide, and extreme poverty. This dark side is most prevalent in the lawless capitol of Phnom Penh where prostitution, drugs and gunfire are literally thrown in your face at every turn. You cannot walk a block without someone offering you one of them.
`Phnom Penh is a city of beauty and degradation, tranquillity and violence, and tradition and transformation; a city of temples and brothels, music and gunfire, and festivals and coups.`
`But for many, it is simply an anarchic celebration of insanity and indulgence. Whether it is the $2 wooden shack brothels, the marijuana-pizza restaurants, the AK-47 fireworks displays, or the intricate brutality of Cambodian politics, Phnom Penh never ceases to amaze and amuse. For an individual coming from a modern Western society, it is a place where the immoral becomes acceptable and the insane becomes normal.`
Quoted from: Off the Rails in Phnom Penh: Into the Dark Heart of Guns, Girls, and Ganja by Amit Gilboa
Most of our days were spent chilling on the deck of our guesthouse drinking, eating and/or recovering from the prior night. We didn`t do much sightseeing other than the gun range and the killing fields. Our nights were pretty much the same as our days except we occasionally would head out to some of the many wild nightclubs in Phnom Penh.
The Gun Range
The gun range is located a couple kilometres outside Phnom Penh beside the airport. You have to aim low! AK-47, M-16, M-60, Uzi, Colt 45, rocket launchers, hand grenades…you name it you can shoot it. If you’re feeling in a bit of a sick mood you can shoot a live cow with a RPG rocket launcher for $200...that was a bit out of my price range, so I opted for every other gun on the menu! All in all after a couple trips to the range I blew about $200 US on rounds! What a rush!
The Killing Fields
Cambodia is one of the poorest countries in Asia (average income is less than $300 US) but I’d have to say that the people are probably the happiest I’ve ever seen in any country. When I reflect on the brutal history of Cambodia over the last 35 years I wonder how people there could be so happy. From 1969 to 1974 the US secretly carpet bombed suspected communist camps killing over 600,000 people. Most of them were innocent men, women and children. In 1970 the South Vietnamese and US invaded Cambodia to root out Vietnamese communist forces killing many more innocent people. From 1975 to 1978 Cambodia fell under the rule of Khmer Rouge under the leader Poll Pot. Their plan was to transform Cambodia into a peasant dominated, agrarian cooperative. Educated people were relocated into the countryside tortured to death or executed. All forms of education were halted. People were killed because they spoke a foreign language or wore glasses. It is estimated that as many as 2 million of Cambodia’s 7 million people died in this time as a result of the Khmer Rouge government. Most Cambodians I got to know who talked to me about this time had lost one or more family members because of the Khmer Rouge.
Just outside Phnom Penh there is a place called the `Killing Fields of Hoeing Eke`. The first thing you come across when you enter is 30-meter high glass tower with 8985 skulls encased arranged by age. The surrounding area is covered with mass graves of 17,000 men, women and children, now there are just huge holes in the ground with a small signs telling how many thousands of people were buried there. They were detained in the S-21 prison and tortured then transported to the Killing Fields extermination camp to be executed. The victims were mostly Bludgeoned to death with blunt instruments to save on the cost of bullets. There are mass gravesites like this all over Cambodia.
We all felt quite guilty for our prior days excitement at the gun range after seeing this.
If you haven`t seen the movie `The Killing Fields` I would suggest seeing it. It gives you a good idea of what the Cambodian people have had to go through.
