Siem Reap and Dinner With an Amazing Stranger

I bet EVERY American tourist who hops into this starts the conversation with:
"To the Batcave!"

Siem Reap is about 320km (200 mi) to north-northwest of Phnom Penh. The drive wasn't too terrible and I ended up sleeping most of the way anyway. Including a 30-minute stop, we got into Siem Reap in the early afternoon.

As soon as I hopped off the bus I was hounded by tuk tuk drivers wanting to take me to my hostel. I figured it was probably pretty close but I kind of didn't want to deal with the hassle of finding it. When I told one of the drivers where it was, he said he would take me there for $1. Deal. The ride took all of one minute, but that's fine.

I arrived at my new hostel, checked in, put my stuff down, and immediately took a shower. Feeling a little bit more refreshed, I went out to explore the town. I headed back toward where the bus had dropped me off and walked around there for a while. Some people had told me that Pub Street is the big tourist hub of Siem Reap, so headed in that direction. At this time of day though, there wasn't much to see.

I wish I could think of a witty caption, but
it's hard to top how hilarious this is all on
it's own

Overall, things look pretty similar to Phnom Penh, but slightly nicer. I've noticed a theme in this region of the world is to name things after American/global (which it turns out are often synonymous in this context) cultural phenomena (see Pretty Woman Bar and Katy Peri's Pizzas, so it wasn't all that surprising to see a 6-Eleven convenience store as I walked through the streets. I also found a KFC (a real one) and got myself some ice cream. Yea, that happened. And it totally hit the spot.

There streets here are a mix of larger paved roads and many smaller dirt roads. Like in Phnom Penh, there are tuk tuks everywhere. Which is awesome, because it makes it pretty easy to go anywhere you want. There are a lot of ancient temples in Siem Reap; it's one of the main reasons a lot of tourists come here in the first place. I had asked at the hostel how much it would be to have their tuk tuk driver take me around the city for the day. The price they quoted sounded like your typical "everything is more expensive when you book through the hostel" price, so while on my walk I asked a few tuk tuk drivers how much they would charge. I ended up having a good conversation with one of the drivers I found who spoke decent English. I told him I wanted to start the day early tomorrow and see sunrise at the first temple. We shook on a price and I was all set for tomorrow. One less headache to worry about.

Not too shabby, Siem Reap

The day was starting to wane as I stumbled upon this city's Night Market. Same concept at the one in Phnom Penh, except this one turned out to be a lot nicer. The aisles were wider, the tarps overhead were higher and there were lights. These few small things made a huge difference in terms of the experience. The merchandise was pretty much the same as in Phnom Penh though, and I've been resisting buying stuff as much as I can because I don't want to carry it with me.

It was getting kind of dark, so I started heading back toward my hostel, hoping I'd find food along the way. Turns out I found a lot more than that. As I was walking down the street, I passed by a restaurant that I thought about eating at, but the guy out front was kind of aggressive in his sales pitch and I wasn't really in the mood for that so I said "no, thanks" in my very American accent. I noticed there was this blonde girl kind of staring at me as I said, "no," to this host. A few seconds later we walked past each other and about five seconds I turned around to see if she was still there. She wasn't. I assumed she had gone to sit down in the restaurant. I thought about it for a few more seconds and for pretty much the first time in my life in this kind of situation I asked myself, "what do I have to lose?" so I turned around, walked back to the restaurant and found her sitting alone at a table. Now, what happens next may not be a big deal for you, loyal reader, but for me, this was literally, literally the first time I've done anything remotely close to this in my entire life. I walked up to her table and said, "Excuse me, are you eating by yourself?" She smiled and said "yes" so I asked her if I could join her and she said, "Sure!" gesturing toward the seat across the table from her. Wait... what just happened?

It turned out to be a really great dinner. FL was an Argentinian girl about my age and is in the middle of several months of travel. At one point in our conversation, she admitted that she had noticed me earlier because I looked/sounded out of place when I was saying no to that host. Yep, that sounds about right. We had a great conversation for a couple of hours and then I walked her back to her hostel a few blocks away. I was doing my temple tour all day tomorrow and she was leaving after that, so we couldn't make any plans to hang out again. Being the gentleman than I am, I stuck my hand out for a handshake before I walked away and she was like "no, let me show you how we do it in Argentina" and did this cheek kiss thing that I'm not totally familiar with but totally support. [Update: I'm in Argentina now and I totally get it.]

I made my way through a couple dimly-lit streets and found my way back to the hostel. When I got back, I met some other people staying in the hostel, exchange students who were currently studying abroad in Singapore. They invited me to go check out Pub Street with them and the night was still relatively young, so I tagged along.

New friends, if only for a day

The six-ish of us made out way out to Pub Street a little while later. THIS was the Pub Street I had heard about. Flooded with tourists. Far too many massage parlors. The constant sales pitch for "boom boom" from... basically everyone. It's so prevalent, you can't even get mad about it, you just have to ignore it. We sat down to eat some food. I skipped out because I had just eaten. I didn't however, skip out of getting some dessert afterward. Of course. We walked around a little more and made our way to one of the bars. There, they ordered a platter of exotic meats. I don't remember exactly what we tried, but it kind of all tasted like chicken anyway.

One of the guys, JS, mentioned that tomorrow in late afternoon he was going with another girl from the hostel on a boat ride to a place called the Floating Village, if I wanted to tag along. We exchanged contact info and I left around midnight. I was getting exhausted and I had to be up super early for my temple tour tomorrow! I walked back again through some sketchily-lit street but made it back to my hostel in one piece.

Today was for sure a win.

CONTINUE ON to Siem Reap Part 2: [R]: Tomb Raider and the Legend of Angkor Waaaaat?!

Genocide, What?

Best tuk tuk driver ever.

In Cambodia, the equivalent to the Indian "auto" is the onomatopoetic "tuk tuk." And they're everywhere. Which is awesome. Our hostel has a dedicated tuk tuk driver, so SR and I booked him for the afternoon today to take us around. He was awesome. On the way to our first stop, he stopped off and picked up two face masks for SR and me to wear. SR was like "I make fun of people who wear these" and I was like "... I do to. But when in Rome..." and donned the mask, because... why not? SR followed suit. We probably both saved about a year of our lives from all the air pollution we didn't breathe in.

Our first stop was a place called S-21.S-21 is a school. Well, it used to be a school before it was turned into museum. Oh also, in between it was turned into a prison where enemies of the state were tortured and killed. Remember how I didn't do any research about Cambodia before coming here? Yea... turns out there was a lot that I missed.

In today's edition of Know Your Planet, we cover Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, the [R]'s Notes version (note: some facts may be "facts"):

My first and last names are both nouns!

The Khmer Rouge is synonymous for the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK). "Kampuchea" is how folks in the East pronounce Cambodia because... you know, it's their country and they probably know how to say it the right way. The CPK was formed in 1968 and officially took power in Cambodia in 1975. They were led by a guy named Pol Pot, a gentle soul that loved everyone. Wait, no, how do you say the opposite of "gentle soul that loved everyone"? Oh right, dictator. He was a viscous, brutal dictator.

On a dreary Wednesday afternoon, 8-yr. old Pol Pot, having been forced for the third straight night to finish his bok choy before he could have dessert, vowed that one day he would rise to power and force everyone to eat their vegetables all the time so they could feel his childhood pain. Fast-forward 42 years and after taking power, he began to implement his vision for an agrarian society, which he also believed was the key to Cambodia's self-sufficiency. A funny thing happens when you force non-farmers to be responsible for producing your nation's food supply: your population starts to die from starvation. Oh also, Pol Pot hates labels, could be labeled as something, then you were executed: Buddhists, Muslims, Christians, the Chinese, the Vietnamese, Laotians, and he threw in intellectuals and disabled people for good measure. And their families. We wouldn't want some orphaned child growing up and exacting revenge now, would we? 

In the four years that Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge were in power, about 2 million people (estimates vary) died, shrinking Cambodia's population from 8 million down to 6 million. 25% of the people! That's insane!

Lots of global geopolitical stuff was going down in the world at the time, and the Khmer Rouge fell out of power in 1979, forcing its leaders into hiding in the jungles of southwestern Cambodia, near the Thai border. The crazy part about all of this (ok, there are a LOT of crazy parts about all of this) is that despite knowing about all abhorrent genocidal tendencies of the regime, the UN still recognized the Khmer Rouge as the only legitimate party representing Cambodia until 1990. 1990! While hiding out, Pol Pot developed a profound love of pizza and seeking to implant a subliminal love for the CPK in the western world founded California Pizza Kitchen in 1985, which today has locations in a dozen countries across the planet.

Pol Pot died, get this, in 1998 while under house arrest. House arrest! Let that be a lesson to you, other dictators of the world: you are going to be so grounded when your regime is finally toppled.

SR and I arrived at S-21 (also known as the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum), paid a small entrance fee, and stepped inside. S-21 was like when you first walk onto a beach and it's beautiful but then after a few minutes you notice the sand is full of trash, the water is full of algae, and the only people wearing bathing suits are the people you never, ever want to see wearing bathing suits. Except the trash/algae/"2-sizes-too-small" of S-21 took the form of barbed wire, concrete cells, and a giant sign listing out "the rules" of S-21.

Beautiful, right? Just ignore the gallows and
graves. Ooo, a palm tree!

Maybe it's just S-21, maybe it's all of the museums in Cambodia, but it's definitely not the same as a museum in the U.S. There are a lot of things that are shown but not really labeled. There are a lot of things that are labeled, but not explained. So you end up seeing a lot of stuff were you're like "...I bet this was used for something awful" without really knowing what exactly. The grounds are also really well taken care of in some respects, but in dire need of a cleaning in other respects. Like the grass is beautifully manicured, but we also found a stairwell that just had trash in it.

Prison cells. Believe it or not, these
are the nicer ones.

Inside one of the cells

SR and I walked around the whole complex. We saw the cells where they kept prisoners. They're so small, you could barely lie down in them. Everything was covered in barbed wire to prevent people from... escaping? Committing suicide? Feeling any small sense of hope? Probably all of the above.

You know it's bad when
you'd rather stay filthy

There were also a lot of pictures and paintings on the walls depicting life at S-21. This one shows how they kept the prisoners clean. And by clean I mean "clean." Once a week or so they would get them all in a room and spray them down with a hose.

After an incredibly eye-opening and disturbing hour and a half or so, SR and I decided to go on to the next activity for the day. If you thought this day couldn't get more depressing, you'd be totally wrong. We hopped back into our tuk tuk and drove for about 20 minutes to our next destination, the Choeung Ek Genocidal Center, more commonly known as the Killing Fields.

Front entrance to the Killing Fields

SR and I hopped out of the tuk tuk and went inside. After paying a small fee, we were given some headsets loaded with an audio tour.

In retrospect, I probably shouldn't have

smiled for this photo.

This is called the Killing Tree. So named
because guards would take babies and slam
them into the tree to kill them. Those bracelets
are mementos left by visitors to honor those
who died here. In another tree close by, they
embedded speakers to play nationalistic music
with the intention of drowning out the sound
of the screams of those being killed.

I'll include some details about the Killing Fields in the captions of the photos so if you'd prefer not to know what happened here, you can just skip past them. But what you should know is that this was an awful, terrible, miserable place where people were taken to be killed and buried in mass graves.

The skulls they've found here have been categorized and put
on display in a central tower. It's so far from what you expect
of reality that it's hard to remember each one of these skulls
belonged to a real, living, breathing human being.

Ever seen a tower of skulls? You have now.

These fields look beautiful but every
sink-hole-looking depression in the ground
is actually the site of a mass grave. As the
weather changes the ground, new bones are
constantly being naturally unearthed.

After the Killing Fields, SR and I went to our next stop, the Russian Market. It was a pretty quiet ride over. I think SR and I were both processing a lot of "genocide sucks" thoughts. We got to the Russian Market about 20 minutes later. I'm not sure why it's called that. It doesn't look particularly... Russian. I'm sure the internet knows but... do you really care? I don't.

The Russian Market is this HUGE indoor market. There is a lot of food and a lot of trinkets and a lot of clothes and... power tools? And a lot of other random things. I mean... it's a HUGE market. Inevitably, SR and I got separated. It was bound to happen. The market closes at 5pm, so a little before then I started trying to find her. I must have searched every possible corner of that place, but no luck. People were starting to close up shop and lights were starting to turn off and things were starting to look a little sketchy. So I figured, if I were her, I'd probably head back to the tuk tuk and wait there. So that's what I did. The problem is I didn't remember exactly where the tuk tuk dropped us off. Or where I entered the market from. So I went outside and tried to get my bearings. After about 5 minutes I found the tuk tuk with SR safely inside. I imagine she had probably been waiting there a while, because she was definitely a little annoyed that it had taken me so long to get there. She hid it just fine though. And you can't really blame her, I probably would be too. I was pretty tired after the day so I was really glad to be heading back to the hostel.

Later that night, SR and I went to go check out this huge Night Market we'd been hearing about. It was raining hard. Luckily there were a lot of tarps setup to protect people from the rain, but unfortunately they were really, really low, so you had to duck down to walk through the aisles. It felt pretty cramped. There were also a lot of food stalls as well, though most of them looked like they sold the same food.

This guy cooked my food. It was good.

There was a cool eating area in the middle of all the food stalls so after we grabbed food, SR and I sat down for a nice meal. I also had cane juice for the first time in a long time. Actually, I take that back, I had some in Bangladesh, but before that I hadn't had cane juice in a long, long time. It was so good, I went back for Round 2.

Yummmmm

No shoes allowed!

This would be funny if it weren't so sad

After dinner, SR and I walked back to the hostel. On the way back we found a small child playing with fire in the street. Yup, that happened.

Remember the German guys from the hostel last night? They're off living it up at a fancy place tonight, but we did decide to all hang out again tonight. The original plan was to head to their place but apparently everything there was really expensive, so they decided to come back to our hostel. So around 10pm or so, they came back to meet up with the Finns and me. The five of us hung out in the lounge for a bit, then went on an adventure. One of the group had heard about this cool club in a touristy part of town. So we grabbed a tuk tuk and headed over there. But once we got there, we decided to go head somewhere else. That somewhere else that the tuk tuk driver took us to was not what we had told him. We went in anyway. It was totally dead.

Katy Peri's Pizzas

So we walked out and went to find another place. On the way, we found the pizza joint that Katy Perry owns. Apparently she's forgotten how to spell her own name.

Finally, we found a decent place, the Rooftop Reggae Bar! On a rooftop! With real people there!

...fight the power?

Unfortunately, my phone camera was not as awesome as
the view itself

It was an interesting scene inside. Mostly expats. There was the standard couple making out in the corner. There was one woman there who forgot how old she was (and I'd generally say "good for her" if not for the fact that she reeked of desperation with each one of her overly aggressive dance moves). Her friend had the opposite "woe is me, I'm just going to sit in the corner by myself looking sad" problem. Like most things in life, the best outcome would have just been to average them out. Like stock market analyst predictions.

There was also a really awesome view of Phnom Penh. And the bathroom had hilarious signage as well. It started sprinkling a little while we were there, which was actually kind of refreshing. We stayed out until around 3am or so before heading back to the hostel.

Get it, grrrl

This was my last night in Phnom Penh and I'm really glad I got to spend it with this crew. They were a ton of fun and I'm going to miss these guys.

CONTINUE ON to Phnom Penh Part 4: Goodbye, Phnom Penh!

In case you've forgotten how to pee, this sign's got you
covered. Unlike what you should do to the seat and/or floor.