Phnom Penh

We took an early morning bus to Phnom Penh from Siem Reap. We had made reservations at a hotel which was owned by the brother of the guest house we stayed at in Siem Reap. We arrived at the hotel and realized it was still under construction. The reception area wasn’t even finished and the temporary reception was located on the last floor. We were told the room would cost us $6 per night but it turned out to cost $8. Maybe not a huge deal but we have been trying to keep our budget in check. We decided to stay there as they would be taking care of our visa to Vietnam. Everywhere else we would have to wait 3 days to get the visa but the hotel manager was able to do it in 1 day for us.

We went out walking and soon discovered there is no real charm to Phnom Penh. Mainly because there is no specific area that you could pinpoint and say “you should go there”. There is a section by the waterfront which has a lot of small restaurants but that quickly loses its charm when you are constantly approached by tuk tuk drivers even while you are eating. We were craving something other than rice and decided on an “Italian” restaurant, by the waterfront. Even as we were trying to decide where to eat there were tuk tuk drivers asking if we needed a ride. The difference between Phnom Penh and Siem Reap is that at least in Siem Reap they listened when you said no. Unfortunately in Phnom Penh they didn’t. They just kept following you around. This one tuk tuk driver continued to pester us even after we had received our food and were eating. He wanted to know where we were going tomorrow and that he could take us there. Finally I said “we’re eating” but he continued. I repeated myself a couple more time and finally he said “I know you’re eating but tomorrow I can take you where you want to go”. He was quite annoyed with me, but so was I. At least Andrew was calm so he just told him “no thank you, we don’t know what we’re doing tomorrow”. Somehow he got the hint. All this would have been enough for an experience but the meal itself was interesting as well. We ordered Spaghetti with meat and tomato sauce. What we received were spaghetti noodles with a ketchup/sweet chili sauce topped with some ground meat. Needless to say we were disappointed in our spaghetti. We spent the rest of the day walking around searching for a McDonalds. We were convinced they must have one since it’s the capital of Cambodia. We were disappointed once again. We did find a mall which had some restaurants in it, mainly BBWorld which is Cambodia’s answer to McDonald’s. The food wasn’t great but at least they had wifi, which is something we have been unable to find in Cambodia. We went back to our hotel, bought a couple of cold beers and watched some TV.

The next day we hired a tuk tuk to take us to visit the school which was converted to a prison during the war with the Khmer Rouge in the mid 1970’s. The Khmer Rouge was the name of the followers of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, who were the ruling party in Cambodia from 1975 to 1979, led by a man by the name of Pol Pot. Pol Pot studied in Paris in the 1950’s and it was at that time when the Khmer students organized their own communist movement. Some of those students would return to Cambodia and end up taking control of the communist party, and eventually rename Cambodia to the Democratic of Kampuchea. By the 1960’s Pol Pot had risen to the rank of leadership in the communist movement. The Khmer Rouge goal was to eradicate any kind of city life as they believed it corrupted society, and for all citizens to essentially become farmers. Of course they wanted to achieve this through a communist government. They were successful in wiping out almost the whole city of Phnom Penh. Their view was that engineers, bankers, business men as well as any other educated people were corrupting society. And they wanted to eradicate the corruption and control the country. Imagine someone with the ideology of Hitler except his ideology was aimed towards the corruption of city life.

The school we were touring is in the middle of Phnom Penh and was renamed to S-21. It was used to house and torture prisoners. Anyone who wasn’t killed was brought to the prison to be tortured for the purpose of obtaining information about other traitors. As we toured the facility it was almost like walking through the Auschwitz camp in Poland. Of course the genocide done by Hitler was on a much larger scale, but wiping out a whole city, the capital, is no small feat and requires a lot of sick individuals to do some bad things. The pictures hanging on the walls were very graphic and showed in detail the different forms of torture used in the school. One of the most disgusting ones shows an officer standing under a tree while holding a baby by its legs. The “soldiers” killed babies by smashing their heads against a tree. And just like the Nazis, the Khmer Rouge documented every single person who was imprisoned at the S-21 prison. The walls are hung with thousands of mug shots of the prisoners. Many of them children. What annoyed me were stories posted in one room from people who used to be soldiers. A lot of them said they joined the Khmer Rouge because they were afraid for their lives. That I can understand, but to torture people for me is unimaginable. A lot of those soldiers are now living normal lives. As I said before, it’s easy to say I was made to do it after the fact. I won’t get into the history too much but the Khmer Rouge was removed from power in 1975 after it was invaded by the Vietnamese. During their time in power, the Khmer Rouge killed an estimated 1.5 million people; 1/5 of the total population of Cambodia. Their motto was “To keep you is no benefit. To destroy you is no loss.” I would like to encourage everyone to learn more about this horrific history. What I describe here is a very brief account and I am by no means an expert in this area or a historian. What got to me was this is very recent history. The Khmer Rouge continued to operate as guerrillas in Western Cambodia until 1996! We all think about Hitler and it all seems a distant memory. Most of us weren’t alive back then. But 1975, and 1996 are very recent events, and most of us don’t know about them. We can’t imagine letting Hitler to live freely after 1945 if he hadn’t killed himself. Pol Pot died of natural causes in 1998 never having been put on trial.

After the S-21 prison we went to see the Killing Fields. These are fields which were discovered after the Vietnamese invasion and they were and continue to be mass graves for those killed during the Khmer Rouge reign. We experienced a couple of dramatic moments while there. The first one is the monument which was built to commemorate all those who died. It’s a 7 storey glass building which holds the skulls, bones and remains of those who were killed. It’s obviously not everyone who was killed, but it does put into perspective what the number 1.5 million actually looks like. The display also has the skulls segregated into sections of male and female as well as male/female children. It describes how based on the size of the skulls they can determine the sex and the age. The second dramatic moment we experienced was standing in front of a tree. It looked just like any other tree there. It’s hard to get emotional about large holes in the ground because it’s hard to imagine them being filled with human remains. But this tree was different. This was the tree which was used by the soldier to kill the babies. Standing in front of that tree I actually got goose bumps. I was standing in front of the exact tree which was used to kill hundreds if not thousands of babies. I could picture the soldier standing there. I could see the picture from the prison clearly. I felt sick. It was hard to believe the tree was thriving even though it had seen all this death around it. I don’t want to suggest trees have feelings or that the tree should have died with those kids. But when we picture death and such horrific acts we picture them to be carried out in horrific and bleak places, not a park like setting. Needless to say we were in dark spirits when we left. We spent the rest of the day walking around the city.

The plan was to leave the next day to Vietnam. We had obtained our visa’s and all we had to do was book the bus. Unfortunately by the time we made the decision to book the bus it was already sold out. We could have gone somewhere else in Vietnam but we wanted to go to Phu Quoc Island in South Western Vietnam. So we were stuck in Phnom Penh for one more day. That sucked because we really didn’t know what else to do there. We decided to find a nice café with wifi access and just hang out there for the day. That was easier said than done because wifi access was not easy to come by nor was a nice café. But we did end up finding one and just hung out there until mid-afternoon. After that we went for a walk to the riverfront, but until most days we headed to a different side of it. A nice hotel was there and they had a nice casino. Right behind the hotel was a bridge which took us to a small island. We weren’t sure what was there as it looked like a modern Exhibition Place; a few large buildings with some smaller ones. We were walking around and noticed a sign for an Import/Export show. We decided to check it out and learned we could get in for free. We made up a fake import/export company when registering and walked right in. It was a typical trade show but with all the different things you can import. The funny thing was how seriously people took us. We were literally the only white people there so everyone thought we were investors from the US. Most things you could find in our dollar stores, but we did come across one cool item. It was a water filtration tower, just like you would have in your kitchen, except it was also a dehumidifier. It used the water collected from the room or apartment and turned it into drinking water. At first I thought it was kind of gross but they gave us a sample straight from the machine and the water was really good. We thought this was a fantastic idea especially since fresh water is such a scarcity in a lot of countries and it will be a big problem for the world one day if we don’t come up with some ideas soon. We spent a good 40 minutes talking to the inventor and his sales staff. The catch was that the machine currently cost $9000. Apparently they had a big market in Singapore. We explained we were just travelling and weren’t interested in an investment but they were happy to talk to us anyway. One other cool thing we came across was a booth which was showing how they make silk. We got to see how the silk worms were boiled in a liquid and the silk extracted from the worms and then spun. We were excited because tours were sold in Thailand and Cambodia to see how silk is made and here we had a free show all to ourselves. Other than that nothing of interest caught our attention. We left the show and went to pay for our tickets, which were not sold out as we had reserved them over the phone the previous day. We found a grocery store, bought some Johnny Walker and got drunk in our room.

Siem Reap, Cambodia

Even though we had gone to bed late the night before, we woke up at 6:30 to the sound of the hotel waking up. Staff walking around, chatting and laughing. We hadn’t noticed it the night before but our room window did not face outside the hotel, rather it looked out into a service corridor in the back of the hotel. Although we were able to shut the curtains, there were no glass panels or even shutters to close to keep out the noise. After trying to sleep a bit more, we got up at 7am and decided to look for a new guest house. We grabbed some breakfast at Temple Bar & Restaurant on Pub Street and headed out for the day. Very quickly we realized the city is not very big at all. Cambodia was also a French colony at one point and it had much of the architecture left over, a lot in pretty decent shape. Also, Cambodia is a democratic country (at least it claims to be, reality is probably a bit different) so right away we could feel a change in atmosphere. We liked Siem Reap right away. Not because it was a democratic country, but because right away the people we encountered were much friendlier than they had been anywhere we had been up until this point (with a few exceptions of course). True, the tuk tuk drivers are extremely pesky and don’t leave us alone. (As explained to Andrew’s brother on skype, no we do not carry cameras on our shoulders to indicate we are tourists, we are white, which makes it very easy to indentify us as tourists- walking wallets). We can’t walk 30 meters without a tuk tuk driver asking “tuk tuk sir? Go see temple today? Maybe tomorrow? Very cheap sir”. This is repeated literally hundreds of times per day. I have come to appreciate how annoying it would be to be a celebrity and have everyone constantly recognize you. Of course we’re not celebrities but it is impossible to have a conversation on the street without getting constantly interrupted and, for lack of a better word, harassed. Despite all this we have found people to be extremely friendly and this is the first time in a very long time that we don’t feel like we are walking wallets. Of course people still see you and think they can make a quick buck, but what we didn’t experience was people asking us for money for no reason.

After breakfast we started walking around and looking for another guest house. We were not only looking for cheap but also for quiet and comfortable. Somewhere we could sleep in. That is definitely something we hadn’t done in a while. Usually because of some type of noise coming in from the outside (roosters crowing, loud boats on the river, hotel staff, etc.). We found what we were looking for at Mommy’s Guest House. This is a family run guest house and we were able to get a room for $5 per night. And the best part is that it was on a side street so it was nice and quiet. The owner was very friendly and provided us with a lot of advice on where we should/shouldn’t go. We moved in that day. We spent the rest of the day walking around and discovering Siem Reap. The following day we arranged for the tuk tuk driver from the guest house to take us see the Angkor Temples. Siem Reap is a town which lies about 10km from the Angkor Temples. Those are the temples where Tomb Raider was filmed with Angelina Jolie. I won’t pretend to know too much history on these temples, and really all I can say is that they are very old and they are quite impressive as they have been preserved quite well. Siem Reap, understandably, has built its whole tourist industry on these temples and really the economy revolves around them. There are a lot of temples you can visit and various “loops” you can complete, so we arrange with the tuk tuk driver to take us on the “big” tour, which basically means the temples on the outer perimeter.

We start around 8am and by 9am it is so hot we are sweating. I really couldn’t believe how hot it was. But the temples are beautiful. It’s hard to describe them and to do them justice so below are a couple of pictures. What’s not beautiful are the number of tourists and the locals trying to sell us things. “Sir buy something, anything” But we keep going and by 12:30pm we complete the entire loop. We’re a little disappointed as we were told it would take all day but it turns out we’re fast tourists. So we arrange for the driver to take us to the floating village.








A floating village is exactly like it sounds, a village which exists on boats. Unfortunately we realize right away this will most likely be one of the tourist attractions where we will be ripped off. It turns out we are right. We pay $15 per person! for a boat to take us around. The tour is supposed to last an hour and a half but after 25 minutes we stop in the middle of the lake for our guide to tell us about the village. This basically consists of him telling us there is a school and we can stop there on the way back, and since the kids are very poor we can buy them some supplies. That doesn’t sound like a tourist scam at all. Another boat pulls up to us and starts showing us a cobra snake. I don’t wish to be anywhere near that snake and I start shaking my head but then they ask us for money! There is no way I’m paying them to see a snake I have no desire to be near. After they pull away, the guide is telling us some tourists like to jump in the lake to go swimming. At the same time I notice another boat behind us, and I see a mom is hanging her child overboard and the child is relieving himself. Not of number 1 but of number 2! Once he’s done she just wipes him with the Water and they continue on their way. I don’t know about other tourists, but I’m not planning to even dip my hands in the Water. We start heading back and again are asked if we want to go visit the school to help the children, but we decline. The tour ends after only 45 minutes. This was definitely a rip off!

We head back to the temples as we want to see Angkor Wat, the biggest temple of all the Angkor Temples, at sunset. We arrive around 4:00pm and there are hundreds of people making their way in. Apparently this is not an intimate affair. We are a little disappointed as the front of the Wat is under construction and therefore we will have a hard time getting a nice picture. Once inside the temple there are thousands of people trying to get a good spot for the sunset. There are 200 or 300 people lining up to climb to the very top of the temple. We decide to go to a more remote part of the temple and are rewarded with very few tourists. In fact, the only people there are a few monks. They take an interest in us and we spend some time chatting. It actually feels really peaceful sitting in the largest Wat in Cambodia with monks, who really are the only people that can appreciate how sacred this location is. At that moment it doesn’t feel like a tourist attraction, and I try to think about the meaning of this place. The moment doesn’t last long. Inevitably some tourists show up and like the snap of two fingers, the moment is gone. We don’t bother waiting for the sunset. We will be at Angkor Wat the following morning for sunrise.

The following day we wake up at 4am. We arrive at Angkor Wat by 4:45am. Even at this early hour there are hundreds of people making their way in. Unlike the day before, everyone wants to be at the front of the Wat to obtain a good picture with the sun rising right behind the Wat, and its shadow reflecting off the pond. Even though there are a lot of tourists, we are still able to get a good spot. Andrew settles in by sitting right at the edge of the pond. I stand just to the side of him. My camera is a point and shoot so I don’t receive a lot of respect from the other photographers. Everyone else, including Andrew, have a camera worthy of a professional photographer. It’s not long before I’m more or less pushed out of the way. I don’t mind. The sunrise is not as exciting as you might imagine. There is no point where you say, okay, the sun has risen. The truth is, the sun is constantly rising. My legs are hurting as I’ve been standing for an hour so I look for a place to sit. Once Andrew is done taking all the pictures his heart desires, we ask someone to take a photo with the both of us. It’s 6am and it is already hot. We walk around the temple and take a few more photos but we’re done with this Wat. We move on.


That day we complete the “small” tour which is all the Wats closest to Angkor Wat. These are a lot more impressive than the ones we had seen the day before. While there Andrew decided to build an inukshuk to add a bit of Canadian flare to the temples. He actually did a pretty good job. We complete our tour by 12:30pm and we are exhausted. It has already been a full day. We go out for a pizza and meet a French guy who has come to Cambodia to film a documentary about his friend that came to Cambodia and decided to stay. We exchange some stories and he tells us how while filming the documentary they also go to a school. By the teacher they are told all the kids are poor and that they don’t have money for school supplies. So the film crew pitch in and buy some crayons along with other supplies (which are of course readily available at the school) and they distribute them to the kids. The kids are all very excited and happy. They spend some more time with the kids and after getting enough material for the documentary they decide to leave. But the cameras are still rolling as everyone leaves, and they capture the teacher collecting all the crayons and supplies the film crew had just distributed. When questioned, the teacher all of a sudden doesn’t speak English. Apparently this is a very common tourist trap. The tourist is guilted into buying school supplies to the poor students (because who doesn’t feel bad about kids not having supplies to learn?), and the supplies are of course readily available right then and there, the tourists feel good for helping the kids but as soon as they leave the supplies are collected and re-sold to the next tourist who comes to help the poor kids. So the same crayons can be sold hundreds if not thousands of times.
The following day we go see some more temples on the “remote” tour. These temples are about 40km from Siem Reap. But this tour is different. Somehow Andrew has found out that in addition to the temples and the Land Mine Museum, there is also a shooting range we can stop at. Of course that is the first stop of the day. At the shooting range they have a lot of different guns. I won’t pretend to know which ones but apparently it’s a good selection. In addition to guns you can also detonate a grenade. All this of course comes at a price. To detonate a grenade you have to pay $40US! Andrew opts to shoot 50 rounds from an M18. My job is to take pictures. This is my first time around a real gun and I’m literally shaking. Not because I think I’m in danger but even with sound proof ear muffs the shots are deafening and I can feel the power of the gun. I don’t even want to think about what it would feel like to have the gun pointed at me. 50 rounds turns out to last all of 30 seconds. After that Andrew spends a lot of time posing in front of the wall of guns so I can capture this moment on film, and he poses with bullet chains hung around his shoulders while holding various guns. All this while wearing his Chuck Norris T-Shirt which he got as a birthday gift before we left (thanks M&M…it’s his favourite T-shirt), and has the caption “Chuck Norris has 2 speeds: Walk & Kill”. He looked tough alright. But I think overall we are quite disappointed. Mainly because it’s so expensive (the 50 rounds costs $50US) and also because it’s all over so quickly. I know this is something Andrew was looking forward to and it sucks that it’s over so fast. But we don’t have time to dwell and we go see some temples.




On the way back we stop at the Cambodian Land Mine Museum. This is an interesting museum because it brings out conflicting feelings. The typical horror of learning how a land mine can kill or maim, but also skepticism. The founder of the museum was a child soldier with the Khmer Rouge, who were responsible for killing millions of Cambodians in the mid 70’s and wiping out the whole capital of Phnom Penh. While he was with the Khmer Rouge he laid down thousands of the land mines he now tries to find and remove. I say skepticism because I think it’s always easy to do something and then when it’s all over to say, I’m sorry, I was made to do it and now I want to help. Maybe that makes me a cynic but I just can’t help it. I know he has now helped a lot of kids and cleared a lot of land mines and he has won the CNN Hero Award in 2010, but my skepticism is still there. The museum gives a very good impression of just how many landmines are still out there and the damage they can cause. It’s tough to see the damage a landmine can cause a person. Once we finished touring the museum the day was done. The next day we left for Phnom Penh.