I left Vietnam for Cambodia in early July, taking a bus from Saigon to Phnom Penh. The last of my land based trips for a while, it wasn’t the most comfortable, or eventless considering I managed to get on the wrong bus for half the journey, but definitely one of the most interesting. While Vietnam offered an insight into a country recovering from war and moving fast, or trying to anyways, into the ‘modern’ capitalist world that defines us today, Cambodia offered an even more vivid and raw example of that.
As soon as the bus crossed the border the landscape changed radically. Gone were the few apparent elements of modernity I saw in vietnam, replaced by a single tarmac road surrounded by a lot of nothing but rundown buildings, shacks, huts, temples, fields and animals. Even though the journey from the border to Phnom Penh, the capital, was just a few hours it was enough to already give me a feeling that Cambodia is struggling with a lot more than some of its neighbours.
That feeling was repeated once I’d got to Phnom Penh, slightly less chaotic than the Vietnamese cities, but just as noisy, polluted and visibly more grimey. And then it all continued as I connected directly on a bus headed to the south coast of Cambodia and a town called Sihanoukville, a tourist resort of sorts, all beaches, sea and relaxing.
Cambodia’s roads, which aren’t many, were rebuilt a few years back with American aid money as the government tried to capitalise (literally) on tourism. So they built road to make it easier for tourists to actually visit the most attractive parts of the country, which primarily include Siem Reap, and the temples of Angkor Wat, and more recently the south coast, with Sihanoukville, beaches, the town of Kep, nearby islands and even a national park. And while a few major roads were tarmaced, and some new airports built, that’s about the extent of the infrastructure in Cambodia. Everywhere you look while on the main roads, dirt roads extend in most directions. Hearing stories of how it used to be even just a few years back at the turn of the century, it seems Cambodia has already come a long way, and yet it’s hard not to feel like there’s still an even longer way ahead.
Along the road the landscape seemed to repeat itself: shacks, huts and make-shift homes alternated with more modern but run down or dilapited buildings and every once in a while, some even more modern structure with little town-like centres gathered around them. There were loads of ox just grazing on the side of the road or in the fields, green forests as we got closer to the coast and slightly arid and dusty plains and hills inland, broken up by temples and other roadside structures. Oh yeah and regular rain showers.
Considering that the Khmer Rouge’s hold on power lasted well into the 90s and that in that time, as well as during the end of their reign, they spent a big portion of their time destroying what had been built and set up by the colonial powers and intellectual and political elites (as well as murdering most of them while everyone was looking in the other direction following the end of the Vietnam war), it’s no surprise that the country is still so visibly run down. The real surprise for me though was just how obvious and apparent it all was, especially coming from Vietnam, a country that’s also recovering but which feels in parts visibly less poor and rundown than Cambodia did. As I said though, when you sit down and think about it for a minute, it’s hardly surprising. And the thing with Cambodia is, while I didn’t visit the more touristy area of Siem Reap, everywhere I went it was all pretty much the same, whether in the capital or the countryside or the seaside.
Sihanoukville continued the whole theme, but at least with a more relaxed and slightly less boiling atmosphere. While the town and its various beaches have become increasingly popular in recent years, with the tourist trade obviously benefiting the area to an extent, it’s still very much a poor, sparsely populated and basic seaside town built primarily around a port. The port is I believe the country’s main one, and so brings with it work and money, alongside the tourist trade. The part of town with the port actually felt even poorer and run down than the rest, with shacks and makeshift homes stringed along a dusty road, surrounded by various construction sites for tourists while trucks come in and out of the port and boats dock and leave.
It was an article I found on the NY Times website that actually brought me to Sihanoukville. I wasn’t particularly in the mood for the overly touristy experience of Angkor Wat, and so I decided to spend a few days on the beach, relaxing and doing sweet nothing. And that is exactly what I got. On the second day I decided to continue with my attempt at biking everywhere I was, only to find that hitching a ride on a motor bike would have been a much better idea. The area is all hills, and as I found after a fair bit of effort, there really isn’t much beyond some beaches, a few bars, a bank and a couple of monuments in between it all.
As the article discusses, over the last few years there has been a growing interest in developing Sihanoukville and the south coast as a tourist destination to rival Angkor Wat. Cycling and walking around this soon becomes obvious as you see signs for upcoming housing projects, hotels, and biggest of all a Hilton five star resort. However while all this goes on, and the existing luxury resorts thrive with Japanese, Chinese, American and European tourists, the town and its inhabitants continue to live in very basic ways. As with Vietnam, the chosen mode of transport is hitching rides on motor tuk tuks or on the back of a motorbike, and the locals who spend their day ferrying people are always on the lookout for a foreigner to ‘help out’. With the town’s size, and the beaches offering plenty of fresh seafood, there is less street vendors, but still a few, and at nights walking past you can see a lot of locals all huddled around tables, eating cheap skewers of meat, chicken and other things while drinking and chatting. Away from the hotels, backpacker resorts and beach huts, the buildings, houses and shacks are all still pretty run down and basic, as with most of what I saw on my way from Saigon.
There are some schools and a small town center of sorts which seemed pretty busy in the afternoon, with even a little market, but beyond that Sihanoukville was very much a dual kind of place: the locals on one side, recovering and etching a living from the main trades of the city, and the tourists. The whole thing makes for a weird experience personally, as I’ve never really been anywhere like it before. While the beach was incredibly relaxing and enjoyable, a real little paradise with white sand, huts, seafood, cheap beers and stars at night, the images and reality of the locals’ daily lives is inescapable. That can make for a pretty sobering experience at times, depending on how you choose to look at it. Me personally I find it hard to avoid the obvious reality of my surroundings. I enjoyed it though, and it’s a way to at least get an insight, however removed, into the lives of people who have suffered a hell of a lot in the last 20 or so years and who are, like everyone else, trying to get back on their feet and move on.
While the obvious poverty and lack of infrastructure is what struck me the most, there was something else I realised a day or so after arriving and sitting on the beach. Cambodia has a lot more beggars than Vietnam or China, and the kids are all working, day and night. The beggars seem to mostly be cripples, I would assume from the war and/or victims of the Khmer Rouge regime’s brutality, crawling along the beaches or being carried, going from sunbed to sunbed. Lying down in pretty idyllic and enchanting surroundings, the constant stream of cripples begging is at first unsettling, and soon enough I guess ‘normal’, even if that sounds a little cold. What it really does though is make it hard to reconcile the Western view of beggars and the likes, especially cripples being carried around, with the reality of what these people went through, and what they have to live with, or what they don’t have to live with. While wealthy, or at least wealthy enough to travel, tourists sit on the beaches, sunbathing, swimming and taking it all in, it’s only normal that they would do what they do. Being comfortable with it is another matter entirely though, again because of the conditioning you go through in the west and how that is difficult to reconcile with what these people have to live with.
And it’s the same with the kids. No matter their age, and starting early enough, they’re walking up and down the beaches, selling trinkets, offering to clean nails, tie hair and whatever else will get them a bit of money. Day and night, they walk up to tourists, striking up conversations in surprisingly nonchalant manners, though you soon realise that it’s just a trick they’ve obviously learnt to try and bond with people and get them to buy something or two. Everyday I went to the beach and sat around, I saw the same faces, doing the same rounds, saying the same things, but still everyday they would find someone who would take them up on it, buying something or other and they would then all gather around, talking and chatting, genuinely keen to exchange with people, even though ultimately the reality is that you can never be sure where the money they get goes to. It’s quite common to hear them tell you to buy something so they can go to school. As with the beggars, it’s one of the ways they know they can make Western tourists feel conscious about the situation and maybe do something, whether or not it actually ever really helps them to ever get to school. And while some the whole working kids thing can be surprising or even shocking, you soon realise that a lot of them are actually quite keen just to talk, they’ll smile at any occasion and ask all sorts of questions. While there is a harsh reality behind what they do and why they do it, they’re still kids at heart and it’s hard not to feel attracted to them in one way or another.
Sihanoukville was a laid back affair, a few days spent doing a whole lot of nothing, lying on a beach, swimming in warm waters and eating some pretty tasty spring rolls and seafood bbqs in the evenings, washed down with cheap beer. And the whole business that surrounds this for locals, from kids selling to beggars to people trying to give you a ride, provides about the only diversions from the laid back routine. For me, as I said it also provided an interesting insight into the country and its people. While there is a lot of poverty and horrors around, most still in sight, there is also a lot of warmth and friendliness, with locals more than willing to strike up a conversation, share a joke through misunderstanding, haggle for fun or just smile at you while you walk past. After some struggles in Vietnam, especially with the haggling and having to fend off people trying to take you for a ride, the slight simplicity of the Cambodian and how they approached the whole thing was refreshing. People beg and kids sell, but because there is nothing else, literally. And that somehow felt a lot more natural than some of what you have to go through in other South East Asian countries at times.
The last thing that really struck me on the coast, and continued as I got back to Phnom Penh, was the sight of older Western men with young Cambodian women. It started in Saigon for me, as I didn’t see much of that in Hanoi, and definitely got worse as I made it to Cambodia. The sex trade is obviously there, it’s not overt but it’s also not covert, and you don’t need to know a lot about it to understand what you see at times. Another thing that was quite strange in Cambodia, was the amount of posters and adverts dealing with child sex, making it quite clear that it was not tolerated and that everyone should keep their eyes out for anything suspicious. I can’t say I saw anything like that, what I mostly saw were older men with younger girls, maybe late teens, early 20s, but speaking to a few people who come to Cambodia regularly, it’s apparently still quite common in parts of the country. And even though there is actually no legal recourse as such in Cambodia, it seems the government is putting on a strong front in trying to deter sex tourism, which is a good thing but feels slightly strange when you put it in the context of how corrupt the whole Cambodian judicial and political system is and how, as I said, they apparently have no law as such that bans sex tourism. It’d be interesting to see how it all develops in coming years as the tourism industry only continues to grow in the country.
This whole experience continued as I got back to Phnom Penh for a couple of days. As I mentioned the city is quite polluted and its traffic is also primarily two-wheeled, though a lot less chaotic than Vietnam. The town itself didn’t have much to offer I found, though the fact that I caught a stomach bug on my first night there probably only added to my not feeling so keen on the whole city after that.
Apart from a string of bars and cafes along the river, the royal palace and some incredibly intricate and beautiful looking temples (to rival those I saw in Saigon), I found Phnom Penh to be lacking a little something. As with Saigon, the most interesting things I found, apart from the intricacy of the temples’ decorations, was the markets, from the big central market to small street markets, filled with people sitting on the street selling anything and everything, and smells as captivating as the sights of the people and their daily lives.
Overall though Phnom Penh felt dirty, slightly claustrophobic and unattractive. On the plus side it did have a more exciting and happening nightlife than any of the other cities I’ve been to so far. Which counts for something definitely, and again showed a side to the Cambodians people which was refreshing after a few weeks in more reserved countries like China and Vietnam. One thing that really made me laugh was walking into a bar looking for someone on my first night, only to be greeted as I stepped through the door by about 30 or so girls, all wearing the same outfit and all shouting hello and welcome at the same time. I had one of those stop and stare moment for a split second as I realised what kind of bar it was, with maybe 3 or 4 western men surrounded by Cambodian girls. It seems I’d somehow found the ‘entertainment’ in the area. I came back to the bar later that night and met a few of the girls, who were really nice and just doing what they did for the same reasons as everyone else, money and a bit of stability. It was just a bit of a shock at first as the place was just on the street, easy to walk into and find, and not as selective as I would assume the equivalents in the west are.
Back to the nightlife though, the people were only too happy to invite you for drinks in bars, take you dancing, laugh and joke and generally make you feel welcome. It really seems to me that no matter how much horror they’ve collectively been through and how hard, and slow, their recovery from that time is, Cambodian still enjoy life in the best way they can. And that’s something that, no matter where you’re from, you can relate to and appreciate. Seeing it gives you faith in humanity to an extent. The country may not have been all that in my experience, but the people were definitely among the nicest and friendliest I’ve met, and made my time in Cambodia what it was.
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