Cambodia/Thailand (plus links to older posts)

Cambodia & Thailand

Before we made it to Cambodia we spent time in Bangkok. Even allowing for the jetlag, the big tourist sites such as temples and the Palace were frankly under whelming.
Bangkok is a big, polluted, overcrowded, young and brash city. Simply having to cross the street is a promotional for the Thai life assurance industry. Scattered through the morass of traffic there are numerous Michael Jackson imitators, hoping to escape the worst effects of the fumes. And Tuk-Tuk's are everywhere, being the weapon of choice for the young adrenaline filled taxi driver: open air souped up lawnmower driving excitement.
The King is extremely highly regarded in Thailand. A previous incumbent sent his children to Europe to learn western ways, and there is the King and I bit. At first this seems somewhat odd. However when the Westerners arrived, Thailand was the only country in South East Asia that Europeans didn't colonise, because the Thais managed to convince them that they were already "civilized". The international focus continues today: for example, royalty skis in Switzerland and has its finishing schools there. A prominent photo of the King in Bangkok for his birthday showed him sporting a camera: photography is one of his favourite hobbies. The monarchy appears to be pushing the envelope fast: it wasn't that long ago when ordinary Thais didn't even know what the King looked like. What will the next monarch do, send text messages to his subjects?
Parts of Bangkok appear to have morphed into "Gap Year Central": sort of like a giant airport waiting lounge where young Westerner's launch their adult life. We walked down "Backpacker Boulevard", 10 years later in life than the norm. It was also "Bootleg Boulevard": it had illegal software, music, even E.U. drivers licenses . And it was a stronghold of the touts: "And how about a suit for you sir, made to measure? I know where you can get a special price." Jen had the feeling that downtown Bangkok could have very easily been downtown Sydney: complete with the shopping malls and scarcity of Caucasian faces. Thai dining seemed to continue this clash of cultures. Fried pig's womb. Marijuana based meals. A campy transvestite waiter.
We were happy to leave for Cambodia.
What do most people know about Cambodia? Not much, apart from the Kim Wilde song Cambodia and the excellent movie about the awful reign of the Khmer Rouge: The Killing Fields.
Nothing can compare you for the mass of large jungle complexes that are crowned by Angkor Wat, built between the ninth and fourteenth centuries in northern Cambodia. Our guide showed Angelina Jolie around it, since it was one of the sets in Tomb Raider. Sites started off as Hindu, finished up Buddhist, and swapped on the King's whim in between. There was Ta Keo that wasn't finished after a small hill of stone was shifted there. Ta Prohm has been deliberately left to a slow destruction by the encroaching jungle, which provides for some great pictures. Preah Khan is a massive low level complex dedicated to 515 divinities. There are literally tens of thousands of images carved across these sites, detailing life in great focus. My favourite was the circus: complete with strong man juggling three dwarves and a tightrope walker.
For sheer scale nothing beat the actual Angkor Wat complex. Crossing the very large moat, the massive depictions of the Mt Mehru from Hindu Mythology were absolutely stunning, especially at sunrise. The height of some of these complexes sometimes meant scaling precipitous stairs very slowly. This is archaeology on a grand scale, definitely boot camp for tourists; bigger even than the Mayan Tikal in Guatemala.
There were so many amazing views around Angkor Wat that we have included a selection of extra images:
ANGKOR!
Throughout these myriad sites the current Cambodian situation came into sharp relief. This is an economy opening up to the outside world. For instance, there were many brands that we haven't seen since Australia. When the UN ushered in elections in 1993, there were two major side effects: everyone wanted to start learning English, and the USD became the currency of choice. An outworking of this were kids that looked about 5 selling beers for US dollars, touting in English. Even the Government demands USD over its own currency when extracting the airport exit fee from tourists. Everywhere there is some aid project: it accounts for one sixth of the economy. Finally, apply a ramshackle legal system with laws that are often "fluid". In parts Cambodia is modern day Asian Wild West.
Before we headed down to the capital Phnom Penh (PP), we went to Tonle Sap. This is a central lake that at its greatest height every year covers one seventh of the landmass of Cambodia. Here we saw the floating villages, housing in distinct areas Khmae (the dominant people in Cambodia), Vietnamese and Cham. These were completed with a variety of essentials such as the occasional floating pig pen. However some of it we saw was put on for the tourists: like the little girl that was holding the python. Did the Cambodians think we would find this entertaining or educational? We left that particular boat witnessing a puppy wrestling with one of the monkeys.
It is only in very recent years that Cambodia has returned to any sort of semblance. While the Khmer Rouge were driven from power in 1979, the guerilla war continued until 1998. Their impact is everywhere. From the bullet holes in Angkor Wat, which they used as a hospital, to the nervous laughter of our guide when he recalled the auto-genocide of the Cambodian people. Their landmines silently waiting to kill. Huge numbers of people, particularly children, were trained to commit atrocities, and virtually all are living freely. It appears peace and reconciliation are deemed more important than justice. The torture centre of Tuol Sleng in PP, and the memorial at the Killing Fields outside it are chilling reminders of the potential for us all to commit evil on a huge scale.
Cambodia is now teeming with children. After many years of people fearing their neighbours might kill them, procreating on a large scale has definitely arrived in Cambodia. Pediatric hospitals built with aid money try to cope with this "populate after perishing" policy. Young people play with kites or volleyballs seemingly everywhere.
PP predated the French, but they set it out in an orderly fashion and introduced the french bread. The principal industry in Cambodia is clothing manufacture, and there are many factories around PP. We managed to pick up many cheap seconds, such as Gap tops for a few dollars. The most popular way to get around on shopping trips is the moto: its not uncommon to see three, four or even more people on these motorbikes weaving through the chaotic motion that can only be charitably be called traffic.
We spent some time in PP with missionary friends (the Painters) from Australia. The Christmas Church service we went to on December 23rd went for about 3 hours and was entirely in Khmae, one of the world's most complex languages and completely alien to western European language speakers. My reading that morning of the account of the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11 was highly appropriate. Apart from words like "Israel", "Assyria", "Marie", "Joseph" and "Amen", we might as well have been on a different planet. The nativity play in Khmae was notable for the very large amount the wise men had to say (I don't remember that in the Bible), and the birth pain noises of "Marie": which as you can imagine somewhat transcends cultures.
The next day we headed down the coast to Sihanoukville, Cambodia's only legal port and centre of the small Riviera. This is the kind of place that Graham Greene would have loved: hints of a grand past, probably pre Khmer Rouge, shine through the shambolic present. There was the quite possibly closed hulk of the Independence Hotel on the hill, and Victory Beach around the point. Independence and Victory from what? And the present does not make it obvious that these names are appropriate.
We parked ourselves in the VIP room of a hotel with wonderful views of the beach. It was ours, complete with peeling paint, for a mere $15 a night.
Christmas Day was a relatively quiet affair until our USD 2 buffet in the evening watching Britney and various Boy Bands videos, complete with karaoke friendly lyrics. Until very recently karaoke was very popular in Cambodia, in part due to it often being a front for "taxi girls" aka prostitutes. Rumour has it that when too well connected people were discovered in these establishments the powers that be decided to shut them down.
The beaches and islands off the coast were very scenic. The water was clean and warm, and on occasion schools of tiny fish leapt into the air. This was a good opportunity for swimming, enjoying the great weather and for Josh (the youngest Painter) to get over his fear of water. Other highlights down the coast included almost not recognising what we suspect was the Cambodian Coast Guard (two operational boats counted), and having our van held up by naval recruits pretending to be ducks waddling down the road.
Cambodia was highly memorable.

Andrew & Jen