Kampot, Kep and PP

09.06.2003 35 °C

So after Sihanoukville, it was on to the "somnolent riverside town of Kampot" (to quote Lonely Planet). It certainly had a sleepy feel to it with cows lulling by the roadside, pigs pottering about in the rubbish piles, chickens and ducks taking their time to cross the road, locals bathing in the waterholes, and endless views of palm-fringed farmlands.

It unfortunately also had a small overpopulation of feral dogs...

Aside from that, it's a laid-back town with some quite lovely examples of colonial architecture, and as it doesn't see too many tourists, is a place where the locals are still surprised (even shocked sometimes) to see the face of a 'baraang' (foreigner) and kids run out onto the roadside just to say hello and sometimes pinch your skin or high-five you. Some of the most radiant smiles I've ever seen were in and around Kampot. There are also plenty of local students who are keen to practice their English with foreigners and if you take a stroll up the riverside, you are sure to meet several young people eager to converse with you.

When I arrived in Kampot I took a moto straight out to the delightful seaside resort of Kep-sur-Mer. Around the turn of the century, Kep was a favourite haunt for the French upper-class and since then the Cambodian high rollers have decided it's a nifty place to hang out and swim, laze about and lose money on the pokies! It's hardly what you'd call a beautiful beach but it's certainly a peaceul enough place to cool down from the afternoon heat.

It's surrounded by rather thick jungled mountains, and former villas of the King. Most of them were gutted and looted in 1980 because of major famine following the ousting of the Khmer Rouge (officially anyway) and all the goodies were sold off to the Vietnamese. It was nice to swing on a hammock under a beach hut while eating my lunch and having the locals stare at me. At one stage I had about 7 kids from the one family taking turns peak-a-booing me and then running off to hide. Kep isn't far from Phnom Voar, the hill where the three backpackers were held out in in 1994 before being executed. It's all pretty safe now though. The area still has major land mine problems though so you can't really do too much aimless wandering off the main roads.

I spent Saturday up in Bokor National Park. For many years, this park was off limits for visitors as it was held by the Khmer Rouge during their reign of insanity and occasionally is a hang out joint for illegal armed loggers. But now it attracts visitors who want to suss out the wildlife (gibbons, tigers, leopards, sambars, drongos (!!) and buzzards) - not that we saw any as they are mostly nocturnal- and have a look at the Bokor Hill station, built by the French in 1922. From atop the station, you get awesome views of the Cambodian coast and Phu Quoc Island (now part of Vietnam but according to our 'guide', it really belongs to Cambodia). If you go up there on the right day, the whole hill top becomes enshrouded with thick clouds and fog that pass through the decrepid buildings that once formed the hill station complex. You can wander through the old casino, dance in the deserted ballroom, peek in the old kitchens, bathrooms, bedrooms....and clouds will suddenly pass through the building. At times the visibility drops to nothing. But hey, we went on a clear day!!! So much for me visiting "the eeriest place on the planet".

Grrrr...the place is still a little creepy though as it is in the middle of nowhere and if you wander back towards the old watchtower to take a photo of the casino, the silence is penetrative and the isolation, incredible. The Khmer Rouge used Bokor Hill station as a hide-out in the 1970s and for three months in 1979, kept prisoners holed up in the catholic church and primary school while the Vietnamese attacked them. Also on the hill is the former Summer Palace of King Norodom - a rather spartan palace but one of which the King was very fond. It was a good day though - nice crowd of people.

On Sunday it was on to Phnom Penh, Cambodia's capital. When it was part of French Indochina, PP was considered to be the most charming of the Indochinese cities and it's easy to see why. It's really very delightful.....I'd had high expectations for PP and I wasn´t disappointed! It's a little like a grungy version of Paris (that's my take on it anyway) - you still have the wide boulevardes, the chic cafes lining the riverfront, and the elegant buildings. Instead of insane Parisiens driving around in their cars trying to run down pedestrians, you have insane Khmer people on their motos swerving around the pedestrians.

Along the riverfront of the Tonle Sap you can watch the locals strut in their Sunday-best and pose for photos in front of the Royal Palace; monks stopping for a smoke (true!) or a chat with a foreigner; odious, corpulent (ok let's just say they're FAT), middle-aged men salivating over pre-pubescent girls dressed in outfits purchased for them by their sugar-daddies.....

I guess you have to look at it from the point of view of the young girls preyed upon by these slimeballs. To many of them, the ogre is but a one-way ticket to somewhat of a better life.....he buys them clothes, drives them around on his snappy moto, takes them to fancy restaurants...... in exchange for some "company" (in one way or another). As much as we can sit back and look on in horror from our comfortable perches, I think that as much as we'd hate to admit it, many of us would do exactly the same....

Also more apparent in PP than down on the south coast is the number of land mine survivors and homeless kids. I guess as in all big cities, they come to the city in search of the better life....but are still unable to attain their dreams and survive by begging. It's been tremendously confronting here as there are so many of them and they can be relentless at time. You see children as young as 4, nursing 6 month old babies, walking down the street and asking for money, food....anything.....you could try to give a little money to each of them but it's impossible to give to everyone, and then how do you know who is actually getting the money or what it's used for?? And how can you possibly discriminate between the children. Why should you give to one and not another? Do you give to the one that looks the saddest? The one with the dirtiest clothes? The one who fell victim to a land-mine? How to discriminate between hundreds of children who are all desperately in need?

Everywhere you go....

Aside from all this, I'm glad to be back in a city of motos, though the amount of trust you have to put if your baseball-capped driver is quite astounding at times. What are the road rules? Are the moto drivers even licensed??!?!!? Everytime you think you are going to crash..... you somehow make it through. Sometimes you can be heading full-on into the traffic and they all just go around you. Crazy stuff.....but the locals do it every day and they manage quite well. And it's really good fun. Pretty much anyone here with a motorbike has his own business, so I guess, irrespective of how ludicrous the driving may seem at times, there is an element of caution employed in the ludicrosity.

I visited the National Museum after some lunch. I'd heard that if you go at sundown, you can see a swarm of bats flying out of the belfry of the museum. I'd for some reason, been looking forward to that more than the contents of the museum (terrible, I know). Unfortunately, the government pumped some extra funding into the museum earlier in the year and got rid of the colony. The museum was pretty interesting anyway....lot's of pre-Angkorian and classical Angkorian ruins, relics, ceramics, and many many Buddha, Shiva, Vishnu, Brahma, Jayavarman etc statues....pretty interesting stuff and perhaps useful as I'm heading to Angkor in a few days.

In the evening I met up with Leila, and a couple we met on our Bokor trip (David and Sheila) at the Foreign Correspondent's Club on the riverside (very comfy bar/cafe). Nice place to sit for a while but a little too upmarket for me in my backpacker garb.

Yesterday I made my way to the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, the S-21 prison used by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge for imprisoning, interrogating and torturing the 17,000 or so people who passed through here. Aside from the intellectuals who were held here before being moved off for execution at the Killing Fields, there were ordinary men, women and children whose only crime was that they were affiliated with someone that the Khmer Rouge opposed - or in some cases, they were executed for no reason at all. Initially the KR wanted to restructure Cambodian society into a Maoist, agrarian co-operative and within two weeks of them toppling the government, they shifted the whole population out into the countryside to work the land....they killed off all the intellects they thought might uprise against their movement and scared the hell out of everyone else....then just started massacring people at random. As many as 2 million people were slaughtered...

The setting of the prison is in the grounds of an old high school...it's in a relatively nice neighbourhood in the centre of town....it could be any school, anywhere in the world.....you can still see fragments from the school's running years, amidst the remnants of the prison.....
From there I visited the Killing Fields at Choeung Ek, which have now largely been cleared out. The mass graves in which remains of people once lay are now large holes in the ground.....there is now a memorial stupa built in the centre of the fields containing some 8000 skulls....this was only one of hundreds of these fieldsscattered across the nation. Very informative place, but, predictably, bleak. Bizarrely, right next to the Killing Fields is a shooting range where, if you are warped enough, you can shoot 5 bullets from an AK-47 for $5, or if you are a complete pycho, you can shoot a cow with a bazooka gun for $100....needless to say I didn't partake in either activity.

I needed something a little less heavy after this, so hit the Psar Tuol Tom Pong ("Russian Market"), located funnily enough on Mao Tse Tung Blvd (plenty of Commo dudes had streets named after them around town) and without too much haggling managed to purchase a ridiculous number of things for a ridiculously small amount of money. This morning, Leila and I met our motos and spent half the day riding round town and stopping to visit Wat Phnom, The Royal Palace & Silver Pagoda, and Central Market.

Wat Phnom rests atop the only hill in town (it makes perfect sense to name a whole city after a mountain right, even if it's thesize of a molehill?) and has been the site of pagodas since 1373. People come from all over town to pray for good luck and success and visit the statue of Lady Penh, after whom the city was named. The Royal Palace and Silver Pagoda were a tad pricey at 3 dollars, considering the royal family were in residence and half the buildings were sectioned off!!! And then the Silver Pagoda....well I had in mind that the building itself was silver in colour (at least!) but it's the tiles on the floor that are silver, andthey are covered by carpets!!! Crazy......This pagoda was home to another Emerald Buddha, about the size of an average adult head! This one is made of Baccarat crystal though rather than emerald. Quite enjoyed the Central Market....good variety of gear and lots of vendors hassling you for business! The Cambodians are much easier to haggle with than the Vietnamese which makes super bargains a cinch.

Quite a cruisy afternoon today. Motoed a little around the town to take some more pics, and then went and vegged out in a cafe for the afternoon along the riverside....doing some reading and people watching. I actually met an Aussie guy down there who wasn't a) old b) overweight or c) salivating over a 12 year old Khmer girl!

Tomorrow we're catching a boat up to Siem Reap....I'm quite looking forward to sitting on the rooftop for five hours (with sunscreen slapped on of course) and checking out the view.

Will write again from Siem Reap....

Cheers
Belinda xo