Escape From Phnom Penh

Tuesday, March 1

We had better luck getting into the National Museum on Tuesday. Since this is the Cambodian Rijksmuseum, we got to meet some of the Khmer masters.

The place is full of religious art recovered from sites around the country. Apparently Hinduism and Buddhism coexisted over a long time.

Many of the pieces, including those from Angkor, were representations of Shiva, the destroyer, or Vishnu, the preserver. They are two-thirds of a Hindu trinity that also includes Brahma, the creator.

According to the captions on the wall, Brahma often appears in a lotus flower blooming from Vishnu’s navel. It was disappointing, but I didn’t see an example of that.

The rooms are full of statuary in stone and bronze. It tends to be abstract and to use symbolism that I don’t know. But even so, the figures come across as graceful and often serene.

There is a huge bronze, perhaps the largest in Southeast Asia, that was discovered at Angkor in the 1930s. The story goes that a farmer or fisherman received a vision in a dream of the Buddha asking to be released from the earth. Somehow, the dreamer got in touch with an archaeologist and led him to a spot on a small island in one of the reservoirs at Angkor, where they uncovered the statue.

A small bronze, just a few inches high, is identified as Avalokiteshvara. This is an Indian Buddhist saint. At some point, when his legend went to China, it became tied up with that of a woman and so he becomes Kun Yum, or Kuan Yin, a female buddha often depicted holding a child—a Chinese Buddhist version of the Virgin Mary.

My fondest memory of Phnom Penh is the garden of the museum. The building surrounds a central courtyard. Joanna and I bought bottles of water and sat at a table to drink them.

We were sheltered in the shade. The garden was bright in the direct sun. There was a flowering tree, possibly a variety of magnolia stretching over a small pond. The reflection of light off the water provided gentle movement.

We sat for a while and stared. We returned to the museum, and then came back to the table later in order to stare some more.

We weren’t the only ones impressed. A monk stood in the middle of the space and recorded a 360-degree video.

For dinner, we visited Kowa, the Japanese restaurant next to the hotel. Joanna had a very savory grilled mackerel. I had inari, a form of sushi that puts rice inside a thin shell of fried tofu, and a bowl of soup with soba noodles.

Wednesday, March 2.

Joanna wanted to walk along the Riverfront in daylight, so we got out early to beat the heat of the day. It was a treat.

The breeze was blowing. There were boats of all kinds on the water,  a couple that looked like small freighters, ferries taking people to Siem Reap or Viet Nam, and lots of the little narrow craft. Some were speeding along, driven by outboard motors. Others were inching through the water by the power of oars.

The park overlooks the confluence of the Mekong and Tonle Sap. It’s broad and hazy. On the far bank is the grand hotel, the largest structure in sight on that side. That’s where all those flags of nations are flying.

A man and a boy were picking their way along the edge of the water with a fishing net. The water is full of trash, like everything else here, but like waters everywhere is a source of food for many.

The bank is high, and reinforced by masonry, something like the L.A. River, only this river has water in it. Also, thank Buddha, nobody doing numbers from “Grease.”

We sat on a bench and ate breakfast, which we had brought with us in a bag: egg, pastry, yogurt, soy milk, tea.

The boy climbed up the embankment, but came empty-handed. The man followed. Joanna asked if he had caught anything. He held up a bag. He had caught at least one fish.

Toward the north end of the park the silt collects at the foot of the steep bank. People have cultivated fields there, and have planted a couple of saplings, suggesting they expect to be there for a while.

Several small boats were moored together. They were partly covered, and perhaps people live in them.

The airline, Cambodia Angkor, sent us an e-mail saying our flight to Siem Reap had been canceled and that we were switched to later flight. We needed to print the new tickets.

So another small task of the day was to e-mail the tickets to the front desk, which would print them. Of course, there was trouble printing one of the documents. There always is. So we thought an internet cafe could fix us up.

That’s when an interesting adventure started. We went to the tuk-tuk parked in front of the hotel, but there was no driver in sight. We waited a minute, and then called another.

Suddenly an asshole drove his vehicle up the wrong side of the road between me and the new driver. Another pulled up on the far side and started giving my driver a load of bullshit.

I said, “No, too much hostility here. I’m not going with any of you.” Get this: The bullshit slinger starts to follow us. It’s like he has claimed us and we have no choice. I’m not going to do even small business with an asshole like that.

I told him that I refused to ride with him, but he wouldn’t leave us alone. I didn’t want to get into another tuk-tuk. For all I know, these guys could wind up shooting each other. To get rid of him, we ducked into a coffee shop called the Kamhouse.

As the door closed behind us, I saw a big guy peering at us through the window.

As we were sipping our watermelon juice, I could tell Joanna was really rattled. I wasn’t too happy. The lady who manages the place started talking to us in order to practice her already excellent English.

She asked where we had come from. She hadn’t been to New York, but know the names of several states, she said. She had visited Vancouver, the one in Canada. A friend of hers had driven from the East Coast to meet her there.

The big guy who had been watching us had gone across the street to a food stand, and then came back and sat in a chair by the door. Who is that? I asked the lady.

It was her security guard. He had been watching over the lady and her place after we entered under such unusual circumstances.

We went back to hotel to ask them to call a tuk-tuk. A different person was showing up for front desk duty. He was able to print what we needed, so it saved us a trip.

While we were in the lobby, we met a man with a strange accent that I couldn’t place. As it turns out, he is a Canadian expat from Vancouver. He lives in Sihanoukville, near the ocean, but travels a few times a year to Phnom Penh to see a doctor.

The weather we have been getting is hotter than usual for this time of year, he said. It is hotter than usual in Sihanoukville too, and he blamed the heat largely on the El Nino current.

Our steak dinner at a riverside cafe called Deja Vu was another highlight of Phnom Penh. Not only was the food good—grass-fed beef, a little tough, but very tasty—but the view of the river was superb. We were looking out across the park where we had walked in the morning.

We watched the endless stream of tuk-tuks and motorbikes go by. There were a few cars, many vans, and the occasional overloaded truck with people sitting on top.

We strolled afterwards through a night market, which was selling mostly clothes.

We called up a tuk-tuk outside the market. The driver wanted five dollars for the mile to the hotel. I offered three. He wanted to haggle, but tuk-tuks are a buyer’s market in Phnom Penh.

I told him that it is usually two dollars for this trip, and I feel overcharged to pay three. He can take us or I’ll get somebody else.

I am sick of these drivers. I’m sick of Phnom Penh and am eager to get out.

Thursday, March 3. 

We were packed and ready early. The lobby has a window and our room doesn’t, so we decided to wait down there. So we went to the lobby long before the car was supposed to pick us up for the airport

I looked out the glass front and there was a monk standing with his bowl. A kid really. If somebody told me he was 13, I’d believe it.

I went to the man at the desk and asked if it was appropriate for me to give a monk money, rather than food. He said it would be a good thing. I offered the kid a dollar. He didn’t take it from my hands (you always offer anything to anybody with two hands here), but instead raised a cloth bag that he carried in the crook of an elbow.

I dropped the money in the bag and went back inside. A lady who works for the hotel meanwhile had given the monk something. She had taken her shoes off and knelt.

The monk looked at me, right inside the door. I suddenly remembered there was more to come. I had done this years ago in Chiang Mai, but had forgotten most of it. I had forgotten to take my shoes off. I forgot that he was going to chant a blessing over my head. So I stood there inside making a wai while the lady knelt outside, and we heard this youngster chant a prayer for us.

The airline always tells you to get to the airport at least two hours early. Cambodia Angkor Airways is no different. We were earlier than that, because the car was available early. Our plane was scheduled to leave at 1:45. They didn’t bother to open check-in desk till noon.

About the only thing edible at the airport was some cake. There were sandwiches that had been sitting in wrappers for who knows how long. That’s always disgusting. I got a piece of stale banana cake and some carrot cake that was better. I had espresso, my first coffee in days. I’d been drinking tea to keep my stomach easy. Joanna joined me but only drank water.

Siem Reap is a dingy, dirty city. It has pockets of tentative gentrification surrounded by stretches of decay. There is trash everywhere. In that respect, it’s a lot like Phnom Penh.

The hotel, as it turns out, has no elevator. They started to put us on the fourth floor. I was having flashbacks to the hostel. So they moved us to the second.

We had agreed to take a taxi ride to meet a boat and see the sunset over the floating city. Somehow, I thought the guy was talking about the temple on the floating island at the city of Angkor. It was a 30 km round trip and the guy was asking 16 bucks. Sounded good.

On the way, Joanna told me she was very hungry, so we stopped at a market on the roadside to buy bananas.

I was still in my flying clothes: white shirt and white linen jacket. No tie, thank goodness. I was walking in and out of the stalls in this rural roadside market looking for decent bananas. I felt like Indiana Jones.

Needless to say, we wound up nowhere near Angkor, but it was colorful.

The road is paved, but badly and rough. It passes fields where people grow rice and lotus. Wooden houses on stilts line the road on both sides. Some are maintained. Others are collapsing. None looks prosperous.

We had read that Phnom Penh and Siem Reap are like protected bubbles in the misery of greater Cambodia. They may be better off than the rest of the country, but that isn’t saying much. Phnom Penh and Siem Reap are both pretty miserable. But this countryside was certainly more so.

We got to the boat station and learned what I should have asked before we set out. Twenty five dollars a person, cash only, to ride a dilapidated motorboat up a muddy canal to the lake. The driver, of course, got a cut of that.

When you get onto the lake, you see a floating city, thousands of people living in poverty on houseboats. There is an orphanage there, too.

They took us to the crocodile farm, a boat that had five immobile crocodiles in the hold. Why they are there or where they came from I didn’t bother to ask.

You go up onto an upper deck to watch the sunset. Here’s happens: It gets red; it gets lower in the sky.

Even after the sun disappears, the subsistence fishermen in the floating city are still desperately poor.

There were electric lights, even an occasional TV screen, visible in the stilt houses when we drove back in the dark. Electricity, the driver said, has reached there only recently.

The food in Cambodia, with a few bright exceptions, has been remarkably mediocre. The hotel dining room is no exception. I had yellow noodles, which weren’t bad, with chicken, which was. It had the stale flavor of being recooked.

Joanna had chicken with cashew nuts, but even though they assured us they understood, they served it loaded with chili and black pepper. The second time, after we sent it back, they got the chilis out, the cashews too.

Enough for now. More to come.

Be well, all.

Harry