November 4 2010 / Phnom Penh and Siem Reap, Cambodia

We got a phonecall wake up at 0630 this morning, thirty minutes late—we had to leave the hotel by 7am.  So I kind of rushed around to get ready and then headed downstairs to the hotel lobby to grab some breakfast.  I have missed having good breakfasts—the ship’s are pretty dreadful, but here I had an orange juice, croissant, some noodles with egg in them, a piece of bacon, and an omlette.  The noodles especially were sooo good.  Then we hopped out to the bus and headed off to the Toul Sleng Museum, which isn’t so much a museum as it was the actual buildings S-21 where people were detained, interrogated, tortured and killed during the genocide in the late 1970s.  We  drove off there and finally reached a compound of four buildings that had barbed wire all over the outer walls.  We were given strict instruction—absolutely no laughing, and you must be quiet.  We walked out into the courtyard of the place, and our guide pointed out the buildings to us.  The one on the very far left was where People were tortured and detained, the second two had pictures of some of the victims, and another was divided into brick cells.  The last one had paintings that some of the prisoners had painted during their detainment. 

Out of the 20,000 people who had been taken there, said our guide, only seven survived, and out of those seven, only three remained alive today.  “One of them,” said our guide, “is the man who is sitting over there.”  We looked, expecting to see a statue—instead, there was a short, old man wearing a green hat and a tattered coat sitting on a park bench, watching the people as they went by.  “If you want to support him, please buy his book,” said our guide.  I walked over to the old man and he smiled—it didn’t look like he spoke English.  I gestured to the little paperback books besides him, and he took one, signed it, and handed it to me with a bow, which I returned.  I’ve only read a little of it on the bus, but it’s fascinating so far.

The first building, apparently bodies had been found in those very cells when the place had been liberated.  There was a big picture on the wall of the crumpled body on an iron bed, and in the room, only the bed and a gasoline can remained.  My stomach churned as I stared at it, and in each of the other rooms I saw the same thing—a picture of the body, the same bed, sometimes ankle shackles or a crowbar.  It was so eerie.  Next I went and looked through all the pictures of the victims—it was horrifying to look at all these kids and realize they were the soldiers, and all the men and women and realize they’d all been tortured and killed.  Further along were tiny cells that were brick and mortar in large rooms.  On the upper levels, there was barbed wire striped across the air in front of the fence—a suicide barrier.  By the time I hit the paintings, my stomach was kind of rolling.  You can’t help but hit a place like that and just feel the death in the air, and how it chills your bones.  By the time I got all the way over to the area where there were paintings that the survivors had done, I was just feeling ill.  I couldn’t help but notice how red the grass was, though it was irrational to think that it was from the blood in the soil. 

We went next to the Killing Fields, which was the site of over sixty mass graves that prisoners of the Khmer Rouge had to dig themselves and then were executed brutally.  We saw a tree that they would beat babies to death on, and even the sugar palm tree that they used the wood to slit the throats of their prisoners.  There was a trail all along the deeply pockmarked soil.  Apparently not even all of them have been excavated.  All over the trail were little flecks of white, pieces of teeth, the circle of a skull, even a femur bone just laying out on the trail that I moved to the side, so it wouldn’t be stepped on.  Clothing was still scattered everywhere, most times half-buried and in tatters.  In the center was a tower, filled with skulls that they’d found and put on display—they’d cremated most of the bodies, but the skulls were still there.  I took a flower and some incense and gave the man at the front a donation, and put the flowers in the vase and the incense in the sand jar, and then I just knelt there, on my knees, and thought.  …I think the most incredible thing was the amount of life that was there… swarms of butterflies and dragonflies everywhere, a mother hen and her chicks, nesting on one of the dips of the mass graves…..

Jeanette and I noticed the gift store.  We were sort of torn between horror and curiosity, and realized that we needed to go inside—it would be too good to talk about for our Anthropology of Tourism class.  Strangely enough, it had absolutely nothing in it about the killing fields or even about the genocide, which I couldn’t figure out was more or less horrible.  =/

After that we changed gears pretty rapidly.  We went off to the Royal Palace to see the outer courtyard and also see a special building called the Silver Pagoda.  Really we only saw kind of the outer courtyard and glimpse inside a couple of buildings, but they were such beautifully ornate palaces!  They were big golden and red buildings, in Chinese pavilion style.  Inside the Silver Pagoda was all of these beautiful religious treasures—a full-sized golden Buddha with gigantic diamonds, smaller silver and bronze statues, lots of jade treasures.  It was pretty overwhelming—couldn’t help but think how many people this amount of riches could feed.  It was a delicate balance between protecting pieces of history and being insensitive to current needs…

Because we had gotten in so late due to the airplane being delayed, our guide decided to let us take a stop at the National Museum.  I was kind of exhausted by this point, and the last thing I wanted to do was go into a museum and look around, so Jeanette and I decided to wander around the streets for a half hour.  It was actually really neat.  I crossed the road the first time on my own and almost wet my pants—you just have to not look at any of the cars a a very low price.  Well, we found a bootleg DVD STORE.  I got Iron Man I and II, Inglorious Basterds, Glee Season I, AND The COMPLETE BOX SET of James Bond movies for—get this—23 dollars.  AND, the absolute BEST part is, when I opened the little baggies up, they’re actually legitimate DVDs—there was just no box.  I AM EXCITE.  I have been craving James Bond movies SO MUCH LATELY!

So now I’m basically out of money for Cambodia.  Cambodia likes the USD even more than its own currency, and I didn’t bring enough USD.  But I found it to be totally worth it.  :D  I actually wish I had bought more, but you never want to put all your eggs in one basket when it comes to places like those.  Anyway, we had a grand ol’ time at the mall, but after an hour we had to go to the airport and get on our flight to Siem Reap!  Cambodia had really mellow airport security, which was pretty awesome.  It also had free WiFi, though I couldn’t take advantage of it due to my computer being silly.  >(  But aside from that, a perfectly okay flight.  I wrapped my head with my plaid hipster button up and dozed off.  It was another short flight, and soon we touched down.  Our hotel was the Allson Angor Paradise, which is a big hotel on a street with other big hotels on it.  We kind of freshened up a little bit before going off to dinner in the coolest building I’ve ever seen. 

Imagine a huge warehouse, open air with a tin roof, with red Chinese lanterns hanging down from the ceiling.  The floor is filled with TONS of long tables, taking all the space, and in the back where there were dozens of tables of different kinds of food, served buffet style.  In the front was a stage with a big statue Angkor Wat head in the middle, with doors on either side for a cultural dance performance—besides it, the cats from the neighborhood lurked on a nearby roof.  This was the Kulen II Restaurant.  It is kind of an adventure to get food—I don’t think anyone came back to their seats before spending 20 minutes trying to find everything.  I got delicious fried rice and even better noodles, as well as spring rolls, egg rolls, a sort of cheesey-egg thing, and lots of pineapple.  After a little while, the cultural dance show started up.  They would do lots of dances between men and women, women and “gods” or maybe demons, I wasn’t sure.  Either way it was a good lot of fun, because Lauren and I were making up the storylines together and putting in dialogue to the body motions.  Lots of women were “simply not havin’ it.”  Still, for all we joked, I really enjoyed it.  Lots of people split  for the night market instead, but as I was broke anyway, I was happy to watch all the way though, especially for the gorgeous costumes!  Lots of demon masks, beautiful dresses and headdresses, and just the movements were so cool. 

After that was over we got ready to go, but as I was walking by, Steven called me over—he was on a different Cambodia SAS trip.  “What are you doing tonight?” he asked.  As I didn’t know, he kind of laughed and said “You wanna try some snake wine?  We bought a bottle and are looking for some people to share it with!” 

…Well, it looked as though The Someone Up There had given me something to do instead of going to the night market.

When I got back to the hotel, I went off to find Steven and found him at the lobby.  I let him use my computer for a while to check his email while I goofed off looking at Indian soap operas on TV.  We also tried to see if any traveler blogs from Cambodia said that people died from snake whiskey (or, as the label said, “Sank Whiskey”), but it looked like everyone just said it was really freaking terrible.  In fact, it looked really freaking terrible.  Inside the bottle was a yellowish liquid, and in that was a rearing cobra.  In its mouth was the tail of a full-sized scorpion.  They were both propped up by some kind of herbs.  A couple more people came by on his Temples of Angkor trip, including a girl from my Anthropology of Tourism class.  After a while, though, it became inevitable—we had to drink this stuff and then go bed, as it was growing late and we had to wake up at 4:30am to take a sunrise tour of Angkor Wat.  We clustered near the mini bar, and Steven popped off the cap.  I took a whiff of it—it smelled like death, literally.  Or maybe fermentation.  Either way I shuddered and began to have intense second thoughts.  But after Steven and his friend took theirs like champs, I realized that you can’t pick and choose when you have a motto like GO BIG OR GO HOME. I poured the smallest amount of alcohol imaginable and took the shot.

It tasted so fucking bad.  I almost threw up twice.  It tasted, quite frankly, like dead animal soaked in alcohol (which is exactly what it was), and what’s worse at first it didn’t taste too bad and then the aftertaste hit and hit HARD.  It feels like a snake is in your belly all coiled up.  An hour later I’m still feeling it in my stomach, so I bummed a Pepto-Bismal from Steven before I headed back to my room to reflect on the day.  NEVER AGAIN.  =|  Am I glad I did it?  To be honest, I’m not sure.  Usually when I’m way past the event I’m glad I tried it, but every once in a while I think about the taste and just shudder.  UGH!  Never ever ever again.  Disgusting. 

This trip abruptly feels like it’s going by so fast.  At the beginning, in Spain and Morocco and Ghana, everything was going so slowly because there were classes to balance out port.  Now I want to just dig in my claws and say, SLOW DOWN!  I don’t want this to ever be over.