Tuk-tuk, Lady?

I mentioned tuk-tuks in a couple previous emails, but I wanted to emphasize their place in our travels again. The men who drive these carts (or motos) wait outside of every place a foreigner might go into and when you come out, they all jump up at once and yell "tuk-tuk" or "moto". They are, of course, trying to get a customer, but seeing as how Sarah and I try to walk pretty much everywhere we go around town, we usually don't take them up on this. So we endure a string of "tuk-tuk lady?" from every one of the thousands of these guys that we pass as we walk down the street. The only thing that keeps this from getting royally irritating is that it is always said with a big grin and good humor. Cambodians have a good store of both of these things. I decided I could make a lot of money selling t-shirts here that say, "NO tuk-tuk!" in really big letters. One funny side note is that we've noticed that many people selling stuff on the streets (especially children and some women) tend to use "lady" for either Sarah or I.... So I'm officially a lady!

Sarah and I arrived in Phnom Penh after a bus ride from Siem Reap. Phnom Penh is the capital of Cambodia, and a pretty decent city. The outskirts are your typical big city slums, and the traffic and pollution aren't great, but the city really has a nice feel to it. The main downtown area is situated along the banks of the Mekong River, right where the Tonle Sap River joins it. The views across the water are great, and the colonial architecture hides a lot of nice restaurants and bars (almost none of which we ate at because they are spendy). There are long, wide open areas (similar to Washington D.C.'s National Mall) in several directions, with monuments and fountains and temples all along them. They made for a great place for Sarah to run in the mornings, and in the evenings half the city was out walking, playing soccer, or sitting in the grass with their families. It was a really nice space for all of this. We stayed at a guesthouse that was teeming with guests -- seriously, we were shocked by the number of people that were in the main restaurant area at all times of the day. It made for a fun atmosphere. And we had a TV in our room!

A few nights ago (on the last night of our stay in Siem Reap) we had watched "The Killing Fields", a movie about the fall of Cambodia to the Khmer Rouge in the 1970's. It was very eerie to arrive in Phnom Penh with that movie fresh in our minds. Some of you may remember Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge army, but for those of you who don't, let's just say he was a bad dude. We were walking down streets in Phnom Penh that would have been deserted in 1976 when the Khmer Rouge took over the city. They forced a mass evacuation of the city, and marched most of the inhabitants out into the countryside and forced them into slave labor in the rice fields. Thus began a short (3 years & 8 months), brutal reign that resulted in the deaths of almost 2 million people. I don't think even Hitler managed that. Pol Pot's goal was to create a people-run, agrarian society where people lived simply and did as they were told for the betterment of all. In reality this translated to killing every intellectual, doctor, teacher, journalist, etc, (pretty much anyone that spoke up) until everyone was equal (except the leaders, of course). There's a high school in Phnom Penh that was converted into a place of incarceration and torture -- these days it is a museum. We didn't visit this, but we did go out to the "Killing Fields" of Choeung Ek, the fields where they took everyone they interrogated at the high school. The 17,000 people who were killed here (men, women, and children) were dumped in mass graves. They apparently played loud music a lot to cover up the moans and screams so that people who lived nearby wouldn't hear them.... There's a monument erected at the sight that contains over 8000 exhumed skulls of victims, all arranged by age and sex. It's a pretty gruesome sight. You can't really see the skulls in the following photo, but they are in there. This puts a shirt I saw a few days ago into stark perspective: "Communism killed 100 million people and all I got was this lousy t-shirt".


Choeung Ek memorial, Cambodia

The killing fields themselves are quite a contradiction. Despite the terrible things that happened there, it's a beautiful place; all orchards and green fields and trees. There are birds singing, butterflies everywhere.... Very different than my visit to Dachau, a concentration camp in Germany. It was stark; iron bars, wooden shacks, bare trees, and incinerators. Choeung Ek felt like it had life again. The Cambodian people are the same way -- they've been through unspeakable horrors, but still they retain an optimism and positive outlook that is amazing. Hardy people, that's all I can say....

So to end this posting on a happier note, I included a couple pictures that Sarah took (my camera is still broken) of the interesting impromptu gas stations that we see a lot in Cambodia. In all the other countries I've ever been to, I've never encountered this. Each "gas station" is a small stand with some 2 liter glass Pepsi bottles on it. Each one is filled with gas, and when a moto bike pulls up, they pay the set price and the person dumps it in their tank! There's also a version where the station is a 55-gallon drum of gas that they pump from.


A Cambodian "gas station"


Another gas station. A driver is asleep in his tuk-tuk while other men play a game.


Selling pomelos on the streets of Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

We're on the southern coast in Sihanoukville now. Lots of beach, sun, fish, and still no birds! I'll write more soon.

Later!

-Matt!