Unkie Herb

Where to start…

I rented a motorbike two days ago, a bicycle yesterday, and so I’m already familiar with Phnom Penh’s streets. As with every poor Asian city, the number of motorbikes is astounding, the insanity with which they drive is hilarious, and the ease with which they deal with the craziness is nothing short of remarkable.

Having driven around Taiwan for more than a year, I was pretty prepared for driving here. One thing that is very different is the pace. Whereas Taipei is all “I’m late for work” speed demons, P.P. is all “we’ll get there eventually” relaxed. It’s a nice change.

Driving around yesterday we saw some sights, including the independance monument, with a palace in the background.

As well, we went to S-21, which is a former high school. During the Pol Pot, Khmer Rouge genocide during the seventies, this place was converted into an interrogation centre and work camp. The regime tortured and jailed thousands of their own people here, eventually sending them off the the more infamous Killing Fields for execution. This genocide was massive, and the Khmer Rouge regime was supported by the U.S. and other western governments. Learning about it firsthand is moving to say the least.

The school itself was left largely alone, although they’ve cleaned the bloodstains and placed hundreds of photos, many of the victims, in the former classrooms. The gallows for hanging are still standing, as are the cell walls and steel beds used for electrical torture. The whole place had a surreal feeling about it, and if you allowed yourself to imagine what had transpired where you were standing, it became difficult to swallow. Overall, impressive and disturbing, but worth a view. Here’s a photo I took of one of the torture beds.

As well, we (the Aussie guy, Rich, who I rented the bikes with) went to Wat Phnom, the spiritual centre of the city. Placed on a small hill near the river, it’s an impressive Buddhist structure that warmed me up to what I’ll see in ancient form in Angkor. As well, the hill had its own troop of monkeys (hilarious) and an elephant show (sort of depressing, poor fella). The big guy didn’t seem poorly treated, but that might have been because dozens of tourists were around. I wasn’t going to snap a photo of the elephant, but then I saw this Cambodian boy squaring up to challenge the behemoth, so I crouched down behind the kid and captured this David v. Goliath moment:

My guesthouse is pretty sweet. It’s Number Nine, and might be one of the most popular in the tourist area near Boeng Kak Lake, in the north end of the city. It has a twenty-four hour bar and restaurant, a free pool table, hammocks, and cheap rooms. Because the lake is so high, the water runs right up under the patio, and so you can hear fish jump and smack against the underside of the platform that your dinner table is perched on.

I caught a couple of decent photos. One of the view from my chair the first morning I arrived:

And another of the flooding between the bar and the rooms. My room is down that row to the left, behind the ferns.

The guesthouse is at a perfect level of business. If it was high season now it might be a little too busy, but its just busy enough to be interesting, without getting overly loud or crazy.

One more thing that is clearly noticable here is how young the population here is. Because of the genocide I mentioned above, the average age here is somewhere in the teens, and around half the population is under twenty. Just walking or driving down the street, you notice it. There are no old people. None. I have maybe seen two or three people over fifty or sixty years old my whole four days here. Wild.

All in all. First impressions are great. I’m excited to move on from Phnom Penh, though, because the friends I’ve made here have given me great advice. They all had nothing but great things to say about the other places they’ve been in the country, and I’m pumped for another new scene and a new group of people.

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