Phnom Penh

I was pleasantly surprised when the bus from Vietnam stopped for a break along the way to the Phom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, where I learned that English is commonly understood and US currency is widely accepted and is their unofficial currency of choice.

Phnom Penh feels just like every other big Southeast Asian city, just dirtier.  The way the sanitation situation was explained to me is you pile your trash outside, sometimes literally in a giant pile on the street.

Neighbors will often sift through the garbage looking for things they may want to salvage.

Then there may be other street pickers that sift through the trash pile over the next few days before a garbage truck rolls by during the night.  The garbage men then have to scoop up all the loose trash by hand or shovel so it takes a very long time for them to clean up some streets.

Recycling doesn’t seem to be a thing here so plastic is everywhere as well.  People urinate in public constantly and the rotting trash around all adds to an unpleasant aroma down some streets.

The country also suffers from frequent rolling blackouts and water shortages.  I was told by some residents that it’s not usually a big issue for them because the government usually limits the outages to business hours.

Most hostels and hotels are unsurprisingly located along the streets lined with bars.  My hotel was on the busiest street so I had to constantly deal with annoying tuk tuk drivers during the day and fending off the prostitutes by night.  Hearing the high-pitched and drawn-out “HellloooOOOOOOO!” as I walked by each bar entrance was getting increasingly more irritating.  One girl even tugged my arm to try to pull me towards her group of street girls and lady boys.

This area of the city felt pretty disgusting.  I constantly saw old men leading beautiful young girls back to their hotels.  One old man even had a walker.  Eww!

I was later told by locals that it’s not uncommon for even shadier stuff to go down such as underage girls selling their virginity for a lot of money and she’ll then give the money to her parents, who are accepting of the whole situation and apparently this happens in Vietnam as well.

I have no idea if any of this is even remotely legal but Cambodian authorities turn a blind eye to everything as long as there’s some money in it for them.  An American woman living in Phnom Penh that I hiked with has been robbed a few times in the last six years living in Phnom Penh and one time she was attacked and beat up.  As she called out for help to a nearby office, he just turned his head and started walking in the opposite direction.

I didn’t personally feel a sense that this city was unsafe or dangerous but it sorta just rubbed me the wrong way so I quickly disliked being there.

Maybe it’s not so dangerous now but this city certainly has a very dark history.

The Killing Fields of Cambodia are sites across the country where more than a million people were killed and buried at the hands of the Khmer Rouge regime between 1975 to 1979, until Vietnamese forces invaded and toppled the Khmer Rouge.

The leader of the regime, Pol Pot, instructed his officers to detain not just offenders but the families of offenders to prevent future revenge.  The number of deaths ranges from 1.7 to 2.5 million out of a total population of about 8 million at the time.

The most well-known of the killing fields is Choeng Ek, just outside of Phnom Penh. Tens of thousands of men, women and children were brutally tortured, killed, and buried here in mass graves.

One segment of the audio tour mentioned that workers tending to the fields still pick up clothing, teeth, and bone fragments that come to the surface every few months.  It may have been a while since the last check because I spotted several small bits of cloth and even some bone poking up out of the ground.

Most of the buried came here from the infamous S-21 prison in Phnom Pen.  A tour of this place was very eerie.  There are photos and artifacts throughout the complex to show what conditions were like and to make sure the horrors that occurred here are never forgotten.  The top floor of one of the buildings is now turned into a museum containing all available archives after the Khmer Rouge forces fled the city.  While not open to the public, visitors are permitted by request only.

Of the 14,000 people known to have entered this prison, only seven survived.

I would have just spent a couple days at most in Phnom Penh, but I was struggling to come up with an interesting set of places to visit in Cambodia.  I seriously considered going to a shooting range an hour outside of the city to launch a rocket propelled grenade, because that is somehow not illegal here.  However, the price for just a single rocket began at $430 US so eventually I decided to pass.

After coming up with several destinations of interest, I left Phnom Penh for the closest and most relaxing of the destinations.