The following is an entry I wrote a few weeks ago after I'd left Phnom Penh. It's odd-- for the first four months of my travels, my journal was a regimented daily affair: every night, no matter how tired I was, I'd write a chronological account of the days doings. "I went here", "I saw this," "I met so-and-so." Then somewhere in the middle of Thailand (or in the middle of June, if you'd prefer), it just kind of morphed. I started skipping entries. I'd combine days or I'd write about general thoughts and out of nowhere I found that chronology had taken a backseat to feelings and flow. I think perhaps it's a manifestation of a deeper change, but I guess that'll be up for debate for quite a while. In any case, here's my thoughts on Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia:
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July 20th till the 26th were spent in Phnom Penh. The place was like Bangkok must have been 30 years ago; all the same elements were there -- the touts and motorbikes and mayhem and dusty, dirty labyrinthian street setups -- just in a slightly more dampened tone. Liam [a Brit I'd been traveling with for about a month] still felt perpetually exhausted, either from the pills or the former illness [he was hospitalized overnight with dysentery the week before], and so we stayed at the first place our driver took us, a $10 per night room that was like a palace: the sheets were so soft and nice, the bathroom so polished and lavished, that as we lay there that night, for the first time since I'd started traveling I felt like I was back in the first world, more specifically the US. That bothered me. It just felt wrong, sleeping in some room so alien to the world we were traveling in (living in, really). I would have preferred to pay $10 for a dive, strange though that may be.
As we'd arrived into Phnom Penh on the bus the exit doorway had been mass-swarmed by tuk-tuk drivers; I hadn't paid enough attention to see but Liam said there was a person at the exit literally holding the touts back with a stick. This was perhaps a premonition. After our first (-world) night we switched to a cheap ($3 each) and popular guesthouse that swarmed with tuk-tuk drivers. You'd usually even find one waiting outside the guesthouse door to spring upon you. Turn left and two or three more would latch on as well. God help you if you ate in the outdoor section of the downstairs restaurant -- you'd be swatting those flies off the whole time. It was such a zoo that the drivers even had to set up a seniority/priority system, identifiable by the numbers emblazoned on their colored vests; number one gets the first crack, then number two gets to pester you, followed by three, four, and so on.
When it was Liam and me we were usually able to get a pretty fair price, maybe $0.50 each for a short ride on a tuk-tuk and between $0.75 and $1 each for longer hauls. However, as Liam left one day before me I discovered to my horror how the tuk-tuks pounced upon a lone prey; drivers started off asking $4 for a short trip, budging reluctantly to $3 and then only $2.75 when I started to walk away (I walked away and found an honest one that started off at a dollar-- I was so frustrated that I didn't even bargain and just took it). I can't express how furious I felt at the drivers' taking advantage of my vulnerability. Despite loving Cambodians generally, I still think all tuk-tuk drivers deserve a special place in hell (ok, maybe that's a wee bit harsh).
Phnom Penh's only real attraction, besides the waste-of-money Royal Palace and Silver Pagoda, was its memorials to the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime: the S-21 prison (Tuol Sleng) and the Killing Fields (Choeung Ek). S-21, and to a lesser extent the Killing Fields, was chillilng, gruesome, and unbelievable in the paranoia and cruelty that was inflicted in such a short (4 year!) regime. Still, at times it felt hard for me to connect, to get into it, and I wondered at my numbness towards others and lack of compassion.
Liam and two guys we rockclimbed with -- Ruben (a couchsurfer from Mexico but living in Phnom Penh) and a French-Canadian named Nick -- dragged me along with them to a girlie bar, a weird sort of pseudo-prostitution joint where you're swarmed by a gaggle of late teen / early-20s girls from the moment you walk through the door. They're smiling, atttentive, playful; they give you free back massages while you sit at the table, drinking your beer and trying not to be freaked out as you realize the table is literally surrounded by this smiling, female Asian army.
The reason I say it's pseudo-prostitution is that none of the girls
have to sleep with you; if they don't like you then it's not happening. If they do like you then you negotiate a price; sometimes they are interested enough that they do it for free. Some men have even found wives at the girlie bar. The flip side of this is that the really cute girls generally aren't the ones fawning over you. I saw the three cutest ones there just indifferently pass our table to hang out outside. The whole experience was just sort of odd -- a bit awkward -- though after a beer or two it admittedly started to feel a lot less awkward.
Of course, the highlight of Phnom Penh had to be the climbing. Three weeks, at least twenty emails, a half-dozen phone calls, facebook messages and couchsurfing messages and a bit of pestering (plus a lot of effort!) and it finally happenned: I climbed in Cambodia. Moreover, it was my first time on granite (and it was in Cambodia!). On top of that I was climbing with a Mexican, a Brit, and a French-Canadian (and in Cambodia!). And while the climbing itself wasn't that spectacular, the ride out and back sure was! Phnom Penh (and Cambodia in general) has without a doubt the most chaotic, lawless, and unpredictable traffic I've ever seen -- and this is including Vietnam (I [wrote] this from a restaurant in Hoi An). To get where we needed to go we had to rent motorbikes, navigating the city in the pre-dawn light before hitting a 1 1/2-lane, more-paved-than-not highway for a good 45-minute drive, being passed by roaring trucks with horns blazing, and at times looking for a window of lulled traffic in which to shoot by other (or the same) giant, powerful trucks.
[... stuff about the climbing like the grades climbed and the crappy bolt and anchor placements ...]
A huge rainstorm was on the horizon, menacing, and so we packed up and prepared for a sloppy return. And that it was: rain and mud and several messy traffic jams. Seven routes climbed, my first foray with granite, and the sweet joy of being able to check Cambodia off on my climbing list. Standing above it all though was the simple triumph of fighting to make this day happen against all odds.
Climbing was the 24th of July. The 25th was a relaxation day. The 26th I crossed the border to Vietnam, arriving in Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) late in the evening.
