Retrospective Cambodia: Part Mui

I first arrived in Cambodia as a, relatively, wet behind the ears 19 year old as part of a two month backpack around South East Asia. After having had my senses and sweat glands punished by three days in Bangkok I had acquired the a Cambodian visa and an exuberantly overpriced bus ticket from Bangkok to Siem Reap via the Poipet border crossing.  I should add that the person that financially screwed me on that first day in Bangkok taught me a well learned monetary lesson; don't trust no one in transport at face value.

I have never liked Bangkok and I guess I never will.

Poipet was, and still is, hub of smuggling in South East Asia.  Everything, from timber sadly to children, is reputed to go through this town on the way to who knows where.  My first experience was of being dumped off a "luxury" coach onto an minivan and then from a four lane motorway onto a dirt strip in what appeared to be the middle of a market. mmmmh.  The crossing itself from Thailand was then a no man's land, where street urchin children piled up rubbish next to the bridge you walked across  and then begged not for money but for a bottle of water.  This all happened under the shadows of the giant casinos set up for rich Thai business men who cannot gamble in their own country.  It was hot, it was humid, it was harrowing, it was going to get worse.

Poipet 06/2006

At that time it was my experience that Cambodia had three tarmacked roads.  They were between Siem Reap and Phnom Penh, Phnom Penh to Sihanoukville and Phnom Penh to the Vietnamese journey.  It is 8hours between Poipet and Siem Reap on an old rickety bus, traveling on dirt roads without any air conditioning.  You have two choices for the journey; open the windows and be slightly cooler but get covered in red Cambodian dust, or, keep the window closed and become unnecessarily hot and dehydrated.  These are you 2 choices for EIGHT hours!

Siem Reap, made famous by Angelina Jolie/Lara Croft in Tomb Raider, is the oasis in the desert.  You reach it at night and can feel and hear the bus gliding onto tarmac.  The lights of the giant hotels light up the streets and you feel as if you've discovered the world again.  In 2006 though the gap between poor and rich was probably worse than it is now. It was a city being built rather than a finished product; I attempted to use the only ATM in the country but it didn't accept my card.


Angkor Wat's construction began in 900AD and finished two centuries later when the city was abandoned.  Almost 1000 years later it is helping to build Siem Reap town again.  Of the thee ancient sites I've visited; The Great Wall, The Taj Mahal and Angkor Wat, Angkor still remains my favourite.  It is huge for starters but it is the feeling of discovery you get walking round that makes it what it is (just ignore the mass groups of Japanese and Korean tourists).  It feels like you are walking around a site that was lost to the jungle and only now, when you turn the corner is it being seen for the first time in centuries.  There are problems though.  That it is such a significant tourist pull means that there is an unequal amount of beggars, more often than not children, selling you cheap tat or asking for the obligatory $1. This can be a) irritating b) draining c) emotionally difficult.  My advice is have a laugh with them, ignore them, don't buy anything and don't promise to buy anything.  However if you can suppress all of the above emotions Angkor Wat is, quite simply, magnificent.

Angkor Wat (south entrance)

Phnom Penh from 2006 is a strange beast to remember because like most tourists who visit the city I never got under its skin but somehow really enjoyed myself.  There were visits to the Killing Fields an area outside the city where mass graves were, barely, dug for the people killed under the Khmer Rouge.  They are still trying to find everyone who was killed there and when you walk over the paths around the pits rags and bones can be seen under the dirt; it is a truly distressing and depressing place.  There was also a visit to S-21 which is the school that was converted into a prison during the Khmer Rouge reign.  Here up to 30,000 Cambodians were imprisoned and sent to their deaths and the school museum is kept in the same way today as it was then; you can famously still see the blood on the floors of some of the torture cells.

Sihanoukville is Cambodia's beach side resort.  At the time there was building work going on a plenty and certain areas of notoriety today weren't so back then.  It was, and still is, a friendly place much out of keeping in some ways to the rest of the country where time can feel to go backwards when you're sat on the beach eating lobster and drinking 50cent beers.  Life is hard sometimes...