Welcome to Cambodia

July 09, 2016

Welcome to Cambodia

Day 18 – July 1, 2016

Friday

We made it to Camboida! Siem Reap is a kind of charming little town with a crazy mix of super fancy, enormous, five-star hotels and little shanties by the muddy river running through town. The harmonious flow of traffic is impressive as the scooters, bicycles, tuk-tuks and cars weave their way through the round-abouts and in and out of alleys and dirt roads. No one seems to be in a hurry. Everyone lets each other take turns. No honking or yelling or road rage. They all seem to understand the unwritten rules of the road and almost help each other out. When you need to turn across traffic, you just nudge your nose out and everyone slows down. The scooters and bikes stay to the right (they drive on the right in Cambodia. Left in Thailand) so the faster cars can pass. When you are going to pass, you give a little bump of your horn to let them know. No one is on cell phones. Everyone is focused on driving and I don’t know if we’ve gone over about 35 or 40 mph! It’s quite mesmerizing to sit and watch as we are driving down the road.

Our driver picked us up at the airport and then headed out to our house that I had booked. Things were going fine as I watched out the window and took in the new sights of Cambodia but I started getting nervous as we turned down rutted dirt road after rutted dirt road. The neighborhood started getting sketchier and we were lost in a maze of shanties and dirt roads. The driver even got lost a few times. Jeff and I looked at each other with worried faces. Where were we staying? We finally arrived at the house and it was honestly just as pictured on Air B&B. It was an artsy little house/hotel with a swimming pool with a bit of an overgrown yard. But it was in the middle of nowhere. Nowhere to catch a taxi or eat at a restaurant. No stores to buy food and no kitchen to use. I assumed it was in the town based on the description, which was a little misleading to be honest. The host was there to greet us and we politely voiced our concerns. They said they had also owned a small hotel in town that was available if we wanted to stay there instead. It was perfect!

It is a small, boutique hotel with only 14 rooms and a little restaurant attached, The owner is a chef and owns several restaurants in town. We can walk to a convenience store for water and snacks and there are tuk-tuks waiting right outside the hotel to take us anywhere we need to go. Plus there is a front desk staff who have been so helpful! I think it will be perfect. We’re only here two nights anyway.

After we were finally settled and had some lunch at the hotel restaurant, we headed out to explore the city. Our driver recommended visiting the floating village on Tonle Sap, the largest lake in Cambodia. I had read about it and honestly wasn’t that interested. The reviews were very mixed and I remembered not really wanting to go but I had no internet to check and I’d forgotten my little black book full of all of my notes. I figured maybe I was wrong and he said it was something we should really do. So we went.

Besides the racket of charging $100 per boat by the angry men at the desk in the dirty little “gift shop” at the dock, it started out feeling like an Indiana Jones adventure. An old wooden boat, the driver with a turban wrapped around his head. Everything looked like it had been painted dozens of times with layers and layers of old paint. The canal leading out to the lake was a dirty, chocolate milk color and there was an old rope hammock hanging in the back.

As we were docking at the little floating village store/market, the boatman rammed the boat into the dock and everyone who was standing went flying. Kate fell backwards and hit her head on a wooden post sticking out of the back of the captain’s chair and split it open. There was a lot of blood and we had a moment of panic that she might need stitches. But as we soaked up the blood, we realized that it was only a scrape and she would be okay. Phew. Quickly after that we realized that it was a bit of an awkward situation. Everyone around us was begging for money and trying to sell us things. Our guide walked us over to see some dirty crocodiles kept in a pen with a bunch of garbage down below the boat. A woman put her little 2 year old in a big rice pot and had him paddle around near the dock and then asked the tourists for money to take his picture. Our guide walked us up onto the roof to get a view and told us how the people here are very poor and how we could help by buying some food from a different floating store (which he casually mentioned was built by North Korea) and taking it over to the floating school. All of the tourists were doing the same. We bought a giant bag of rice and then took it over to the school where they had an old man with a microphone speaking and the kids lining up and receiving top ramen and candy and then getting in line again for more. They asked if we wanted our picture with the kids so we could show that we were giving food to them but I just felt weird about the whole thing. Lots of able-bodied adults were standing around, some smoking, others exchanging money. There were no school supplies in the whole school. I didn’t see a single book or teacher. Just empty desks and kids filling empty backpacks. I wondered if they just kept reselling the same bags of rice to tourists each day. It felt like somebody was making money, but the school kids and others were just being exploited by using the sympathies of tourists to bring the money in and maybe only a few were profiting from it. There were hundreds of tourists coming in and out of the floating village. They were charging $20 per person to go see the floating village, bringing in tens of thousands of dollars per day. It just felt like something was off and it made me uncomfortable.

In the evening we loaded up into two tuk-tuks and took the bumpy twenty minute ride to the Phare Cambodian Circus. It was actually really fun. They presented a story with their circus show that showed how a girl who was a child during the devastating uprising and control of the Khmer Rouge party and how she used art and music to heal from the torment of her past. It was based on the life of the founder of the circus and his experience. It ended with a powerful message of hope and healing through reaching out and connecting with the younger generation through love and art, music and theater. The music and colors and acrobatics were impressive and it was a fun show in a small “big top” in the outskirts of Siem Reap.