Holiday in Cambodia

« Return to Cambodia

Cramming a lot into one day, we returned to Siem Reap thoroughly exhausted and ready to hit the bars of Pub Street. We found a restaurant with dÈcor straight out of Manhattan; flawless white, a long couch, free wireless internet, an iTunes portal for patrons to build their own playlists. The food was gourmet, the service impeccable, and it cost $5 for a three-course meal (including coffee). For no other reason, enjoying first-class meals and less-than-third-world prices was worth the visit to Cambodia. Many eateries are owned by French, Thai, or German or English expats, taking advantage of cheap start-up costs to build top-notch establishments for a growing tourist industry. All along Pub Street, great music spilled onto the streets from one hundred year-old French colonial buildings, converted into lush bars and restaurants. The only giveaway that I wasn’t in some charming, upmarket European town were the maimed beggars, hobbling over legs blown apart by landmines. Unlike Laos, which is a poorer country than Cambodia, the poverty here is desperate. Touts and beggars are constantly harassing you, creating scenes of heartbreak amidst the tourist decadence. That food portions are so unusually large and cheap makes it all the more silly - I was compelled to share a few meals with whoever happened to be outside the restaurants, which is why they hang outside in the first place.

On the second day, we rented electric bikes, battery operated, capable of breaking speed limits if life were in slow motion. Heavy and low seated, anyone who owns these lemons in a city deserves the mockery, but on the flat roads of Cambodia, where coconut trees spring from the flat rice paddies like pins in a cushion, the pace was perfect. We checked out the Landmine Museum, where, Aki Rai, a former Khmer Rouge boy soldier once tasked with laying down these instruments of death has made it his life mission to remove them from his country. He has personally removed some 30,000, without any equipment or aid from NGO’s or the government. Hardly a dent considering that there are an estimated six million landmines in the country. It costs NGO’s about $500 to remove on landmine. Made with plastic, they cost as little as $3 to produce. I was shown the variations of mines, from the US bouncing betties to the Chinese pineapples, all designed for maximum pain and carnage. In a little strip of land, I looked at a typical minefield, where dozens of different types of mines are placed together so that one detonation triggers the others. Most were difficult to see, and good luck if you come near one. I stood on a small mine, listening to the “click” of death. “When you hear that,” explained the guide, “boom!” Unlike the movies, there’s no escaping the blast with a carefully placed stone of similar weight. Young boys missing arms and legs had been adopted by the museum, which has grown a village around it. Here is horror and carnage of Cambodia, back to back with the inspiring story of one guy who is trying to do something about it.

We rode past Angkor Wat, with its three imposing towers, past the Elephant Terrace, with incredible relief carvings from nearly a thousand years ago, and onto a temple several kilometers away called Ta Prohm. The jungle is in the process of taking back the temple, and archeologists have left Ta Prohm as they found it, full of enormous fig trees now one with the stone. It is eerie, incredible sight, like walking through a modern city in a thousand years to find roots growing out a department store. No matter how important we think we are, or how important the Khmer thought they were one thousand years ago, nature is patient. Eventually, all our achievements will be dust anyway.

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