Karaoke Bus Travels (no singing please!)

We faced another early morning on Saturday as we had to catch the 7:30 am bus from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh. I have described the bus travel to you in the past and these buses are no different. The comfort level of the bus varies widely based on a variety of factors including: price, bus company, age of the bus, and luck. On this morning, we were fairly lucky as our bus was a bit newer and, therefore, a bit more comfortable. However, every bus you take on a long journey, new or old, has one thing in common…karaoke music. Yup. All of these buses play the same karaoke soundtracks over and over again. We listen to Korean pop bands, Cambodian love songs, Laos power ballads (minus the power), and every type of Thai music imaginable. The onslaught is never ending so travelers via bus had better just accept their fate – bad karaoke music. I will not bore you with any further details regarding my bus travels and will pick up our story around 2 pm when we arrived in Phnom Penh…

The bus dropped us off in the Riverside area of Phnom Penh, a nicer, falang area of the city where Lonely Planet suggests tourists stay. We had booked a guesthouse in this area, which turned out to be one block from our bus drop, a very fortunate occurrence for us. As I mentioned previously, Cambodia is filled with poverty. People in this country, particularly in the larger cities where many poor farmers flock in hopes of better opportunity, are desperately poor. Many men become tuk-tuk drivers, so many, in fact, that it feels as if there is a ratio of ten tuk-tuk drivers to every one falang. As we stepped off the bus, we were inundated with calls for tuk-tuks, fares shouted in our ears (“Two Dollars!” “One Dollar!”), requests for patronage (“Tuk-tuk here, lady!” “Tuk-tuk this way!”), and information about destinations (“Anywhere on Riverfront, lady?!” “Lakeside, lady?!”). The term overwhelming cannot even begin to describe how you feel when you first arrive in Phnom Penh and are accosted by the tuk-tuk drivers. What is even more horrifying is your later realization that this is just the beginning. Tuk-tuks are parked in huge packs on every corner and along every open inch of the street side. Any individual walking on the street will be instantly surrounded by ten tuk-tuk drivers offering a ride and a single, “No.” will not do. Instead, you must either ignore them completely or sing-song a continuous litany of “No’s” until you are out of range of that pack.

We were able to leave the mob around the bus stop quickly as our guesthouse was so close, but after dropping off our belongings we were forced to brave them once again as we headed out to lunch. We walked along the Riverside for a while, enjoying our first view of this area of Phnom Penh, which was quite lovely, with wide streets, the River on one side and falang friendly restaurants and shops on the other, a truly sanitized view of Phnom Penh. It was nice nonetheless, and we enjoyed our meal at a riverside restaurant. After we had finished, we set out for Tuol Sleng, the Cambodian Genocide Museum, located in the heart of Phnom Penh.

Before the Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia, Tuol Sleng was actually a high school in Phnom Penh. Under the rule of the Khmer Rouge, however, it became known as S-21, one of the worst prison-torture centers used by the Khmer Rouge. Over 16,000 people were tortured and killed during the three and a half years Tuol Sleng was used as a prison. When the Vietnamese liberated Phnom Penh, they found eleven people tortured to death in various rooms and only seven left alive in the entire center. Today, Cambodia has turned the former high school/prison into their official Genocide Museum.

The area surrounding Tuol Sleng is shabby and rundown, and oddly quiet as compared to many other areas of the city. When we mentioned this to Talia later, she told us that no native Cambodians will voluntarily live in this area of the city, choosing to stay away from the ghosts who may remain at Tuol Sleng. Upon entering the high, barbed wire fences, it is easy to imagine ghosts may linger. The buildings are stark cement structures sitting in an E shape without the central prong. In the center is a courtyard that has now been filled with a graveyard for the eleven people found dead in the prison upon its liberation and a memorial spire. We, and other tourists, walked through the Museum in almost complete silence, moving through the rooms and open air hallways in quiet contemplation of all we were seeing. Tuol Sleng is a place that has the power to dampen your soul, making you realize anew the horrifying atrocities man can perpetrate against his fellow man. I won’t describe in detail what we saw in the Museum as that could fill a book on its own. Instead, I will say that we learned quite a bit about the Khmer Rouge and its history in Cambodia during our visit. We left Tuol Sleng understandably dejected and ordered our tuk-tuk driver to take us to the Russian Market in an attempt to boost our spirits and pick us up out of our slump.

The Russian Market actually has a much more Khmer/Cambodian name that I can’t remember at the moment and that doesn’t really signify as everyone simply refers to it as “The Russian Market.” As any guidebook or traveler to Cambodia can tell you, The Russian Market is the place to go to buy clothes. Look in your wardrobe and about half your tags will bear the words “Made in Cambodia.” This is the land of clothing manufacturing and therefore, the home of the seconds. All items with “problems,” often mislabeling of sizes, are deemed unworthy of shipping to the Western countries, and those items usually find their way here. The Russian Market is housed in a single building filled with hundreds of stalls. Each stall occupies about a four foot square space and aisles between stalls are about three feet wide. In some stalls, clothes are displayed hanging from every available location and more are stacked everywhere else. If the size or color you need is not out, bags on which the owners are standing behind the massive piles of clothing may hold what you are looking for. In other stalls, clothes are just thrown in a haphazard pile that stretches two and half feet into the air from the bottom surface of their stall. As with the other indoor(ish) markets we have visited in SE Asia, this place was sweltering, reaching disgustingly hot temperatures with even worse humidity than outside.

As with, evidently, all SE Asian countries, businesses close sharply at 5 pm. For some reason, SE Asia has not discovered the fact that life (and potentially necessary shopping – grocery shopping for example) may need to occur after traditional business hours. Instead, all businesses seem to run from 9 am to 5 pm and you must simply find your way down there during that time. Therefore, we only had time to do a brief walkthrough of the Russian Market before it closed. At 5:15 pm we grabbed another tuk-tuk and took off for our hotel to refresh ourselves for the evening. That night we went out to dinner on the riverfront and then went to a club that had been recommended to us, once again, by Lonely Planet and Talia. We got there quite a bit earlier than is the traditional club time, but as the World Cup was playing on a large screen TV we had no trouble sitting down with a drink (cranberry juice in my case – they actually have cranberry juice in Cambodia!) to await a more “appropriate” clubbing hour. We enjoyed watching the game, but as the night wore on and more people came to the Heart of Darkness we became aware of the increasing number of falang men with young Cambodian women (prostitutes). It was sad to see so many girls working in the sex trade industry, but that is not uncommon in Cambodia. In fact, Cambodia is one of the major problem areas for prostitution in SE Asia (although all of SE Asia is considered a “destination spot” for men looking for young Asian women prostitutes). We soon left, but encountered the same thing upon our return to our hotel. There, a hotspot for expats, the prostitutes gather around the pool table in the bar and any interested man goes over to play one game with her. It is all sad to watch, but unavoidable if you are traveling in SE Asia and go to visit a bar of any kind.

We went to bed a bit sad that night, having had our spirits worn down by Tuol Sleng and the unavoidable sight of desperation forcing women into the sex trade world. Cambodia is a beautiful country with a history that continues to haunt it, leaving the people poverty stricken and desperate.