March 8, 2009

On the highway from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh
When I first visited Cambodia in 2005, I did what most tourists here do. I flew in to Siem Reap, spent a couple of days touring the famous ancient temples at Angkor, and then left the country.
I came back for a few days in October 2006, this time to visit the capital city Phnom Penh. All I knew about the city was that it was the site of Tuol Sleng and Chuong Ek, and I wanted to visit both. Tuol Sleng was a prison during the Khmer Rouge era (1975 – 1979), and the place where more than 20,000 people were brutally interrogated and tortured. They were then usually taken to Chuong Ek, one of Cambodia’s “Killing Fields,” where they were killed and dumped in mass graves. Chuong Ek is today a museum and a memorial to those who died at the hands of the Khmer Rouge. Visiting these two places was, as I had expected, a powerfully moving experience (They will be the subject of a separate blog entry, coming soon.)

On the river, Phnom Penh
What I had not expected was to be charmed by the city of Phnom Penh. It is a poor, crowded, and somewhat ramshackle city of about 1.3 million people at the confluence of the Tonle Sap and Mekong Rivers. There are foreigners here, to be sure, but Phnom Penh is not a favorite destination for visitors to Cambodia. The tourist contingent seems to consist mainly of adventurous-looking backpacker types, many of them here to visit the genocide sites, and some East Asian tour groups. There also seem to be quite a lot of diplomatic and NGO personnel here, many of them moving around the city in large SUVs (The largest and most impressive SUVs in town, though, are those black vehicles with military or government license plates or, most impressive of all, those at the top of the traffic food chain, Lexus SUVs with no license plates at all. Many of these have the word “Lexus” emblazoned on their sides in foot-high letters, presumably to avoid the embarrassment of being mistaken for Toyotas.)
As a person with unusual travel interests (I’m a geographer, after all) Phnom Penh’s lack of “tourist attractions” makes it all the more interesting. It is a very lively, vibrant place, full of people living their lives (in many cases very tough lives.) I found the people I met here almost unfailingly friendly, frequently charming, often with a great sense of humor.
Take for example the young boys selling (apparently pirate) copies of books about Cambodia to diners at riverfront sidewalk restaurants. They are very persistent salesmen, badgering people waiting for meals to buy their wares (but seldom approaching anyone whose food has already been served.) When a dining companion declined to make a purchase, the twelve-year old salesman looked him in the eye, and said with mock seriousness, “Then I will kill you.” Each time he walked by for the rest of the evening he would stare at my friend and make a throat slitting gesture.
During my 2007 visit to Cambodia, I was lucky enough to make the acquaintance of two brothers; Vita was then a student, and Pheap worked for an NGO. They live in Phnom Penh, but their family home is in Svay Rieng province, near the Vietnam border. After we had met a few times, they invited me to travel home with them for a visit, and I readily accepted.

Taxi on the road to Svay Rieng
And so Vita, Pheap, a cousin of theirs and I set out in a sturdy Toyota Camry taxi one morning for Svay Rieng. I know the car was sturdy because, aside from a punctured tire, it survived the journey. The four-hour trip took us along Route 4, apparently the main road from Phnom Penh to the Vietnam border and Ho Chi Minh City. Much of the road was in the process of being upgraded, courtesy of Japanese aid funds. The upgrade hadn’t come moment too soon. The journey over the unimproved sections of the road reminded me of a friend’s description of a journey somewhere in east Africa: “it’s like being dragged naked over a xylophone.” Only this xylophone was mounted on a roller coaster.
Making the journey immeasurably more hair-raising was the fact that the traffic on the road consisted of Cambodian vehicles. This means a motley collection of motorcycles, trucks, minibuses, cars, ox wagons, and an array of vehicles occupying intermediate positions between these various categories. (On a trip to the coastal city of Sihanoukville, I even saw a large elephant being steered down the road with a full load of passengers and cargo.) What the vehicles had in common was that they were all overloaded, and none of them would pass a vehicle inspection examination in any country which has such things. And by overloaded I mean really overloaded. Minibus taxis in my home country of South Africa are not overloaded; they just make full use of 12 seats by squeezing 20 people onto them. Cambodian minibus taxis make equally efficient use of their interiors, but they then also put six or eight passengers on the roof. A fully laden motorcycle might carry four or five people, or three people and two large bird cages, or a driver, a passenger, and a large live pig bound to a couple of planks of wood, or perhaps a driver, several large sacks of rice, and an old woman on top of the rice.
But the story doesn’t end there. Cambodian roads not only carry Cambodian vehicles, they carry Cambodian vehicles driven by Cambodian drivers.
In a moment of what I now realize was great naiveté on my first visit to Phnom Penh I asked a hotel concierge whether I might rent a car to travel to Sihanoukville rather than taking a bus or taxi. He raised his eyebrows, and said “No, Sir.” “Do you mean that there are no rental cars available, or that it’s not a good idea?” I asked, “Not a good idea, Sir,” he replied, indulgently but very definitively.
After five visits to Cambodia, I still cannot claim to understand what rules of the road Cambodians follow. Perhaps there aren’t any rules, or at least any written rules that are enforced. On one occasion I was riding with two other people on motorcycle, for example, when we

Phnom Penh traffic
passed through a police roadblock. Three people on a 125cc motorbike, none of us wearing a helmets The police didn’t even glance at us, nor did they pull over motorbikes with four passengers. I don’t think I have seen anyone stop at a stop sign here, whether or not there is traffic approaching. And driving on the wrong side of the road toward oncoming traffic doesn’t seem to constitute an infraction.
There are obviously numerous unwritten rules, or at least guidelines, that Cambodian drivers follow. I have managed to figure out only a few. The most important is that drivers here are amazingly calm and very considerate. Despite congestion, agonizingly slow traffic flow, and ubiquitous traffic jams, I haven’t seen anything remotely resembling road rage. Drivers cut in front of each other, trucks back out of driveways and block the street, and tuk-tuks (motorcycle-drawn taxis) stop everywhere to pick up and drop of passengers. But nobody seems to get upset or impatient. The reason that it’s possible to go through a stop sign and merge into oncoming traffic is that oncoming drivers let you in. If you are turning left into a road of busy two-way traffic, it’s okay, as a first step, to turn into the oncoming traffic, then gradually ease your way across to the correct side of the road. Oncoming drivers will avoid you.
It took me a while to figure this all out. To someone like me, used to driving in the USA, first impressions are that Cambodian roads are full of very angry drivers. Horns honk incessantly. The driver of a car passing a motorcycle, bicycle, or a pedestrian will almost always honk. A honk in the US is a reprimand, or an expression of anger or frustration. But in Cambodia, where bicycles and many motorcycles don’t have rearview mirrors, a honk is a kindly warning, “I’m coming up behind you and about to pass.” Indeed, it would be most inconsiderate, even dangerous, to pass a motorcycle without honking.

On display at the open-air butchery, Svay Rieng
But back to my journey to Svay Rieng, where we eventually arrived after a four hour journey. As in most Cambodian towns, it consists of a bustling area of stalls at which one might buy vegetables, fruit, fish (often still – barely – live,) skinned frogs (cooked or raw,) even spiders (food, not pets.)
And meat. Meat dangling from hooks on the ceiling of the stalls, maturing in the tropical heat and open to the elements. Or lying unwrapped and uncovered on wooden tables, passing the hours until it is purchased by providing sustenance to local flies. At one butchery store, the upper halves of two pigs’ heads lay on a table, exposed brains on display for the customer’s inspection. Mercifully, my hosts passed over the brains, and selected a large slab of beef lying alongside. This was, it appeared, to be part of our lunch. I was apprehensive.

With my hosts, Svay Rieng
But lunch turned out to be delicious. The hunk of beef was transformed by my hosts’ mother into tasty slices, fried with onions, garlic, and other spices, and attractively garnished with lettuce and slices of green tomato. Another dish was piled high with pieces of roast chicken, whose relatives pecked around on the ground below the table as we dined. (As in other parts of East and Southeast Asia, the cooked chicken here was hacked into pieces rather than being dismantled into legs, wings, breast, and other constituent parts. The bird’s neck was on the plate, as were the feet.) The rice that accompanied the meats was grown by the family in the paddies surrounding the house, and tasted better than any other white rice I have eaten.

Rice paddy, Svay Rieng
While the meal was being prepared, Pheap took me for a walk around the area. We crossed the road in front of the house, and made our way along a narrow strip of raised land separating the rice fields. I saw rice in various stages of growth, some about 30 days old, and a couple of weeks away from being ready for transplanting, some younger. I saw tiny fish, not much bigger than mosquito larvae, their big eyes out of all proportion with the rest of their bodies. In a couple of month’s time, Pheap told me, the paddies would be full of large fish – he indicated their size by clenching his forearm – which I would certainly get to eat if I were to visit the family again later in the year.
On what appeared to be an island in the midst of the rice fields, connected to the rest of the world by a narrow path, was the house of the oldest brother in the Hy family and his wife. Like most houses in this area, it was on concrete stilts. In the shaded and protected area beneath the house was a raised platform, about a meter above the ground. We removed our shoes, and sat down here. Around us was a small courtyard. At one end was a small structure on low stilts, used to store rice. Alongside it was a hand operated pump, the source of the family’s water supply. The house was not connected to the electrical grid, although a fluorescent light was attached to a beam over the platform where we sat. I asked Pheap what powered the light, and he pointed to a small car battery. The family takes it into town periodically to be charged, at a cost of about 25c (the exact price depends on how fully it is charged.) This is enough, as I understood it, to provide light for four hours.
My hosts’ house was similar in design, but somewhat more substantial and better appointed (see photograph). The house itself consisted of a single large upstairs room, its floor made of a smooth and very study tropical hardwood. There were shuttered windows on the sides of the room (no glass,) and the walls were made of wood. The house sat on a dozen concrete stilts, underneath were tables, benches, and a raised sitting platform. The roof of the house was covered with terracotta tiles, and a gutter ran down the side of the building into a large clay pot used to collect water for drinking and washing (the pot was half full when I arrived at the house, and overflowing after the brief downpour that arrived during our meal.)
Several smaller structures surrounded the main house, all of them with walls and roofs of palm leaves. One housed a cow, which peered out at us as we ate. Another, without walls, sheltered a large pig. There were also several other buildings whose functions I could not discern. The house did not have an indoor bathroom.
This makes it a typical home in Svay Rieng province, According to the Atlas of Cambodia, only 4.7% of homes in the province have electricity, safe drinking water, and a toilet; 5.1% have a toilet and safe drinking water, and 70.9% have safe drinking water. 16.1% have no amenities at all (2005 data.) Svay Rieng is by no means the poorest province in Cambodia: indeed, it is one of the better off. Only in Phnom Penh province do a majority of homes have electricity, a toilet, and safe drinking water. In most provinces, most homes have no amenities at all.
On each visit to Cambodia, I have become more fascinated with the country, its people, and its history. The reason for my current trip to the country is that I am confident that many of my students will share my fascination with this place, and so I am here to set up a study abroad program that will bring students from the University of Mary Washington to Cambodia during the Summer of 2010 and, I hope, regularly thereafter.
The program will include time in Siem Reap, a chance for the students to learn about the history of the Angkor Kingdom, and see the magnificent Angkor Wat and some of the other temples in the area. They will visit Phnom Penh, and learn about the tragic Cambodian genocide. But they will also learn about more than ancient history and genocide. I hope to arrange a service learning experience for the students, in which they will work with NGOs and others on development projects (such as those working with street children, or promoting awareness of HIV.) And, most important of all, the students will meet and get to know Cambodians of their own age, through homestay arrangements and a “buddy program,” where each UMW students will start getting to know a Cambodian student prior to traveling to the country.
I will be working on arrangements for the program over the next couple of months, and I will post information on this blog and at regionalgeography.org as soon as I have it. In the mean time, if you think you might be interested in traveling with me to Cambodia in 2010, please let me know, and I will make sure that you get regular updates on our plans.
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I have posted additional photographs from my current trip to Cambodia on Facebook; these include photographs from Kampong Phluk (see my previous post,) and from some of Phnom Penh’s markets.