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Charlotte's Travels
Belatedly Merry Christmas and Happy New Year's to everyone.
We have long since left Cambodia, which i miss terribly despite its difficulties. It has a intense, adventurenous feel that the other places in the area don't share. Despite the fact that 2 million people visit the temples of Angkor every year, so long as your ticket is checked (it has a photo of you on it, which is quite cool) you can climb all through over and up the temples as much as you want so it feels more like exploring than sightseeing.
Swarms of men, women and children come up to you around the entrances and try every technique possible to make you buy souvenirs and water off them. These people don't need a degree in marketing to know what works, so we had to get good at saying 'no thankyou' and jumping into our trusty driver's tuk tuk fast. The hardest to refuse are the children who completely on purpose, but brilliantly guilt you until all you want to do is throw money at them. This is one of the hardest parts of Cambodia, and the biggest reminder of the poverty and tragedy here. It's a difficult conundrum when all you want to do is help, but giving usually supports scams and hierachies that the kids are inevitabily the victims of (especially in a country where even basic education costs, it's a much better option to alot of people to send their kids out begging). Sarah and I gave in once a boy grabed onto Sarah and would not let go. Considering he was less than half my size I didn't see this as a huge problem and after trying to sweet talk him off, I just cut to the chase and grabbed him. He was like a leech,and when I finally got him off he jumped straight back on. We gave in. All the moral logic in the world doesn't help when a small person has attached themselves to your leg next to a busy road. We bought him a tin of infant formula (which he probably went gave back to the shop for a commission afterwards) and he smiled cheekily at us. It's quite humbling being outsmarted by a five year old. Later I saw him again on the street about to grab onto me this time. Then he realised who I was and hugged me instead. Cheeky brat.
After four lovely days we left Siem Reap and took an surprisingly (given our track record) comfortable and fast five hour bus ride to Phnom Penh. This city had all the chaos and dirtiness of a big Cambodian, or any South-East Asian, city, but also a relaxed quality I wasn't expecting. Near our 'guesthouse', which was really just a room next to a bar in the owners' house, at one end of the street were huge islands of grass in the middle of the traffic where all the locals ran, walked and played badminton in the late afternoon. At the other end of our street the was the river with lots of bars and restaurants alongside it.
Some of Phnom Penh was heart renching, though. There wasn't the level of poverty we'd seen in more rural areas visiting the Killing Fields and Tuol Sleng museum, a school converted into a torture prison by the Khmer Rouge, left me literally feeling cold even in the 32 degree temperatures. Tuol Sleng, in particular, really hit home. It's not so much a museum as a place of horror frozen in time. Virtually nothing has been changed except the dead bodies have been taken away and photos of every person who passed through here have been put up in their place. The grounds of the school are quite pretty and would be a nice respite from the ditry city streets, but it's like walking through a ghost town of the 20 000 men, women, and - this was the hardest to handle - children who were held and tortured there.
We left Cambodia with the level of drama suitable for this unpredictable country. Our bus ride started well, they gave us pastries! But it quickly disintergrated from there. We had the happy experience of sharing a bus with a man of indeterminate nationality (but my bet from listening over is slurred words, is French) who was clearly drunk off his face and probably not the the picture of mental health to begin with. He started off relatively unobtrusively yelling to himself about American (I think) conspiricies (I think; it was quite hard to follow). The situation disintegrated fast when he decided that another man, also of indeterminate nationality but definately not American, was one of the Americans behind these conspiracies. As you do, the drunk man decided the best course of action was to attack him. Luckily we had a hero on the bus in the form of a Vietnamese man who quickly dispatched his sleeping grandson (incidentally the cutest child in the world) to his grandmothers at the front of the bus, then organised himself and the bus attendants into guarding the drunk man. Apparently in Cambodia you cannot just hand over an intoxicated mentally ill person to the police if they are foreign (explained, our hero the Vietnamese grandfather) so we had to share a tense three hours with our raving companion at the back of the bus. Luckily the Vietnamese are not as tolerant of such people entering their country so we finally were able to lose him at the border.
Vietnam is a very different place to Cambodia. It also has beauty and intensity, but of a completely different kind. But this blog post is long enough, so I'll write about Vietnam another day (probably from China, just to make life confusing).
Swarms of men, women and children come up to you around the entrances and try every technique possible to make you buy souvenirs and water off them. These people don't need a degree in marketing to know what works, so we had to get good at saying 'no thankyou' and jumping into our trusty driver's tuk tuk fast. The hardest to refuse are the children who completely on purpose, but brilliantly guilt you until all you want to do is throw money at them. This is one of the hardest parts of Cambodia, and the biggest reminder of the poverty and tragedy here. It's a difficult conundrum when all you want to do is help, but giving usually supports scams and hierachies that the kids are inevitabily the victims of (especially in a country where even basic education costs, it's a much better option to alot of people to send their kids out begging). Sarah and I gave in once a boy grabed onto Sarah and would not let go. Considering he was less than half my size I didn't see this as a huge problem and after trying to sweet talk him off, I just cut to the chase and grabbed him. He was like a leech,and when I finally got him off he jumped straight back on. We gave in. All the moral logic in the world doesn't help when a small person has attached themselves to your leg next to a busy road. We bought him a tin of infant formula (which he probably went gave back to the shop for a commission afterwards) and he smiled cheekily at us. It's quite humbling being outsmarted by a five year old. Later I saw him again on the street about to grab onto me this time. Then he realised who I was and hugged me instead. Cheeky brat.
After four lovely days we left Siem Reap and took an surprisingly (given our track record) comfortable and fast five hour bus ride to Phnom Penh. This city had all the chaos and dirtiness of a big Cambodian, or any South-East Asian, city, but also a relaxed quality I wasn't expecting. Near our 'guesthouse', which was really just a room next to a bar in the owners' house, at one end of the street were huge islands of grass in the middle of the traffic where all the locals ran, walked and played badminton in the late afternoon. At the other end of our street the was the river with lots of bars and restaurants alongside it.
Some of Phnom Penh was heart renching, though. There wasn't the level of poverty we'd seen in more rural areas visiting the Killing Fields and Tuol Sleng museum, a school converted into a torture prison by the Khmer Rouge, left me literally feeling cold even in the 32 degree temperatures. Tuol Sleng, in particular, really hit home. It's not so much a museum as a place of horror frozen in time. Virtually nothing has been changed except the dead bodies have been taken away and photos of every person who passed through here have been put up in their place. The grounds of the school are quite pretty and would be a nice respite from the ditry city streets, but it's like walking through a ghost town of the 20 000 men, women, and - this was the hardest to handle - children who were held and tortured there.
We left Cambodia with the level of drama suitable for this unpredictable country. Our bus ride started well, they gave us pastries! But it quickly disintergrated from there. We had the happy experience of sharing a bus with a man of indeterminate nationality (but my bet from listening over is slurred words, is French) who was clearly drunk off his face and probably not the the picture of mental health to begin with. He started off relatively unobtrusively yelling to himself about American (I think) conspiricies (I think; it was quite hard to follow). The situation disintegrated fast when he decided that another man, also of indeterminate nationality but definately not American, was one of the Americans behind these conspiracies. As you do, the drunk man decided the best course of action was to attack him. Luckily we had a hero on the bus in the form of a Vietnamese man who quickly dispatched his sleeping grandson (incidentally the cutest child in the world) to his grandmothers at the front of the bus, then organised himself and the bus attendants into guarding the drunk man. Apparently in Cambodia you cannot just hand over an intoxicated mentally ill person to the police if they are foreign (explained, our hero the Vietnamese grandfather) so we had to share a tense three hours with our raving companion at the back of the bus. Luckily the Vietnamese are not as tolerant of such people entering their country so we finally were able to lose him at the border.
Vietnam is a very different place to Cambodia. It also has beauty and intensity, but of a completely different kind. But this blog post is long enough, so I'll write about Vietnam another day (probably from China, just to make life confusing).
- comments
Dad Happy New Year Charli. I reckon the wild man was a French Canadien! The Neighbourhood Rooster survived Xmas somehow and is in full crowing around 5am. Have a great trip to Beijing. Much love Dad