The journey from the Mekong river to Phomn Penh in Cambodia was predictably entertaining - everything I'd heard about the roads turned out to be true. For about an hour, our minibus bumped along in a cloud of dust, the vehicle shaking as though it could collapse clown-style at any moment, with twenty of us crammed into the sixteen seats and our luggage jumping all over the place. Luckily everyone retained their sense of humour and we arrived at our guesthouse with the minibus, our luggage and ourselves all intact.
When I ventured into the centre of Phnom Penh the following morning, I found it surprisingly quiet for a capital city. At first I thought it was just calm in comparison with the Vietnamese cities, but I later discovered (when talking to a Cambodian student who had been studying English and had then swapped to the more lucrative Computer Science) that I had arrived during a three-day public holiday to mark the king's birthday. My time in Phnom Penh also apparently coincided with the visit of the North Korean Prime Minister Kim Yong Il, but I had no idea about that until I saw all the flag-waving on the BBC World News that night.
Apart from an occasional pile of dead rats obstructing the pavement, Phnom Penh was an easy city for me to navigate, compass in hand. The guesthouses offered cheap whirlwind tours of the Royal Palace and Silver Pagoda, Russian Market, National Museum, Toul Sleng genocide museum and Killing Fields of Choeng Ek all in one day, but I decided to take things a bit more slowly and visit all of the above independently. On my second day in the city I went to the Killing Fields in the morning and the Toul Sleng museum in the afternoon. I thought I was prepared for what I'd see there, but I can't describe the feeling of walking across the site of a genocide, where the clothes of victims are still visible through the earth from unexhumed mass graves. You pay US$2 to visit Choeng Ek; according to the guidebooks the government privatised it a couple of years ago, despite outrage from the victims' families, and it is now managed by a Japanese company.
I also heard that the Angkor temples are privately owned, by the owner of a luxury hotel in nearby Siem Reap, but I don't think this is true. However, the hotel resorts certainly epitomise the extremes of rich and poor in Cambodia. These resorts and the nearby French colonial areas have the look and feel of continental European boulevards, while just a couple of streets away are neighbourhoods that are clearly those of a developing country. Even my guesthouse, located in quite a tourist-orientated part of town, was set back from an unpaved track where the pavement was an obstacle course of rubble.
I spent a day exploring the temples, beginning with the obligatory 5.30am sunrise at Angkor Wat. But although Angkor Wat is the most famous, the most striking (to me, at least) was Ta Prohm, a 12th century Buddhist temple which - unlike most of the others - has not been restored or preserved in recent times. As a result, the jungle has taken over and giant tree roots have gradually grown over the walls (as in the photo above) or worked their way in between the stones to push the buildings apart. When I saw Ta Prohm, it reminded me of the Bill Woodrow sculpture "Regardless of History" which was displayed in Trafalgar Square a few years ago. The sculpture made quite an impression on me at the time, and I was excited to finally see in real life an example of the phenomenon that perhaps helped to inspire it.
When I ventured into the centre of Phnom Penh the following morning, I found it surprisingly quiet for a capital city. At first I thought it was just calm in comparison with the Vietnamese cities, but I later discovered (when talking to a Cambodian student who had been studying English and had then swapped to the more lucrative Computer Science) that I had arrived during a three-day public holiday to mark the king's birthday. My time in Phnom Penh also apparently coincided with the visit of the North Korean Prime Minister Kim Yong Il, but I had no idea about that until I saw all the flag-waving on the BBC World News that night.
Apart from an occasional pile of dead rats obstructing the pavement, Phnom Penh was an easy city for me to navigate, compass in hand. The guesthouses offered cheap whirlwind tours of the Royal Palace and Silver Pagoda, Russian Market, National Museum, Toul Sleng genocide museum and Killing Fields of Choeng Ek all in one day, but I decided to take things a bit more slowly and visit all of the above independently. On my second day in the city I went to the Killing Fields in the morning and the Toul Sleng museum in the afternoon. I thought I was prepared for what I'd see there, but I can't describe the feeling of walking across the site of a genocide, where the clothes of victims are still visible through the earth from unexhumed mass graves. You pay US$2 to visit Choeng Ek; according to the guidebooks the government privatised it a couple of years ago, despite outrage from the victims' families, and it is now managed by a Japanese company.
I also heard that the Angkor temples are privately owned, by the owner of a luxury hotel in nearby Siem Reap, but I don't think this is true. However, the hotel resorts certainly epitomise the extremes of rich and poor in Cambodia. These resorts and the nearby French colonial areas have the look and feel of continental European boulevards, while just a couple of streets away are neighbourhoods that are clearly those of a developing country. Even my guesthouse, located in quite a tourist-orientated part of town, was set back from an unpaved track where the pavement was an obstacle course of rubble.
I spent a day exploring the temples, beginning with the obligatory 5.30am sunrise at Angkor Wat. But although Angkor Wat is the most famous, the most striking (to me, at least) was Ta Prohm, a 12th century Buddhist temple which - unlike most of the others - has not been restored or preserved in recent times. As a result, the jungle has taken over and giant tree roots have gradually grown over the walls (as in the photo above) or worked their way in between the stones to push the buildings apart. When I saw Ta Prohm, it reminded me of the Bill Woodrow sculpture "Regardless of History" which was displayed in Trafalgar Square a few years ago. The sculpture made quite an impression on me at the time, and I was excited to finally see in real life an example of the phenomenon that perhaps helped to inspire it.
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