February 03, 2006
Exit Cambodia...now that I really like the place
After my relaxing Thursday I spent the evening down by the beach and enjoyed sunset at Chaimoy's Frog Shack. I was hopping to meet up with Levi but he never showed up, so I just had dinner, took some pictures and called it an early night.
Friday morning started out at the beach very early, went for a swim, had a quick breakfast at Le Rouse, said good bye to the staff, checked out of my hotel, hopped on a $1 motorbike ride to the bus station and grabbed a 11:30am decrebide TSG bus for US$4 to Phnom Penh. I had a window seat in the second to last row and two Cambodia teenagers were trying to squeeze both of them into the one seat beside me. At first I thought they’d wait until the bus got moving and then spread out to other seat or the floor, but after being crammed up against the two of them when we were moving I forcefully but politely said “one of you will have to sit on the floor”. I don’t think it was the language they understood, but my tone of voice and pointing certainly did the trick.
Some four hours later we arrived in the capital and a motorbike driver took me back to the Dara Reang Sey Hotel for US$1. My moto-driver agreed to take me to the airport the next morning for US$3. It seems that once I become comfortable with a city I start taking the riskier transport options, bargaining a bit harder, etc. Soon I checked into a lower end US$7 room on the top floor with only a fan and tiny TV. My favorite room number again, 404.
Next I headed down to a restraurant on the Tonle Sap River. There I had a fantastic grilled cheese sandwich, a few lattes, a few beers, and bought the latest copies of the Economist and International Herald Tribune from the disabled teenage vendor who remembered me from the week earlier. There was a eight year old girl selling trinkets, but I don’t buy into that child labor thing and stayed away. It being somewhat of a low season she was just hopping around from table to table chatting and playing. I gave her my last week’s Economist which she subsequently sold for US$2 and even offered to split the profit with me. Her name Ling and I certainly hope her life improves.
The Cambodian owner/hostess of the bar was a bit of a cold fish, but strikingly beautiful. She let me take a picture of her but other than that wanted me to buy her or some of her waitresses drinks. Apparently the restraint is half hostess bar, although you could not tell that from the generic tourist cliental. (“Hostess” as in buy me a drink and I’ll talk to you…no motorbike driver “boom, boom” stuff here.)
At about 11pm I hit the sack, woke up just in time to meet my waiting motor bike driver downstairs and was off to the airport. We arrived in plenty of time for my to catch my Bangkok Airways PG921 flight on a well maintained Airbus A-320. They even had a little lobby lounge where I filled up on free cakes, coffee and internet. Fantastic. An eventless hour and fifteen minutes later I was back in Bangkok.
Posted by stu at 05:35 AM | Comments (1)
January 25, 2006
Chilling in Sihanoukville
My first evening in Sihanoukville on the coast consisted of getting semi-swindled into a $15 double room with air conditioning at the New Christmas Guesthouse back a few hundred meters the beach. I had insisted that my driver take me to Occheuteal Beach My motorbike driver and he had taken me to three other guesthouses that were apparently full. At the bus station an older western man told me it was full down here, gave me the card to his guesthouse in the center of town. My lack of planning was starting to look like a mistake. That evening on a $5 rental scooter I explored town, including Victory Hill and Beach. It is supposed to be more of a low end backpacker scene there but I thought it was just plain nasty. 
So I went cruising the guesthouses back on Occheuteal Beach and quickly found the Occheuteal Bungalows.
At the Occheuteal Bungalows they arranged for a really nice $15/night room with fridge, a single large bed, satellite TV and most importantly a sea view from the balcony with chairs and a little table. I’m splurging again. First thing the next morning I moved to my new digs, settled in and wandered down to the beach and found a charming little restaurant/beach chair place called ‘Le Roseau’. The staff are really nice but typically Thai-like in their concepts of service, but that’s ok. 
That first evening I met Jan from Norway. The second day of laying around in the beach I met a couple from Austria, Victor and Lea. (BTW: Lea is not with an 'h'!) Victor is actually British, but that is beside the point. My third day in town Levi showed up and the group of us spent the day hanging out at the beach.
While on the beach I got a manicure and pedicure for $3 from an older Vietnamese woman named Long, which was great. Also a young woman named Tani sold me some hand made bracelets with my two niece’s names on them, which her sister Dani hand made a few tens of meters away in the shade while Tani and I chatted down by the ocean water.
The beach area is really relaxing. The surf is generally calm, a few people playing about with Frisbees and rafts, people walking up and down the beach just relaxing. I’ve taken a few swims each day and the water in the Gulf of Thailand is just about perfect. Unfortunately there is little local fish life as dynamite fishing was all the rage a few years ago. The sunsets have been spectacular.
On the third night Victor, Lea and I headed up to Victory Hill where there is supposed to be some sort of night life. The reality is that it was pretty dead and lots of strange characters about. We settled in street side at the Paragay Taras Bar for a beer. At one point a young French boy walked up and sat down with us. His mother was across the street getting drunk with some weirdoes. The young Parisian was very polite at first but then he became a little shit faster than Bush can make an excuse to invade another country. At one point he stood up with a rolled up a news paper and smacked me on the forehead with it. Very uncool. I spanked him twice on the ass, pushed him away, and grabbed his chair from him so that he couldn’t sit on it. We then agreed that we should head inside the bar and but soon got bored and left.
One the scooter taxi ride home, my driver veered off and tried to take me to some dodgy girly bar away from any other night life. After some polite ‘no, no, just take me back home’ he finally took me back to my digs at the guesthouse where I crashed.
On the fourth day, after having been in party mode for the past two nights, I just hung out in my room sleeping, watching some television and writing some emails and blogs. 
Just some quality time with Stu to take the edge of such a relaxing few days.
I’m scheduled to leave Friday back for Phnom Penh where I have a flight Saturday but am half temped to blow that off and hang out a few more days…it is very relaxed around here, it is not crowded at all, prices are decent and I’m just liking S’ville a lot more than I expected. Decision day is tomorrow.
Posted by stu at 04:28 PM | Comments (2)
January 24, 2006
This used to be a school
After having read David P. Chandler's Voices from S-21 while in Vietnam and Laos, I knew that I wanted to visit the notorious S-21 Prison in central Phnom Penh. Before having read Voices… my knowledge of Cambodia’s recent history was much weaker than I had realized. Now my understanding of what happened here in the ‘70s is another piece of the jigsaw puzzle we call modern South East Asian history.
The Tuol Svay Prey High School, later referred to as the S-21 prison under the Khmer Rouge, is now named the Tuol Sleng Museum. There are five main buildings at the former school site. The administration building in the center of the five structure E-shaped compound is used for the museum’s administrative purposes but the cells blocks and torture chambers of buildings A, B, C and D now host artifacts, picture galleries but most areas are as they were during the Khmer Rouge’s administration of the prison. The site is ringed by fences and barbed wire.
Building A is where many of the torture chambers were located. There are still some of the bed frames in several of the rooms. Building B is now mainly dedicated to photographs of the formerly imprisoned and later executed victims. Building C was full of cells for the prisoners. It stands out from the rest of the buildings because the upper floor walkways are enclosed in barbed wire and each of the former school rooms has been divvied up into cells with bricks on the ground floor, wood on the first floor, and nothing on the top floor. There are iron rings embedded into the floor that are all too real.
In the right side of building C, under the stair case, there was a bunch of graffiti by English language tourists. The scribbles were unanimous in their condemnation of what happened, but varied from the religious (“Jesus saves”) to the comparisons with recent events (“G-Bay”) to completely off kilt Michigan Militia-like ideological crap (“take away their guns” being the first step to such an atrocities). The only one that stands out in a positive aspect was “When this was a prison, nobody learned. When this was a school, nobody died.” Building D housed a photo exhibition of photographs and statements by former prisoners, guards and Khmer Rouge headmen—many of whom are still alive today. Pol Pot’s photograph had been heavily and repeatedly vandalized.
There were about two dozen westerners about, including a few Asian-Americans. The few that did speak spoke in hushed tones. No body laughed. Nobody smiled. Nobody made eye contact. It was eerie and I have not felt like that since my first visit to the Vietnam War memorial in Washington DC. I guess all such places, those memorializing the death of so people so recently like S-21, are like that.
Posted by stu at 10:03 AM | Comments (0)
Check box tourist
My fist real day in Phnom Penh was “check box tourist day”. I really wanted to see the Royal Palace and Silver Pagoda, 
the Tuol Sleng Museum genocide museum and just wander aimlessly thought the streets trying to understand the city.
It was hot and humid and water stops were frequent. After some difficulty, I arrived at S-21 (Tuol Sleng Museum.) There will be separate post on that. After two hours I headed back north to my hotel and stopped off at the Royal Palace and Silver Pagoda which is a HUGE complex. And amazing. And beautiful. Give me a week or two and the pictures will be up in the picture gallery.
My final day in Phnom Penh as all about breakfast and taking the bus to Sihanoukville, a $5 four hour ride in seat 15. The Cambodian man adjacent to me tried to trick me into taking the window seat, but after a few laughs and a ‘no way in hell, buddy’ smile we settled in for the journey in our semi-air-conditioned 50 pax bus.
Posted by stu at 09:53 AM | Comments (0)
January 20, 2006
Off to Cambodia...
With only a few days left in Chiang Mai there was a bit of pressure to square things off before leaving: pack up and ship home newly purchased stuff, come to a stopping point with Child’s Dream and the web site, and organize my last few weeks in Asia. Except for shipping a 10kg box back to Zurich for 2200 Baht, I failed at everything. The web site is going to need my intermittent attention for the next week or so. I have lost my UBS ATM card. (Now I’m on the backup Credit Suisse ATM card.) My plans from here on out include only 4200 Baht return tickets form Bangkok to Phnom Penh, a Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia flight to Macau in mid-February, and a two night reservation at the Kowloon New World Renaissance for my last two night in Hong Kong. Everything else is a mess and I’ve got some hard dates to work with.
After over a day of trying to get the Bank of Bangkok to open up their ATM machine for me to look for my card (successfully searched but no card) I just had to get down to Bangkok for my Thursday morning flight to Phnom Penh, Cambodia. 
That meant a Wednesday evening 1900 VIP night bus for a whopping 780 Baht—nearly double the train fare. But the ride in seat A7 on the air conditioned 30 seat Mercedes-Benz was comfortable enough with its wide seats to get maybe four hours of sleep. The driver even dropped me off right at the airport, which he was not supposed to do, at about 4am. My check in time was at 5:30am so I just sorta cruised the terminal for a while before check in. That gave me enough time to sort out my 2200 Baht VAT return for the replacement camera, grab a bite to eat, and check the internet for hotels/guesthouses in Phnom Pehn.
After sleeping most of my Bangkok Airways flight PG920 away in seat 17D, we landed in Cambodia. The US$20 visa-on-arrival process was quick despite being so poorly organized. Next was immigration, baggage claim, customs and a US$7 taxi to the Dara Reang Sey Hotel where, in room 102, I’ve got air conditioning, cable TV, the best hot shower I’ve seen in months and a broken refrigerator. Oh, well. By 10am I was fast asleep again. At 3pm I awoke with a major headache and sore throat—Pam back in Chiang Mai was ill and now it seems I’ve picked up her disease. Super. I grab some food downstairs at the Guesthouse kitchen (cheese omelet, French bread with jam) and head back to bed to watch TV, read the latest issue of the Economist, and try to sleep my illness away.
Posted by stu at 03:43 PM | Comments (0)