Penh’s Hill

It’s 3am in Phnom Penh, and the street children have only just finished their soccer game beneath my window. I guess if you have no place to go when the street lights come on you just get to keep playing.

Lying in bed in a puddle of sweat I can’t help but wonder how this place was ever inhabited before AC, or electricity to turn a damn fan for that matter, but I guess you could say the same about Florida.

What Conquistador got off the boat into a neck-deep swamp teeming with alligators and malarial mosquitoes and said ‘yeah, this’ll do’.  How bad must the place they left have been?

Cambodia is not a bad place, but it is a bit hard. As a country and a people they wear their history on their faces.  How can they not?  Their holocaust is a recent memory.

You can’t find a living Nazi in Germany. The ones they keep putting on trial are all over 80.  Slowly carting their oxygen bottle up to the defendants box. Yet here you can be almost certain that the 50yr old tuk-tuk driver who drove you to dinner was not that long ago a card carrying Khmer Rouge soldier, directly or indirectly responsible for things that defy logic, reason, and simple humanity.

In the killing fields on the outskirts of Phnom Penh there’s a large oak tree.  While the mothers and fathers were marched off to the pits that littered the field to be shot, or stabbed in the back of the neck, the babies heads were bashed against that oak. I can’t rightly wrap my mind around that.

What can you do? People get swept up. Ask any young German who saw Hitler speak in 33′ or 34′ and they would say the man had charisma.  No one could really know how things were going to play out.  Saloth Saar, better known as Pol Pot, wasn’t necessarily a charmer, but he knew how to control people with fear.

Keep people scared. Keep them informing on their neighbors so there’s less chance of it coming back at them.  Keep them looking the other way, so when the time comes to bash the opposition’s head in no one says word one.

I suppose poverty plays it’s role. Hitler wouldn’t have had a chance if Germany had been prospering between the wars, but by capitalizing on peoples hopes and desperation he was able to catapult himself from petty informer to Chancellor.

As far as poverty goes, Cambodia is up there with the poorest I’ve seen. Ripe for the groundswell that brings a despot into power.

These day’s the outlook is happier, if still staggeringly poor.  Half shuttered malls abut slums, which are exactly what one pictures in the mind’s eyes when contemplating the word.  Gaggles of half clothed little street Arabs play games in puddles of stagnant water.  Their mothers watch disinterested from street corners while managing their booth or snack-stall that is their only meager source of income.

You half expect Sally Struthers or that guy who looks like Santa to walk by, emaciated child in arms, and film crew in tow.

It’s a dirty, dusty city, and the heat mixed with the exhaust from what seems like a million tuk-tuk’s makes you struggle to breathe.  I gave up trying to jog here after one miserable attempt.

Legend has it that a small girl named Penh, while pulling firewood from the Tonle River, came across a log filled with golden Buddhist and Hindu statues. Taking this as a sign of good fortune, the capitol was moved from Angkor to Phnom Penh, or Penh’s Hill.  The site is commemorated with a beautiful Wat, and a glowing statue of Lady Penh herself, right next door to a massage parlor run by blind masseuses. (They’re really blind too. I tested them.)

I wonder what lady Penh would think of the city that still bears her name. To put it plainly, ‘it is not a city burdened by moral excesses’.

It’s seedy in a way I’ve not experienced before. A luridness borne of desperation.  Bangkok is like vice if Disney got into the prostitution game.  Phnom Penh is like the island of bad kids from Pinnochio. Vice and corruption left to run rampant. A dirty playground for miscreants and malcontents who feel Bangkok and Saigon are too sanitized.

I’ve been offered every drug I know, a few I don’t, and women of all manner and age. Word around the bar late at night is that there’s a place that for $10,000 you can kill a man.  Pay your fee, walk into a room, and shoot some poor bastard in the head.

Apocryphal?

One hopes…but something about this place tells me it’s not.

Having seen the sights the first time around I am content now to while away my days in this den of vice reading by the pool. It doesn’t help that I get pulled over every single time I ride my bike during the day.

Jackbooted cops. Corrupt is a harsh term. If I made $100 a month I’d probably shake down the occasional wide-eye as well. Kid’s probably needed braces.

A white face (proudly bearded) stands out like a big dollar sign in a sea of Khmer motorcyclists. The quick jump into the street with the baton and the wave. A snap decision to be made.

‘I got two choices y’all. Pull over the car or,
bounce on the devil put the pedal to the floor.’ Jay-Z

I’ve run from the cops twice. Neither time did they give chase. Turns out they pay for their own gas, so a high speed pursuit isn’t economically sound.  But I imagine if they did chase you, you wouldn’t be paying the usual $2 bribe.

My ethos is this: Pay small, but quickly, and with the utmost respect.  The longer a discussion of your rule-breaking goes, the longer the list of ‘fines’ becomes.  While this isn’t Japan with the whole saving-face aspect, the corruption here is instead done with a cheeky wink, you still don’t want to risk offending.

Despite the near constant police harassment, it’s not my main gripe with the country. It’s the food.

Perhaps months in Vietnam spoiled me. Any roadside stand, which were plentiful, if questionably sanitary, would provide a solid meal for a buck. Two got you a feast. Three might kill you.

The standard Viet street meal:
-Huge plate of rice
-Grilled pork chop/chops (Thit Heo)
-Soup, usually a thin vegetable soup
-Veggies: cukes, tomato’s, onion, water spinach
-Tea, complimentary and generally self service from a giant bucket

By comparison, my first meal after barely scraping through the border into Cambodia consisted of a block of instant noodle in a lukewarm broth. After waiting hungrily for it to soften I finally resorted to eating it like a giant cracker.

Then comes the bug.

It could be in anything. The murky water bucket used to ‘wash’ the dish. Old food in the tines of a fork. Or simply good old fecal bacteria ferried onto the meat by the hordes of flies that commute between the buffalo patties in the street and the meat on the hook.

There’s no avoiding it.

Even playing chicken and eating in my western-run hostel resulted in me puke-shitting myself more times than I’d like to count. I figure I’ve spent seven weeks in Cambodia over the last few months. Of those seven I figure I was deathly sick for three, and weak and miserable for four. Few people I met in Cambo avoided it. Most fell the first week. Perhaps there should be a comical name created for this malady. India has ‘Delhi Belly’, maybe the ‘Phnom Poops’ would lessen help lessen the stigma of deucin’ your hostel bed.