I used to think there were two types of travelers. The type that couldn't handle the discomforts of traveling in the third world and those that could. However, after spending three days in Cambodia, I have determined that Cambodia is in its own league as far as third world goes. I have traveled to more than 70 countries on six continents and at least half of those countries would be considered third world but I have never seen the type of poverty I saw in Cambodia. Nor have I experienced the types of discomforts and inconveniences that I had in Cambodia. However, after a marathon three days I will consider Cambodia one of my all time favorite places to visit.
First, Cambodia may be the single hottest place on Earth during the dry season, which is exactly when I was there. Second, the roads in Cambodia (which is a term I use lightly because they really aren't roads, they are more like bumpy, sandy, death traps) are the worst in the world I am convinced. Third, Cambodia may be home to world's most amazing and impressive ruins at Angkor. Finally, (Cairo and Bangkok aside) Phnom Penh may be the single craziest place to try to navigate with all the motorbikes and tuk-tuk's crisscrossing all over the place trying to get your business amidst the air pollution and hell-ish heat.
In order to properly characterize my trip through Cambodia I need to start with the heat. I am a person who loves the heat and will go far and wide for warm weather but I have never felt heat like I did on this trip. What makes the heat seem so unbearable as opposed to a Northern Africa, Middle East or Latin America is that there is simply nowhere to go to beat the heat. The country is not developed enough to have many places with air conditioning. In addition, you can't even get a tan in Cambodia if you wanted one. You sweat so much that the lather of your sweat will reflect the sun away from you. Even though you sweat off five pounds minimum per day you don't actually gain any color. You only gain more dirty laundry or, in my case, I just threw my clothes out because they were that gross and because to replace clothes in Cambodia is less than a burger at McDonald's back home.
The only thing that could make the heat even worse in Cambodia was the condition of the roads of which there are only three or four in the whole country. When I left at 5a.m. from Bangkok to go to Siem Reap I was expecting a 9-hour bus ride to pass quickly. As any veteran bus rider knows you can usually sleep for a good amount of the trip, especially if you were out partying in Bangkok the night before and hadn't slept before you got onto your nice air-conditioned bus heading to the Cambodian border along the smooth paved roads of Thailand.
At about 11 a.m. we arrived at the Thai side of the border at Aranyaprathet where we were supposed to walk across the border into Poipet, Cambodia where we were to catch the connecting Cambodian bus to Siem Reap, a modest 150km away. I was planning on arriving in Siem Reap at 2pm. That didn't happen.
After waiting in line forever to sort out details of my visa which I had bought in the United States before my trip to avoid this type of hassle, I was shook down for another US$10 by a collection of corrupt border police who happened to be holding my passport at the time. Despite my anger about the hold-up (which I have come to expect with my traveling experiences) I was very excited to continue on to Siem Reap and the great temples at Angkor Wat. There was supposed to be a bus waiting at the border for us and of course there wasn't. So a man appearing to know what he was talking about directed us to a house with a red roof and told us to wait here for the bus which was to be there shortly to whisk us away.
Four hours later, we loaded our belongings onto the diesel burning metal monster that you only seem to see in the third world, except the air conditioning was broken on this one so we would have to rely on the windows as our source of cooling. However, when it is 300 degrees out and the roads are so awful that the bus cannot manage more than 7 miles per hour in velocity, the windows don't provide much comfort in the middle of the day in the dry Cambodian desert. I say desert because all the rice fields have dried up. They are unmanageable since the end of the war because they are still loaded with landmines. Cambodia had more live land mines than any other country in the world and hundreds of people die per year because of them. Needless to say, by the time our bus broke down for the third time I was ready to jump on one of the landmines. After helping to push the bus out of a sand trap, we continued on to Siem Reap, arriving at midnight. I found a lovely US$1 a night guesthouse and went to sleep. I awoke to a 5am wake up call for sunrise at Angkor Wat.
I met my group that I had made plans with on the bus to go explore the temples at 5:15am and arranged our tuk-tuk for the day. We paid our US$20 entrance fee, which is more than I spent the rest of my days in Cambodia combined. Continuing down the dark road, the sound of the tuk-tuk motor started to deteriorate and the sight of the magical spires of Angkor Wat could be seen as the sun was getting ready to wake up for the day.
The first sight of Angkor Wat is a breathtaking thing because of its total viewing appeal. It is located in the middle-of-nowhere Cambodia surrounded by this massive moat protected by a huge, perfectly symmetrical fortress fence containing carvings that would make Michelangelo proud. Once inside the temple, it is better than you can imagine. A World Heritage Site, it has so much to offer with its size and the fact that you can be a kid and climb on the very steep stairways. It is not for the faint hearted and once you get up to the top you are scared to go back down. I saw a Japanese tourist do just that. She got all the way up and refused to go down because it was so steep. She crouched at the top for about 45 minutes crying before a friend went up and helped her down. We felt bad for her but that wasn't about to deter us from reaching the top of the temple.
Angkor is a huge complex of temples with other temples of varying size, shape and layout. Some were actually in the jungle where they had trees growing out of them and animals having permanent residence in them. They are so unique because they are so raw. Machu Picchu in Peru has a five star hotel on its grounds for God's sake and tour groups galore. Tikal, Guatemala has built wooden stairs to assist the elderly and the faint hearted in reaching tops of the ruins. I can appreciate all of that because different people have different needs and aspirations, but for me Angkor Wat buries them all.
After taking in all the temples I could handle, I bussed it down to Phnom Penh, the capital city of Cambodia. The horrendous bus ride aside, again I arrived about 3pm. Just enough time to go and see the Killing Fields. The Killing Fields are the horrible reminder of the 40,000 people who met their final destination here under the Pol Pot reign of terror. Although largely unknown to the western world the Cambodian genocide is one of the worst in history and it happened as recently as the 1980's. Today, you can still walk around and see bits of clothes and bone sticking out of the ground. Impoverished children who play on top of the mass gravesites and the stray dogs who tug at the pieces of clothing sticking up from the ground add to the despair of the site. The center of the sad site contains a 17 level glassed-in shelf with the remains of a lot of the humans who perished. The thousands and thousands of skulls have left a lasting impression on me and like the Nazi Holocaust or the Rwandan Genocide is something that the world should never forget.
Finally, the next morning I caught a bus to Saigon to get back to normal third world living of air pollution, petty crime, hassles and bad water. After three wonderfully awful days in Cambodia, that didn't sound too bad.
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