Cambodia - The "Everything For A Dollar" Country

Sometimes that's good, sometimes it's bad. But quite cheap all around.

Phnom Penh - a filthy barely paved backwater of a capital which is either on the verge of recovery or collapse. You can really feel like a foreign correspondent here - drinking Jack Daniels in a musty bar while the motos buzz by on the shredded, muddy street. It's really a destitute and memorable place. I hope it never changes.

I just finished an old but interesting book on the 'revolution' of Cambodia - "year zero" if you don't know.... where the Khmer Rouge evacuated the cities and put everyone to work on the farm fields to harvest rice. With their bare hands. I won't go into too much detail about it - but one of the overlying questions was how a small number of extremist rebels could manage to force the entire population of Cambodia(about 9 million people) into the countryside and make them do forced labour.

One way was to punish every crime by death. This explains how 2 million were killed over 4 years, about a fifth of the population. Human skulls are as common as palm trees in Cambodia. But the other reasons involve the mentality of the people, their attitude toward society and who they are - the writer, a frenchman who worked with the refugees in Thailand after he was forced to leave his embassy in P.P., states in great academic detail how the Khmers(this is what everyone calls the Cambodians - it's the major ethnic group of Cambodia) are in general a simple rural people - that they will do whatever they can, allow whomever wishes to lead the country to do so, as long as they can tend their land. They love their land and they love their people - and it would take brutal conditions, such as the ones the KR put into place, for the thousands to flee their country. Even then, many Khmers in refugee camps expressed regret for having to leave their land and country behind.

Now extend that philosophy into a contemporary city populated 95% by these people.... the government, whoever it may be, really doesn't matter on a day to day basis. Nor does law enforcement or anything else related to what we rely on so heavily here in the west - infrastructure. There is a different law, an inherent law - the law of the land. You live in the woods, you see someone who you haven't seen before, you welcome them into your house and offer food and lodging for them - it's as natural as breathing. Right? Perhaps not to us - but to them, at this point, that's how they work. Their inherent law, their inherent ways, are what really govern Phnom Penh and Cambodia. Yes, there is a great deal of crime in the city; a great deal of underworldly things you couldn't fathom. But when you have lived with such difficult conditions for so long, since 1975, you become used to the fact that danger exists in your country and you just continue with your life.

But perhaps the best signifier of how Phnom Penh works is with the long-term security of the city over the years.... it hasn't always been dangerous, and it hasn't always been safe. Crime seems to run over the city in waves. A fellow I spoke to who visited in '93 said that you wouldn't think twice about going around the city at night.... and then when he visited in Christmas of last year you wouldn't dare go out at night. And now, it's reasonably safe again.



Aside from the general feel of the city, you're hard pressed to find anything really interesting. The walk along the river is allright, but of course the kids pestering you to buy something from them reduce the pleasantness of the walk to little more than a hassle. Cheoung Ek, the Killing Fields Memorial outside of town, is worth visiting - to see the giant monument filled with human skulls. Guaranteed to gross out the folks back at home. Everyone I've shown the pictures to always has this strange scrunched up look on their face. Now, though, I think the memorial is a bit too sterile - the skulls help you to recognize the immediacy of what happened in Cambodia, but there are more powerful testaments to the country's disaster in the country.





Like the Tuol Sleng Genocide museum. Easily the most disturbing museum I've visited anywhere. Much more moving than the concentration camps in Europe. The crudeness of the devices used to torture and incarcerate the people in the museum are shocking, as well as how neatly they have been preserved. And then to finish with a wall-sized map of Cambodia made out of human remains is, well, just downright disturbing. But it says a lot about how the Cambodians view their past and how much these people have had to live through - they're just presenting their story the way they've seen it. And all of us western fools who are used to such sanitized exhibits the world over cannot help but feel a bit uneasy at the ubiquity of human remains in Cambodia.













I'm staying at a place called the Walkabout Hotel, just a block away from the Hearts of Darkness pub. This hotel has a bar, a pool table, and a real foreign correspondent feel to it. Glenn's the Australian fellow who runs the place - some people have fallen in love with Phnom Penh. I wouldn't say that I'm at that point yet, but I am certainly fascinated by this place.

Tomorrow morning I'm off to Siem Reap and see what all of the fuss is about up at Angkor. I'll be back in Phnom Penh in a few days - unless, of course, all of this talk of Cambodia being a dangerous country actually materializes into something I can sink my teeth into.

Part 2- Up To Angkor, following the beaten path
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* A full account of my visit to this country is available in my yet to be published book, Means To An Exit. If you are an agent or publisher and would like to receive an outline and manuscript, please Contact Me.