Kampuchean Adventure

We leave Kampong for the first time. It is not just another trip to the hub site for lectures, immunizations, and perhaps some time spent at the Internet café. This is a real trip, a real adventure on our own. Leaving in the afternoon, we pass schools, factories, slums, mansions, houses on stilts, and hilltop temples in the distance on our way to the capital. We are joking and laughing, happy at the fact that we are finally free for a weekend after six weeks jumping from day to day, hour to hour. It is blazing hot outside, but the van has air-conditioning. The taxi arrives on the riverbank of the Mekong, and a wind is blowing off the river that cools us as we make our way to the guesthouse.

Phnom Penh is a crawling metropolis of filth, luxury, and darkness. Madness and danger lurk around every street corner, and seeing the unexpected familiar is a daily occurrence. The streets are lined with shops that are crowded together, and motorcycles move quickly in herds down the boulevards. The legacy of the French occupation, which ended in 1953, can be found in the design of the city. Roundabouts circle giant, illuminated monuments, and the architecture of the rectangular apartment blocks resembles some sooty and foreboding neighborhoods of Montparnasse in Paris. The riverbank is lined with expensive hotels, restaurants, and bars that cater to western tastes, and tourists walk around unaware of the spectacle that they are. Aside from here, they hide in pockets around the city. When we stumble upon them, we stare just as much as everyday Cambodians, but they take no notice of who or what we are. Phnom Penh is a world unto itself, unlike the rest of Cambodia.

We check into our guesthouse, and move quickly to walk around and eat before dark. The streets are very dangerous at night, and no one wants to be the next victim of some wealthy man’s temper. Crossing the streets and walking past the independence monument at the heart of the city, we finally reach one of our main destinations: a western supermarket. My mouth drops as I enter the air-conditioned confines of the store, and stare at the goods that I found common in my former life. Peanut butter, jelly, cheese, donuts, ice cream, maple syrup, packaged meat products, and cookies. I walk around the isles in sheer astonishment and excitement at what I find. As I examine the prices of all these things becomes registered in my mind, however, the astonishment slowly turns into bitterness. The want of these things is drowned by the fact that I cannot afford to buy many of it. I buy a small jar of Nutella, and leave satisfied.

The group of people that I am with splits up, and a few of us head over to a western restaurant for dinner. I eat a hamburger and French fries. The others order the same, or Mexican food. We talk, we eat, and life feels good. After dinner we head back to the guesthouse, and I use the Internet for a little while at the café across the street.

A little while later I find myself sitting in the bar of the guesthouse with some volunteers and trainees. Pint sized bottles of Anchor beer are on the table, and I am drinking a Fanta. We are sitting in brown wicker chairs, and there are wooden fans circling above our heads that are suspended from a thatched roof. Yellow, Chinese lamps are strung from the ceiling, and the electric light is not very strong. We talk, exchange stories about our training villages, and the listen to the advice given to us by some of the other volunteers about living abroad. Australian and European backpackers filter in and out, and I stare at them as if they were aliens. The women are wearing shorts, low-cut shirts, and exposing their shoulders. I am ashamed to even glance at them, but I cannot seem to stop doing that. It is something I have not seen in so long.

I am so tired. I want to go to bed, but I am drawn to these people. One of them is leaving tomorrow, and while I am sad to see him go I know it is really for the best. I finally excuse myself, and go upstairs to the room I am renting for five dollars a night. After taking a hot shower for the first time in six weeks, I watch the news on the television. John McCain is announcing his running mate for the 2008 presidential election as I drift off.

The next morning, three friends and I pile into a cab that drives us to the Russian market. I feel refreshed, and the day has not quite warmed up yet. We negotiate the time and price of the bus, and leave Phnom Penh. Slowly, we wind our way up the Mekong river to the town of Kampong Cham. We get to the town, and take a tuk tuk (a motorcycle rickshaw) through the roundabouts and markets to the Mekong hotel on the riverbank. Making friends with the driver, we ask him to take us to Phnom Bros and Phnom Serai after lunch.

Phnom Bros and Phnom Serai (male and female mountain) are two small hills around 6km away from the town. The legend about this site is that they are the result of a competition between the men and women of Kampong Cham. The story is that before this took place, women were always responsible for the expense of weddings. The women did not think that this was particularly fair, so they challenged the men to race and put a wager on it. Whoever could build the tallest mountain would not have to pay for weddings from then on. The women built the mountain halfway during the day, and then built a fire to trick the men into thinking that they had stopped to rest. The men saw the smoke and proceeded to rest while the women kept building. The women eventually built the taller mountain, and the men, from then on, had to always pay for the wedding.

After lunch, we make our way to this site. Climbing up long, stone staircases to see the temples on top of each one, we can see how the Khmer Rouge damaged them during the mid 1970’s. The areas around the site are some of the infamous killing fields in which people were systematically put into forced labor camps. Walking between the mountains through the farms, I feel a chill crawl up the back of my spine when I imagine what went on there some thirty years ago. Despite its terrifying history, the land itself is barely scarred. Like the beaches of Normandy or the farmland of Gettysburg, you would think that it was just like any other place on earth.

We come down from the mountains, wash up, and stroll around the town before having dinner. Another volunteer from Kampong Cham province joins us and tells us some of the things he has seen in Cambodia. The restaurant is owned by an American ex-pat with a big, black mustache, and serves western food. I eat spaghetti with tomato sauce, look at movie posters on the wall, and listen to Tom Petty as it comes over the stereo. The restaurant overlooks the Mekong, and during pauses in conversation I stare at it. The sun’s reflection on the water shimmers as it slowly dips behind rain clouds, and then behind the other side of the river. It almost nine in the evening, and time for bed.

The next day I head back to Kampong, and the cycle of training begins again.