Cambodia

Cambodia is not a country whose name necessarily conjures up positive, sunny images. Growing up, as an avid reader of books on world history, I first heard of Cambodia in connection with the Khmer Rouge genocide, one of the most notorious events of the 20th century, sitting alongside the Holocaust, Turkey's extermination of the Armenians and the Rwandan genocide as an example of the lows humanity can reach.

Years later, as I started travelling around Asia, I would sometimes hear bad reports about Cambodia from people who'd been there. Several of them said they'd noticed a sadness about the country, as if the terrible events of its recent history still hung in the air. Other travellers, perhaps less perceptive, just spoke about how desperately poor, corrupt and chaotic the country seemed. Everyone agreed, however, that the temples of Angkor Wat were amazing and worth visiting no matter what. 

During my years of studying Chinese affairs, I learnt that Cambodia had essentially become a Chinese client-state, run by a leader who depends on China for support and patronage. I read about how Cambodia vetoes any move by ASEAN to condemn China's actions in the South China Sea, and how many parts of the country have been taken over by Chinese developments, creating some resentment among ordinary Cambodians.

As I climbed onto a minivan in Bangkok's backpacker district on a blisteringly hot March afternoon, headed for Siem Reap, it was impossible to completely shake off this baggage of hearsay and negative images that I associated with Cambodia. The journey to Siem Reap, the modern town that sits next to the ruins of Angkor Wat, took a total of seven hours, including the border crossing at Poipet. 

After crossing the border, the difference in prosperity and infrastructure between Thailand and Cambodia immediately became apparent. Everything looked less affluent and more ramshackle on the Cambodian side. After entering the country my driver took me to a place where I could exchange money. I was surprised to learn that the US Dollar is accepted everywhere in Cambodia, just as much as the local Riel, and so I changed my Thai Baht into Dollars.

We drove into the night, through the provincial town of Sisophon (which looked frankly rather miserable) and on to Siem Reap. The place I had booked in Siem Reap turned out to be right in the middle of the bar street. The hotel cost very little, only 13 dollars a night for a room with a bathroom, balcony and AC. It even had a pool. When I booked it, I was struck by how cheap Cambodia is; in Thailand you would never find a room of your own for that price, especially in a major tourist destination.

It turned out that the hotel's cheapness was not without reason: in my room the wifi only really worked on the balcony, and what's more it was facing a bunch of bars with loud music, and the girl at the front desk warned me that the racket would go on until 1 AM. The hotel did have a pool, as advertised, but it was somewhat miserable and it faced the entrance to the main street, so it provided little privacy.

The following day I got up determined to go to Angkor Wat, but I soon realised that I'd already missed the opportunity, since the organised tours all leave early in the morning to catch the sunrise and avoid the hottest time of the day. It is possible to rent a tuk-tuk for the day and go to the temples alone, but the cost is similar to an organised tour and you won't have a guide.

I resolved to go Angkor Wat the following day, and for that afternoon I booked a tour to the so-called "floating villages" outside the city. About 30 kms South of Siem Reap lies the Tonlé Sap, the biggest lake in Southeast Asia. Along the banks of the lake there are a large number of fishing villages where the houses are built on very high stilts. During the tour I was bussed to one such village with a group of sightseers. 

The village was quite large, and all the houses were built high above ground, on stilts almost 10 meters in length. During the rainy season the village is submerged, and the water almost reaches the houses. Tours like the one I took have to reach the area by boat. This was the dry season, however, and there was no water in the area. The wooden houses looked simple, but decent. Many had boats parked underneath them in preparation for the rainy season. 

There was a Buddhist temple (which was not on stilts) and a school in the middle of the village. The brown, parched landscape and the features of the local people reminded me more of India than Thailand. At some point a group of children appeared, accompanied by a couple of women who asked us if we wanted to donate some money to buy textbooks for the kids. The initiative was apparently supported by an educational NGO, and quite genuine. I declined to donate, not wanting to feed into a cycle where children depend on foreign tourists to buy their textbooks. 

Further down there was a local wedding going on under a canvas, with extremely loud music played on loudspeakers. Some of the tourists in my group stood right next to the seated guests and filmed the wedding or took photos, but I felt uncomfortable intruding on a private ceremony in this way. After this we were taken to a river and put on a boat which drove us to the Tonlé Sap Lake. As we approached the boat, somewhat outside the village proper, local children gathered to ask us for money. Unfortunately, local children begging from tourists was something I encountered several times in Siem Reap.

The boat took us to a floating restaurant in the middle of a lake, which was clearly a tourist trap, so the majority of us wisely decided to just get drinks and no food. There was also a live crocodile in a cage in the middle of the restaurant. Crocodile meat is part of the diet in Cambodia. 

Images of a floating village near Siem Reap

The following morning I woke up at 5 to join a sunrise tour to Angkor Wat. Almost everyone else in the minivan was English, including a loud and boisterous group of students from London, about 20 years old, many of whom were still nursing hangovers from the previous night. 

Angkor Wat did not disappoint. The temples are undeniably amazing in their size, number and exquisite architecture. This is perhaps the most impressive historical site I have seen anywhere in Asia. There were throngs of tourists, but it didn't spoil the atmosphere. We were taken to the precise spot where Angelina Jolie filmed the most famous scene in Tomb Raiders, and in fact the guide mentioned Angelina Jolie several times over the course of the tour, as if this amazing historical site needed to latch on to her for added glory, or as if only the association with a Hollywood blockbuster could truly impress Westerners. 

Angkor Wat is the world's largest religious structure. But more than that, it was the centre of the great city of Angkor, the capital of the Khmer Empire. Angkor flourished for six centuries, and it came to cover an area of 1000 square kilometres, larger than modern Paris, making it by far the most extended pre-industrial city in the world. At its peak it may have housed a million people. The city was held together by a complicated water management system, the likes of which the world had never seen. 

In the end, Angkor collapsed under the weight of its own success, as the system became unmanageable, the climate changed and the population became exhausted by the constant forced labour needed to maintain the city. The downfall of the Khmer Empire, and of the Khmer people, was truly striking. For centuries their empire extended over most of continental Southeast Asia, and the capital was the most advanced in the world. 

And yet, after their empire collapsed, the Khmer people found themselves hemmed in between the Siamese (the modern Thais) and the Vietnamese, who had become far more powerful. For centuries they were only able to survive as stagnating vassals of one of these two powers, while more and more of their territory was grabbed by their neighbours, particularly the Vietnamese. It was only the establishment of the French Protectorate, in the 19th century, that may have saved Cambodia from complete disappearance. For once a European protectorate really did protect, even if it was by accident. 

The 20th century has also been unkind to the Khmer people and Cambodia. After getting dragged into the Vietnam War, suffering American carpet bombings, the four-year nightmare of the Khmer Rouge, and further years of Vietnamese tutelage and simmering conflict, Cambodia is now a scarred and traumatised nation. 

Until this day the Khmer are unfortunately looked down upon by many of their neighbours as backwards and lazy, and not even a hint of their former glory is in sight. I got an inkling of this when I told a girl from Bangkok that I was going to Cambodia. She told me that all the beggars in Bangkok are Cambodian. I asked her if Bangkok also gets Burmese beggars (Thailand sees massive Burmese immigration) and she replied "no, the Burmese are hardworking people".

Given their country's troubled present, it is hardly surprising that Cambodians take the huge pride they do in the temples of Angkor Wat. Even the blue and red national flag has a depiction of Angkor Wat at its centre, the equivalent of the Italian flag having a picture of the Coliseum or the Chinese flag a silhouette of the Great Wall running down the middle. All Cambodian flags have displayed Angkor Wat on them since 1850, as if to tell the world "yes, we may be poor and powerless, but our ancestors built something incredible". Even Pol Pot, in spite of wanting to completely destroy the country's old culture, kept the depiction of Angkor Wat on the flag of his "Democratic Kampuchea". In this way he was still a Khmer. 

Our tour of the ruins of Angkor Wat started at 5, and by the time it finished at 1 pm we were all drained from the humid heat. This was, after all, the hottest time of the year. The temples are incredible, but half a day was enough for me to get the idea. Many visitors go back over several days, but I'm not that kind of traveller (the tickets for foreigners also aren't cheap, costing 37 dollars for a day and 63 for three days).

That evening I went to a slightly different area of Siem Reap to visit the Peace Cafe, a place that offers Khmer and yoga class and nice meals. The area was less touristy and more quiet than the one around my hotel, and I walked around a bit by the river, while young locals sat and chatted on the banks. I can't say I liked Siem Reap very much, or at least, I didn't like the touristy area I was staying in. It struck me as a Southeast Asian tourist trap with none of the charm of a place like Chiang Mai, and plenty of seediness and squalor.

The next day I took a minivan to Phnom Penh, Cambodia's capital. This time all the other passengers were Cambodian. The trip took about five hours. The dusty towns we passed along the way looked relatively poor, with no sidewalks and plenty of children cycling to school on bicycles. There were no malls or supermarkets, but plenty of little shops selling all kinds of goods.

I was surprised by how much I didn't dislike Phnom Penh. Cambodia's capital is fairly small and compact, sitting mostly on the left bank of the Mekong. It lacks the overwhelming size and bustle of many other capital cities in the region. The centre is quite cosmopolitan and, rarely for Southeast Asia, walkable. Getting around with tuk-tuks is cheap and easy. While it is the capital of a poor country, Phnom Penh itself doesn't look desperately poor, and it has two or three modern shopping malls of the kind you expect to find in any Asian city. 

What struck me the most was the openness and friendliness of the people. Even compared to Thailand, where people tend to be pleasant and smiley but also rather reserved, the friendliness of Cambodians was striking. I never personally encountered the guarded, suspicious or downright bizarre behaviour you often find in countries that have had a traumatic recent history, starting with China. Almost every Cambodian I dealt with was polite, helpful and friendly, and I did not encounter venal behaviour, scamming or insistent pushing of wares.

I was warned by long-term residents that Phnom Penh has a theft problem, and that people on motorbikes might snatch my phone out of my hands while I walk or take a tuk-tuk. I'm sure this is true, but I never felt any less safe in Phnom Penh than I did in Bangkok, Jakarta, Beijing or any other big Asian city, in other words I felt quite safe. I behaved with the same carelessness towards personal safety that I always do when in Asia, including walking around alone after dark, and suffered no problems because of it. 

Riverside view, Phnom Penh

Inside the royal palace complex

I also found Cambodians' skill with foreign languages rather striking. A working knowledge of English is quite widespread in Phnom Penh, even among tuk-tuk drivers and security guards. In neighbouring countries like Vietnam or Thailand it is considerably harder to find English-speakers, in my experience. This is probably explained by the fact that Cambodia is a small country with a small language unrelated to any other, and it is used to depending on foreign powers. After learning French during colonial times, many Cambodians found it useful to learn Vietnamese or even Russian during the Vietnamese occupation of the eighties, while nowadays the useful languages to learn are English and, increasingly, Chinese. 

This brings me to another thing about Phnom Penh that hit me immediately: the massive Chinese presence. I'm talking here about recent arrivals from Mainland China, not the traditional Cambodian-Chinese minority. The city is packed with businesses and restaurants opened by and catering to Mainland Chinese. Hearing residents speak Mandarin on the streets is quite normal, and you see the language everywhere. A lot of signs in Cambodian banks and businesses are translated into Chinese. Even Cambodia's prerecorded phone messages saying you dialled the wrong number are in Chinese, as well as Cambodian and English.  

On at least a couple of occasions, I found myself communicating with Cambodians in Chinese. On my last evening in the country, in Kampot, a group of friendly Cambodians invited me over to their table. They had come from Phnom Penh on business. The men were all shirtless and drinking beer. They spoke incredibly limited English, although we managed to bond over one of them being a Juventus supporter. It then turned out that two of the group spoke rather good Chinese (one claimed his father was, in fact, from China), and we managed to have an actual conversation in Chinese. 

I spent my last two nights in Phnom Penh in a serviced apartment on Diamond Island, an island on the Mekong which fifteen years ago used to be mostly slums and farmland. It is now full of new buildings and it seems to be populated primarily by Chinese. Most of the residents in my building were Chinese, and the Cambodian staff spoke to them in Chinese with no difficulty. The streets outside could have been those of any new neighbourhood in Tianjin or Changsha.

Street market, Phnom Penh

While in Phnom Penh I visited the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. It is perhaps the most disturbing museum I have ever visited. It is located in a building that used to be a high school, and was then turned into a high-security prison under the rule of the Khmer Rouge. The building sits right in the middle of the city, surrounded by bustling streets. 

What went on in that building between 1975 and 1979 is beyond description. Around 20,000 people were imprisoned there because they were accused of being in some way connected to the former regime, including plenty of former teachers and professionals whose only real crime was being educated. Later on, purged Khmer Rouge cadres also ended up there. Only a literal handful of prisoners ever survived, mainly because they made themselves useful to their captors in some way. The almost totality of those imprisoned there were tortured to death or killed. Some of the rare survivors of the prison now sit in the courtyard all day, selling books on their experiences, translated into several languages, to the tourists. I wonder how it must feel for them to still be sitting right in front of the place where they were tortured, decades later.

When the invading Vietnamese liberated Tuol Sleng, they found the bodies of the last detainees, who'd been bludgeoned to death by the fleeing guards. The building has been preserved in the same state it was found in 1979. Walking around it is an affecting experience. Some of the school's classrooms are still divided into lots of little cells, the size of pig pens, made out of rudimentary walls of wood and brick. Seeing these tiny cells made me think about the people locked up there day and night, sleeping on the hard floor with only the prospect of torture and death ahead of them. The corridors were laced with barbed wire, to stop the inmates from jumping to their deaths in the yard below.

In one room there were graphic pictures of the tortures detainees were subjected to, along with some of the original torture tools the guards used; in another room there were piles of skulls and collarbones of the victims. The audio tour included the testimony of one of the survivors. He said that when he first arrived in Tuol Sleng, in a bus with a group of other prisoners, the teenage Khmer Rouge guards looked at the new arrivals in the same manner animals of prey might look at their next meal. 

I have never visited a Nazi concentration camp, but the emotional effect would probably be similar. Tuol Sleng is a powerful testament to the evil that human beings can do to each other when the right circumstances arise. 

Tuol Sleng prison today

The corridors of the prison, laced with barbed wire so prisoners wouldn't try and jump to their deaths

The classes of the high school turned into a prison block, with holes punched through the walls and little cells built of brick to house the prisoners

Photos of some of the victims

A letter from a hospitalised Khmer Rouge official to his daughter, showcasing the movement's fanatical mindset. Notice the ranting against the CIA, the "Vietnamese expansionists" and the KGB

Collarbones of the victims, Tuol Sleng Prison

Skulls of the victims

What happened to the broad mass of the Cambodian population under Pol Pot was quite unparalleled. Phnom Penh and all the other towns were evacuated, and the inhabitants were forced into communes in the countryside. These communes were ruled by terror, with people forced to work from dawn to dusk for starvation rations, and murdered at the merest hint of suspicion. About a quarter of Cambodians are thought to have died during the four years of Pol Pot's rule. A French author once called it an "auto-genocide", a genocide done by Cambodians against Cambodians, which seems like an apt description.

After the Vietnamese invaded and liberated most of the country, the Khmer Rouge retreated to a small patch of land on the border with Thailand, where they fought on for two more decades. Their movement was provided with a shameful amount of international support. Their biggest supporters were the People's Republic of China, which funded and supported Pol Pot and his movement at every step of the way, and even attacked Vietnam in retaliation for their invasion of Cambodia.

But the US also have to take a share of the blame, and not only for dragging Cambodia into the Vietnam War to begin with: since this was the time of the Sino-Soviet split, and Vietnam was a solid Soviet ally, the US also preferred to see Pol Pot rule over Cambodia than the Vietnamese. Even after 1979, the US and many Western countries continued to recognise the Khmer Rouge as the legitimate government of Cambodia until 1993.

Then there is Hun Sen, the current president of Cambodia, who has ruled the country in one form or another for four decades. He started his political career in the Khmer Rouge, but defected to Vietnam when he was 24, when the movement began to cannibalise itself, and then rolled into Phnom Penh with the Vietnamese. After presiding over a "socialist regime" under Vietnamese oversight in the eighties, Hun Sen continued ruling in the nineties as Vietnam retreated, Cambodia officially became capitalist, the monarchy was reinstated and Buddhism was made the official religion again. 

Hun Sen now runs a regime that is close to being a one-party state (although it is not yet). When Western NGOs and international organisations provided much of the country's foreign funding, there was a need to at least pretend to adopt the trappings of liberal democracy. Now that China has become Cambodia's main sponsor, there is no need to play along with that game. All over Cambodia I saw the blue banners of the ruling "Cambodian People's Party" with Hun Sen's face on them. At least on one occasion, to be fair, I did see an office of the Candlelight Party, the country's most serious liberal opposition party.

Perhaps I wasn't in Cambodia long enough, but I never really felt the sadness and trauma in the air that many claim to have noticed. Of course any Cambodian over 50 lived through a genocide under the Khmer Rouge, and it is often claimed that large numbers of them suffer from PTSD and have passed the trauma on to their children. This may well be true, and it fits in with what I know about Holocaust survivors. Still, to an outsider like me there were no obvious signs of generalised trauma. If I didn't know what had happened there during the 70s, Cambodia would have struck me as just a relatively poor and traditional country, no more troubled than many others in Asia and around the world.

One of the placards of the ruling Cambodian People's Party that seem to dot every town and village in Cambodia

The Cambodia-Vietnam Friendship Monument in Phnom Penh

While in Phnom Penh I also took a day trip to the "Silk Island", actually two islands sitting in the Mekong River. The islands are known for their traditional silk production, and as a rural getaway from Phnom Penh. They are a stone's throw away from the city's Northern' suburbs, and looking at the map I could not believe they could be all that rural.  

The islands are reached by taking a ferry across the Mekong. The ferry ride lasts about two minutes. Although the ferry leaves from a suburb of the city, once you get to the islands you are indeed in the countryside, a world away from the capital's hustle and bustle. As soon as you get off the ferry there is a place that rents bicycles, and I paid 3 dollars to use an old bicycle for the day. 

The island's inhabitants mostly live in traditional houses on 2-3 meter stilts, and spend their days under the stilts, in the shade, during the dry season. There were plenty of people, mostly women, making silk on sewing machines. In the first village I crossed I ended up buying a silk scarf from a woman who convinced me to come to her home and see her work. No one else tried to sell me any silk while I was there.

I ended up finding a little rustic cafe' on the banks of the Mekong, and lying in a hammock while I looked at the river, a favourite Cambodian activity. A group of young Cambodians on a weekend trip happily waded into the river with their clothes on.

While I'm sure the islanders are wealthier than most rural Cambodians, with their proximity to the capital and their silk industry, the islands mostly lacked new buildings and life still seemed pretty simple, although on the bank facing the city a few fancy boutique hotels are now springing up.

Children cycling, Silk Island

After a week in Phnom Penh I made my way to Kampot, a small town near the sea, known for its old town built by the French and its riverine location. It now has quite a developed tourist industry, with plenty of guesthouses, bars and restaurants opened by foreigners. I was surprised to see bars for backpackers openly advertising that they sell hashish joints. Unlike Thailand, Cambodia has not yet legalised hashish, but the law is widely ignored and the drug is sold openly in tourist hotspots. 

There was little to no presence of Chinese tourists in Kampot, but the town has an important historical presence of Khmer-Chinese, and I did notice quite a few Chinese altars in shops, 对联 on the doors and even a Chinese temple. On the other hand, I saw little in terms of Buddhist worship while I was in Cambodia. There are Wats and I saw the odd monk here and there, but Buddhist rituals and monks didn't seem to be nearly as widespread or visible as they are in Thailand, even though 97% of the population is considered to be Buddhist. Although this is obviously just my outsiders' impression, I do wonder if this might be another consequence of the iconoclasm of the Khmer Rouge.

Evening dancing on the riverside, Kampot

A monument to the durian fruit in the middle of Kampot. Durians are the local specialty.

Kampot is still a sleepy place, where cab-hailing apps don't work and the only way to get around is to rent a scooter for 5 dollars a day, as I did. The roads are in quite a bad state, with potholes everywhere. My hotel, which included some lovely bungalows facing the river, was run in the carefree local fashion. The wifi was weak and unreliable in my room, as it seems to be in many mid-range hotels in Cambodia, and the restaurant was inexplicably closed for two days in a row.

After spending four days in Kampot, I decided to return to Bangkok. I chose to do the whole trip by bus, which was good for my wallet and for the planet, but certainly tested my patience. The journey took hours longer than it was supposed to. Our minivan carried several local passengers, as well as another three foreign backpackers, two from Turkey and one from Australia. The driver kept stopping to pick up bags of unidentified stuff, and we even had a bag with a live chicken inside squawking in the back. 

The road from Kampot to Sihanoukville was in a horrible condition, with a large tract that had no asphalt and was just a dirt road. We bumped up and down for an hour at extremely slow speeds, on what is supposed to be a national highway. This highlighted the dire state of some of Cambodia's infrastructure, Chinese investment notwithstanding.

The state of the national highway between Kampot and Sihanoukville

Even though we were taking the route next to the coast, the scenery was some of the most bucolic and underdeveloped I'd seen in Cambodia, with tracts of rainforest and plenty of raised wooden houses on stilts, with the inhabitants lying on hammocks underneath their houses, in the shade. People rocking back and forth in hammocks is a common sight everywhere in Cambodia, as if to symbolise the unhurried way of life. The road had no proper rest stops, but we stopped at a little restaurant run by a friendly family of Cambodian Muslims, who lived in a house on stilts just behind it. There was a mosque nearby, so it was clearly a Cham Muslim area. 

Once we crossed the border into Thailand, everything changed. The roads were in pristine condition, and there were modern chain stores and proper rest stations along the way. I felt like I was back in a country comparable to China in terms of economic development and infrastructure.