Phnom Penh

Phnom Penh seems to get a pretty harsh rap among travelers--too small, too quiet, not much to see. I think I agree with all of those statements, but for me, they were the charm of the Cambodian capital. For one thing, the capital fits the country. Cambodia is much poorer and has a much smaller population than Vietnam or Thailand, and so Phnom Penh is bound to be a little more modest than Bangkok, Saigon, or Hanoi. It's charms are subtler, but I found them to be more enjoyable than Bangkok's. Take the royal palaces, for instance. Bangkok's palace complex is a must-see: huge golden stupas, an ornate Emerald Buddha temple, huge palace, expansive grounds, all in the middle of the city. In Phnom Penh, the palace is much smaller, and the colors are less flashy--but they're much easier to take in. You're not overstimulated from 25 different corners, as a first-time visitor to Bangkok's palace can be. You can quietly make your way through the shrines and actually enjoy the architecture, as opposed to drowning in the glitz. There's less Disney in Phnom Penh.

While in the city, I took the chance to go to the Tuol Sleng Museum, aka S-21, where thousands of the Khmer Rouge's prisoners were tortured and interrogated before being taken to the Killing Fields just outside the city. It felt like the Khmer Rouge used similar tactics (though far more brutal, and on a far larger scale) to Pinochet's goons in Chile. Tuol Sleng was a secondary school, not far from the city center, before Pol Pot's men took over. When you go there, it still looks like a school--chalk boards still standing, with iron beds and other remnants of the dark history of the place still in the rooms. Pinochet liked to use prosaic settings as torture centers too--an office in the middle of a brownstone neighborhood in the city center, or the soccer stadium. While Pol Pot was very different in a whole host of ways--for instance, he apparently largely emptied Phnom Penh of it's residents, pushing them into the countryside--it feels like this transformation of the everyday and the innocent and even fun into an instrument of a brutally oppressive regime is a tactic that these despots get some special sick pleasure out of.

Other than that, I spent most of the rest of my time in Phnom Penh exploring the streets and hanging out with a Quebecker named Antoine. Not a bad guy--an artist, a little bit older than me, biking around SE Asia for 6 months with a friend of his. Cracked a few beers by the river, and found out what the moto-taxi drivers do at night: they turn into pimps and drug dealers. "Marijuana man? Want lady, man?" Must've heard that 15 times in the few hours we were walking around the riverfront that night. Yes we both turned them down.

I meant to go straight to Vietnam after Phnom Penh, but it turned out I could only get a 15-day visa, or at least if I wanted to get it that day. I also knew that I could only get a 30-day visa once I got into Thailand (or at least without having to spend more money and waste more time). So, being as I'd had my fill of Phnom Penh after 2 and a half days, and my visa to Vietnam didn't start for 3 days after that, I headed down to Sihanoukville--beach resort town 4 hours southwest of the capital.