Sita, a driver from our guest house, invited us to his English school one night. We were the first barang (foreigner) to visit their classroom. The students were all enchanted with Mandy, who’s friendly and knows how to teach. We liked it so much we began going every night. During class, people from the street crowded around the windows to see the barang. After class we would move out onto the street and continue, but we got mobbed by random people trying out their English.
After class one night I encountered a new kind of beggar. A guy from the crowd wanted ten thousand US dollars to start a top end guest house. Not a bad idea. Another night we gathered such a mass that the police broke us up.

The teacher from one of the English classes got himself an English degree, but he says the good jobs are tightly controlled by people who know each other. You have to know somebody to get a corporate job so he must teach English until he can get catch a break. The teacher would walk us home at night because he felt so greatly indebted to us for gracing the class with our presence. Everyone kept asking why we would take time out of our “busy lives” to come to speak English with them. Being able to practice with a native speaker is very valuable. We later hooked the teacher up with an interview at Patrick’s company.

Cambodia is a great place! If you come to South East Asia, jump on a chance to go to Cambodia. Our guidebook went over the top with effluent praise for the country, but it took us a day or two to see why. Its the Khmers. They’re just a very friendly people. Everyone’s an entrepreneur, like in Thailand, and everyone needs English, but the salesman veneer is very thin. They’re not hardened capitalists (yet), and they don’t see friendly foreigners all that often. Every day in Phenom Penh we were “going to leave tomorrow,” but every day we’d meet someone new or be obligated to hang out for another day. It can be a very hard place to leave, as the Australian couple, Dick and Layne, have found. They went back to Perth, looked around and got on the first plane back to Cambodia.

Once again we found our self on the Mekong, this time with the retirees from Oz and drifted down into Vietnam…

Khmer opera has everything I’ve always wanted in a performance: Comedy, drama, acrobatics, costumes and good kung fu. The play started with ornate shadow puppetry about two monkey brothers quarreling. When the action got very intense, the monkey brothers were replaced with live acrobats who had a fast and funny monkey style knife fight. The mayhem causes the brothers’ girlfriend to leave them for a Prince with a calmer temper.

We sat in the front row with a dog and some seven year old Khmers piled against the stage in front of us. The Khmer kids pointed at our beer and made drinking motions, so I gave them our water bottle. They tore into it like candy and realized I had accidentally bought the “fancy” water with the French label.
After much debate amongst themselves, they decided to leave me a little water at the bottom and found the English to say “sorry”. One of the children then adopted me and took it upon himself to explain every scene in the opera to me… in Khmer. I’m sure I got all the nuances.

At one point in the opera, the Prince’s warriors filed out and begin showing their martial prowess with Khmer boxing and acrobatic strength. Flips and backsprings turned into swift kicks and spinning elbows. Human pyramids were built and destroyed and then the magical Apsara girls appeared.

The girl’s dance was Indian with tight mincing footwork. Their arms and hands moved about independently from each other like snakes catching butterflies. Decorated smiling faces weaved back and forth and they folded effortlessly through the increasingly aggressive boys’ dance. The warriors worked harder to impress the girls until they dripped with sweat. Finally, the girls chose two surprised musicians from the orchestra to be their consorts.

At the finale, The Prince battles the two reconciled (but furiously jealous) monkey brothers to the death in an aerial knife and staff fight. Just as the prince and his warriors are overwhelmed, the ever present Apsara girls sprout weapons of their own. The graceful Apsaras’ dance turn out to have been an empty-handed sword dance. Suddenly armed, the girls help the prince defeat the monkeys without altering a step of their fluid moves.

Moral: Do not give monkeys knives. Join a band.

Many days we’d just hang out with the family who owns Sunday Guest House, mostly with Gech, the oldest daughter. Gech is really sharp, loves her job, dresses Japanese and practices origami. Her younger brother is 13, goes to Khmer, Chinese, Japanese and English school and is the best student in each. The father just bought a Korean digital video camera, which never leaves his hand. They go on weekend trips in their private automobile. The guest house thing has really worked out for the family.

One night the Sunday family took us and a retired Australian couple out to dinner a few miles outside the city. We drove to a bunch of huts on stilts with hammocks. We ate beef kebabs, papaya sum tom, corn on the cob, and sucked water from coconuts while we watched the sunset and talked.

Later we went out for beers with the Australians where we met Patrick. Patrick is an ex-UN worker who’s started a private Development oriented IT/Polling/Statistical Analysis services company. He hopes to expand into providing “real Computer Science degrees”. We stayed up late trying to keep up with his Irish liver and listening to grizzled Cambodian stories. In 1991 he came here and there were 8 year olds on motorcycles with RPGs and AK-47’s. He says the current King of Cambodia enabled Pol Pot to come to power and managed to profit from his downfall as well. Patrick thinks there’s no foreign capital here because of a “misconception about the level of corruption.”

Another night up late talking with Patrick, an SUV hit two motos and flipped over right in front of us. Working from the wrong set of reflexes, I jumped up and ran over to see if anyone needed help. Patrick later informed me that this happens several times every night and its best to just not get involved. He said two months ago a similar thing happened a couple blocks up the street and the moto driver was killed. The SUV driver was the nephew of the prime minister. The nephew screamed at the gathering crowd of Khmers, but they wouldn’t go away. So he reached into his car for his machine gun and sprayed them with bullets. Three people died and it took three weeks before the police would arrest him. It remains to be seen if the nephew will be charged with anything.

Patrick needs old computer donations in the hundreds. If you can swing such a thing, contact me. He’s also hiring. Here’s some photos of Phnom Penh.

We woke up early the day before to catch the sunrise at Angkor Wat and stayed up drinking with some Japanese kids. Sleep deprived, we got up before dawn, again, to catch a ride down lake and river from Siem Reap to Phenom Penh.
I realized that I had food poisoning about the same time we figured out that we only had “cling to the roof” tickets on the speedboat. While trying to find a way to nap where my stomach didn’t hurt and I wouldn’t fall off the boat I burned myself pretty good on a smokestack. A few hours later, lake sick, sun scarred and deaf from engine noise we arrived at our guesthouse in the capitol where I promptly electrocuted myself trying to turn on a fan. I stopped twitching and fell into a very deep sleep. A good day of budget travel is one where you actually get where you’re going.

Phenom Penh’s not much to look at. There’s not much pavement, people build little shacks between buildings, on top of buildings or in the street. On our first day we met a screaming old Khmer. In fractured, slurred English he told us that we should not worry about anything in Penomh Penh, that he would take care of us. Over and over he would shout: “I AM DRUNK AND FROM RHODE ISLAND!” and open up his wallet to display a Pennsylvania Drivers License and Social Security card with his picture and name on them. He was a moto driver.

In Thailand the most pervasive form of transport is the tuk-tuk, a moto-trike with a passenger bed. No one has the capital for such an elaborate ride here. Light motorcycles/scooters (“moto”) are the transport of choice.
A typical moto ride begins with you finding a driver who will agree to your price and who can bluff you into believing he knows where you’re going. Like their counterparts in Thailand, moto drivers can’t read maps. You hop on his bike and he speeds off against the flow of the no-rules traffic. First stop is always a group of his moto buddies, whom he queries until he has directions. Next you hang on to the bike and motocross to some part of the city that is often near your intended destination.

Like in Lao, Cambodian food is like bland Thai food with lots of black pepper added to make up for flavor. You can eat good French food if you shell out $2. In the city, we tended to eat at NGO-cafes that trained street kids in French restaurant skills. The food was pricey ($3.50) but excellent.

A thousand years ago the Khmer ruled Southeast Asia and Angkor was the seat of their empire. They spent their time feeding the Vietnamese to the crocodiles, stomping on the Siamese and constructing colossal temples filled with beautiful dancers. Things change.

The Mongols and then French invaded, the American/Vietnamese war obliterated what little infrastructure there was. Then the Khmer Rouge stepped into the vacuum. They wiped out all the culture, all the intelligentsia, and maybe a quarter of the population. Eventually Vietnam rolled in and kicked Pol Pot out. The Khmers are now building up from nothing and just sort of making it up as they go. Somehow, out in the jungle, the temples have managed to survive all this.

While touring Bayan Temple I met this grinning old toothless monk who spoke French at me. All the old guys speak French and assume all Europeans do. He lead me around the temple and showed me how to pour water over a stone lingham and wash my face with it. Then he lead me to a bat cave and charged me a nickel for the use of his flashlight. Man, there were a lot of bats in there.

Photos of Angkor, Bayan, Preah Kahn and Tah Phrom

What we only started to grok in Siem Reap was how incredibly friendly the Khmers are. We found out a bit more about that in Phnom Penh…

The transition from Thailand to Cambodia at Poi-Pet couldn’t be more drastic. Cambodia is incredibly poor. The highways and most streets are completely unpaved. Many of their destroyed monuments have only been replicated with cheap plaster. There are people missing multiple limbs everywhere. The country is littered with land mines. Its really hard to rebuild a completely shattered culture when you can’t even walk around –let alone farm– without exploding. On the bright side, the signs and seeds of growth are everywhere.

Everyone on the street says “Hello!”. Moms wave their baby’s arms and teach them to say “Hello! Howareyou!” to foreigners. Everyone wants to talk to you. Not to sell you something, but to practice enough English so that they can eventually sell something. Its difficult to describe the desperation you feel here. The police want to practice their English with you. The most basic contact with you is gold. There’s a lot of begging.

As we entered Poi-Pet we saw a British kid get mobbed by street children. The people in this border town have nothing and the Brit didn’t have a good hold of his bags. He looked frightened, so I waded in to help. I found myself a rich foreigner in the middle of a public square about to fight the local youths for control of a backpack. I felt absurd, but the kids jumped away after a tap on the shoulder.

We stopped to eat at a cafe one night in the town of Siem Reap. We followed our usual practice of looking for a clean, crowded place without English signs. When we sat down we were warmly welcomed by no less than six waiters who hovered to attend to our every need. The head waiter took our order and then plunked down to practice English. He has 4 siblings living in the country, Pol Pot killed his father and he makes about $30 a month as the head waiter. That’s a good job. Average income for Cambodia is like $200 a year. A meal at a restaurant will run you $1.25.

One thing I hadn’t seen in Thailand or Laos was guys practicing fighting in the street. Khmer boxing is just like Thai boxing. When men and boys are idle (which is most of the time) they start playfully chucking knees and elbows at each other.

Tourism is a big part of the solution for this place. The area next to the famous Angkor Temples is exploding with (relative) prosperity. But foreign capital is scared. Cambodia is caught in the catch-22 of needing infrastructure and a well paid government to get tourism and capital, but that won’t happen without infrastructure and less corruption.

Here’s some photos before we get on to Siem Reap’s big draw: The Temples….