sunday, august 6, 2006

boy were we happy to get out of taipei. what a hole...

we took a flight to phnom penh, the capital city of cambodia. first impressions of the city are that its a different world from traditional tourist centers. first, right out of the airport, several aggressive taxi drivers approach you to drive you into the city and stay at their guesthouse. we needed a taxi but no accomodation as we already had reservations, so we got one that would just drive into the city.

once you start the drive, the world looks very different on this side. no paved roads, poverty everywhere, crumbling infrastructure with bullet holes all over it, no traffic lights and motorcycles galore...its definately not japan. once we got to the road of the guesthouse, we got touted endlessly for just about everything, from tuk tuk rides to drugs to "massages". but once we got to the guesthouse, everything was alright. the place was a cheap, nice, quiet two floor setup right on the lake, quite beautiful setting actually.

we bargained for a tuk tuk driver to take us sightseeing. first, in cambodia and thailand, you have to bargain for everything. at first its cool, trying to see how cheap you can get things. after a while, though, it gets grating, as you just wanna buy a 50 cent bottle of water and not spend 1 minute arguing over the price. the tuk tuk is another cool thing, basically a carriage on the back of a motorcycle. pretty comfortable really, but you really inhale the fumes of the bike and the dirt of the road during the ride.

in phnom penh, the only real "sightseeing" is the stuff from the war, like the killing fields and the torture museum. so we went there and now were glad we dont have to go back. what horrific places. very important historically, but almost too morbid to pass as a must see tourist spot. ive been to auschwitz, dachau, hiroshima, so ive seen my fair share of horrific museums and monuments, but these ones were just so plain as day. the killing fields is nothing but a tower with 5000 skulls and locations of mass graves where they still find bones today...the torture museum honestly details what the khmer rouge did to people before they took them to the killing fields for slaughter. brutally honest stuff, with no velvet ropes or anything restraining you from seeing things. the kind of stuff thatll give you nightmares for years.

to take the emotional load off we went to the surprisingly developed riverside boulevard for happy hour. luckily in phnom penh, happy hour is basically dinner, as it goes from 4-10pm. we had some cheap drinks at the ritzy foreign correspondants club before going to a few more places on the riverside for some beers and food. cheap and good stuff.

we got back to the guesthouse pretty late so we couldnt watch what wouldve been a great view of the sunset on the lake, but no matter...we had to take the speedboat pretty early in the morning, so we went to bed relatively early.