The taste of home

No matter where you go in the world there are certain American products you will always find. I have never been anywhere where you can't buy a Coke. I have had discussions with other travelers about whether there is anywhere Coke isn't sold. Our best guess was North Korea. We were wrong. I met someone who travelled to Pyongyang as a tourist. He was able to buy a Coke there.

Maybe we should put the CEO of Coca-Cola in charge of international relations.

Pringles are everywhere. And Snickers bars. When I was traveling by train through Russia there were several stops long enough for us to get off the train and walk around. There were always women there with carts selling Coke, Snickers and Pringles. In Siberia. At 4 a.m.

One big surprise was finding Snyder's pretzels on the road. When I was growing up you could only buy them within close proximity to the factory in Hanover, PA. I did see Snyder's while I was traveling. I have been in some of the biggest and most cosmopolitan cities in the world. Where did I find my favorite pretzels from home?

Vientiane, Laos.

The pace of life in Laos is the slowest I've ever seen, and I mean that as a strong compliment. Vientiane is the capital of the country, but it's hard to believe it's the capital of anything. It's a sleepy city of about 200,000 people. If I were more ambitious I would prove my guess that it's among the smallest capital cities in the world.

There isn't much there. But you can buy Snyder's pretzels there. I was flabbergasted. I found them again in Vietnam. Not in Saigon or Hanoi (although it's possible they're there), but in Mui Ne, a tiny little beach town with literally one road.

I have seen McCormick spices for sale in various places. It is the biggest spice manufacturer in the US. They are produced almost literally across the street from my last job in the US. When the wind was right we could smell the spices on the wind. Prices here are exorbitant -- $4.50 for a small container of garlic salt -- so I have never bought any.

Last year my parents sent me a care package. One thing they included was a tin of the iconic Chesapeake Bay seasoning concoction, Old Bay. While I do shop at local markets, there are some things I always buy at western-style supermarkets.

I was flabbergasted to find this at Pencil, a big supermarket near my school.


Old Bay.

In Cambodia.

I didn't think it was sold anywhere outside the Bay region. I would have thought it more likely that I'd see a herd of unicorns in Cambodia than find Old Bay on a supermarket shelf. (Sorry for the poor picture lighting. I used my phone in bright supermarket fluorescent lighting.)

Home Sweet Home

Through the magic of Google Earth -- one of the coolest things ever -- I can show you where I live. This is Phnom Penh.


The turquoise circle in the bottom left is where I live now. The circle in the far opposite corner is where my first apartment was. The big box beneath it is the Royal Palace. I could see it from my kitchen window. The circle in the center is where I work. It's easy to see my commute. I drive parallel to the bottom of the picture on Mao Tse Toung Blvd, make a left onto Monivong Blvd, make a right onto Street 214 and I'm there. It usually takes about 10 minutes.

The smaller box on the right of the image is the Koh Pich footbridge. This is where the stampede happened during the Water Festival, during which nearly 400 people lost their lives. I started a post about that, but every time I try to go back to it I quickly lose interest. It's just not a fun thing to write about.

The yellow circle at the top is where I hope to move next month.

The river closest to the Royal Palace is the Tonle Sap River, which I've written about before because it's the only river in the world that changes direction. You can see the tip of a peninsula in the top right corner. The river on the other side is the Upper Mekong, which joins the Tonle Sap River and the Bassac River, which curls under the bottom of the photo. The Lower Mekong splits off around the tip of the peninsula.

Not a Baltimore address

I recently moved into a new apartment. For reasons I won't bore you with, I only plan on staying there for three months. It's a nice enough place, but a bit out of the way by Phnom Penh standards. One day traffic was particularly bad and it took me almost fifteen minutes to get to work!

One my American colleagues who lives in the same building pointed out the irony in our address. Most of the streets here have a number and a name. The street number is 245. The street name is Mao Tse-Toung.

I am living on a street named after Chairman Mao.

You know, the guy who starved 60 million of his own people to death during the Great Leap Forward? I know we're all big fans. It was another one of those moments when I took a mental step back and realized how things that are so different from home have become normal.

It could be worse. I could be living on Kim Il-Sung (Street 289). I don't think there is a Stalin Street.

The street names are vestiges of Cambodia's fairly recent communist past. My street is one of the biggest thoroughfares in the city. (For the folks back home, think of Charles Street or Pratt Street.) This makes sense since you can make a convincing argument that, due to the amount of development and financial aid, China owns Cambodia.

The city is almost completely flat. It tickles me to no end that the highest point in town, Wat Phnom, is a 30-meter high hill. And it's man-made. When they paved the streets here they give exactly zero thought to grading. Maybe they don't worry about it because they assume it's not a problem given the flat terrain. What's more likely is they just don't think about it at all.

A friend of mine told me about how when he first moved here he got what he thought was a great deal on a house. He signed the lease in the dry season. When the rainy season rolled around the street was always under a foot of water. It was a great house. He just couldn't get in or out. I had been warned, then, that one thing to ask about when renting a new place was flooding. Surely this wouldn't be a problem on one of the city's main streets...

Last night I had plans for my usual Saturday night out. A big storm rolled through, so I had to wait out the rain. I also had to wait for the floods to subside. I'm living on one of the biggest streets in the city and there was over a foot of water.

Here's the kicker: It was just my block! From the balcony I could see in both directions. I could see the street past the traffic lights on each corner. Past the traffic lights? No water. In front of my apartment? The Amazon. It would have taken just a few truckloads of dirt to bring the block up to grade, had anyone bothered to think about it.

I had to roll up my pants, ride my moto in flip-flops and then change into grown-up shoes when I got to the night club, all just to drive through one flooded block. Ah, life in Southeast Asia...

I certainly don't mean to imply that this is a catastrophe or major hardship. You know if you live in Southeast Asia that you will have to deal with rain and flooding. Cambodia doesn't have to deal with earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, or tornadoes. Every once in a while I'm mildly inconvenienced when I want to go out. I can live with that. On Mao Tse Toung Street.

Fail!

If you are looking for a funny website to waste half a day look here. Hilarious. I submitted some photos to them. Here's the story:

At my school they installed a privacy partition in the men's room. There are two urinals so I guess someone was concerned about someone else watching them pee. This wouldn't be high on my list of changes to make at the school, but whatever. However, the maintenance guys were apparently a little unclear on the concept. Someone told them to put a partition on the wall next to the urinal and, dadgumit, they did it.


What makes it even funnier is that the bathroom is quite small and is off a hallway. A classroom is directly opposite. There is a door, but when the door is open this is what you see.


I took this photo from the hallway. The door in the back is the toilet. There's another one on the other side of the sink. The locks are broken on both doors, so if you're sitting there you have to be vigilant and make sure no one rips open the door while you're doing your business. Otherwise, people (students) in the hallway can see you.

So, to recap, one guy watching another guy pee is a problem. What is not a problem, apparently, is that little girls in the hallway have a straight line of sight into the both toilets and both urinals. Note that the partition does nothing to help this particular issue, either.

Oktoberfrat

Last weekend I went to an Oktoberfest celebration at the Cambodiana, one of the more luxurious riverfront hotels here. It sounded like fun, a departure from the normal nightlife scene and an opportunity to consume some animal parts. As much as I love the food here I do miss sinking my teeth into a big ol' hunk of cow or pig. I knew there would be German sausages aplenty.

I think every German and Austrian expat was there, as well as most of the older foreign crowd. Translation: Lots of sloppy, old men with bewildered looking young Khmer girls in tow. There are plenty of expat bars here, but you're always aware that you're in a foreign country and different rules apply. I think because there was such a large group of foreigners together in a European-themed setting it meant whatever inhibitions people might normally have were left at the door. It was like 25-year reunion frat party.

The buffet spread was indeed impressive. I figured I would go for a while, mingle, drink my two free beers, eat until I exploded and escape before people started dancing on the tables. No such luck. People were dancing on the tables at 8:30!



I apologize for the poor photo quality. I didn't think to take my camera so I had to use my phone.

One thing I do miss from home is a choice when it comes to beer. There's plenty of beer here but it's mostly standard pale lagers, comparable to Budweiser or Miller Lite. I couldn't bear to watch all the fat, drunken foreigners stumbling into each other, or listen to the ear-splitting music, but at least I could enjoy some good German beer, right?

Here is the beer list, in its entirety:

1) Tiger

Tiger was one of the sponsors. The $18 ticket entitled me to two free drafts. I drink Tiger all the time. It's a perfectly decent beer. Shouldn't there be some real beer at a German Oktoberfest party, though? No hefeweizen, no pils, no doppelbock... sigh.

There was a (cough) German band. Luckily they had a captive audience hellbent on getting trashed and making fools of themselves. The band was bad in a way I've never seen a band be bad before. I think there were a few German songs in there, but it was mostly the same crappy songs you'd hear at a wedding, but set to a "German beat". For those of you with a musical background, this means every song was played to thumping quarter notes on the bass drum. It was historically awful. I knew it was time to go when they broke out the Chicken Dance at 8 pm.

Cambodian cuisine

One question people from home ask me is what do I do for food. Do I cook? Do I eat local food or western food? And so on. I have a small kitchen in my apartment with a single gas burner, but I only use it to heat water for noodles or coffee. Food here is so cheap and so good that it doesn't make sense for me to cook. Back home it's far cheaper to eat at home than go out. Here it's the opposite!

Even at the tourist restaurants on the riverfront it's possible to have a meal and a cocktail for $5 or so. Get away from the tourist areas and go to one of the little sidewalk restaurants and you can eat well for less than a dollar.

People think I'm exaggerating to make a point but I can get an honest-to-goodness meal for less than a dollar here. There's a sidewalk cafe around the corner from my school that I frequent. The owner cooks up a few big pots of soup. You lift the lids, look at what's inside and (if you don't speak Khmer) point at what you want.

This is my favorite soup there. It's a sweet-and-sour sort of affair, with pineapple, tomato, melon, fish and an okra-like vegetable. I get it often but because I use the point-and-smile method of ordering I have no idea what it's called! (Hopefully this will change soon. I start taking Khmer language lessons this week.)


As you can see I get a bowl of soup, rice, a little bag of chili sauce, a cup of jasmine tea and even a plastic spoon for 4,000 riel. That's about 95 cents at the usual conversion rate. It's possible to eat for half that.

Teacher, what mean coprophilia?

I tell my students to tell me if there are topics they'd like to discuss that aren't covered in class. One class wanted to know the meanings of FBI, CIA, NASA, etc. This led to a short discussion of acronyms. One student wanted to know "which is worse": crazy, stupid or idiot.

One student wanted to know the difference between shit and damn.

I said cursing is a surprisingly complicated subject and that I couldn't give a short explanation. I said that in Khmer there are probably things you can say to a friend that you can't say to a teacher or a stranger, right? This is an intermediate class so I said it probably wasn't an appropriate topic for their level. How's that for ducking the issue?

At higher levels it's not necessarily inappropriate. If you're teaching advanced students who are planning on working or studying overseas it might be worthwhile to give them some pointers on how and when to curse or, perhaps more importantly, to know when someone else is cursing at them in jest or in anger.

Last week I had all of my students write a practice essay. In one class it was to write a funny story from their childhood. One student gave me an otherwise decent essay which the word "shit" was used about 20 times.

Whenever I mention this people immediately assume it was a boy who wrote it, a punk kid with a bad attitude. The author was actually a sweet young girl talking about a time when one of her classmates came to class with a shoe caked in doggie doodoo.

I guess I'll have to give a short lesson on the s-word after all. I'll give them the same advice I gave when a student asked how to use a semi-colon. I said "This is the rule for using a semi-colon: Don't."

Maybe I'll play for them the famous George Carlin routine about the seven words you can't say on TV!

Free food!

I went to visit a friend of mine, who recently started working at a new bar. The bar is fairly swanky. Big, comfy leather chairs. Pricey, frou-frou cocktails. Lots of pretty girls to make conversation with customers.

Unfortunately it's on the notorious Street 136, where all of the quote-unquote hostess bars are. These are the bars where male tourists go to find young ladies to take home. We'll see how long a bar with more legitimate intentions and non-working girls can last surrounded by sleaze.

It must have been happy hour because there was a complimentary pile of fresh fruit. In the bathroom.


Why buy urinal cakes when you can use a couple pieces of fruit for the same effect?

In a previous blog post I wrote about a German professional photographer named Michael Riehle that I traveled with in Chiang Mai. One of the reasons I liked Michael so much is because even though he has seen more of the world than anyone I've ever met -- including some of the worst parts -- for him travel was still fun and exciting. He was delighted to find lemon slices in the urinals in a bathroom in Chiang Mai, Thailand. I was struck how someone who has seen so much could be so amused by something so small.

So many travelers get jaded. For some their unwillingness to enjoy travel is almost a badge of honor. No matter what they do or see it only reminds them of something they've already done or seen.

Oh yeah, you see them everywhere in Indonesia. The best ones are on a little island in Malaysia. You've probably never heard of it. But that was 10 years ago before tourists ruined the place.

That kind of nonsense. I will never see or do as much as Michael has, but I hope I retain his ability to be surprised and entertained by the little things.

Final grade

Last week I completed my first full term as a teacher. I was more nervous than my students about the exams. I was so worried that they would do poorly because I failed to teach them properly. None of my students failed -- even those that should have! So maybe I did do something wrong.

This is not including the students who didn't show up for the exams. Classes at my school cost $180 to $220 for a 10-week term. This is a fortune in Cambodia. Yet there are students who pay the tuition and then don't attend. Baffling.

(To put this figure in perspective, I just returned from Siem Reap. The guys who worked in the hotel where I worked have one or two days off per month. They start work at about 4 a.m., to serve breakfast to guests who are going to see the sunrise at Angkor Wat. After working all day and all night they sleep on cots in the lobby so they can get up to unlock the door whenever guests stagger home drunk from the bars. They make $50 per month.)

Back to school... I am a stressful person under the best of conditions. I actively seek out things to worry about. Teaching has been nervewracking because, let's face it, I have no idea what I'm doing. Every time I teach a lesson it's the first time. I have to teach grammar that I haven't studied since elementary school to teenagers who know it chapter and verse.

I was stressed out but I genuinely enjoyed the experience. Most of my classes were fantastic. In Vietnam I felt more like a zookeeper than a teacher. Here behavioral problems were nearly non-existent.

This was my Tuesday/Thursday morning intermediate class.


They were a joy to teach. Bright, friendly, hard-working kids. Oddly enough, I took this photo on one of the few days Chetra, the boy on the far right, showed up. He attended a half-dozen classes and missed the exams. What photo of a group of Asians would be complete without at least one of them making the obligatory V-sign with her fingers? Thanks, Raingsey!

In Vietnam I found it impossible to memorize the names of the students. Maybe it was because I spent the majority of class trying to get them to shut their stinkin' pieholes instead of actually teaching. Actually, it was probably because of the similarity in their names. All Vietnamese words and names are one syllable. There were so many girls named Thu, Thuy, Thy, etc. that it was hard to come up with mnemonic devices for remembering them.

Cambodian names are more varied. Some of the girls' names are pleasantly musical and roll off them tongue, like Molika (printed tshirt) and Chanmarie (black tshirt). Some of the names are long and difficult for foreigners to say. There are two girls in my class tonight named Sochanmoninit and Sopheakleap. Then there's the girl in the black and red plaid above. The English spelling of her name is E, pronounced like the letter.

This variety may be why I was able to memorize them in just two or three weeks. I was quite proud of this, since I taught six different classes. I was even prouder when I discovered that some of my fellow teachers, some of whom have been in Cambodia for years, don't even try to learn their students' names. I found it a bit sad to see classrooms in the final weeks of class where students still had name tags on their desks.

This is my Tuesday/Thursday afternoon intermediate class.


I should mention the boy in the pink shirt because he's a whipsmart student. Oh, and because his name is Rambo. Today I start my second term. Let's hope it goes as well as the first.

Dare to dream

One of the reasons that Cambodia intrigues me so much is because things are changing here so quickly. Vietnam is an exciting and often intense place to live, but it's stable. Next year or even in five years Saigon will look and feel very much the same as it does now. The city is changing but at a steady, predictable pace. Phnom Penh is a city with no skyscrapers, but look around the skyline and you'll see high-rise construction cranes in every direction. Even next year the city may be unrecognizable.

Hopefully these changes portend increasing prosperity for the country. The Pol Pot years constituted one of the worst episodes in world history, but that period was part of the larger pattern of Cambodian history. For 1,000 years or so Cambodia has been struggling to maintain its very existence as Thailand and Vietnam, its bigger and more populous neighbors, chip away at its territory. Thais and Vietnamese openly despise and look down upon Cambodians and speak about them as if they barely more than animals. Siem Reap province, where Angkor Wat is located, was captured by Thailand in 1431 and only returned to Cambodia in 1946.

Even though the country is lurching forward into the modern world, every day there are reminders that I am living in a third world country that is decades behind its neighbors terms of technology and infrastructure. People here carry multiple celphones, for example, because not all of the networks are compatible.

I enjoyed a little chuckle when I read about the Phnom Penh's newest addition: a highway overpass. The first highway overpass in the nation. For the folks back home, think about that the next time you're driving around the Beltway or up I-95. Cambodia now has one overpass.

Cambodia's crafty Prime Minister Hun Sen attended the opening of the overpass. He is a man who thinks big:

"Now that we have the first, there should be a second, third, fourth and so on."

They're so cute at that age

When I was teaching my intermediate students the second conditional (things that can't or won't happen) I put them in groups and asked them to imagine they were all-powerful beings from another planet. What would they do if they took over the planet? The results were enlightening, funny and a little scary.


In the center you can see where one group, consisting of three boys and one traumatized girl who obviously had no say in the matter, said "I would kill all the people". There's a group I was careful not to turn my back on.

In the bottom right corner you can see where one group wrote "I would make men to replace the women duty like the men is give birth not women anymore". Not surprisingly, this group was comprised of four girls.

Happy New Year, Part 3

First there was the New Year on December 31. Then there was lunar new year, widely known as the Chinese New Year but called Tet in Vietnam. Now there is Chaul Chnam Thmey, the Khmer New Year. It's also the Thai New Year, or Songkran. Got it? Yeah, me neither.

I start my new job on Monday. I wanted to get to Phnom Penh and get settled. I knew it would be a ghost town because of the holiday. Folks here either go home to visit family or go to the beach.

(Fun fact: In Vietnam when people talk about visiting family they say they are "going to the countryside". Here they say they are "going to the province". )

I had an admittedly crazy idea that I would show arrive in the city and then head to the beach in Sihanoukville the next day. Everyone I talked to just laughed when I mentioned my plan. I would be lucky to find a hotel room, they said. A friend here took his children and indeed did have trouble. I'll wait a week and go when the hotels are empty and the rates are back down to normal.

In the meantime I'm laying low and resting. My last week in Saigon completely wore me out. I was making the rounds to see all my friends before I left. I was going out every night, which I normally don't do. And after months of not getting enough hours at my school they decided to pile extra classes on me before I left. Amazingly I was paid in full for all my classes before I left.

My first day in Phnom Penh was exhausting. More on that in a separate post. My poor old body just conked out. I spent the past two days vegetating, watching whatever crap movies happen to be on TV and sleeping whenever the mood hit me.

I wanted to find an apartment before I started classes, too. Ideally I'd like to find a place close to my school but I really don't know where to start looking. And because of the holiday it's also a bad time to look for an apartment.

I asked one of the girls at the hotel where I always stay if she knew anyone who has an apartment for rent. Her aunt! The hotel is on a small alley street which ends in a sort of cul de sac. Apparently her family owns the whole neighborhood. I had an idea of what I should expect to pay. The price was right. The place is like a hotel room with a small kitchen. Jackpot.

Just Kathmandu it

One of my few regrets from my round-the-world trip was that I didn't budget my time well in Nepal. I didn't leave myself enough time to hike what is considered the best trail in Nepal, the Annapurna Circuit. I hiked to Annapurna Base Camp, but did not do the full circuit. It takes at least three weeks. The best time to do it is in October.

I just finished my TEFL class and have been stressing about where to teach. I haven't even decided which country to teach in, let alone which city, school or grade. I took a bus from Saigon to Phnom Penh and spent a couple days there. I took a bus from Phnom Penh to Bangkok, which is where I am now.

Tomorrow I fly to Kathmandu. I decided to take advantage of the opportunity. When is the next time I will have the entire month of October free? I really can't afford it, but I can't pass up the chance. It'll give me time to think, unwind and lose some weight!

I have a few more posts I'll try to publish before I hit the trail. I was flabbergasted last year when I found internet cafes on the trails in the Himalayas, so I wouldn't be surprised to find internet access on this hike. For all intents and purposes though, once I start the hike I will be off the grid for at least three weeks.

My life as a non-sex tourist

Southeast Asia, and Thailand specifically, and Bangkok even more specifically, are famous as destinations for sex tourists. For reasons I won't go into here -- stacks of books have been written on the subject, after all -- the culture here is more tolerant of prostitution. There are few places in the world where a man can walk down the street or sit in a restaurant with a woman (or man) who is obviously a prostitute without inviting public scorn.

Expatriates, or expats, are people who take up residence in a foreign country. Southeast Asia has its own variety, men who move here to enjoy the sex trade. They're called sexpats.

I haven't sampled the wares, so to speak. Honest. But I can't help but wonder what it would be like to be a sex tourist. I see men all over the region traveling with women who -- I'm going to go out on a limb here -- are being paid for their company. They travel with them for days or weeks, to beaches, on boat trips, etc.

How would it feel to be a Western guy walking down the street with a Southeast Asian woman? What kind of looks would I get? (And what the heck do they talk about?!)

Now I know.

Sort of.

While I was visiting the Royal Palace in Phnom Penh I was approached by a Southeast Asian woman. She was friendly, gorgeous and effortlessly glamorous. I had no idea how to react... Something was going on that was beyond my experience.

I was pleasantly surprised to discover she was another solo tourist from Indonesia. She wanted to know if I was having any luck deciphering the map. (I wasn't.) We were both planning on visiting the main tourist sites in Phnom Penh so we spent the day sightseeing together.

Until she mentioned it I had never thought about it, but you just don't see Southeast Asian women traveling alone in Southeast Asia.

Luckily she has a sense of humor, because no matter where she goes in SE Asia she looks just enough like a local that other locals assume she is a prostitute.

We went to a club one night. A guy checked me through security while a woman checked her. The security woman spoke to her in Khmer. I heard her saying "I'm sorry, I don't understand. I'm Indonesian." It was like that everywhere she said. Locals speak to her in the local language.

When she pointed out that everyone assumed she was a prostitute I realized that meant that everyone assumed I was a sex tourist! I noticed the looks we got. Because men assumed she was a prostitute they made no secret about looking her up and down and then sizing me up.

There were more prostitutes in the bar than actual customers, and they all gave her nasty looks, presumably because they didn't recognize her and thought she was poaching on their turf.

When she got up to use the toilet or take a photo two or three of the local girls would approach me instantly, trying to arrange a future business transaction.

I had wondered what the girly bars were like in Bangkok but was afraid to check them out. I just wanted to see the inside of one. I had hoped to find a group of people to go with but hadn't had any luck.

I am pretty fearless in some ways. Traveling 5,000 miles on a train through Siberia didn't scare me at all. But there is no way I'd go into a go-go bar by myself. I'd be helpless!

So it was quite a learning experience to visit one with a Southeast Asian woman.

In Nha Trang, Vietnam I met what I thought was a young Vietnamese couple on a boat trip. It turns out they were childhood friends. She had been living in Australia for years and was home visiting friends and family.

I hung out with them for two days until he had to go back to Saigon for work. I hung out with her for two days after he left.

In Vietnam the sex trade isn't as prominent as in Thailand, but it's there. It's not quite as accepted, though. In Bangkok, for instance, hotels and guest houses will charge a fee for any "guest" who stays the night. In Vietnam most guest houses don't allow "guests" at all.

My Vietnamese friend is a gorgeous young woman. She was concerned about how people would react to seeing us together. We were just eating, drinking and sitting on the beach together, but she's obviously Vietnamese, and I'm obviously not, so we did get some looks.

So now I know how it feels to be a sex tourist in Southeast Asia. Except without the sex.

Somehow, somewhere, something went terribly wrong....

Phnom Penh

There's a shooting range in Phnom Penh that caters to tourists. You can fire just about anything there if you're willing to pay. For $300 you can fire a rocket launcher. For an additional $800 you can shoot it at a cow.

That's Phnom Penh. Anything goes. Literally almost anything is possible if you have the money.

The country just opened to tourism about 10 years ago. The industry is taking off. There's a crazy, "wild west" energy to the place. Skyscrapers are going up all over town. Western-style restaurants and internet cafes line the riverfront.

And yet signs of the country's grim history are evident everywhere. The poverty there is possibly the worst I've seen. It's in your face constantly. Entire families sleep on the streets outside of tourist restaurants. The number of people missing limbs, presumably victims of landmines, is shocking. The number of prostitutes is not shocking -- they're everywhere, too. The tuk-tuk drivers are the most obnoxious I've encountered, and that, my friends, is saying something.

I wasn't looking forward to visiting, quite frankly. I had read the place is dirty and dangerous. I figured I'd spend an obligatory day, maybe two, seeing sights and then head for the beach. I was both pleasantly surprised and deeply disturbed by what I saw there.

The downtown area, by the intersection of the Tonle Sap, Bassac and Mekong Rivers, is quite beautiful in parts. Look how clean, well-tended and free of dog poop this public park is.



This is another park that forms an 'L' with the above park. Here's a monk walking in the foreground with Independence Monument in the background. It's modeled after the towers at Angkor Wat.



The city name means Penh Hill. It's named after a woman who is sort of the patron saint of the city. A shrine to her was built as part of Wat Phnom (Temple Hill) on the highest hill in the city.

In fact, it's the only hill in the city.

Careful, don't get vertigo looking at this next pic, taken from the summit of the hill. It took nearly 20 seconds of grueling climbing to reach the top.



Nepal it ain't. In fact, this hill is artificial!

The National Museum worth a look, although I found the exterior more interesting than the interior.



Inside are exhibits on the history of the country, with lots of statues and carvings from the Angkor period. It just wasn't that interesting to me, since I'd already spent so much time at the temples. I could have spent the entire day sitting in the central courtyard, though.



Next door is the Royal Palace. I didn't expect much here. I'm surprised anything is left of it considering Cambodia's recent history. Again I was pleasantly surprised.



I tried to get some closeups of this but I couldn't. I was shooed away by a soldier because the king was in it! I'm surprised they even allowed tourists in at all that day. Here I am with the Silver Pagoda in the background.



It gets its nickname from its floor, which is tiled in pure silver. Most of it is covered by carpet. A small section can be seen but is roped off, and it's in pretty bad shape, unfortunately. But it must have been something to see in the old days.

Several former kings and queens are buried on the palace grounds.



The streets are packed with vendors pushing carts, tourists, tuk-tuks, cyclos, etc. The city has a population of about one million. When the Khmer Rouge took over the city in April 1975 the population was about double that, as people from the countryside had fled to the city during the civil war.

(I'm sure we all remember learning about Operation Menu in school, about how, in 1969 and 1970, the US bombed Cambodia, killing as many as 600,000 civilians. The devastation helped fostered anger and resentment and a power vacuum which allowed the Khmer Rouge (KR), an unknown group even within Cambodia, to take power.)

The KR promptly emptied Phnom Penh. The entire population was forced to evacuate. This happened in all the major cities. One of the KR's nutty ideas was to turn all Cambodians into farmers. Less than four years later roughly a quarter of the population was dead, mostly from starvation. It seems you just can't wave a magic wand over a teacher or a plumber and -- poof! -- turn him into a farmer.

This is a morning market just around the corner from my guest house.



As I walked down streets like this I tried to picture what the city would have been like when it was empty. Like everything else from the KR era, it's hard to imagine. The more I read about Pol Pot and the KR the more bizarre it seems. But I'll save that for a future post, perhaps.

Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide

From a distance this looks like an old school that is no longer in use, which it is. The buildings are crumbling and the paint is fading, but blooming rhododendron trees frame a quiet courtyard. From a distance it appears tranquil.

But it is a bleak, terrible place. The air is thick with despair. Closer inspection reveals barbed wire fencing enclosing the walkways.



And 14 graves in the courtyard.



In April 1975 the Khmer Rouge took over Phnom Penh and emptied the city. The entire population was driven into the countryside where they were to become farmers. In less than four years about a quarter of the population was dead, mostly due to starvation. Hundreds of thousands died in combat. Tens of thousands were executed.

The KR also closed all the schools. Tuol Sleng, or S-21 as it was called during that dark era, was turned into a prison. Twenty thousand people came through. Only seven survived. The rest were killed here or taken to the Killing Fields.

Visting the Killing Fields was a sobering experience. But it was easy compared to Tuol Sleng. I was there for less than two hours but I was emotionally exhausted when I left. The Killing Fields and S-21 are similar in that they appear so ordinary.

But once inside the S-21 the horror smacks you in the face like the wall of cold air you feel walking into an icebox. The only thing I can compare it to is The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.

The two places are completely different in that Tuol Sleng is the actual facility, in more or less the state it was found after the KR was kicked out of the country by the Vietnamese in 1979.

There were 14 prisoners at the facility when the KR evacuated it. But the KR wasn't about to pass up a chance to murder a few more innocent people. Those last prisoners were shot to death as they lay chained in their beds.

Photos of those poor souls are on the walls of the rooms in which they were discovered. They are gruesome and extremely hard to look at.



You have been warned...



All available evidence indicates that torture is useless as an interrogation tool. (People will say literally anything to escape physical pain.) But even if you believe torture has its uses, either as a means of gaining information or as a political tool to maintain control of a population, what is ultimately the most disturbing aspect, it seems to me, is how easy it is to find people to do it with such enthusiasm.

Before I visited the site I thought there was a joke somewhere about how going to high school felt a lot like torture. This rather sinister-looking sign is to remind visitors to respect the dead, but the atmosphere is so oppressive it's hard to imagine anyone wanting to smile or laugh here.



I couldn't help but flash to the debate -- and the insanity that the topic was even open to debate -- of whether the United States should torture detainees in Bush's war.

Anyone who thinks that torture is acceptable should be dragged kicking and screaming to S-21 and forced to look at the grimy, stained floors of the cells where the KR tortured thousands of innocent people.

The KR kept mind-numbingly meticulous records, in which they recorded the "confessions" of prisoners and obsessively cross-referenced them.

They also kept photographs of all prisoners. Surely there were those who opposed them and, by their rationale, deserved to be tortured. I doubt this guy was an active conspirator.



Photographs of all the S-21 prisoners are on display on dual-sided bulletin boards. This is one side of one of the bulletin boards. All of the prisoners are children!



In some of the photographs the subjects are smiling. I could only guess that these were the first prisoners, who had no idea what they were in for. In other photos, which I assume to have been taken later, the subjects are clearly aware of the horror they are about to endure.

I simply couldn't find a good angle to get a good shot of this man's photo, but even in this poor attempt the look on his face is haunting.



In an alternate universe this child would have been a beauty pageant contestant. Instead she was tortured, executed and dumped in a mass grave.



And yet some of the victims' faces burn with a fierce pride that I found oddly inspirational, considering the circumstances.



When I look back on this trip I will remember the joy of walking on the Great Wall, the awe I felt standing at the foot of Everest and the perfect, ghostly silence of the Sahara Desert at night. But, more importantly, I will always remember the sickening knot in my stomach when I left Tuol Sleng.

This has been the hardest post for me to write. The subject matter is disturbing, but I was also concerned about getting it right, out of respect for those who suffered at S-21.

Sihanoukville

If I hadn't gone home for the holidays I would have spent Christmas in Sihanoukville. Which would have been fine.

It's the main beach town in Cambodia, on the southern coast. I had heard it would be disappointing after the beaches in Thailand but I liked it a lot. The beach was crowded but still had a mellow, laidback feel to it.



I spent most of my time there just sitting on the beach reading, relaxing and talking to the local working kids. They sell fruit, bracelets, and so on. Even if I didn't buy anything they'd sit and talk with me. Most of the kids were adolescents or young teens, but some were only four or five years old, often following around an older sister or cousin.

This is Som Peh (sp?), 13, a really sweet kid from whom I bought a dragon fruit every day.



I made a point to go to a beachfront restaurant every night to have a beer and watch the sun go down.



I did get my lazy butt off the beach one day to take a tour of some of the surrounding islands. This is Bamboo Island.



I did some snorkeling that day. There wasn't much to see and the visibility was nil. I had planned on scuba diving while I was there but after snorkeling I decided not to.

My decision to stay on land was cemented when I went to the beach the following day and saw one of the snorkeling boats had sunk overnight. You can see part of it sticking up in front of the boat in the center of the photo.



While I was in Phnom Penh the darker aspects of Cambodian life were always obvious: the poverty, the sex trade, the lawlessness. In Sihanoukville it was there, but in a more subtle, insidious way.

I was talking to a little girl who couldn't have weighed 70 lbs. She proudly showed me a few cheesy glamour shots like the kind you'd get at a mall in the US. I asked her why the color was so washed out. She said they did that on purpose to make their skin look whiter. I jokingly told her that people from the US and Europe came to Cambodia to get their skin brown like hers.

(It's funny to look at all the sunburnt, overweight tourists in their wildly inappropriate swimwear and then compare them to the locals. The beach vendors wear sunhats, scarves, long pants and long sleeves to protect themselves from the sun.)

She then showed me a photo of herself with three other girls in traditional Khmer costumes. They were standing behind a guy who was sitting in a faux military uniform. I guessed the guy to be in his mid-60s. He was bald, fat and white.

Suddenly the scene snapped into focus, as if I'd been staring at one of those 3-D posters. I literally shuddered as I realized, Holy @#$%, this little girl has already had sex for money. She's 14. She looks like she's 10.

I realized that selling bracelets or fruit or whatever was, for at least some of the girls, merely a means to bigger transactions. They practice their English, learn how to flirt with tourists, and, whether they're trying or not, eventually an opportunity will present itself.

Until that epiphany I saw them just as friendly kids trying to make a buck selling fruit. The only thing I was guilty of was naivete, but from that point on I was very careful about what I said and did.

One of the girls I bought fruit from actually was 18. Sam has been selling fruit on the beach for 10 years. She speaks excellent English even though she's never been to school. She walks up and down the beach all day, every day, selling fruit so her three brothers and sisters can go to school.

When she first started she would sell her entire tray of fruit and make pretty good money. Now there are too many kids selling fruit. Even though every year there are more tourists she makes less money. She could make more in one hour with a tourist than she could make in a week of selling fruit on the beach, but she won't.

The Killing Fields

Ever wonder what 8,895 human skulls look like?

Just outside Phnom Penh there's a memorial to those tortured and executed by the Khmer Rouge (KR). It's on the site of one of the Killing Fields. At Choeung Ek Genocidal Center there is a stupa (monument) containing the skulls of every body unearthed on the site.

Inside the glass you can see shelves stacked from floor to the top of the stupa. Each shelf is full of skulls.



Here's a really shaky video I took with my camera which gives a better idea of what a horrifying sight it is.



None of the buildings remain. There are signs on the grounds to indicate where the various buildings were. The KR couldn't kill the people fast enough so some were forced to stand in shacks overnight to await execution in the morning.



As this sign indicates, tearing down the buildings was a mistake. Visitors are left to imagine what the site might have looked like.

I was struck by how ordinary the area looks. Without the stupa a casual visitor might walk through the field with no notion of how much blood was spilled here.

But a cursory examination of the terrain reveals of pit rows and row of pits in which nearly 9,000 people were buried in mass graves.



The cries of the condemned were too much even for their executioners, as this sign states.



The KR played music to drown out the cries of their victims. I noticed with a shock that this is a Bodhi tree which is the type of tree under which the Buddha sat to attain enlightenment. Like everything else at this site, the irony is cruel.

Rough Morning Vietnam

I know, I know ... it's a pretty weak title for a blog post. Even worse than The Secret Treehouse, which sounds like a Hardy Boys mystery. Bear with me. I'm feeling a little rough around the edges after a couple nights checking out the nightlife in Saigon.

I generally don't go out drinking when I travel. It's expensive, for starters. From what I've seen bars everywhere look the same for the most part, and drunks all look and sound the same, no matter where they're from or which language they speak.

If I have people to hang out with I'll go out, but I don't like going to bars by myself.

But perhaps the best reason for not going clubbing while traveling is that I end up waking up feeling the way I did today and wasting an entire day. I thought I'd spend the day bringing the blog up to date but the creative juices just aren't flowing. It's hard to write when your muse is nursing a hangover. I've got a lot to write about from Cambodia and Vietnam, but not today.

I've been wrestling with a long post about Phnom Penh, but I'm still trying to get my head around the place. It's fascinating, exhilarating, wild, beautiful, horrifying and sometimes dangerous. I'm intrigued by Cambodia, probably more so than any other country I've visited. Of all the countries I've visited, this is the one I'd like to spend more time in and get to know more intimately.

Tonight I'm heading to Nha Trang, which is supposed to be the best beach and scuba spot in Vietnam. I'm taking a sleeper bus for the first time. It has actual beds, so I might actually get some rest. I'll hang out there for a few days and then fly back to Bangkok. A friend of mine from the US is joining me there and we're going to do some diving. I'm looking forward to having a travel buddy for a while.

How to eat a cockroach

As I was wandering around the riverfront of Phnom Penh I found a little market where there were vendors selling flowers, Coke, cockroaches -- you know, the usual stuff.

I had been to a night market in Beijing and tried all sorts of crispy critters and was generally disappointed that they didn't have much flavor. The seahorses and scorpions, for instance, were small, and after they were fried they were crunchy and tasted like popcorn. Silk worms tasted disgusting, as expected, but everything else was pretty easy to eat.

I ate grasshoppers in Cambodia. They were easy and even a bit tasty. But I didn't think I could bring myself to eat a four-inch cockroach or a tarantula.



Those are cockroaches on the left, then spiders, then whole partridges, with grasshoppers in the second row.

I was wandering around by myself when I saw this. If there had been traveling with someone who was willing to try it with me, or even to egg me on (I'm talking to you, Earl) I would have tried it.

A local woman came by to sample the goods, and I watched her eat one. You could see from the look on her face that she was sampling the cockroach as someone would sample a wine. Or durian!

As I watched her I was really glad I wasn't brave enough to try one. I would have popped the whole thing in my mouth like a grasshopper.

But that's not how it's done.

You break off the wings. Then you snap the head and abdomen off, much like cracking a lobster. Then you pop the meat out of the shell -- it's about as big as a Brazil nut -- and chew slowly ... I nearly gagged.