Travel Day: Ho Chi Minh City

The busload of forty or so backpackers I traveled with was unceremoniously dumped at the Bavet/Moc Bai border crossing to take care of the requisite paperwork for the journey onward to Vietnam. Just like any other land crossing I’ve gone through so far, it’s more or less a simple affair. First step was to check out of the country of origin (Cambodia in this case), handing over the departure card I filled out in Poi Pet when I first entered the country. The officer at the booth checked over the details, stamped my passport to void the visa and ushered me toward the gated border separating Cambodia from Vietnam. So far so good.

After a brief walk, I stepped into the building on the Vietnamese side of the border to fill out my entry papers. A “helpful” member of staff blocked my path as I reached for the forms and insisted he fill them out on my behalf. I told him I was quite capable but he stood firm. Admittedly, I caved and let him do his thing, but as he finished up, he sheepishly looked around and then demanded a dollar (wahn daw-laah) for services rendered. This type of thing, I’m sure, isn’t standard practice and because he looked around before asking, he was probably doing something he wasn't supposed to. So I mustered the loudest “one dollar??!?” I could, making sure it was loud enough for the higher ups to hear, which prompted him to back down and push me to the visa line.

As far as first impressions go, I’m really hoping this isn’t representative of my upcoming experience in Vietnam, though I’ve certainly been warned of this type of thing.

A silly sign on the Cambodian side of the border (Bavet):

I met up with Andrew and Jo (or Jonus, as Andrew calls her) a couple of hours after my arrival in Ho Chi Minh City. We wandered around the backpacker district’s alleyways for a cheap room, finally settling on one run by honest owners (it's actually quite surprising how things work here).

Phnom Penh: The Curse of Lakeside #10

Living on a tight budget requires a fair bit of compromise on the traveler's part, especially when it comes to accommodation. So when we arrived in front of Phnom Penh's train station the other day, we beelined it straight to Lakeside #10, one of the cheapest spots in the city center. For $2USD a night, Andrew and I scored a top floor room (hardly a penthouse) for a few days. Problem is, for that price you can't really expect much by way of quality.

The guesthouse is broken up into three distinct areas. The first is the super cheap partition built entirely of wood with filthy shared bathrooms at the end of the hall. I stayed in this portion of the guesthouse the first time I was in Phnom Penh. So poorly constructed is this wing, it shakes at the slightest movement. While I stayed here, the whole place swayed to the rhythm of a young couple's late night indiscretions a few doors down.

The more upscale wing is further down the hallway in a concrete building. Rooms here are maintained quite well in comparison to the rest of the guesthouse and remain relatively cool during the sweltering daytime heat. This is where the Swiss girls stayed.

Section three is a metal girdered monstrosity constructed haphazardly atop the concrete building. Most people don't stay here because it's inconveniently located and the tin roof makes the rooms unbearably hot during the daytime. This is where Andrew and I stayed.

Though clean, little care is taken on the maintenance of the building. As such we were left to deal with series of catastrophes, increasing in severity with each occurrence. I've documented them here:

June 17th - Room 402 - A heavy rain had rolled in as we sat down for dinner a few blocks from Lakeside 10. When it subsided, we returned to the guesthouse and found our room completely flooded - our bags were soaked through. The seals in the windows, it turns out, were inadequately weatherproofed. After a bit of complaining, we switched over to room number 403.

June 18th - Room 403 - The afternoon storm that kept us from going to Choeung Ek had leaked through the ceiling onto my bed, soaking my bag (again). We complained and were switched over to Room 404.

June 21st - Room 404 - It was around 1 AM, Andrew had left for Vietnam, Hobbes and I were fast asleep, when part of the ceiling collapsed and landed on the bed. Thankfully, neither of us were hurt in the incident. By this point we were out of rooms to switch over so we just had to deal with it.

The hole above the bed:

June 23rd - Room 404 - As the sun set, a plague of insects of Biblical proportions (beetles, grasshoppers, mosquitoes and moths mostly) descended on the room through the newly created opening in the ceiling. I stress, insect repellent is a must in Southeast Asia.

June 24th - Room 404 - For whatever reason, last night's swarm of insects had migrated to greener pastures, allowing me the freedom to work on the blog (play freecell) in the comfort of my own bed. After about half an hour, I was blinded by searing pain. A tiny beetle the size of a sesame seed found its way up my shorts and took a bite out of my... ah... sack lunch.

June 25th - Room 404 - I woke up bright and early to prepare for a long bus ride to Saigon. Unfortunately, the water had been shut off so I spent an extra twenty minutes in bed and stank up the bus with my improper hygiene.

Phnom Penh: Pictures

The view of the neighbouring shanty town from my guesthouse window. Gunshots have been heard coming from this direction in the middle of the night:

Crackdown on pedophelia

Thailand's got Red Bull, Cambodia has:

Mid afternoon nap:

Near accident. Motorbike drivers here are nuts:

Phnom Penh: Cheoung Ek Killing Field

With Andrew and Jo taking a head start on Vietnam today, I’m sort of left here in Phnom Penh by myself for a few days, waiting for my Visa to kick in. Since the weather has cleared up considerably, I decided to try my luck with the Choeung Ek Killing Field again.

Along the way, I learned that mullets and leisure suits still attract babes. I have neither, unfortunately:

Best seat in the house:

The giant Stupa at the heart of Choeung Ek was constructed in the late eighties as a final resting place for the 8958 Cambodians exhumed from nearby mass graves. Victims, carted here by the truckload, were almost always bludgeoned to death here to save on ammunition.

Skulls inside the memorial have been carefully arranged by age and gender:

And are piled in shelves reaching up to the high ceiling:

While clothes recovered from the mass graves are heaped haphazardly on the floor:

In accordance to local custom the memorial stupa is kept partially open to allow spirits to move freely from this world to the next. Despite the added ventilation, an overwhelming musty, almost chalky odour dominates the building’s cramped interior.

Outside, signs placed around crater like pits document victims found in mass graves

One reads:
“Mass grave of 166 victims without heads”

Another:
“Mass grave of more than 100 victims children and women whose majority were naked”

Other signs point out execution sites, while unclaimed bones sit atop bricks nearby. The ground is littered with white flecks of bone and cloth that surface with the rain. I've read that executioners would often grab babies by their legs and swing them against this tree until they died:

An unknown number of bodies still remain in undisturbed graves surrounding the site, though estimates peg the total to be around 17,000. Sadly, despite the numbers, Choeung Ek probably doesn’t rank highly amongst the hundreds of other killing fields documented around the country. The figure seems a paltry sum considering upwards of three million people, or almost a third of the country’s population succumbed to “unnatural deaths” while the Khmer Rouge were in power.

Phnom Penh - Brother Number Four

Of the hoards of smarmy moto drivers plying their trade along the lakeside backpacker district, only a precious few comprehend English sufficiently to communicate with foreigners. Even then, most were confused when we asked to go to visit Phnom Penh’s prison, a place not frequented by many tourists. Nearly all assumed we wanted to go to the S21 genocide museum, which we’d already covered a couple of days ago. The plan was to go on the off chance that they would let us in to visit Ta Mok the Butcher, also known as Brother Number Four.

Ta Mok is one of the few high ranking Khmer Rouge officials currently awaiting trial for crimes against humanity. Most of his compatriots managed to strike immunity deals with current Prime Minister Hun Sen’s (also former Khmer Rouge) administration and have made off scot-free. During his tenure as the party’s Chief of Staff, Ta Mok gained notoriety as the man who orchestrated the brutal purges (such as those in S21) synonymous with the Khmer Rouge’s rule.

Anyway, back to the story. As is daily practice here, we were continually accosted by moto drivers between the guesthouse and the main street. One particular moto driver on this stretch has taken to calling me “Ajinomoto” whenever I walk past because a) I’m “Japanese” and b) he’s trying to sell me a moto ride (get it? Ajinomoto hur hur). Ajinomoto is Japanese for MSG. We finally found a driver who was positive he could take us to the prison so Andrew, Jo (a British girl I’ll be traveling Vietnam with) and I climbed into his tuk tuk and away we went.

A retro cop car stationed near the guesthouse:

The ride went relatively smoothly until we reached a flooded out patch of road.

Soon after, our driver stopped for directions, stirring up a bit of concern between the three of us. A few minutes later he called his boss at the base station for further instructions. We did finally manage to get to a corrections facility but it ended up being the wrong one. Unfortunately, they didn’t allow visitors so we had to turn back.

Phnom Penh: Tuol Sleng (S21) Death Camp

Between 1975 and 1979, Tuol Sleng (also known as Security Prison 21 or S21 for short) served as the Khmer Rouge’s main internment camp, “processing” an estimated seventeen to twenty thousand “enemies of the state” during its operation. The high school turned prison presently houses a museum and a small memorial site.

From a cursory glance of the courtyard, it’s hard to imagine any crimes against humanity could have taken place in such a pleasant setting:

The illusion is quickly shattered upon entering the A-Block interrogation building where the bloodied corpses of the prison’s last fourteen victims were found by Vietnamese Liberators, still shackled to the bedposts. The rusted beds, shackles and ammunition boxes (used as makeshift bed pans) still remain, overlooked by photographs taken by the Vietnamese as the rooms were found. Fourteen graves rest a few feet from the building’s entrance.



A frangi pani flower placed near an interrogation room:

B-Block, the next building over, is home to wall upon wall of prisoner mug shots. Comrade Duch, who oversaw the operation of S21, was meticulous in his documentation of prisoners, carefully taking photographs of everybody passing through the system and coercing them into confessing their nonexistent crimes. A cycle developed whereby prisoners, after being tortured, were forced to name accomplices to their imaginary crimes, implicating more innocents for torture, interrogation and execution.

Hopelessness and terror:

Particularly disturbing amongst the photos, these children were branded as enemies of the state along with their probably innocent parents and suffered the same fates. The ones shown here most likely didn’t survive long enough to see their next birthdays:

Excess photos are haphazardly stored, where they slowly deteriorate over time:

An imposing building fronted by a mesh of barb wire, C-Block holds the prison proper:

Claustrophobic cells line the brick halls:

The view from this barred window probably held little hope for prisoners here:

Prisoner numbers for easier management:


Of the estimated seventeen to twenty thousand Cambodians processed here, only seven are known to have survived.

Day tours in Phnom Penh often include a visit to Tuol Sleng's sister site, the Choeung Ek Killing field which was the last stop for prisoners who didn't succumb to torture at S21. Unfortunately, a heavy rain developed halfway there so we had to turn back to town.

The rain gave way not long after we were back in the city limits so we finished off our tour at a peace statue. The statue is unique in that it's made entirely of melted down guns, including one surrendered by Prime Minister Hun Sen himself.

Nearby is a massive poster of the Cambodian Queen, who looks suspiciously like the British one:

Travel Day: Phnom Penh

Last picture taken in Kratie:

Travel Day: Kratie - Pajamas

So I guess it should go without saying that the only way to get back to Phnom Penh from Ratanakiri is by the dreaded shared taxi – something my back can’t tolerate for much longer. We’ve decided to break up the journey by stopping overnight in Kratie so that we can catch a ride on a more spacious bus from here. No matter how much we tried today, the four of us just couldn’t get comfortable in the cramped back seat of the old Camry, especially with our driver pushing the throttle to the beat of loud Cambodian electronica while barely missing oncoming trucks appearing through thick clouds of dust. Surprisingly, we got here in one piece.

If you invest any time at all watching people in Cambodia, you’ll find a large number of the womenfolk going about their daily business dressed in their pajamas:

Theory has it that up until recently, owning more than one set of clothing wasn’t a national standard here. Instead, like it or lump it, most people had to make do with, literally, the shirts on their backs (and many still do). So as the country slowly picks itself up and the standard of living improves, more people are afforded the luxury of owning more things. Things like pajamas, which are wholly frivolous, become status symbols and, if the theory holds true, by wearing them these women are showing their peers that they are moving on up in the world.

Of course all this was theorized (and applied to a completely different country) in an in flight magazine I read back in 2001 so I guess it should be taken with a grain of salt (more like a few shakers of it).

Ratanakiri: Veung Sai, More of the Same

Today played out more or less like yesterday except it started earlier, the bicycles were replaced with motorbikes and we tried our luck with Voen Sai, a village quite far North of Ban Lung. Actually, thinking about it now, today played out nothing like yesterday.

To start the day, we headed to Psar Ban Lung, the wet market right behind the taxi station, where we bought ourselves some very stylish SARS masks to keep dust from clogging our lungs. Mine's a dark grey Burberry plaid.

A peeing contest taking place in the market's parking lot. Good thing I'm not on the receiving end of it this time:

The road to Voen Sai isn't in the best of conditions and certain stretches require quite a bit of effort to navigate. Luckily, I was the passenger today:

Being the passenger gave ample opportunity to try my hand at drive by photography.

The approach:

SURPRISE!:

In true drive by fashion, we sped off after taking the above photo.

One should note that drive by photography doesn't elecit the same response from lazy water buffalo who are too busy wallowing in mud to care.

There wasn't anything going on at the Southern bank of the river in Voen Sai aside from an expensive (for the area) two minute boat ride to the opposite side. The area of the town we visited consists of a fair number of ramshackle huts in a rural Cambodian setting; Something we'd already seen in Kratie so we passed on the boat ride and doubled back to Ban Lung for a quick lunch at the American Restaurant.

Women wash their dishes close to the boat's launching point in Voen Sai:

Further upstream, more villagers bathe and hunt for snails:

We finished off the daylight hours goofing off at the meteor lake again, where I temporarily lost my only pair of glasses. Thankfully, Thien An salvaged them from the lake bed right after I slipped and bruised my backside (and my ego) on the dock in my panic.

Ratanakiri: Late Night Hauntings and Meteor Crater Lakes

An overactive imagination kept me up ‘til the wee hours last night, forcing me to sleep through my alarm clock this morning. It’s embarrassing to admit but I’d somehow convinced myself that the room next door, the one I switched out of yesterday (because the used condom I found under the bed was attracting ants), was haunted. See, I’m the only one staying in this particular building and it’s prone to blackouts. Strange thing about this "haunted" room is, every time I pass it, the door’s always open. Stranger still, I lock and close the door each time I pass it so it should remain shut. Aside from the slight hum of my fan, the building is silent so I should be able to hear the door clicking open. Suffice it to say, I spent a good portion the night staring wide eyed at the ceiling, imagining the worst as one of the creaking window shutters banged on its frame in tandem with the wind. Things worked out though, I wasn’t visited by anything supernatural over the night and Andrew, Thien An and Caroline had slept in as well.

Following brunch at the “American Restaurant” (a hole in the wall place on the opposite side of town) we hopped on our rented bicycles and rode Eastwards to Boeng Yeak Lom, a perfectly round 700,000 year old meteor crater lake.

A krama dust mask for the bike ride:

We spent what little we had left of the afternoon swimming in the lake.

This guy looks a little confused:

Gutted by termites:

Travel Day: Ban Lung, Ratanakiri

The four of us loaded up our bags into the trunk of our shared taxi and climbed into its far from spacious back seat to continue our journey further off the beaten path. The destination, Ban Lung in Ratanakiri province (but we prefer to call the town Ratanakiri because it has a nicer ring to it).

Where limited few barang (foreigners) are still visible in and around Kratie (usually around the town center and in guesthouse commons), virtually none stay in Ratanakiri. We made it a game to see who would be first to spot another tourist. It was a tie much later in the afternoon.

Not too many paved roads exist in Ban Lung’s backwater main stretch, where red dust kicked up by passing vehicles obscures visibility to a couple of hundred feet.

So prevalent is the dust, everything exposed to the elements is caked in it:

Local men convene at the town center's taxi station for a game of pool:

Neglecting their dirty old motorbikes parked nearby: