Thursday
After breakfast, Thursday is devoted to understanding about Cambodia’s recent past and the period under Khmer Rouge rule. Our visit to Tuol Sleng, also known as S-21, the infamous detention centre where citizens deemed to be anti-revolutionary were beaten to death, shows the conditions people were kept in and, quite graphically, the types of torture they were subject to before being killed. A walk around the buildings, which have been preserved as they were found by the Vietnamese forces who liberated the city from Pol Pot’s rule, is a sobering experience.
Our next stop is the Killing Fields. A tuktuk driver offers to take us there and back, a price that our guide book suggests is worth taking. We set off. After five minutes or so, he turns down a side street and pulls up outside a shop – his sister’s shop, he claims – and tries to sell us a hat. We decline.
We move on. On another side street we pull up outside another shop. Our driver tells us his sister lives here and wants to meet us. He offers us a free drink each. I choose a Coke. Kate wants a Coca Cola Light, which he doesn’t have. His sister is offering to feed us. We’re not having that. We move on.
We get on the main road. Travelling in Cambodia is like the TV cartoon show Wacky Races, but on steroids. Everyone is jockeying for position and happy to switch lanes, pull out in front of fellow road users (or ‘opponents’) and do their damnedest to get to wherever they’re going in spite of the highway code. And yet there’s no massive overuse of car horns that you get in Delhi, or Rome. Everyone’s respectful of everyone else’s road space and somehow it all works.
Out in the countryside we are most struck by how much litter there is piled up by the side of the road. Unlike Siem Reap, there’s zero evidence of anyone doing anything with their rubbish other than chucking it out their front door for someone else to clear away. Which no one does.
Our tuktuk driver delivers us to Choeung Ek Genocide Center, perhaps better known as The Killing Fields. An audio guide is available to visitors but we decline it. The memorial containing the skulls of several thousand of the dead and stacked atop each other in glass fronted shelves tells its own story. Many of the skulls have small coloured dots on them to indicate whether the victim was male or female, their age and their mode of death, eg. flogged to death with a bamboo stick or bayoneted. Elsewhere the mass graves of the thousands of people that were killed and buried here are marked. As with Section 21, it is a thought provoking visit. Genocide carried out in our lifetime and Western governments knew – colluded even – and did nothing to stop innocent civilians being murdered by the Khmer Rouge.
We take the return tuktuk ride to Phnom Penh. Our driver tries to persuade us to visit his sister’s cafe. This man seems to have a lot of sisters. I suggest to Kate that we need to explain to him that we don’t feel the need to visit our own sisters so why would we want to visit his?
He weaves in and out of the traffic even more erratically than he did on the way to Choeung Ek. Kate wonders if he might be ‘a bit pissed’. When he delivers us to our preferred destination – the Russian Market – he seems disinterested in the $15 I hand him as the agreed fare and drops some of the money on the ground. We make our escape into the Russian Market before he can conjure up another relative who he says wants to see us.
The Russian Market is, despite its name, not obviously Russian in its nature. Instead it is a tight cluster of market stalls selling food, clothing, motorcycle parts, trinkets and everything the average Cambodian might need on a day to day basis. The alleyways between the stalls are so narrow and so crowded with customers, stallholders and their families that one is forced to turn sideways to navigate through certain parts of it. People are eating and sleeping in their stalls and it is stiflingly hot. We step back out onto the street. We have ‘done’ the Russian Market. We adjourn to a small cafe, run by an Italian guy, and cool down with a couple of 7 Ups. A customer comes in wearing a face mask to protect him and us from spreading germs. The proprietor holds his hands up as though he’s being robbed at gunpoint by a masked raider and says, ‘I haven’t got any money.’
Back at the hotel after another tuktuk ride, we go up to the rooftop bar and then plan our evening meal. The Foreign Correspondents Club is on the list of places to visit but seemingly closed for refurbishment and the Elephant Bar is $14 a cocktail, so won’t be getting our custom. We elect to go to the Phnom Penh version of the Friends restaurant we visited in Siem Reap. The food is good and distinctly unCambodian.
Friday
Friday and it’s an early start as we are catching a train to Sihanoukville, a seaside resort in Cambodia that was once a sleepy town but is now the recipient of much Chinese investment.
Even at twenty past six in the morning, the streets of Phnom Penh are abuzz. The traffic, however, is of typically British proportions.
We arrive at the railway station in good time. The station is almost deserted. I wander out past the non existent ticket guards to look at the railway timetable. The timetable for the whole week in the whole of Cambodia is captured on one sheet of A2. Even Chris Grayling couldn’t mess this up.
The Royal Train is not, despite its name, a gold covered locomotive built in the Edwardian age in Crewe and shipped out to Cambodia as a refugee from the Beeching cuts. Rather it is a single push me-pull you unit of around 40 years vintage that Northern Rail would herald as the star of its fleet, working the Blackburn to Burnley line. It seats 56 people and we find ourselves sat facing a Western European couple of indistinct origin or possibly Australian. Either way, their first language is not English. Kate suggests we swap seats so that the couples can sit either side of each other. The man, who proves to be a serial manspreader, declines.
I am sat with my back to the driver’s cab. The door to the cab isn’t closed . As we move off, the cab door is still open. I could hijack this train and demand the driver takes me to… exactly where we’re going. There’s no other option as there’s only one railway line in Cambodia.
As we pull out of the station there are a couple of huge rusting steam locomotives sitting in the sidings. These are truly ‘royal’ trains and where Cambodia should be spending some money, restoring these mighty beasts, if it wants to boost this line as a tourist attraction.
The train rocks gently to and fro as we slowly leave Phnom Penh, the driver beeping the train’s horn frequently as we pass the tin shacks that constitute home for the many people who live by the railway and pass over innumerable ungated level crossings. It’s going to be a long journey. No toilets, two long legged Scandi types sitting opposite us who aren’t willing to change the seating arrangements and the driver’s cab door left open and swinging to and fro, banging against my elbow. Whose idea was it to get the train rather than fly again? Thank God we at least have air conditioning.
On the outskirts of Phnom Penh there are drab single storey industrial buildings mixed with patches of open land which seem to be nothing more than dumping ground for waste. Mile after mile of it.
Mid journey our train grinds to a halt. One of the train’s staff leaps from the train, changes the points and the loco reverses into a siding. We are waiting for a train coming in the other direction. It could almost be a Will Hay comedy, expect that this is Cambodia and these things take time. A lot of time.
There’s no signalling system. Everything is done by the drivers communicating via walkie talkie. Fortunately the trains travel so slowly that the prospect of a head on collision is virtually nil.
The train shows a series of comedy films which make Benny Hill look like Eugene Ionesco.
We reach Sihanoukville. We are actually staying in a place called Otres Beach. The taxi marshall outside the station tells us it will be $15 for a tuktuk. We approach the owner of a vehicle that is half van and half tuktuk – a vantuk? – who also wants $15. $15 it is.
We have read that we are staying in a place that, despite the beautiful strip of beaches that once made it idyllic, is now a massive construction site. So it proves. It is Cambodia’s only deep water port and the Chinese are building roads, hotels, shops, houses and more roads. There are cranes. There are piles of rubble. There are lorries and earth movers. There are cement factories. There is dust. And in amidst it all there are Cambodian residents of Otres Beach trying to make a living.
Kate has booked us into a small bungalow complex that looks like an oasis of calm amidst this madness. Unfortunately, our vantuk driver can’t find said oasis and drives slowly up and down the string of cafes and businesses that populate the devastated streets looking for clues. Eventually he stops and asks for directions.
We find our bungalow complex. It looks like the centre of calm we were hoping for but the lads operating reception don’t seem to know what they’re doing, checking us into one bungalow before deciding we need to move to another. The accommodation is, to be honest, ‘tired’ and as soon as she has got the manager to sweep all the dead flies out of our room (I’ve rinsed out the handbasin and brushed them from the bed) and obtained the wifi password, Kate is on the internet and looking for alternative accommodation she can move is to immediately.
I suggest to Kate that we have stayed in worse accommodation – the motel in Bridgport, Connecticut where she was convinced someone was going to enter our room during the night and shoot us both dead springs to mind – and that it’s only for two nights. She stops looking for an alternative.
We head out into the building site and directly to the beach. The beach is beautiful, with fine white sand and thousands of tiny crabs that run into their holes as humans approach. A handful of small Cambodian motor boats are tied up in the shallows and bobbing gently on the tide. There are small groups of people sheltering under the limited shade offered by the palm trees that line the beach. If it wasn’t for the 50 yard strip of chaos immediately behind it, the beach would be an absolute paradise. As it is it’s a sliver of paradise in a sea of concrete, chaos and Chinese road construction.
We watch the sun go down before adjourning to a nearby restaurant for Happy Hour and something to eat.
Saturday
We awake to a power cut. We were headed out anyway so the lack of power is only an inconvenience if you want a hot shower or to make yourself a coffee using the kettle in the room.
Our first task is to find an ATM. I reason that the locals are do heavily reliant on tourist dollars that, despite the place looking like a war zone, there will be a functioning ATM. There isn’t. The local pharmacist suggests to Kate that the nearest ATM is seven kilometres – and therefore a $30 tuktuk ride – away. I suggest that we find a place to have breakfast that will allow us to pay by card.
We have breakfast – me an amelette with mozzarella and tomatoes, Kate crepe suzette – and the restaurant staff tell Kate of another ATM that was seemingly unknown to the pharmacist. She disappears to pay the bill and returns waving a fistful of dollars.
We spend the day on the beach. I read Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop from start to finish, a terribly politically incorrect novel that still accurately portrays the journalistic trade as the self-centred bunch they are. Read what’s going on at the BBC in terms of them squabbling about ‘equal pay’ if you don’t believe me. (Many BBC types seem to be more equal than the rest of us).
As sunset arrives, we retire once again to the restaurant where we ate the evening before, again taking our place at the table before the curtain comes down on Happy Hour.
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