Violence gives way to hospitality and hope!

Some moments its better to just stare silently at your surrounding and take it all in. We left Saigon in the morning and headed to Phnom Penh last Sunday. It was a decent ride about 5 and half hours. We had to stop at the Vietnam/Cambodia border to get all our visas and passports settled. The border itself took an hour so in effect the ride wasn't exactly too long. All the time on the bus I had a craving for "insects"??? We were reading the lonely planet guide book and it said Cambodians eat pretty much anything that walked on the earth. They weren't wrong about that. We made our way to Phnom Penh and a guide of a group helped us out with getting a TukTuk driver. Our driver's name was Paulie and he took us to our hotel, "Le Pavillon". I booked a room for my group of four - Mads, Carrie, Vania, and I. The suite we had at the Pavillon was amazing! It had two rooms, a large bathroom and a huge patio overlooking the national palace. Our hotel also had a pool with a bar at the side and wifi connection everywhere. We were in heaven! My entire room went for a dip and relaxed a bit. We told Paulie to pick us up tomorrow morning and went off to dinner.



We walked to a restaurant near our hotel, which we were pretty sure catered to tourists but served up Khmere food only, which in my opinion is alot better than half the places that try to serve western food as well. Guess what was on the menu! "ANTS" I was so going to order that dish. It was Spicy fried beef with large red ants! Yes, ANTS! My gastronomic journey has reached the outlying borders and I was going to try it. The dish came and it looked like any other stir fried dish and I couldn't see the ants at first, but then I started spooning the stuff on the my plate and there they were. Bits of ant heads, abdomen and wings mixed in with the beef and veggies. The dish tasted fantastic though and I ended up eating most of it. We also had a bit of frog and quail. Cambodia is definitely a culinary adventure! After dinner we ventured out to town and went looking for a good bar. We found a large place that wasn't so cheap with a 2 man band that looked like they were war vets from the vietnam war. One had his shirt unbuttoned and wrinkley flesh all hanging out and the other had a crocodile dundee hat on. They were playing slow rock songs and we decided to interact with them a bit after getting inebriated on pitchers of the local ANgkor beer. We started requesting songs and they played a few. Though we ended up requesting outrageous things they could never play. We got pretty drunk and my group of four just ended up going back to the hotel. Carrie was DONE. She was passing out on my shoulder and demanded, like she usually does, for a Tuktuk home instead of walking. We dragged her into her bed and tucked her in while the rest of us went to the pool again. We met a guy from Ottawa while in the pool and was talking global issues with him. How we ended up doing this I have no idea, but we were too intoxicated for our own right to hold up any proper conversation. We headed back home and went to sleep in our deluxe suite.

Monday morning, we wake up and paulie picks us up to show us around town. We show him all the spots we wanted to hit and he did an amazing job taking us around. Our group of 12 first headed to the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. This museum was the former prison and torture sight of the Khmer Rouge regime. It was designated S21 and is still known by the infamous name nowadays. The museum sits in its former state, run down and eerie looking. We watched a movie on the massacres that happened in Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge regime. It is amazing that these attrocitie ended only in 1979 and the leaders of the regime were not arrested until 2007 though Sarath Sar aka Pol Pot died in 1997. We walked through the museums witnessing rooms with rusted tortue devices and pictures of people of perished in the prison or were sent to the killing fields. It was a depressing tour but it was necessary in my opinion to truly understand the identity of this culture by witnessing their horrid history. We were on a roll with this depressing mood and decided to go to the killing fields at cheong ek. The rain started to pour as we were heading there and it seemed complimentary to the whole visit. The killing fields is an area just outside of central phnom penh where they took the prisoners from S21 or any other prison to be executed. In the middle of the fields near a tree where they use to let out the prisoners now stands a large monument with hundreds of skulls housed in it and the clothing of the executed on the bottom. It was a gruesome but surreal moment to realize that this green patch of land with holes in it use to be mass graves. We walked through the fields and we realized that the rain was washing some of the dirt from the ground and pieces of bones started to appear. Although there was excavation done in this area, the sheer amount of bodies made it impossible to excavate every single one out. People to this day just as we did continue to find bones and lay it on shrines out of respect.





We were getting hungry and decided to head back to town for lunch. We wanted to invite Paulie for lunch as well. We went to a place called Khmer Saravan which was quite well known within the backpacker community and had a delicious Khmer meal without bugs. We made conversations with Paulie and the other Tuktuk drivers and got to know their family stories. They all had children and one barely ever got to see them. They slept a maximum of 3 hours a day working to the wee mornings. One Tuktuk driver lost his wife and rarely ever got to see his daughter. Getting to know them as humans over a proper lunch that they would never consider spending on was very heartwarming.

After lunch we decided to go to the National Palace and see the glamour of being a Khmer King. And let me tell you, Buckingham palace or any other palace in this world has nothing on what the King of Cambodia has. His complex is HUGE! There are areas we are not even allowed on as they continue to be used by the King and his family. Most interestingly is a decent sized french mansion which was a pallisade from Africa somewhere given by Napoleon III. We visited pagodas, gardens, elephant stables and various ceremonial structures. This place was definitely impressive and beautiful. One thing that I found most striking in Cambodia is the architecture. All the roofs are elaborately adorned and they embellish every bits of columns and walls with engravings.





We headed to Wat Phnom after the palace and had a nice stroll around the park of the Wat and walked up to the Wat itself. It still functions as a buddhist pagoda and the monkeys in the area gave us a bit of a scare when they decided to pee down from the trees. Our final destination for the day was the central market where we bought some Krama scarves and other Cambodian crafts. We also bought some street food to try. The food we bought were little gluttonous cakes fried in a pan with divets. Its almost like the Japanese Takoyaki but a little bit different in texture and taste.
After the market, we told Paulie to take us home and gave him the pay for our day.

The next morning we headed out to Siem Riep on another coach bus. This part of the story I'll leave for another time.

My pictures will be up soon and maybe you'll get to glimpse a bit of all I experienced here.