Written Itinerantly by John Irvin                           No. 22                                           March 1, 1999

Back From Cambodia

Before I get into my Cambodia trip, a word on the weather. It’s been a very strange year here in the north of Thailand. The famous cool season (normally Dec. - Feb.) was very weak, and very short, this year. Last year, it was pretty cold at nights (down to about 12 C / 52 F), so cold that I had difficulty sleeping in my non-insulated house. The cool nights lasted for a good solid two months, from the middle of December into the beginning of February. This year, it only got down to about 15 C / 60 F, and by the middle of January the nighttime temperature was already back up to about 18 C / 65 F. I’ve hardly had any nights that were too cold for me.

Then, starting in the middle of January, the days began to heat up. When I returned from Cambodia in the middle of February, the daytime temperature was already around 32 C / 90 F, although the nights were still pleasantly cool and good enough for sleeping. The hot season, which normally runs from March through May, seemed to be starting early this year. But then this past weekend (Feb. 27-March 1) we’ve gotten a storm which dumped a lot of rain and lowered the temperature about 5 or 7 degrees. This kind of thing is very unusual for this time of year; normally the first rains don’t begin until May.

A related environmental pattern is the haze and air pollution caused by people burning weeds, leaves, and anything else they can find to burn. This is a popular way of getting rid of surplus growth here in Thailand; the concept of preserving air quality just hasn’t caught on here. When many people are burning leaves at the same time, it turns the nice, clear, sunny afternoons of January and February into hazy, smoggy days. It gets so bad I don’t even like to go jogging, which is my way of keeping in shape.

I had known very little about Cambodia before doing this trip. I had heard plenty about the Khmer Rouge kidnapping and killing tourists, and about robbers and shootouts in Phenom Penh, and about the danger of land mines. I also heard that traveling into Cambodia by road from Thailand (going from Arunyaprathet in Thailand to Siem Riap, near Angkor Wat) was a terrible ordeal. It seemed to me that this trip might be an exercise in survival, and that I might be really crazy for doing this.

What I found instead was that the trip is now surprisingly easy to do. The bad road going into Siem Riap from Thailand turned out to be real, but it didn’t kill us, or even maim us. To be sure, it was very bumpy, so bad that in some places we had to take detours through fields. But we made sure to reserve a couple of seats in the cabin of the pickup so that we wouldn’t have to sit in the back, and we managed the trip quite easily.

These trips all use Nissan King Cab trucks, with a back seat inside the cab, sedan style. If you plan to do this kind of trip, just make sure you don’t get one of the seats in the back – the bed – of the pickup. If you do, you’ll be in for a real grueling, bruising time, packed like sardines with a lot of other people, and going over all those bumps with no comfortable place to sit.

We paid 300 baht for the front seat next to the driver, and we bought two back seats for 300 for the pair (150 plus 150). Getting two back seats meant having only three bodies in the back row instead of four. A young Korean traveler joined us later, and paid in dollars, buying the front seat for $5, about 185 baht. We agreed to let him take our front seat away because they let us take the whole back row (four seats at 150 each), just the two of us. So we made out okay, and everybody was happy. One other lesson I learned from this is that dollars are respected in Cambodia.

The other anticipated problems, the crime and violence, didn’t materialize, fortunately. I don’t want to be the authority on this, but the Khmer Rouge seems to be out of business, hopefully for good. Most of their surviving leaders appear to be turning themselves in, making details for immunity, but at the same time joining the present government. When this happens, the chance for armed conflict lessens, and by now, it really appears to be pretty remote. Nevertheless, nothing is certain in Cambodia, and I would urge anyone planning to go there to study the situation from week to week to make sure everything is still okay.

The fear of robbers and violent crime made us cautious, but we gradually learned from others what was safe and what was not safe to do. Basically, around Angkor Wat, any daytime venture seems to be safe now. We always traveled with a guide, so that probably helped us, too. At night, in Siem Riap, walking places seemed okay, at least in the early evening. We went out a couple of nights there and had no problem whatsoever. In Phenom Penh, we were more cautious at night, not going out at all during our stay together, but after I returned to Thailand, my friend did go out with some other people at night and it was okay. Still, I would be careful about going out at night in Phenom Penh. They are still hitting on tourists there, particularly the unlucky ones who stray too far and who come home too late.

Regarding sights and features of Cambodia, I think it’s well worth it to go there. Angkor Wat, which I knew very little about before I went, is absolutely magnificent. For those who don’t know, it’s a collection of temples and buildings that cover a 60 square mile area, and which were built a thousand years ago by the Khmers during the height of their civilization. The individual site which is called Angkor Wat is perhaps the most imposing of all of the structures, a huge palace-type structure with five towers, steep stairs, long hallways, many rooms, courtyards, elaborate ornamentation and relief work everywhere. The towers of Angkor Wat appear on the Cambodian flag, making it the only nation in the world with the emblem of a building on it’s flag.

Other sites in the Angkor area have their own unique attractions, such as the elephant terrace in Angkor Thom, or the fascinating kaleidoscope of perspective when viewing the hallways, windows and doorways of Ta Phrom. The entire Angkor site is so vast in its size that one can’t take it in all at once, but must spend several days walking around the various grounds, and even then, I found the full impression wasn’t made on me until days later, after I returned to Thailand, when I realized the greatness of the place where I had been.

In Phenom Penh, there are some interesting markets, particularly the central market, with it’s art deco yellow building and with hundreds of vendors outside and in, selling lots of jewelry and clothes. Another interesting, but very disturbing place to see is the Tuol Sleng prison, where thousands of Cambodian civilians were held and tortured during the reign of the Khmer Rouge, from 1975 to 1979. It’s a very sad thing to see the pictures and hear the story, but it’s also worth going to see that these places and things really do exist.

Just for fun, I returned to Thailand by taking a bus out of Phnom Penh to Sihanoukville, along the coast of the Gulf of Siam, and then taking a speedboat to the Thai border. Crossing the border, I returned into a part of Thailand near Trat, which I had never seen before. My traveling partner, with more time on his hands than I had, went eastward into Vietnam. I am looking forward to hearing what kind of adventures he encounters along his way.
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© Copyright 1999, John Irvin

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