Tag: Cambodia

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Battambang, Cambodia

The bus ride from Phnom Penh to Batambang was a long one taking 7 hours in total. We did have a stop at a service station for lunch, I ordered chicken noodles which seemed to contain every part of the chicken except the bits we eat in the UK. No leg or breast meat but plenty of internal organs, the chicken’s feet and even cubes of chicken blood sausage. I gave a few of the more edible looking bits a try but mostly concentrated on the noodles! Most of the group preferred to go hungry. Even the vegetarians were left disappointed after finding the only vegetarian meal was just a plate of morning glory (A kind of spinach eaten for breakfast here). You can imagine the jokes that provided us with…

Our next stop was one where we didn’t risk food poisoning at least, it was a small family run pottery. And when I say family run I mean it, everyone was involved from the grandmother making pots to small children digging the clay from the ground and a young teen adding insulation and concrete bases to some basic cooking ovens being made. It was a quite interesting and enjoyable stop, if you ignore the child labour! But the kids were playing in the clay and fascinated to see us.

Initially we weren’t sure what they were making. It was basically an insulated container with one open side and prongs on top. Used to light a fire in the bottom, once the container heats up you can put a pot or wok to cook with. Our guide Sarath was mind blown that we had never seen one before as it’s such a basic household item here and how everyone cooks. He couldn’t believe that we all had ‘fancy hotel ovens’ at home.

The grandmother also showed us how she makes the pots from the clay. Potter’s wheels are not needed here, instead she just walks backwards in circles around the clay. When someone asked why she didn’t buy a wheel she was mystified why anyone would need one. Getting me to walk around backwards to demonstrate how easy it was.

After a few more hours we reached Battambang. A few of us decided to do the optional extra of riding the ‘bamboo train’. The ‘train’ is an invention by the locals to use an old railway track to move things between villages. Two axles with rollers the right distance apart are put on the track and then a rigid bamboo floor mat placed over them to sit. Originally a hand pumped leaver was used to move the contraption along, but nowadays they use a motor.

It was great fun, we were wizzing along the track. At one point we met some locals coming the other way and with a huff our driver got us all off, took the contraption apart, let the other train pass and put it all together again.

Eventually we reached a small bridge over the river and the drivers stopped to let us get off and watch the sunset. Apparently we were a little too keen, we all got off at once leaving the driver and engine on one side of the axle and causing the train to tip up.

Once there, there wasn’t much to do except have a photo shoot, so obviously we did and milked it! We also saw some monks having a photo shoot too, so we weren’t the only ones!

The next morning we went on a bicycle tour. Batambang is known as the rice bowl of Cambodia, so we got to see everything and anything made out of rice. We had a joke on the trip that if you were ever unsure of what you were eating it was probably rice of some kind. This trip definitely proved that!

First we saw the process of making rice paper, the super thin paper like wraps used in fresh spring rolls. I even got to have a go at rolling one out to dry in the heat.

Next on the tour was a house making sweets out of, you guessed it, rice. They were nice enough but not really my thing, its like a ground down and condensed version of rice pudding I guess.

After that was a brewery making rice wine. Sadly we didnt get to try any, but that may have been for the best, the whole opperation had a very moon-shine feel about it and I actually enjoy not being blind…

After this we went to see a traditional Cambodian house that had been in a family for 7 generations and had a lot of antiques, it was interesting to look around and also super cool to see how the building let in a breeze and kept cool. They also showed us how they grind up rice as no stop could be complete without some rice facts.

The one stop of the day that didnt invlove rice was the Prahok making tour, I ended up being the only one brave enough (also know as smell deficient enough) to take part in this stop. I was taken around a fish processing area where a speciality of Prahok (fermented fish paste) was made. There were a lot of big open barrels of fermenting fish. I wasnt quite brave enough to try any but it was interesting to see the process.

On our way back from the tour we got caught in a large down poor of rain, so heavy we couldnt ride our bikes in it, some kind shopkeepers let us stand away from the rain in their large open shop, we were stuck there for about an hour but it ended up being one of our best stops. An impromptu meet and greet with two locals, translated by our guide they were asking us about where we came from and how things worked in our countries. They found it funny that white people are all obsessed with cheese, something not really found in cambodia, infact they dont really have a popular word for it instead calling it ‘American Milk’. That got us on to the subject of hotdogs, here what they’re called roughly translates to ‘American Dicks’ this let on to more dick related conversations including the fact that cambodians use ox cock as slang for aubergine but they also eat ox cock which lead to some hillarious pranks on some travelers. Eventually the rain cleared and we left our new friends behind and cycled back to the hotel.

Day two bike tour rice paper, rice wine, fish factory, rice cake, ride in the rain, ox cock. Evening saw bats walked up to Budda, tried crickets silk worm and raw meat.

In the evening we got to experience the famous bat migration at Phnom Sampov. We parked up and walked down what felt like an A road, the further we walked the bussier it got, there were food stalls and tables and chairs everywhere all directly under a huge cave, it had a real festival vibe, even though this happened daily.

The migration doesnt happen until 5pm so we decided to expolore the area while we waited. We climbed up the giant budda to get a view of the area and then after that hungry work we went of to try some local speciality foods.

A few of of us were brave enough to try crickets, silk worms and raw beef, (not sure why I was so keen to risk food poisining this close to the end of the trip, but luckily it was fine!) but we werent brave enough to try the raw chicken fetus even though our guide indulged and kept asking if we wanted some…

After our snacks, we sat down and waited for 5pm, when the migration would begin. First it was just a trickel of bats that came out of the cave, but then there were more and more until a thick stream of them could be seen coming out of the cave and snaking across the sky, there were thousands! The photos really dont capture how many there were and they kept coming at that volume for about 45 minutes.

We stayed until dark and then headed back to the hotel to rest after our jam packed day. The next few days will be just as busy, will write about them soon.

Love Alice x

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Phenom Phen, Cambodia

Our journey from Vietnam to Cambodia was a long one. Ten hours on a bus including a two hour stop at the border waiting for visas and exit and entry stamps. We got so bored we all had a go at squatting like the locals with varying degrees of success and then we just moved on to doing stretches and yoga because it was nice to move about after being stuck still for so long. Eventually we made it through the border and carried on to Phnom Penh the capital of Cambodia.

Cambodia is quite a poor country and it’s evident from the increased amounts of rubbish everywhere and farm animals wandering about, but it is also very green and beautiful. It has a real mix of roads, some built by the Japanese, which are smooth modern and in good condition and some built by the Chinese, which already appear to be crumbling with potholes. The locals call them the Chinese massage roads as you are bumped and pulled about like a massage. So the onwards journey was a mix of sleeping on the Japanese roads, only to be jolted awake as your head banged against the window once we hit the rougher roads in China.

We arrived, slightly more bruised that we started and in the evening and were supposed to go on a tuk tuk tour of the city. However, it is now the rainy season, so it absolutely chucked it down for two hours completely flooding the roads. So instead we went for dinner in the Hotels restaurant which was delicious, it seems Cambodian food is a mix of the best parts of Thai and Vietnamese food. Our guide told us here the word rice is interchangeable with food/meal as they eat it constantly, instead of asking ‘have you eaten yet?’ they ask ‘have you had rice yet’. After dinner/rice some of us decided to take a dip in the rooftop’s partially covered pool as we would be wet anyway we may as well enjoy the rain from up there with some beers, before heading to bed.

The next day we learned more about the Khmer Rouge an extreme communist party that took control of Cambodia between 1975 to 1979. The party’s aim was to establish a class-less communist state based on a rural agrarian economy and a complete rejection of the free market and capitalism. The way they achieved this was to enter cities, after the end of the brutal civil war for power, and tell the cheering citizens, who were just happy the war was over, that they needed to leave immediately as the city was about to be bombed by America.

Once they left the city with little food and next to no belongings they were not allowed to return, instead they were sent to hard labour camps to farm the land. The Khmer Rouge then arrested and killed thousands of members of the previous government and regimes, including soldiers, politicians and bureaucrats, who they considered to be not “pure people”. Meaning those who were not fit or capable of building the agrarian state they had set out to establish.

Over the following years, hundreds of thousands of intellectuals, professionals, members of minorities and ordinary citizens who were deemed not to conform were also killed in a systematic campaign to eliminate those deemed to be “impure”. With mass exicution centres set up across the country.

This eventually extended to anyone who had lived in a city or not done hard labour being killed. With people being executed if their hands were too soft, skin too pale or if they could not climb a tree fast enough.

There were 8 million people living in Cambodia when the Khmer Rouge came into power in their reign of just 3 years, 8 months and 20 days they had killed around 2 million people. 24% of the population. Mass graves are found all over the country.

Ending just forty two years ago, it’s effects are still seen deeply as you travel around Cambodia. The abolishment of money and free markets means the current currency of Cambodia is weak and is used side by side with US dollars (you regularly receive change in a mix of the two currencies). Normal schooling was banned and teachers executed, meaning even after the regime, there was no one to teach when schools could finally be opened again. It took 10 years to get formal education back in place, meaning a whole generation was left uneducated. Even now students only do half days, one group of children in the morning, one in the afternoon, so that teachers can teach double the amount of students. There was no public or private transportation, meaning roads and transport methods here are limited. Foreign languages, except those of communist countries, were also banned so people of a certain age don’t speak English. Our guide was in his mid/late fifties and told us how he illegally learnt English. The lack of food as the country collapsed also led people to eat insects and learn by trial and error which ones were safe to eat. These are still sold everywhere today: Tarantulas, crickets, Beatles, silk worms etc. Landmines are also still being removed from the land often by the,now grown, child soldiers who were trained to set them up in the first place.

Yet for a country where such horrific suffering happened so recently, I have never met such happy and friendly people. Cambodia is often called the land of smiles and I can see why, wherever you go people wave and smile and practice their English saying hello and good morning and bringing their children to greet you.

It was against this backdrop we visited one of the killing Fields outside Phnom Penh, Choeung Ek. It was truly harrowing. Near the entrance stands a stupa, when Cambodians traditionally place their dead. They had initially planned to dig up the graves and place the skulls of the dead inside as a symbol of remembrance. After removing 5,000 bodies from the site, they decided the number left inside the unopened graves was too large and that they should be left to rest in peace. I’d read about the number of dead, and the horrors they faced, but seeing rows and rows of skulls, and knowing this was just a fraction of those that lost their lives and suffered, the injustice and pointlessness of it all really hit me.

Behind the stupa are the mass graves, some dug by the prisoners themselves before execution, filled with the dead. So many people were killed here, that they attempted to save bullets by instead killing them with bamboo spears, sharp blades of grass or farming instruments such as hoes or hammers. The site is littered with bones, teeth and clothing washed to the surface by the heavy rainy season. The bones and clothing that wash to the surface are put in boxes as soon as possible but the sheer volume of them means that the floor is covered with clothes and teeth and bone fragments as you walk around.

The hardest part was the grave of the mother’s and children. The Khmer Rouge had a saying that ‘to kill grass, you must dig it at the root’ meaning that if they killed one person in a family, the whole family had to be killed so they would not plan revenge. To save ammunition when killing young infants and babies the soldiers would swing them against a tree, while making their mother’s watch, knowing they would be next. It was horrific to see and hear about and the last straw before most of our group were in tears. Even our guide a young woman in her 20’s was crying after telling us many of her aunt’s and uncles were murdered here. It didnt feel right to take photos on the fields themselves where these horrific things had happened, so I have none to add, but there is more information online if you are interested.

Equally as scary was the fact that the guide had asked us not to ask any political questions here and would pretend she didn’t hear us if we asked one even close to being political or relating to anything current. When we got back on the bus she answered the questions she had previously ignored, telling us that the current government is still closely linked to the Khmer Rouge with high officials previously having senior roles, even the president. She told us that tour guides are constantly watched for any criticism of the current government, she told us ‘we are not a communist country externally anymore, but there are always eyes and ears watching’.

The next stop was equally as difficult, we visited Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. Housed in the infamous former S21 prison. The prison, one of nearly 200, was built in a school in the city and used to hold prisoners of interest to the Khmer Rouge, who tortured them for information. The torture would often lead prisoners to make up stories about being in the CIA or KGB and naming family and friends as co-spies meaning more and more people were brought in and tortured.

Cells were built inside the school and the inmates shackled to the floor given an ammunition box as a toilet. If they spilled any or made a mess they were beaten until they licked it all up. Three times a day they were tortured by beatings and having their wrists tied behind their backs and then being hoisted up on the previous gym rope bar by their wrists, dislocating their bones and ripping their muscles. If they lost consciousness their heads were submerged in a vat of sewage formed from emptying the prisoners ammunition box toilets.

20,000 prisoners were kept in the prison over the three years it was opened, 12 survived. Those twelve only survived as those who were adults were useful enough to the regime in the running of the prison that they were un-shackled and could run when the Vietnamese invasion came close to the prison and the Khmer Rouge soldiers were evacuating. The children were able to escape by hiding in a large pile of dead victims clothes. The rest of the inmates were killed in their cells. Their blood still stains the floor of the museum.

On a positive note we were able to meet two of the survivors. One, an old man, who told us about his life before, during and after the regime. How he was kept alive as he could fix the typewriters that the ‘confessions’ were recorded with. His wife and children were not so lucky and to this day he still does not know why they were all arrested. We also met a man in his late 40’s who was one of the child survivors who told us about his short experience in the prison, the last time he saw his mother through a window as she was taken to be executed, hiding from the guards coming to kill them and about being adopted by a unit of Vietnamese soldiers after they rescued him and then being placed in an orphanage.

Both men had written short books about their experiences which we also purchased. The old man told us to have a photo with him and to smile to show that it had not broken him.

The next day thankfully was a bit less heavy on the heart. We did a tuk tuk tour of Phnom Penh and saw lots of pretty temples and monuments to the king and one to a monk who had standardised the Cambodian language. We also learned about Mrs Phen the woman who founded a buddhist temple on a hill or ‘Phnom’ after she found a statue of Budda floating down a river inside a tree.

We also got to go on a boat ride on the Mekong River. As we waited for the boat to arrive we saw lots of birds in cages and our guide Sareth told us you can pay to release them for good luck so we all paid a dollar to release some. It didn’t get us much luck though, half way through the boat ride there was torrential rain and we had to turn back, we were absolutely drenched!

Hopefully the weather will be better in Batambang where we are headed next! I will tell you all about it soon, love Alice x