Days 125 – 126: Phnom Penh

Photos: http://princeton.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2059205&l=79201&id=1101094

I left the next morning on a 7am bus for Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital; based on my experience so far in Cambodia, all buses leave by 7am. Maybe that’s because it’s too hot to travel in the afternoon.

The bus was an exact replica of the junkpile that I had take to Kratie the previous day; in fact, it may have been the exact same bus. Having learned my lesson about putting luggage into a luggage compartment that doesn’t close, I kept my pack at my feet for the entirety of the journey to Phnom Penh, a decision which ensured that my legs would spend the seven hour ride in agony. Of course, this time all the roads were paved and the bags underneath the bus stayed perfectly clean, but isn’t that always how it works?

We arrived in Phnom Penh at 3pm and I quickly found a guesthouse, dropped my pack, and headed for the Indonesian Embassy to drop off my visa application. While one-month Indonesian visas are generally available on arrival, I hoped to spend two consecutive months in Indonesia and had been told that I could get a two-month visa by visiting an embassy prior to my visit.

When I arrived at the place where the Indonesian Embassy was supposed to be, I found an abandoned building that looked as if it hadn’t been occupied in years; sure enough, the embassy had moved to the other side of town nearly three years ago (thank you, newly revised and updated Lonely Planet), and I didn’t have time to make it there before it closed for the weekend.

Annoyed that I would have to wait until Monday morning to drop off my application, I headed down to the riverfront, which was alive with a strange mix of tourists and people celebrating the Lunar New Year. Apparently there are a large number of Chinese immigrants in Cambodia (as evidenced not only by the celebration but by the many signs around Cambodia that are translated from Khmer into both English and Chinese), and they were all out celebrating that afternoon. The party continued into the evening, and as the sun started to set kids began setting off firecrackers, which mostly scared the tourists shitless—they probably thought they were being fired at.

I ate dinner at a riverfront restaurant called Bali Café, which served the Indonesian food that I missed so much. The chicken satay, drowning in just the right amount of peanut sauce, was wonderful, and made me wish I was back in Bali eating fish satay made from the mahi mahi that I’d pulled from the water that morning. But for that I’d need to wait at least another few weeks.

The following morning I rented a motorbike and visited the sights of Phnom Penh, most of which are horribly depressing: the Killing Fields, where Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge murdered thousands of its own citizens, specifically those who were educated or knew foreign languages; Tuol Sleng Prison, where the Khmer Rouge imprisoned and tortured thousands of people before sending them off to the Killing Fields to be exterminated; and the Royal Palace, which was depressing mainly for its admission charge, which rose from $3 to $7 in the past two years. That’s some wicked inflation.

I assume most of you know your history well enough to be familiar with Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, so I won’t rehash the details here. I will say that the country still seems haunted by the terrors of the regime, which I suppose isn’t surprising considering it all happened only 30 years ago. Most scholars estimate that nearly two million Cambodians were killed under the regime, which would represent nearly a quarter of the 1975 population. In those terms, Pol Pot is the worst mass murderer in history.

I finished my tour of the city by mid-afternoon, and because I didn’t have to return my motorbike until 6pm I decided to zip over to the Indonesian Embassy just to make sure I knew where I was going for Monday morning. The trip turned out to be incredibly worthwhile, as the embassy, though closed, had a sign posted stating that two-month visas were not available. Apparently, only certain embassies grant such visas, and Cambodia’s is not one of them. The good news was that I could leave for Siem Reap the following morning instead of waiting until Monday; the bad news was that I now have to go back to the drawing board on a plan for March and April, as I’ll need to leave Indonesia at the end of March to renew my visa.