Cambodia blows my mind
Don’t you hate it when someone gets off the plane from a holiday raving about how great the place they’ve just been was? Thank god I’m not one of those people! I’m just a dude who’s come back from a holiday in Cambodia two days ago, key difference, who is highly enthusiastic about visiting Cambodia.
On face value, Cambodian tourism seems to have three major selling points: the Angkor temples, atrocity museums, and ‘‘we do not check ID card’’ bars. Not that I would know anything about that.
Cambodia is not for bros who always seem mainly impressed and surprised by how cheap the Third World country they’re semi-exploiting is. Obviously, South East Asia is cheap, it’s poor and developing, they take the savings they don’t spend on restaurant hand soap and pass it on to you.
I experienced the most bizarre example of this uneasy tourism mix when leaving the Choeung Ek Killing Fields and mass grave, undoubtedly the most haunting experience of my life; my tuk tuk driver asked me, without irony, if I wanted to go to a shooting range.
For him, maybe the genocide museum’s just become another tourist spot, in a country where almost a quarter of their population, close to two million people, died during the four-year reign of the Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979.
The most shocking memorial to this is the Tuol Sleng torture prison. An unbelievable collection of photographs, torture equipment, and human skulls, where low estimates suggest 12,000 people – including Kiwi Kerry Hamill – were horrifically abused before being murdered.
After finishing the audio tour, I was again surprised to be offered the chance to meet two of the prison’s seven surviving prisoners. I couldn’t believe it, I’d just been listening to these people’s incredible stories of torture, and here they were smiling, doing a book signing. It was a mindblowing experience, and incredibly sad to think something like this had happened, and still is happening.
Ironically, that night I ate at a North Korean state-run restaurant. A desperate ploy for their own version of the Khmer Rouge to generate foreign currency.
The ‘‘Pyongyang’’ restaurant was fairly normal, until halfway through the meal, the all-female wait staff jumped on stage and started singing a group harmony, complete with live music and laser lights. The show was off the chain, ‘‘the forced government music practice was paying off big time!’’ I thought, before remembering these smiling women weren’t free, and were tightly monitored.
A very impressive thing about Phnom Penh is the food. I was also embarrassed to find out how terrible Kiwis are at barbecue. Cambodian barbecue blows us out the water.
In conclusion, Cambodia is great; I couldn’t recommend it highly enough.
I’d just been listening to these people’s incredible stories of torture, and here they were smiling, doing a book signing.
Guy flew to Cambodia via Air Asia.