Bad tourist

Trip Start May 06, 2007
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144
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Trip End Jul 24, 2008


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Flag of Cambodia  ,
Thursday, May 8, 2008

Phnom Penh is the capital of Cambodia.  Like many capitals, it's a large, rather unimpressive city.  While I didn't exactly love the constant barrage of tuk-tuk and moto drivers vying for my business in Siem Reap, the ones in Phnom Penh actually made me dislike the city.  I had one yell at me and call me a bad tourist when I said I was going to walk the half-hour across town to the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum.  Another immediately followed that up with "You shouldn't come to our country if you're not going to take our transportation."  Not exactly a welcome greeting.  At other points I had moto drivers follow along side me insisting that I take a ride with them.  One of them only left when I stopped, looked him straight in the eye, and told him that if he didn't stop harassing me immediately I would report him to the tourist police.  All of my tuk-tuk and moto driver interactions left me with a bad taste of Cambodians.  I know that they're not the majority of people, but it definitely wasn't pleasant.  It didn't help that they overcharged like crazy for every ride I did take, trying to get more than the agreed-upon price out of me once we arrived at my destination.

One day was really enough for me to see everything I wanted to see in Phnom Penh.  I first visited the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, a prison complex during the time of the Khmer Rouge regime from 1975-1979.  It was really depressing to visit and learn about.  During the four years that the prison was active, about 20,000 were imprisoned with only 8 of them surviving.  Many of them were brought to the killing fields about 6km away to be killed, while quite a few died or were killed at the prison complex.  Before being transformed into a prison, the buildings had housed a local school.  It was rather surreal seeing what was once a classroom turned into prison cells and torture rooms.  I was sufficiently disturbed by the prison complex that I canceled my plan to visit the killing fields.  Too many parts of the prison complex reminded me of what I saw at Auschwitz that I just couldn't bring myself to go see another site of mass genocide.

In harsh contrast to the prison and killing fields, I also visited the Royal Palace, a set of opulent buildings right in the center of the city.  It felt a bit strange seeing such lavish luxury just a few hours after seeing a sight of torture and massacre, but life is full of juxtapositions.

I had my fill of the city and decided to head south the next morning to the beach, with my fingers crossed that the weather would hold out.  The rainy season seems to have begun early this year as every day around 3 or 4pm the skies open up and rain pours down, sometimes for about 10 minutes and other times for a couple of hours.  So far I've been lucky not to have been stuck in it, but that can't last forever if it rains like this every day for the rest of my trip.
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