The defacto mode of transport for those quick jaunts around town and not so quick jaunts out of town is the tuk-tuk. They come in different shapes and configurations but basically consist of a modified moped pulling a rickshaw. It’s the sherman tank of the roadways, nothing can stop it, it just keeps heading where you want to go (you hope), often at top revs although not always top speed. No such thing as a meter, all trips are negotiated beforehand and are, confusingly, sometimes a fixed price and sometimes not. In any case and in any country, the trip is cheap. In Siem Reap, Cambodia they are just about the only transportation option for the weary traveler so I thought I’d get to know what life on a tuk-tuk is about.
YoYo was our driver for a whole day around the ruins of Angkor Wat. He’s young, I’d say his early twenties, and has just started as a tuk-tuk driver. His initial investment was high. Although everyone has one, the scooter has to come from somewhere, and the rickshaw half costs around $400 – which is a lot of money by Cambodian standards and took him 5 YEARS to save. I’m sure there are many loan sharks out there and a lot of drivers are hopelessly in debt. Everyone wants to be a tuk-tuk driver though and the city has enforced a licensing scheme to keep them honest (marginally) and the tourists safe (relatively). Tuk-tuk driving is seen as a lucrative job, one step above that is an official tour guide. Anything to do with tourists is considered to be a good way to make money. A dollar from us means so much more than a dollar to them. Unfortunately, this is one area where tourism doesn’t always help the economy because instead of going to college, young people fall into the tourist business to make quick money. This isn’t raising the general level of education in the country and therefore will not raise Cambodia’s economic standing in SE Asia. None of this, however, is of concern to Yoyo. All he wants to do is climb the next step up the ladder of the tuk-tuk business. Yoyo works and lives in a guesthouse. Mark and Shirin drove a hard bargain with the manager/tuk-tuk driver/guide in their guest house and rather than do the job himself for $20, he handed it down to Yoyo. Basically then, Yoyo gets the crappy jobs and has to pay commission to his boss. We certainly had a crappy job for him too. We wanted to visit two very out of the way temples and the drive was about two hours, mainly on dirt tracks where the roadside fauna was a more brown road dust than leaves. And there, on the front of the tuk-tuk, no shade or protection was Yoyo trying his hardest not give the tourists a bumpy ride on a road surface more holes than surface. Yoyo’s mum lives only 10km away from the city but he chooses to sleep in the guesthouse so not to miss any jobs and, he explained, the gasoline is too expensive to go home every night. Like most of those that work in guesthouses in both Cambodia and Vietnam, he probably sleeps on a mattress he pulls into the hotel lobby when all the guests have gone to bed. He said he misses his mother but sends as much money home to her as he can. We tipped Yoyo $5 over the amount agreed with his boss and told him not to tell anyone. Whether he did or not, we’re not sure – I’d like to think he sent the money back to his mother after buying himself a well earned beer but somehow I think his boss has him on a pretty tight leash.

The second tuk-tuk referred to in the title of this posting belonged to Nol. One of the tricks the drivers in Siem Reap do is offer you a free or heavily discounted ride in order to get a days’ business like Yoyo. We discovered this within five minutes of arriving in town when a tuk-tuk driver held up a sign implying he was the shuttle service from the bus station to the guest house we wanted to stay in. Turned out he had nothing to do with the guesthouse but would give us a free ride to whereever we like if we’d book him the next day. After two days of every tuk-tuk ride being a setup for the next day I was a little short with Nol. We had already hired him for a pointless trip back to the bus station to reconfirm our return trip to Phnom Phen (they wouldn’t do it over the phone) when he tried to upgrade us for the next day. I said “no” and walked away in a semi-huff and Sarah ran over and said that this was his first job in three days and wanted to know if he could take us back to the bus station tomorrow to catch our bus out. It’s hard to imagine when you see every tourist in a tuk-tuk that there are way more tuks than tourists and that the bartering we do mostly on principle can have a dramatic effect on the income of the driver. We gave Nol the return business and, there he was the next morning, ten minutes early, waiting to drive us. I think I gave him a big tip to make up for a hard barter the day before and to make up for being a tourist.

I desperately want to dispel those terrible rumors and impressions from message boards and guidebooks that the only reason to go to Cambodia is for Angkor Wat and a traveler should “get in and get out”. I want to scream from the mountain tops, “I LOVE CAMBODIA! GO TO CAMBODIA!”.

Sure, Phnom Pehn is not the most pleasant city. The poverty is massive, incomprehenisible, surrounding you all the time. It’s the country’s capitol city yet most of the streets are unpaved, a red dusty mess. There are chickens pecking around major inner-city construction sites. There are stray cats and dogs everywhere and always, always, hungry children and disfigured landmine victims asking for food and money. It’s tough to be there, this is no lie.More…

We didn’t go to PP to do happy things. On our list, on everyone’s list, was to visit the museum that was once a high school and then the city prison where Pol Pot had thousands and thousands of people sent to be tortured before being driven by the truckloads to the killing fields 7 kms away. We walked silently through the classrooms turned brick or wood cells where people were chained and beaten, starved and tortured:  mothers in cells with their babies, children of all ages – all innocent. If you squint real hard you can see how it was once a school but you don’t have to try very hard at all to feel all the ghosts in the air. Of the 15,000 or so people who were kept prisoner there from 1975-1979, only 7 lived to tell about it. Each prisoner’s mug-shot was displayed for you to walk among and we desperately wanted to look at each and every face to pay each person respect. To say, “we see you, we are thinking about you, we wish you peace”. To say that the Cambodian people are physically beautiful is an understatement and it was remarkable how many of the girls and women still looked stunningly beautiful in their mug shots even though we know they had likely gone through unimaginable hell right before the photo was taken. I was standing in front of these pictures thinking, “I was alive on the day you had this picture taken. I was probably playing outside and you were here, your life about to be brutally taken, you were in so much pain and agony, confusion and bewilderment. We woke up on the same day but my day ended very differently.” I watched a tourist bus pull into the main front gate, the same gate through which trucks drove in and out on their way to the Killing Fields. We opted not to visit the Killing Fields as most tourists do, driving in tuk-tuks along the same route as the people in these photos had taken. We’d kind of seen enough. Instead, we walked down some dusty, dilapidated side-street, through a 10-foot high corrugated iron fence and into the most lovely, tranquil garden cafe and decompressed. It was surreal to go from one environ to something so completely different and that juxtaposition didn’t pass us by.

We have heard of foreigners moving to Phnom Penh for one reason or another and we honestly didn’t stay long enough to be able to see how anyone could stand it. I mean, we did have some good times. We had our glorious dinner (see my previous post) and I also had the most amazing massage at Seeing Hands, a message therapy institute where all the therapists are blind and my happily spent $4 went to an excellent cause. And, of course, you can’t put a price on the random conversations we had with locals – obviously that’s partly what this whole endeavor is all about. We also got a huge kick out of all the variations they have on the 7-11 convenience store: 7-Nice, 7-Happy, 7-Super…..Looking back, we think that, as with any culture and city so crazily different from your own, you need to give it time to see the beauty and we just plain didn’t give PP the time. We listened to the guide book and headed straight for Siem Reap to see Angkor Wat. As with the bus ride into the city from the border crossing, the drive out of the city north gave us a chance to see how GORGEOUS this country is. The landscape is rich and lush, the village houses are all built on stilts among palm trees and jungle, the sun always seems to be shining a favorable light no matter what time of day it is. The children all come to the road to wave at the bus; everything about it just kind of makes your heart smile.

Please read about Angkor Wat or, better yet, fly to Cambodia and see it for yourself. It’s one of the ancient wonders of the world and it IS truly spectacular but I’m not going to write much on it. We spent 2 days in a tuk-tuk touring around them (ok, for those who don’t know and want to finish reading my blog before researching: wats are temples and Angkor is the name of the city as well as the name of the reigning dynasty responsible for building these stunning stone carved temples in the 11th century, the detailing putting anything in Europe to shame). The main little town that visitors stay in to visit the temples is Siem Reap and it was absolutely charming. We weren’t expecting to love it as much as we did and I’m so thankful that we had at least 3 days there but I would have liked to spend more. The people just make your heart melt, their warmth and sincerity shining through if the guarded tourist can open up and take a chance on a real conversation underneath the desperate pleas for money. We got to be friends with the owner of the 7-Happy where we bought our water everyday and we talked about his store as he asked us about our trip and wished us well.

I had this constant feeling of happiness, of just loving being there. I had this overwhelming feeling of wanting to help, contribute in some way. Right now, seeing as we have no income, there is only so much we can do. One of the big problems is simply getting kids in school and keeping them there so we bought some kids’ artwork from and organization that gives 100% of the profits back to local schools. We also bought a few little things from an organization that trains and employs women who would otherwise likely be on the street. We visited this fantastic photo gallery displaying the works of kids who’ve been given a camera and some skills and sent out the take street pictures. They’re also given a safe place to play in the afternoons, to do their homework, to shower and drink clean water (if anyone has seen Born Into Brothels, it’s kind of the Cambodian equiv.). My heart is welling up right now all over again. I just can’t say enough.

Unfortunately, we simply didn’t budget enough time for Cambodia. There are other towns I’ve love to see, more time I’d love to spend and give, more money I’d love to give….and since we heard fantastic things about Laos as well and we didn’t get there, I guess we have another trip to SE Asia in our future!

Your traveling duo have come up with yet another humorous eating tale for you. Please recall from an earlier post Mai from the Ba Le Well who literally fed us like babies while yelling out “Vietnam Ba Le Well Good!!!” Our tale this time comes to you from Phnom Pehn, Cambodia. On our 2nd night in town we had dinner with Mark & Shirin, the lovely English couple we made friends with during our entrance into Cambodia up the Mekong where our cage-like boat was beseiged by pirate children kind of wanting to steal our bags. Nothing bonds a friendship like crossing the Cambodian border together and we went on to spend a fantastic few days with them, beginning with this dinner.

We were after true Khmer food which I’d heard was amazing so we stumbled into a place right on tourist row that was proudly waving a sign that read, “Good Khmer food.” The place, though, looked like a huge, deserted, florescent-lit cafeteria. I must, however, always remember to look up with asian restaurants becuase the upstairs balcony is always where the ambiance and action are.
Two fatefull things happened during our 1st 5 minutes that, we’ve come to believe, altered the course of what would have otherwise been a normal night of eating out. Firstly, on the way in I spotted a table on which there were maybe 50 small pouches of secret goodness wrapped in banana leaves. I’d been noticing street vendors selling these mysterious things for weeks and I was dying to know what was inside so I stopped our kind host and asked him. He indicated they were for dessert and promised me a try. Then, when we sat down with our menus I told him we wanted the best Khmer food and I asked him what his house specialties were. Fortunately, the menu was a picture menu and he proceeded to engage me in a very animated and dedicated conversation, putting all his food passion into telling me about Khmer food and the dishes we must try. The four of us believe that these two small actions somehow made the host like us.

Throughout the course of the evening we had a team of no less than 4 wait staff attending to us, usually it was closer to 10, somtimes 12. They watched us closely as each dish arrived to make sure we were pleased. They smiled and cheered as we took our first bites. We were kind of seperated from most of the balcony tables by a half wall so we couldn’t see what was going on for everyone else but surely they all got terrible service that night because the entire staff seemed always to be around our table. We feasted on coconut curry, beautifully marinated beef, wonderfully fresh flavors of lemongrass and basil perfectly married together. After dinner, as promised and on the house: plates and plates of the banana leaf pouches arrived, some filled with some kind of coconut custard thing and some filled with a pumpkin custard (I think the ones sold by street vendors are just sticky rice which is my new fave). At the end of the meal, when plates were cleared, one waiter came behind each of us and began giving us massages. At first only 3 of us were being massaged and when the host saw this he sharply clapped his hands, yelled something, pointed to the neglected one and instantly, a 4th masseuse appeared. The massages went on for a bit too long than I think any of us were comfortable with but we didn’t know how to say enough so it just kept going an going……shoulders, arms, neck, temples……with us looking at each other like, “I kind of don’t like this…….do you think they’ll ever stop?” Finally they did and we snapped a picture:

(Picture to follow soon!)

The crowd around our table gathered again when the bill came. A dozen servers and the host completely circled the table and watched us as we reviewed the bill and negotiated the strange new play-currency in our wallets. And as the last one of us layed down the very last note that brought us to our total (which was about $5/person), a group cheer rang out with more laughing and more clapping. We were escorted out of the restaurant by our entourage and, when out on the sidewalk, we all agreed that this was definitely a story for the blog.
Mark & Shirin (their blog) are also traveling for a year- they’re 3 months ahead of us and their tans prove it: