Holiday in Cambodia

I just finished up 3 days in Siem Reap and I am now in Cambodia's capital, Phnom Penh. The first 2 days I spent checking out Angkor's countless ancient temples and crumbling structures. I opted to get shuttled around to them by a guy working at the guest house I stayed at on the back of a scooter. His name was Phech Sopaul, or just Paul. I also met 2 lawyers from CO who met in the courtroom (facing eachother)and have been engaged for over a year.

By the third day, I was pretty much tired of seeing the temples, so we did something a little different. There is a huge lake in the middle of Cambodia and of course many people who live on the lake fishing and raising alligators. I shared a boat with a Brit banker who was on his way back from working in Bogota, Colombia. We checked out the floating villages and I was the only foreigner to jump into the muddy, flooded canal with the Cambodians.

Then Paul took me to what he called the killing fields. It was a site at which many people were massacred during the Khmer Rouge's regime and institution of communism. Today, it is a Buddhist monastary complex. There was still a pile of bones as a memorial along with pictures and diagrams of different ways in which people were killed. As I began to feel pretty emotional thinking about this, I strolled over to a classroom where there was a foreigner teaching english to a classful of young adults. I stepped outside and there was a Buddhist funural service going on. There was the body in a concrete pyre and men began to put burning wood inside to cremate the body. I saw some women and kids crying for the deceased. It was an amazing place with so many real things happening.

I then asked Paul if I could go to his house. He lives in this tiny, one room shack with a hammock for a bed and a dirt floor. He cooked me a little food he usually eats and his mom brought over a special dish too. We strolled around the neighborhood and talked to a few people, one guy who makes genuine engravings like the ones at Angkor Wat and sells them to hotels and rich tourists. Last night, I paid Paul more than what he asked for for the 3 days. He was pretty happy and invited me to drink with him, some other co-workers, the guest house owner and the owner's family. It was great fun an we raised our glasses every 2 minutes to drink Anchor Beer poured over ice. I did the usual foreigner thing of repeating funny Cambodian phrases to everyone's amusement. I was sad to leave Siem Reap this morning, giving Paul my e-mail and a recieving a promise that he will ask me to invest in a new guest house he wants to open.

Land mines are a part of everyday life all over the country. Millions of mines were laid in the decades of war in the 60s to the 80s and they are still a huge problem today. I visited the Siem Reap mine museum. This small one room building has tons of old mines and bombs gathered by the museum's creator, Aki Ra. He was a child soldier for the Khmer regime and he actually placed many of the mines when he was a child. Today, he works on locating and disarming the old, but still active mines. Several children live at the museum. They are all amputees or are blind. Being in Cambodia, I have seem so many people walking or crawling around missing legs, arms, or everything. There is really no reason for these terrible devices to exist in the first place. Most mines are created by the huge powers: Russia, China or the good old USA, and end up in extremely poor places like here and Laos. About 90 Cambodians are victims of land mines every month.

More to come from Cambodia...