Slumming in the Sunny SouthEast #1

Not Wexford, different sunny southeast entirely. First time in Asia proper, place is interesting. First stop is Cambodia, specifically Siem Reap. Plan is to hack through the entire southeast within a month and a half.

Airport built by the Chinese, full biometric scanning etc upon entry. Infrastructure built out from it, but located 60km away from the actual city it serves. Airport is absolutely massive, much bigger than required, either built for capacity in the future or something else. Extremely high tech, with qr code visas and very simple process coming in, no queues etc. Biometric details taken on entry. Apple and western companies already have all our data from fingerprint and face, so it is possible the Chinese are attempting to do the same in some way by installing this technology on behalf of countries popular with tourists. Paranoid? Very possibly. When you think about the belt and road initiative and the fact that China is pushing hard in the global south, it is possible that many of these infrastructures are built for a second purpose such as military or aid or economic deployments which benefit China etc. Also makes these countries significantly indebted to China and subtle servants to Chinese influence.

Instant facts from perplexity

I’ll be honest the place is quite poor and visibly so, haven’t been anywhere like it before, the infrastructure is not great, there’s very little in the way of upholding rules or public services, seen no police or ambulances . There was obviously a civil war+genocide, American bombing campaigns, Vietnamese invasion and military pressure from other neighbours so a lot to overcome.

The place is beautiful outside of the tourist areas which are, quite frankly, greasy as fuck. Very rural, small roads, community feeling, farms and rice paddies, better maintained and slower pace. The city centre in terms of being built up etc dissolves into countryside within about 30 minutes of walking. There’s no suburbs and the “city” blends into the surrounding countryside fairly smoothly and quickly. The people outside of the centre are very friendly, lots of waves “hellos” and children running out to greet you. Lots of smiles and far less pestering for you to enter into places etc. There are plenty of Buddhist temples outside the centre and touristy areas, quite beautiful. The design looks like flames arrayed around seven snakes or five snakes and sometimes some sort of eagle thing riding a snake.

Angkor Wat is clearly the draw for this city. It was built about 900 years ago and is a fairly large one , oriented to the compass, surround by an almost perfect square moat with water in it. Surprisingly, I was far more impressed by the Bayon temple which is smaller but has about 50 different towers rising to different heights with carved faces in all of them. Very cool, walking through it, has a lot of arches and corridors etc. Cute monkeys running around it as well, the guide I went with gave him the water to drink then when he tried to get it back the monkey was holding onto his hand like a child and pulling, very nice little creature. It is interesting how close they are to human, eyes, hands arms etc. Anyway, the place is seriously cool, would like to see again even further into the off season. A few funky mushrooms before wandering in there in there would be extremely interesting I am willing to bet.

One very strange thing is the prevalence of iphones, smartphones etc despite the income levels. People are all on them, constantly, in every place I’ve seen, terminally online. There seems to be basically no road rules, it’s a bit improvised, just go with the flow and pray you don’t get They use the dollar and the local currency interchangeably at a fixed rate , 4000 riel to 1 usd. It seems to be informally pegged to the usd because they are used so interchangeably, for example you can pay for something in riel and get usd in change and vice versa depending on what they have to hand, hence it’s fairly stable. People I’ve talked to make about 10$ per shift and work basically all day.

The food is decent despite the low prices, get some good portions as well considering. There are quite a few markets that are used by the locals with plenty of fresh fruit and veg , the food in the stalls and restaurants seems to be freshly made. The markets where the locals go are fairly rough and ready, veg, fruit, raw fish, wriggling live fish, cuts of meat, chicken legs and heads of various types all laid out on blankets with people going up and down the little streets on the mopeds. Not sure how good the exhaust fumes play into the flavours but it must be doing something. The local Khmer food are kind of like curries but sweeter and creamier - Amok and Lok Lak. There’s also fried spiders and scorpions. Despite the aircon, fans and occasional breeze, the humidity is really just insane, sweating through every item of clothing the minute you step outside, like being in a warm bath. The sun is also extremely intense, got absolutely scorched the first few days, from a shade of light latte to deep lobster purple almost. There are plenty of dogs and cats hanging around and they have all 100% been beaten by the heat. They just lie around all day, dozing and panting and I could pretty much join them. Just lie in the shade melting in a puddle of humidified sweat. It is apparently rainy season but it seems to just lash rain for an hour or two in the afternoon, again in the night and then it goes back to intense humidity and heat again. The soil is an orangey red and loamy/semi solid when moist. It’s actually extremely nice to walk on which is a weird comment but it feels like a more comfortable form of sand or something, a bit more dense, maybe like playdough. Weird thing to take note of but it feels nice to walk on and I’ve walked quite a bit.

There are tuktuks constantly harassing people to give lifts, prostitutes constantly soliciting, masseuses constantly looking to massage you and so on, phone shops, bars, restaurants, etc. No different to any tourist place really. Took a walk out the main road to try find a rave but unfortunately it was over before I got there. Sit in to some restaurants in the tourism area and you’ll be surrounded by seriously greasy geezers, usually from England, that are just ogling the locals and feeding on the cheapest possible gruel and beer. There is unfortunately an appeasement attitude, where people try to give you what they think you want, be it music or food or whatever else. Stopped in at many a small bar and talked with the bartenders etc. The English level here is much higher than in Japan, probably out of necessity.The older style Khmer music from before the disasters is great. Apparently the independence from France in the 50s unleashed a revival of Khmer culture, language, Hinduism/buddhism etc and a big urban surge in the colonial vacuum including tunes. This led to some real blending of neighbouring styles and ownership of Cambodian pop and rock.

Phnom Penh:

Only stayed here for a couple of days but quite the place. Much busier, much dirtier, much louder, much more intense than the other place. Walking outside, there’s people burning their trash etc, cooking on open flames and then everyone is on diesel powered scooters so the air is quite hazy and after a while walking and breathing in it, you can feel grit/silt building up in your mouth. Apparently the crime rate is similar to Dublin. The place is a little bit ropey in some areas at night, but generally people are very welcoming and friendly. There are plenty of very hectic markets etc. as well. Some areas still have what I think is the old French style architecture, lower kind of buildings with arches etc and they have plants growing on the building which is quite nice. There are some nice walkways and some more “developed” modern soulless corporate areas as well. Nice promenade along the river where you can see the Mekong and Tonle sap rivers meet. There was also one very funny “anti-corruption” unit building which just happened to be one of the largest buildings I saw there, kind of ironic

They have a tour of one of the killing fields south of the city. They give you a little audio tour which calmly explains how the commies basically hacked, beat and raped thousands of people to death in open pits under fluorescent white lights to the sound of communist party music and diesel generators, absolutely horrific to listen to and the images that come into your mind make you want to vomit. In the centre of the compound is a temple looking thing with thousands of skulls piled on top of each other in it, 17 layers of skulls classified by how the person was killed - machete to the head, club to the head, skull crushed by feet and so on. They couldn’t afford bullets for all the killings so they did it all by hand, farm tool and even palm leaves to cut throats which had serrated edges. The most horrific element was the indiscriminate nature of the brutality, with one tree highlighted as being used to smash children’s heads against before they were tossed into pits. Absolutely demonic. I was thinking about how progress requires sacrifice ( for example, how we “sacrificed” hundreds of millions of people and flattened the entire old world to come into the modern era in the 20th century through two world wars and dozens of genocides) and whether the whole process in Cambodia was a sacrifice to come into the present day - before the Khmer Rouge the country was completely agrarian, basically everyone was a farmer with only small pockets of development and after 3 million deaths, they have the internet, tv, hospitals, cars/mopeds, etc. Not sure how valid the theory is but it has a strange feeling imagining the soundtrack of the slaughter being diesel generators and the method being old school manual labour. Not to compare the situations but there is something much more raw about the place compared to auschwitz which I’ve also visited. The patchwork, disorganised nature of the slaughter compared with the industrial efficiency, people being trucked in from the prison in drums and drabs, 50-100 at a time every few nights, blindfolded and dragged behind a wall of trees to be hacked and tossed into a hastily dug pit. The waiting prisoners being held in a dark warehouse and dragged out, names recorded and brought behind the wall of trees for their turn. Also trying to imagine the level of degradation for the people doing the slaughter, night after night just dragging people down and, by hand, sniffing the life out of your fellow countrymen. Spreading some agricultural chemical to hasten the decay and mask the smell, covering the pit and waiting for the next batch. All in the humid, hot summer or rainy season, sweating and the hum of the jungle all around you. Dispersed all the way throughout the country, the same process at hundreds of sites. After the fields I went to the prison the people were being taken from. It is essentially a straight road all the way between the two sites, even to this day. I walked with the audio tour /mental images of pits and piles of bodies still ringing through my head and then at the prison they had the photos of the prisoners, hundreds and hundreds of photos like profile pictures from some depraved Facebook gallery. A few images in particular stood out - a teen with the number 1 hung around his neck, probably the first prisoner, a child probably around 4/5 with the number 3 hung around her neck, hundreds of desperate stares but among them one extremely defiant woman who was either delusional or stoic but had absolutely 0 fear or desperation in the eyes, very heroic. Over the profile photos hung on the walls were the images of the pits upon discovery, just horrific piles of rotting corpses and decomposed piles of skulls in muddy puddles. Fairly fucked in the head all of it. I didn’t take any photos.

Overall, Cambodia is very cool, they’re working hard and I hope they can pull through and thrive going forward. I will go back in the future.