The International Writers Magazine: Extract from John H. Rydzewski's book

Exploring Cambodia • John H. Rydzewski When I was in elementary school, I heard about bad things happening in Cambodia mainly because a quiet Cambodian girl named Cindy showed up at our school. I never understood Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge or what was happening in that part of the world in the 1970s and early 1980s, but now looking back on it all, it had to have been bad if a Cambodian girl was escaping to my rural hometown of Massena, New York.

Since then, the only things I ever heard about Cambodia involved civil war, genocide, land mines, poverty, paedophilia and famine. Still, I never comprehended or understood Cambodia. Deep in the recesses of my brain, Cambodia had a very high “yuck factor” and never made it onto the list of places I wanted to visit. But after three friends returned from separate trips to Cambodia with rave reviews, I opted to hit the jungle and follow in the footsteps of Lara Croft for the October 2008 Chinese National holiday instead of ruining my liver and skin on the beaches of Thailand or Indonesia.

In Cambodia, where the average income is $200 per month – the United Nations Development Program estimated in 2010 that a third of the population makes less than $1.00 per day – one is constantly reminded of the grinding poverty, but I encountered and sensed very little misery among the everyday people. People didn’t focus on what they didn’t have, but were content with what they possessed. I’ve seen more misery in Portland, Oregon where the average welfare recipient sees government handouts several times greater than what the Cambodians earn. Strong Buddhist traditions have taught the Cambodians to make due and be happy with what they have. It was not uncommon to see five people (parents and three kids) on a scooter; 30 people riding in or on a pickup truck; or a family of four living in a lean-to made of scrap lumber and sheet metal, cooking their meal over a fire fueled by someone else’s garbage. Some were also making do with what they didn’t have, especially the many land mine amputees playing in music bands for spare change, including one band on the Siam Reap Bar Street that was selling their music on CD.

Because of the Khmer Rouge, the better part of an entire generation is missing, and the kids, matured dozens of years beyond their age, are picking up the slack. In and around Siam Reap I saw two dusty boys, maybe 10 years old, walking down the street with bulging burlap bags slung over their shoulders and serious, 40-year-old looks on their faces; a little girl, no more than 9 years old, caring for her toddler sister; another little girl, maybe seven, preparing a meal; a boy who might have been 10 years old, tending to his family’s flock of goats; and a 12-year-old boy taking care of the family cow. When not doing their chores, the kids were being kids, playing and splashing in their local swimming holes to beat the tropical heat; running around their homes; napping in hammocks; or playing in the roads. In every instance, their parents were nowhere to be found.

The rest of the kids were at the tourist attractions begging for money or selling postcards, trinkets, bottled water, or knock-off versions of the most popular books at the time. At one temple, a 10-year-old girl selling postcards followed me into the ruins. Working hard to sell me the cards, she counted to ten in English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, and Mandarin. If the kids were lucky, their adult handlers – usually not their parents – might give them a paltry cut of the total proceeds. When I first entered the Banteay Srei ruins, 23 miles outside of Siam Reap, there was a little girl, maybe seven years old, in a red, white and blue-striped rugby shirt just inside the ruins, carrying a notebook with a blue cover. She looked at me, but wouldn’t smile or speak when I said “hello” to her. When I reached the back end of the ruins about an hour later, she suddenly appeared and handed me a picture of a flower she drew in her notebook with a green ball-point pen. When I took the drawing, I saw a Cambodian man, her handler, standing 20 feet behind her and watching us. I found a dollar in my backpack, folded it tight, casually moved close to her and, out of view of the man, slipped the money into her hand. When I walked away after she let me take her photo, I looked back to see her run around the corner, jump up, and give me a wide toothy smile and a big, thankful wave.

There’s no doubt that Cambodia is full of little heartbreakers desperate to earn some money to help their parents feed their families, but this is absolutely no reason to prey on them for sex. Cambodia is one of the world’s top destinations for paedophiles. Prevalent are advertisements warning adults to keep away from the kids; and for legit tourists and hotel employees to report any suspicious activities. Violators will get at least 20 years in a Cambodian prison before serving jail time in their native countries. When I asked an American teacher friend from the Pacific Northwest who worked in a kindergarten in Siam Reap about the sex tourists, Anne said that she had seen a few questionable Western men who she thought could have been perverts on the prowl. In one Siam Reap tuk-tuk, I saw a pasty white, freckled, and balding Western tourist – who would have been more comfortable in a London pub – in the company of an almost too-young Asian girl slouched way down low in her seat and wearing sunglasses too big for her face. If anyone wants to go to Cambodia to get their freak on, they only need to walk alone after dark along Pokambor Avenue in Siam Reap that runs parallel to the Siam Reap River, or stroll through the park in front of the U.S. Embassy in Phnom Penh after sunset, where the lady boys of legal age are cruising for customers. Just keep in mind that Cambodia has one of the highest HIV/AIDS infection rates in the world.

The hot Cambodian air, thick with humidity, was clean except for the campfire smoke from the cooking fires, and the sunny blue sky was a nice change from China. But more often than not, the water was poisonous. A canal of black raw sewage flowed through Siam Reap and emptied into the Siam Reap River. Raw sewage bubbled up into the street near my Phnom Penh hotel, and flowed next to where people pitched a tent made of scrap wood and sheet plastic on the sidewalk. If the streets in Siam Reap had storm drains to keep the streets from flooding and filling up with mud during every heavy rain, I’m sure they too would have spewed forth some sort of black, smelly nastiness.

The main attraction in Cambodia is the 12th-century temple complex of Angkor just outside Siam Reap. As for Angkor Wat itself – believed to be the largest religious structure in the world – I found it overrated, probably because of its lack of nooks and crannies begging to be explored. Still, visitors should plan at least three days to see the entire Angkor temple complex at a casual pace. Angkor Thom and the Bayon Temple, with its 216 carved faces looking down from every direction on the visitors below, are gems within the overall complex that are worth more than cursory visits.

The highlight of my trip to Angkor was Ta Prohm. Ta Prohm is an excellent example of what happens when someone doesn’t mow the lawn for a very long time. Many people may have never heard of Ta Prohm by name, but have seen it in the movie “Tomb Raider” starring Angelina Jolie as adventure hottie Lara Croft. I don’t know how long Angelina stayed in Siam Reap, but she sure did leave an impression. At Ta Prohm there is one tree known as “The Tomb Raider Tree” that was featured in the movie; and the drink list in any Siam Reap watering hole isn’t complete without the “Tomb Raider”, a unique concoction of Cointreau, lime juice, and tonic water. Ta Prohm wasn’t my favorite place because of Angelina Jolie (I never saw the movie), but because I’m a big fan of Mother Nature when she shows us mere humans who’s the boss. Nothing gets the adrenaline going like a good electrical storm, blizzard, ice storm, etc., that can, in an instant, send modern-day society back to the eighteenth century. Maybe this finally explains my fascination with the Weather Channel, when after all these years I thought it was weather cutie Jill Brown who, in the early 1990s, put the wind in my sails.

I visited Cambodia during the rainy season, and most of the country was under water and being used to grow rice. It seemed like the only dry ground was the 30-foot wide and 200-mile-long ribbon of national highway, NH6, between Siam Reap and Phnom Penh. Each side of the road was lined with houses on stilts, goats, cows, and water buffalo all competing for the same meager grass; while cars, scooters, motorcycles, tuk-tuks, buses, trucks, bicycles, pedestrians, you name it traveling in both directions competed for their share of asphalt. Phnom Penh, the largest city in Cambodia, is a six-hour, $10 bus ride from Siam Reap. Being the capital city, it has a greater number of foreigners, a larger number of adorable street kids, and seemingly more Cadillac Escalades per capita than any other city in the world. Phnom Penh also has what must be one of the largest U.S. embassies in the world, although I’m not sure why the U.S. government requires such a massive outpost in this otherwise simple country. Phnom Penh, after one long day of sightseeing, reminded me of Athens and Bangkok: a must-see place, but where one should not spend more than two days before making their way to the nicer, more interesting destinations deserving of a much longer stay.

As advertised at all the tourist attractions, foreigners will pay more for some things than the Cambodians, but I never had the impression that the Cambodians were trying to rip me off. Maybe it was the Chinese cabbies that made me think that the Cambodian taxi and tuk-tuk drivers were land sharks, but they are benign, non-threatening, willing to negotiate, and happy to help the wayward tourist. When I landed in Siam Reap, one tuk-tuk driver – for a dollar – let me borrow his cell phone to call my hotel to fix a minor problem. The only person who genuinely tried to rip me off was Roberta, a grandmotherly American living in Phnom Penh who was selling what appeared to be locally-made “Obama/Biden” campaign pins for $5.00 each (with no mention of the proceeds going to the Obama/Biden campaign) at an expat event replaying the Biden/Palin vice-presidential debate in a Phnom Penh restaurant central to the Western expat community. Apparently her social security check didn’t go that far in Cambodia either.

Given that just thirty years ago, some two million Cambodians, or one-fifth the total population, were killed by civil war, genocide, and the resultant disease and famine, Cambodia has come a long way in a short time. Knowing where their bread is buttered, Cambodian schools now require students to learn English and Mandarin. Cambodia still relies on billions of dollars in foreign aid (a Japanese storm sewer project in Phnom Penh; United Nations activities all across the country; private donors from the U.S., U.K., Canada, and elsewhere funding house and school construction; Koreans and Indians funding the restoration of ancient ruins) but things are looking up. From 2004-2007, GDP growth exceeded 10 percent per year, slowed down to 6.7 percent in 2008, declined by two percent in 2009 during the Great Recession, rebounded six percent in 2010, increased by 7.8 percent in 2011, and was forecasted to grow by 6.2 percent in 2012 . To parlay this growth into bigger things, the Cambodian government during the summer of 2011 opened the Cambodian Securities Exchange (CSX) which has one listed company, the Phnom Penh Water Supply Authority. On my pre-dawn drive to the Phnom Penh International Airport to head back to China, my driver pointed to the hundreds of people out for their daily exercise, doing their best to stay in shape before the sun became too hot. He mentioned that this was a good sign for Cambodia because the people we saw had a reason to exercise.

Whenever I recommend to people that they should put Cambodia on their must-see list, their initial expression is that of a wrinkled nose and a doubting eye. But no one should let a “yuck factor” keep them away from exploring this most amazing country.

© John H. Rydzewski Jan 2013

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“Exploring Cambodia”, excerpted from the recently published book China Diaries and Other Tales from the Road, by John H. Rydzewski, which is available in paperback, Kindle, Nook, and Apple formats. Published with permission from John H. Rydzewski.

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