Day Three

And so we wake up to our last full day in Phnom Penh. Well, my last half-day – last night’s boozy night out means that I wake up early in the afternoon. Sonny and Nick have already left to return the hired motorbike and get some lunch, so I wander on my own to find the British pub/restaurant I saw last night that advertised an all-day breakfast.

Half an hour later I’m polishing off the remains of sausage, bacon, ham (wrong), saute potatoes (wrong again), fried eggs, toast, beans and mushrooms. And tea. And orange juice. No black pudding, but you can’t have everything. English cuisine may not be the most elegant, but by crikey we know how to treat a hangover.

I spot Sonny at La Croissette on the way back to the hotel and join him for a coffee and a flick through yesterday’s Bangkok Post. We head back to the hotel, Nick shows up, and we go for a wander around the city.

There’s a lot of squalor and a lot of dirt – garbage sits stagnant in the street. Some of the side-streets are little more than dirt tracks, but are nowhere near as bad as yesterday’s trail to the Killing Fields.

There is a lot more greenery visible than in Bangkok – one good thing – but the overwhelming impression is one of extreme poverty and discomfort. We are, again, eyed with distrust and unease by some. We are so, so lucky to have been born white Westerners, into middle-class families.

We drink pappaya fruit shakes at a street stall, then go for a traditional Khmer massage (which is almost identical to a traditional Thai massage, unsurprisingly) – $10 each for two hours, which is a little more expensive than Thailand, surprisingly. However, I’ve no doubt that this is a tourist version, and that the local versions, if they even exist, would cost pennies.

Later it’s back to Cafe Rendezvous via a few clothes stalls. I see some shirts I know I could buy in Bangkok for $5 at the most; here the pushy stallholder demands $10. Pizza for dinner, then a few beers and bed.

Day Four

In the morning we check out at around 7am, and get a tuk-tuk from the hotel to Phnom Penh airport. We check in, then discover that there’s a $25 “departure tax”. We don’t have enough dollars yet. There is a door between the departure tax booth and the ATMs, which we are not allowed to open. So we have to leave the airport, walk around the building, and get some more dollars.

We breakfast on a burger and fries round the corner, return to pay the bill and head to departures. The duty-free store sells cigarettes at 50% more than the cost in Bangkok, so I leave well alone.

Finally we board the plane, and within what seems like moments we’re back at Suvarnabhumi Airport, Bangkok. Immigration is straightforward – a pleasant surprise given the recent chaotic changes in visa rules.

When I used to arrive at Don Muang International, it was a simple matter to avoid the queue (and surcharge) for using the official taxi rank by hopping upstairs to Departures, and hailing a taxi that had just dropped off. Here at the new airport, the authorities have become wise to the trick, and the security guards tell us that we have to use the rank.

Nick is having none of it, and hails a cab. It’s a little rude, of course, but our social status as farangs in Thailand means that the guard will not actually stop us getting in the cab. The hierarchy is a double-edged sword. We save ourselves a long way, and 50 baht, and the drive home is swift, comfortable and easy.

My apartment is still here and intact, which is nice, and I flop onto the bed to sleep.

Dawn breaks, and I slumber on. Eventually I rouse myself, and head down to the hotel veranda for another exquisite bacon cheeseburger and fries. Phnom Penh is apparently not a fully paid-up member of the South East Asian Diet Plan.

Nick and Sonny have gone to hire a motorbike. I drink a soda and chat to a motorcycle driver. He offers to take us to the shooting range, where we can fire handguns, AK-47s, M-16s, rocket launchers, etc etc. Then the Killing Fields, and S-21 if we’re interested. The round trip is maybe 40km, and the price will be $4.

Nick and Sonny return on the hired motorbike, and we agree to take the trip. I sit on the back of our driver’s bike, and Nick follows with Sonny on the back of his. A quick petrol stop, and then we’re off on the long drive to the shooting range.

Outside urban Phnom Penh, on a long busy country road, people stare at the three white men. Some look suspiciously at us, others smile and wave, or shout “Hallo”! There are very few cars, a few trucks, but the traffic is overwhelmingly motorbikes. We see two, three, four, even five people on one motorbike. One of them is actually carrying two passengers and a bicycle.

And then the rain starts – a torrential downpour. We pull over to the side of the road and wait under the tin roof of a shack where a local family live and work. They’re collecting the rainwater in the polystyrene boxes discarded by the factories nearby. They’ll sell the rainwater by the tank for a couple of dollars. A small girl is out washing her bicycle in the rain. Nothing is wasted.

Eventually the rain passes and we set off again. We wind round back roads, past an apparently abandoned assault course, and finally reach the shooting range. We’re greeted by a gaggle of Cambodians, one with a huge grin. “Your driver tells me you want to shoot a rocket launcher”, he smiles – you can sense he can almost smell the dollars. We tell him that at $200 a shot, that’s a little outside our price range, and his face visibly sags.

Sonny and Nick eventually decide on a couple of handguns to fire at the open-air range – I, as the token Brit, am playing the conscientious objector today, and just watch. We’re given ear protectors, but Nick fires off the first shot before I think to put mine on. I’m almost deafened – guns are loud. They’re only firing at paper poster targets, but the feeling that this is all too real is inescapable. This is my first experience with live firearms, and I’m taken aback at how simple it is for such a small piece of metal to wreak such havoc.

The handguns are soon depleted of ammunition, and we move into an enclosed brick corridor to fire the AK-47. One magazine of 30 bullets costs $30, and Nick and Sonny fire off 15 each. Even with the ear protectors the noise is deafening.
We pay up, take a few photos, and then it’s back onto the motorbikes as we head for the Killing Fields (Choeung Ek, actually). The ride is easy enough on the tarmac roads, but as we get closer to our destination the road surface swiftly deteriorates into mud.

Eventually we arrive at Choeung Ek, our clothes covered in mud spray, and we pay $3 each for the privilege of standing in what appears to be a paddy field. Child beggars follow us around the muddy track, continuously begging us for dollars as our shoes become caked in crap.

We complete the circuit and walk back to the waiting motorbikes. We had planned to visit S-21 as well, but this waste of time has put us off tourist attractions for today, and we just want to get back to the hotel, change our now filthy clothes and have a thorough wash.

For dinner we head up to the Rendezvous Cafe by the riverside again – another stupendously good (and cheap) meal, and then we wander down to Sharky’s.
Sharky’s is a rock bar not far from our hotel, and its slogan is “Survive 3 mortar rounds and get a free t-shirt”. Disappointingly, a “mortar round” is a cocktail.

9-ball and 15-ball pool tables, draft beer, a wide variety of cocktails, local and western food, decent music and a swarm of, shall we say, “ladies of negotiable affection” make for a lively atmosphere, and Sonny and I make a commendable dent in their stock of Anchor (not Angkor) Beer.

Next stop is the Heart of Darkness – I was wary, having read online about a murder there last year, but we decided to brave it. We are thoroughly searched for weapons on the way in – further reading since the trip suggests that this is mostly for show. Westerners (who are going to be unarmed anyway) are thoroughly frisked, whilst the Khmer gangsters get waved through without any checks…

Thankfully, our visit is incident-free – we glug a beer each and leave before the dirty looks we are getting from the locals turn into anything more serious.

We were going to head to Martini’s after that, but a particularly insistent taxi tout suggests we try Zapata Bar. To be fair, it was a pleasant enough venue, with cheap beer and very attentive company. A Khmer girl stands behind my barstool, massaging my neck and shoulders while I make short work of a Beer Lao.

Finally we do make our way to Martini’s, and it’s quite a sight. A chap with no arms or legs greets us at the door, and after another weapon-frisking we’re out on the patio sipping the evening’s final Heineken and fending off the by-now-obligatory pushy whores.

The alarm goes off at 4.30am. My new girlfriend, Aum (more on her later), calls from the beer garden on Thong Lo where she’s just finished her shift. I think she’s offering to go to the airport with me (she speaks no English, my Thai is barely functional), but I tell her there won’t be room in the taxi with 3 farangs and the baggage, to get to bed and I’ll see her on Monday.

And so we begin. Sonny, Nick and I emerge from the tower block, blinking in the dawn light on New Petchburi Road, and hail a taxi to Suvarnabhumi Airport – Thailand’s new pride and joy has only opened one day previously, so we will be amongst the first people to use it.

The taxi ride to the airport was surprisingly smooth. No traffic at this early hour, no need to take the “highway” (toll road), and we were there far more quickly than we would have manged to get to Don Muang International – the airport that this grand place is replacing.

Structurally it’s all very impressive; apparently it boasts the tallest air-traffic control tower in the world. Such phallic obsession in the land where the sex industry officially “does not exist”…

We make it through to the departure lounge easily enough – there are no tannoy announcements, but the signs are (just about) clear enough. There’s a nice decently-sized plasma screen in the departure lounge, which you’d be forgiven for expecting to display boarding/flight information. This being Thailand, it is showing video commercials instead.

Eventually a queue forms silently, and we eventually find a member of staff who tells us that yes, this is the queue for the Phnom Penh flight. We go through the gate, onto a bus which has had all of its seats removed, and we stand like cattle as we’re slowly driven to the plane, only half an hour behind schedule.

The flight itself is straightforward enough, of course. We get to Phnom Penh by about 9am, and it’s very much a case of “start as you mean to continue” by the Cambodian officials. A passport photo is required for your visa application form, or you can pay ฿50 if you don’t have one. I hand over ฿60 in notes, which the official happily takes. I wait. I am given a withering glance, as the official beckons the next person in line, willing me to get out of the way. Instead, I hold out my hand for my ฿10 change. The official laughs: “We don’t do that here”.

Sure, it’s ฿10. If I’d dropped it, I might not have bothered to pick it up. But I object to being openly ripped off, no matter how trivial the amount. It’s the bare-faced-ness of it that I object to, I think…

That done, we are allowed to proceed to the visa cashier, where we pay $20 (US dollars) each for our tourist visas. Then passport control. Nobody has smiled at me yet. Has Thailand spoiled me? If Thailand is the “Land of Smiles”, this is the “Land of Contemptous Glares”.

We find an ATM and get some dollars – bizarre to be using “greenbacks” in South East Asia, but the Cambodian currency (riel) is so meagre in value that it is currently pinned at 4,000 to the dollar. Change of less than a dollar is given in riel. There are 100, 200, 500 and 1,000 riel notes, as far as I can tell. There seem to be no coins whatsoever in use in Cambodia. Not a bad idea, to be honest.

At least things have moved on from the Khmer Rouge – under that regime, rightly more infamous for mass genocide, currency literally didn’t exist. Money was declared illegal, and the authorities blew up the central bank for good measure.

We get a taxi to our hotel for $7, and are met by friendly staff who offer us two options. We can have a room on the first or second floor for $15 a night, or the third, fourth or fifth floors for just $10 a night. There is no elevator. Lazy mollycoddled westerners to a man, we go for the $15 rooms to save the effort of climbing more than one flight of stairs.

The rooms are decent enough for $15 – air con, fan, cable TV, en-suite bathroom. A bit run-down, but it all works. We wolf down burgers and fries outside the hotel, then hit our rooms for well-earned naps.

At around 4pm, I emerge into the late afternoon sunshine on Street 148 (catchy, eh?), sit at one of the hotel’s outdoor bar tables, and order an Angkor Beer. A pint or so of this very pleasant local brew sets me back $1. And I am so transfixed by its yellow fizzy goodness, that I don’t notice the seedy taxi driver until he sits down next to me.

And within moments he has offered me firearms, drugs and underage prostitutes. I firmly inform him I’m not interested in any of the above. He backpedals a little – tells me that the girls are fifteen, so only just underage, but that they do cost more than regular girls because they “have small hole”. Nick and Sonny appear from upstairs, and he slinks away. Cambodia is apparently known as the Wild West of South-East Asia – I’m beginning to believe it.

We wander up to the riverside, which is dotted with some superb restaurants. The Rendezvous Cafe does terrific pizzas, and amidst a sea of motorbike touts, pushy salesmen and child/amputee/both beggars, we eat.