I’m quite behind on travel blog posts, but I’ve committed to catching up and so though I’m writing in Washington, DC, on the blog I’m still traveling between Cambodia and Vietnam’s largest cities: Phnom Penh and Saigon.
I first fell in love with Phnom Penh after a chance encounter with the crispiest tastiest grilled squid on earth during a bus stop between Siem Reap and Kep. Upon returning to Phnom Penh, we visited the central market again for the heavenly dish, served with cold cucumbers, herbs and a dash of homemade chili sauce. This was a no frills spot; just a small roadside stand with food served on melamine dishes. Yet the taste and the service was five star. It’s a microcosm of Phnom Penh, a shabby city upon first glimpse yet one oozing with character. Despite being Cambodia’s capitol city, Phnom Penh’s demographic is decidedly rural in nature, in large part because of Pol Pot’s reign of terror over the wealthy and educated classes. So scenes of life in rural Cambodia are often played out in city streets: people commuting by bicycle, carrying livestock, and selling fruit from bamboo baskets. PP feels more like a small town than a capitol city and in some ways, it seems as if time stands still. One night we ventured to the local mall, where the top floor contained a roller rink packed with Khmer teens doing tricks and drinking soda pop from glass bottles. It was as if we were transported back to 1950s America, when life seemed so simple and wholesome.
Despite its renewed character, Phnom Penh is still deeply haunted by the days of Khmer Rouge, when an estimated 2 million people were brutally killed. We visited Tuol Sleng (S21), a former high-school turned prison and place of torture for the Khmer Rouge. After the regime fell in 1979, 14 bodies were found. Photographs of the bodies as they were left are hung on the walls of the cell in which they were found along with the bed and shackles to which they were chained. The stark images are a sobering reminder of the capacity for human beings to be unapologetically inhuman.
We continued our journey to Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, still regularly called Saigon today. It never ceases to amaze me how different a place can be just a few miles across a land border. A bustling sprawling behemoth of a city, Saigon is everything that Phnom Penh isn’t; It’s a city on a race for advancement. Streets are nearly impassible due to waves of motorbikes speeding in every direction and construction is everpresent. But the most significant difference were the people, who on the outset were much more cold and aloof than the Khmer, Lao and Thai. We had only a day in Saigon and it wasn’t an especially memorable one thanks to buckets of rain and a few attempts by locals to rip us off. But we kept up our hopes high for better days in Vietnam, and fortunately there were many. Stay tuned!
