Well, a little over a week here and I feel satisfied to know that I haven’t been too long without seeing mountains and the ocean. This past weekend, four of us (me, Brendan, Justin, and Mel, who is here for the year researching in Siem Reap) decided that we wanted to take our first adventure out of Phnom Penh and figured that we would try Kep, a small beach community in the Southeast of the country not far from the border of Vietnam. We hired a car to take the four of us, and the car ride alone would have been worth it. I saw my first houses on stilts over waterways, saw mountains (and the really jagged ones sticking up randomly in the middle of plains), crossed lots of stereotypical little metal bridges, and just got to see the countryside. It was beautiful. The roads seemed just barely too narrow for comfortable two way traffic (when you take into account a lane for bicycles, motos, and cars), but the roads weren’t quite as bad as everyone seems to say they are, as long as you don’t mind an occasional section when the pavement feels as though someone put speed bumps in every few feet. And when all of that was done, we arrived at the type of beach travel magazines feature on their covers, all within a 2.5 hour drive of where we live and work.
The town of Kep itself was not much to speak of. It had about two small hotels, five restaurants, a beach, and the feeling that we were seeing someplace that would look radically different in 10-20 years. In general, there’s a strange sensation being here in Cambodia that you are seeing everything on the cusp. Things are how they have been but just have this sense of imminent change that hasn’t quite been realized. Although the town is probably not what it will eventually become, it was great the way it is, and we got to swim in 85 degree Gulf of Thailand water. Ironically, the town was undeveloped enough that we kind of just blended in. Although people are usually very friendly, in some parts of Phnom Penh, one starts to become wary of what people who start chatting with you are about to try to sell you, yet in Kep, it was almost as if the residents didn’t realize that they could constantly try to hawk us their goods, ask for money, or try to persuade us to check out whatever site their brother runs.
While we were there, we took a boat trip to Koh Tonsay (Rabbit Island) about 30 min out from the beach, which felt very Pirates of the Carribean-esque. We hiked across the small island to another beach and a small shack, where the family who lived there cooked us lunch. In general, I was taken by the general emptiness and rusticity of the entire area, an area still untouched by chain hotels and beach chairs. And it made for a nice weekend retreat where we could fall asleep to the sound of the ocean.
Although it feels like it should be a separate blog entry, just as it felt like a whole different part of the tip, on the way back, we stopped at the Killing Fields of Choeung Ek because Justin wanted to see them before he headed home. I would like to go again because I was not in the right mind-set, as much as you can be or as weird that sounds to say something like that. But just as we stopped at Choeung Ek on the way back from a trip to the coast, that part of the country’s history is everywhere, and it is both intense but also something that is part of everyday life and therefore must be incorporated into regular life in a way that is not paralyzing. The site was, to be literal, a field with way too man pits to fully comprehend and some signs that indicted what happened and where. It took a lot of imagination, yet it also felt very vivid and present. The dates aren’t from that long ago, and the simply signage pointing to the “beating tree,” the chemical storage area, and the truck drop-off point all make it eerily real in their matter-of-fact way everything is presented. It’s still not a fully uncovered site, and there were fragments of bones set on top of the official cases that people had found and brought up there when walking through the field. Having been here even only a week and a half so far, everything felt very real.
The one thing that got to me and then made me think more than anything else in the site, though, was this group of about eight kids asking for money and following us along the paths for about three minutes. There’s a whole separate issue of the ethics, motivation, and feeling about giving money to people here who are probably in need of the money but who also come up to every single foreigner every time they walk by and who don’t offer anything for the money you give (unlike some who sell water or other small things). Additionally, some certainly ham up their expressions and voices right before you get there, yet others seem more genuine. There’s no clear cut answer, but these are separate issues in themselves. Anyway, it just felt very disrespectful for these people to be asking for money and annoying everyone walking through this site, yet at the same time, who was I to say what was or wasn’t appropriate in this place that was more theirs than mine? Why should I be imposing what I thought was appropriate for such a grave site? But as soon as we rounded one of the bends in the path, one of the guards saw them, at which point they took off their flip-flops and booked it across the fields in the other direction.
When we returned to Phnom Penh, we got back just in time to see a play at the Cultural Center, and you couldn’t help but think that this was exactly the opposite of what the Khmer Rouge stood for. It was a refreshing contrast to see culture, actors, and art in the city, almost in defiance. The play was actually pretty good too, done in Khmer with English subtitles projected on a side wall from a laptop about every four lines so that you could just make out what was going on on stage. There were ridiculous hula hoop contests, clever scene changes involving unicycles, and generally just good acting. The show was about relationships and, interestingly, made many mentions of AIDS, condoms, gay relationships, and traditional expectations versus modern ways of life. What was interesting was how much of a public service announcement quality it incorporated into what was a very well done show. We noticed afterwards that the production was sponsored by a few NGOs, and in general, it seems that NGOs are truly the agents of change and responsibility here. You have to wonder what would happen if everything was left to the government and anything would actually get done.
Anyway, more updates on the first days of teaching, the first nights out, and some random observations to come soon.