Go Go Lightly!

Just before our Mui Ne debauchery (see last post), Jill and I spent a month volunteering in Cambodia’s bedazzled capital city, Phnom Penh, and it was a damn fine place to unpack our bags for a while. Before we could even properly spell Phnom Penh without doing a Google search, we both fell in love with its barely-controlled chaos, and as we savored our brief taste of the Cambodian expat life our awe and love-struck giddiness grew.

We didn’t expect to settle in as comfortably as we did. Especially upon arrival: tired and irritable from a 12-hour bus trip from Laos, we quickly planted ourselves in a basic, dropped-tiled, fluorescent-lit budget room in the PP backpacker strip known as Lakeside, and immediately we were taken aback by the area’s seediness: as we headed out to find dinner that night, not-so-subtle whispers offering weed and assorted drugs just the other side of the gateway seemed to sidle up to us from the shadows of every roadside tuk-tuk. Realizing that this would get really old really quickly, we set out the next morning in search of a budget option in a less opiate-laced place.

But instead of settling on an alternate budget option, we somehow ended up in a not-so-budget, brand-new, two bedroom luxury riverside apartment that sparkled and shined sort of like this:

with a view from our large private terrace that looked something like this:

Oops. But also, YAY! And in the YAY! spirit we immediately celebrated our infrugality by hosting a terrace-top housewarming party with our old friends Max and Kris, who were in town for a few days, and our new friend Rachel, whom we met on the bus from Laos. (Rachel had to catch the several hour bus to Siem Reap at something like 7:00 the next morning. The party broke up at something like 3:30 am (???). Sorry Rachel!)

After recovering from the housewarming festivities, we turned our attentions to setting up a proper expat life: we descended upon the buzzing markets in our neighborhood to haggle for fresh veggies and dairy (where I learned to steer clear of the fertilized eggs, i.e. eggs with mostly-formed chicks nestled inside), and we hit up the French market and deli on Street 278, aka Expat street, and stocked our kitchen full of freshly butchered meats and imported cheeses. And, to tone down the damage from our frequent feasts on bacon-wrapped tenderloin, we lined ourselves up monthly memberships at the super glitzy megagym, The Place, which offered us yoga, step aerobics and toning classes and a gazillion brand-spanking-new machines. Remarkably, I even showed up for twice-weekly 6 am personal training sessions with the excellent and fun Swedish fitness queen turned personal trainer, Maria Alhberg (http://www.mariaahlberg.se/) (Hi Maria!).

And the final step in setting up our proper expat life? Adopting a pet. Our Phnom Penh pet was R. Kelly, the Friendly Bathroom Roach. He was a fairly large cockroach, colored a warm, dirty Mekong brown, and he showed up most nights somewhere on our bathroom floor to alternately terrify and delight us with his stealthy, scurrying antics. (He wasn´t as welcome a pet when he became overly confident and ventured into Jill´s bedroom.)

Our next task: learning to navigate the streets. Which was really a process of un-learning every traffic rule we´d previously obeyed. Look both ways before you cross the street?? Nope. Yield to oncoming traffic?? Not if you plan to get anywhere anytime soon.

In PP there´s only one traffic rule: Go and Don´t Hit Anything. Or rather, Go and Don´t Get Hit, depending on who you ask. This rule indiscriminately applies to cars, tuk-tuks, motorbikes, pedestrians, chickens, diesel engines, balloon-chasing children and terrified tourists who idle away dozens of confused and insecure curbside minutes as they await a never-arriving break in the zipping and sidewinding traffic.

And so quickly enough, we learned the Go and Don´t Get Hit technique: like the tenacious little amphibian from my favorite 80s video game, we had to hop, sprint, duck and tumble our way across the various “lanes” of speeding motor vehicles that careened, loomed and slithered and threatened our squashing from every possible direction. And amazingly, it somehow worked, every time.

How the motorbikes are able to manage this precarious dance remains a mystery. Motorbikes in Phnom Penh (or motos, to those in the know) are loaded up and bogged down with every imaginable configuration of people and possessions, such as:

Driver, two women, two children, one baby.
Driver, three monks.
Driver, two men, five foot row of inverted chickens hanging from pole.
Driver, two women, ten speed bike.
Driver, full sized mattress.
Driver, several chopped-up trees.
Driver, large adult male, whole roast pig.
Driver, me, Jill.
And even Driver, entire contents of kitchen, like so:

Thankfully no one in Phnom Penh ever wears a helmet, so at least the poor little motorbikes are spared that additional burden.

Our various means of traversing the city proved to be among the highlights of our time in Cambodia – deciphering the kinetic confusion of Phnom Penh street life easily provides a month´s worth of non-stop entertainment. Overloaded motos, neon-splashed tuk-tuks, street-side slow-aerobics sessions and never-ending badmitton tournaments (it seems PP’ers LOVE badmitton), pick-up trucks full of monks on the move, women selling featherless baby bird corpses and mismatched shoes….and it just so happens that the playground for this cacophonous mess is accented by the gorgeous, highly ornate Cambodian royal architecture and traced casually by the mighty Mekong. Sensory overload, to be sure.

Phnom Penh street life didn´t always leave us wide-eyed and giggling, though. Notwithstanding its expat conveniences, Phnom Penh is the heart of a developing nation with a very recent, very troubled past (if there ever was a hell, it was run by Pol Pot), and even the most willfully blind tourist can´t ignore its economic realities. Our apartment was on Sisowath Quay, a street that is jammed-packed full of tourist-geared bars and restaurants and just as many tourist-geared street kids. These grade-school-aged kids are typically very cute and very smart, and they can fast talk several dollars out of unsuspecting tourists (aka me and Jill?) before he or she (um, Jill or I?) masters the exchange rate. After talking to some local friends, Jill and I learned not to buy what these kids were selling (postcards, books, newspapers, assorted Khmer bric-a-brac), because, despite their promises to the contrary, they most likely are NOT in school, and the money is most likely NOT going to them – often it´s going to a sort of pimp for street children who holds kids as human property and forces them to do this work.

There are various reputable NGOs that are geared toward helping Cambodia´s street children, and they provide a reliable means for well-intentioned travelers to provide meaningful help to these highly sympathetic kids. One of the best meals we had in PP was at a restaurant called Friends, which is a culinary and hospitality training restaurant run for and by former street children (those kids sure know how to cook up a curry!). The restaurant is one of the many endeavors of Mith Samlanh (www.mithsamlanh.org), an organization that runs health, education and training programs for Phnom Penh street children.

Unfortunately, walking past begging mothers with their naked infants splayed out belly-down on the dirty concrete is easier said than done. And on the sidewalks of Sisowath Quay, this sort of desperate poverty is all too common. Also a little too common for my taste were the frequent sightings of sixty-year-old men walking hand in hand with teenaged Cambodian girls. Bars all around our neighborhood catered to this dirty old man/young dude crowd (Candy Bar; 69 Bar; Cathouse; Up and Down – promising beautiful girls and one lady boy!), and after several weeks of grimacing and suppressing an internal riot at each sex tourism sighting, I found myself very very late on Halloween night, dressed as Pat Benatar´s Backup Dancer #14, chasing a wrinkled, cackling old man out of the bar and down the street and hurling obscenities and idle threats his way as he swept a lovely sixteen-year-old girl onto his motorbike and off to his hotel room for the night. Probably not the most effective way to wage war with the seedy underworld of Cambodian sex tourism.

Thankfully there are organizations like AFESIP (Acting for Women in Distressing Situations), the incredible anti-human trafficking organization for which we did pro bono legal work while in PP (read about their work at www.afesip.org), that are a bit more effective in the fight against sex slavery. AFESIP was founded by Somaly Mam (www.somaly.org), a Cambodian woman who was sold into sex slavery as a young girl, and who, since her escape several years later, has devoted (and in the process risked) her life helping girls and women who are similarly forced into prostitution. AFESIP´s mission is to rescue girls and women from sex slavery and provide them with housing, health care, education and skills training in order to reintegrate them into their communities. Jill and I visited AFESIP´s centers for the girls in both Siem Reap and Phnom Penh, and they were full of bright and lovely girls (and their children) who were very excited to show us their fashion and beauty handiwork. Of course, we fell in love with the babies.

Through AFESIP Jill and I were able to meet Somaly Mam , which was a big highlight for us in Cambodia (she´s an international celebrity now, read about her at http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1894410_1894289_1894268,00.html). And through AFESIP, I accompanied a huge cadre (including the very intimidating chief) of the Cambodian National Police during the raid of brothel full of sweet and lovely 13- to 18-year-old girls. Whoa. Scary. Crazy. Highlight.

Among many Cambodian highlights. Phnom Penh nightlife (Magic Sponge, hi Eran! Riverhouse Lounge – where Jill loved her some bad Katy Pery tunes on a regular basis. Talkin´to a Stranger – dumb name, great bar, super awesome bartender, excellent popcorn and perfect gin and tonics.). Expat dancing awesomeness (Hi Arielle and the Cambodia Daily crew!).

Weekend beach trips to the stunning tropical beach paradise called Otres in Sihanoukville. The mind-blowing incredibleness of the temples of Siem Reap and the buried jungle treasures at the dilapidated temple Bang Mealea. And the people – friendly, funny, cheerful, welcoming, and perhaps the cutest kids on the entire planet.

One little month for this big, beautiful place definitely wasn´t enough.

Much love!

Heather and Jill

This entry was posted on January 15, 2010 at 4:35 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.