Pnom Penh

I carried your bag and now those big guys wont share the money with me!
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Pierre Cardin is driving us to Cambodia. Well, perhaps it’s not Pierre but that’s what it says on his slouch hat. He’s the third one at the wheel since we took off by speedboat from the Chau Doc dock at 8.30am. At the Cambodian border, we’re harangued by 20 children who board and are all over the boat like a rash, with drinks, pineapple cut and in plastic bags, packaged snacks, baggage-carrying service and “massa’ (massage). We must haul our luggage up a hot, steep, slippery gravel hill and into a tiny building to be x-rayed and then returned by the same route to the boat. We engage a bevy of children and negotiate one 20,000 Vietnamese dong note to be shared for the job. They carry our luggage on their heads, then the little ones cry foul, declaring that the older will not share the booty. Good trick! It seems to work on Andy but given he’s out of dong, they’re out of luck.

The nicest thing about the border crossing was the obsessively clean paint job on the government buildings.
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Sitting in the windy heat for six long hours, made longer by the hideous Vietnamese music – easy listening has never been so difficult – we ponder how we could have been so silly as to not realize there would be no food on board. Everyone else has brought snacks. No matter. We could live for days on what we’ve been eating for breakfast.

Easy listening has never been so difficult.

From speaking with him, we have an image of Henry sitting on his luggage now in the middle of the living room, awaiting his red-eye to Hong Kong, Saigon and Siem Reap, where we’ll meet him in about 30 hours, if all goes according to plan.

Yes, this Buddha is actually sitting under a bodhi tree.
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Before we’ve even disembarked, we see how strikingly different is the Cambodian architectural style. Even Western hotels have adopted the peaked roof of the temple, to ridiculous effect. More to our fascination is the glorious Royal Palace: shining gold overlapping tiles, with roofs upon roofs upon roofs reaching up into the heavens. Those heavens look ready to open up as we tour, but they only threaten, creating a dramatic show in the evening that silently lights up the sky but fails to deliver the rain. This show is backdrop to an entertaining street stage we view from our hotel window, which seems almost on top of one of the city’s major intersections, where tuk-tuks, cyclos, motos, pedestrians, vans, buses and limos merge and separate – miraculously without colliding.

The Silver Pagoda houses thousands of beautiful Buddha images rescued from all over the countryside.
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How a country that wears its spirituality on its fine silk sleeve could produce a monster such as Pol Pot is beyond belief. Everyone has a story of a lost relative or a parent worked half to death.  When it comes to America, Cambodians claim to want to forget the past and move on. However, they will tell you that they dislike the Thais, have a disinterested truce with the Lao, and absolutely hate the Vietnamese. They feel they backed the Khmer Rouge yet came in to “save” Cambodia and never left. They say they’re always fighting loudly among themselves and that all Cambodian sex workers are actually Vietnamese.

I cant decide if Im an elephant or a bush.
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With only an afternoon in town, we decide we have no time for the Genocide Museum or the Killing Fields, but time for that Royal Palace and the National Museum, which houses thousands of ancient Buddha images – tragically none of them protected from grubby tourist handling because the country is pretty much broke. The way of peace has not worked out in Cambodia’s favor.