Phnom Penh was much nicer than the chaotic, vice-filled metropolis I’d been led to expect. The most chaotic it got was inevitably as we stepped out of the bus that had brought us, into a heaving throng of taxi drivers, pushing and shoving past each other to try to grab our attention, or arm or backpack, or anything else to get us into their taxi.
But once the ordeal of getting into a taxi and agreeing a price was over, the ride became much smoother. Lakeside is the main backpacker-hotel area, sort of the Koh San Road of Cambodia, only nicer and more sedate. Guesthouses are perched on the lake, with balconies kitted out with hammocks and easy chairs overlooking the water. It’s a great place to sit and watch the sun setting over the city, as the tide moves a carpet of water lilies along, creating the illusion that you’re on a boat, slowly cruising through the water.
True to the title of the Guns, Girls and Ganja book, it is still possible to buy just about anything in the city, but the days of picking up AK47s and an ounce of weed openly in one of the main markets are gone. Still, a corrupt government and police force, and a lack of regulation, mean that drugs and prostitution are still rife. Large bags of cannabis are available for a few dollars from the scooter-taxi drivers around Lakeside. Many of the restaurants in the Lakeside area will offer you either a free spliff with your meal or a free beer with your Happy Pizza. A Happy Pizza is a Phnom Penh speciality, a margheritta topped with a ridiculous amount of cannabis. “Comatose” is probably a better word to describe the effects than “happy”.
Not surprisingly there is a darker side to this than happy pizzas and stoned backpackers. Harder drugs are available from the scooter-taxi drivers around Lakeside. In one short walk from guesthouse to bar I was offered coke, pills and yabba. Yabba is produced locally and cheaply, making it affordable to ordinary Thais, Cambodians and Laosians. It has been linked to serious psychological disorders, suicide and depression. The Thai government’s hard-line crackdown on the sale of yabba is well documented with hundreds of suspected dealers having been executed on the streets without trial.
Most of the drivers I spoke to were students, working as taxi-drivers and part-time drug dealers to pay for their college fees.
With the growing number of tourists now visiting Cambodia, the prostitution trade is also booming. Phnom Penh’s most famous nightclub, The Heart of Darkness, is basically a brothel. Even my clean and respectable Lakeside guesthouse had about 5 “taxi girls” staying there, going out to The Heart of Darkness and other nightclubs when they needed to, hanging out with their latest Western boyfriends the rest of the time.
A typical Lakeside guesthouse had a TV area where you'd sit and get stoned and watch "The Killing Fields", a veranda over the lake where you'd sit and get stoned and watch the water-lillies, and a bar area with a pool table, where you'd sit and get drunk and play pool. The taxi girls generally hung out around the pool table. I'd been to Thailand and had seen large-scale prostitution before. But even in Thailand it's generally kept semi-separate from the mainstream, in red-light districts and go-go bars. But here the girls just mingled with everyone else, in a normal guesthouse. There wasn't the whole "come-on-baby-love-you-long-time" hard sell you get as a Western man in Thailand. The girls just hung out and if you were a bit naive you'd be forgiven for thinking they were just girls hanging out with their mates having fun like everyone else.
As with the kids selling postcards in Angkor Watt, you couldn’t help but be struck by the gross unfairness of their situation. These young women spoke fluent English, were genuinely funny and obviously very intelligent. Many of them struck up friendships with the Western girls staying there, and basically just seemed really, really nice. If they had been born into wealth or a rich country, they would be at university or pursuing their careers and dreams. As it was, they were using what they had to do the best they could by themselves.
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Cambodia is also the place where backpackers used to be able to blow up a cow with a rocket launcher for $50. You can still go to the semi-official shooting range and fire almost any lethal weapon you wish, but nowadays it’s about a dollar a round, $50 for a rocket, and $200 for a cow (incidentally, a chicken is only $25). While we were there, a story was going around about a Canadian backpacker who bought a cow for $200, missed, and ended up wandering around Phnom Penh, cow in tow, trying get rid of it. The other story doing the rounds was of the American who blew his head off with a Magnum the day after we arrived in the city. The really interesting part is that nobody knew for sure whether it was a suicide (the Cambodian explanation) or whether the gun simply backfired (the explanation of the other backpackers who were there when it happened).
So, the guns, the girls, the ganja, it’s all there. But to just write about that is to do the place a huge disservice. There is a more sedate and innocent side to Phnom Penh than just a seedy black market for drugs, guns and girls.
Compared to the frenetic concrete high-rise of Bangkok, Phnom Penh resembles a provincial market town. The Mekong River runs through its centre, along which are some of the city’s more up-market bars and restaurants. The riverside pathway is spacious and lined with palm trees and small golden pagodas. It was pleasant to sit on the wall under the shade of a palm tree, sharing a packet of cigarettes and a light with people, having limited conversations in basic English and learning a few Khmer words. Next to the river is the splendid royal palace, with golden dragon tails curling out from the rooftops into the sky. Next door, monks in their saffron robes and yellow parasols stand out against the lush green of the park gardens, and young Cambodians gather around their mopeds.
Mopeds and small cars vie for space on the roads in Phnom Penh, but the traffic is actually fairly organized, and once I got my bike I realized that it differs from places like India or Thailand in one important way; people may drive pretty erratically but, unlike elsewhere, they don’t seem to be in a rush. It is intriguing how in places like India or parts of Africa, even the most gentle, devout and unhurried people seem to turn into inconsiderate, aggressive speed-freaks with no concern for their own life and positive disdain for that of others, as soon as they are in control of a motorized vehicle. Witness paan-leaf chewing bus drivers in India overtaking lorries around a blind corner on a mountain road; scooter-taxi drivers in Bangkok accelerating towards a 2-foot gap in the traffic with gay oblivion to the fact your legs are sticking out about a foot on either side of the bike; matatu drivers, hungry for an extra 10-dhilling fare, racing each other along pot-holed roads in Nairobi; or just try crossing the road in Saigon. In Phnom Penh though, things are different; everyone drives badly but everyone drives badly very slowly, so driving in the city is just a matter of keeping your eyes open and going slowly like everyone else.
Above all though, Phnom Penh is probably the friendliest city I have ever had the pleasure of spending time in. Of course, Cambodia is a poor country; when people in poor countries see a rich Western tourist coming they have a reason to smile and be nice to you. One of the questions of travelling in a poor country; yes, you meet many people and experience friendliness you never would at home, but how much of this kindness is genuine altruism and how much is simply borne out the desire to have a wealthy Western friend?
In Cambodia, I always felt the smiles and the offers of help were mostly genuine. During the 10 days I spent exploring Cambodia on a motorbike, I have never experienced such generosity. And this from people with so little, materially at least, to give. Twice during the trip we were in need of medical and mechanical assistance, and in both cases it was given all for free.
The first time was when Steve, a friend I did the first leg of the trip with, drove down a ditch, grazing himself quite badly and jamming his bike’s gear-shift. The road was still under construction, and we had been weaving around heavy machinery, waving back at workers who were surprised and bemused to see two farang drive by.
Distracted by the somewhat surreal setting, Steve had failed to notice a 2-foot ditch running across the road in front of him. I looked up to see the front of his bike disappearing down it, and Steve following. Disaster may have been averted had he known where the back brake was, though apparently I had forgotten to point it out to him when I’d shown him how to ride a motorbike the previous morning.
In Snuol we got the bike fixed straight away. It turned out to be a ridiculously simple job, involving simply bending the gearshift back into place with a pair of pliers. Feeling pretty embarrassed at our blatant ineptitude, we offered some riel as payment but the mechanic refused to accept anything.
Let me repeat that in case you missed it; a mechanic refused to accept payment. In a country where most people get by on less than a dollar a day, to these people we represented the fabulously wealthy, taking a pleasure tour around their country on bikes they could never afford. Yet in a situation where others may have seen an opportunity to make a quick buck, they acted only with generosity and dignity.
Four days later, about 300km from Phnom Penh, things got slightly more serious.
