En route to Siem Reap

Sitting in the brand new and very nice domestic departure lounge at Phnom Penh, a beautifully designed café / waiting area with silks and weaving tools displayed on the walls - waiting for our flight to Siem Reap. We’ve had a great three days in the city, and really wish we had 1-2 more. It has seemed a far easier, more relaxed and more pleasant place to be than we expected. The Cambodians are wonderful – even our pathetic attempts to pronounce “thank you” correctly (or-kun / awk-wan / okk-quon?) have invariably produced delighted nods and smiles, and there always seems to be a joke going about something. The city somehow just crackles with positive energy. At first it was unnerving to have someone say “tuk-tuk Sir?” about every fifteen paces, but this is a place (unlike India) where you can just meet each person’s eye, smile, say “no thanks!” and walk on.

Part of the trouble with travelling in Asia – or rather, writing about it – is that the impressions come too thick and fast to record. Little things like the knock-off “Talking Rain” water that is “Talking Water” (with close-but-not-quite label). Very very big things like the glorious Royal Palace – truly breathtaking buildings containing e.g. a Buddha encrusted with gold, diamonds the size of eggs, and cobwebs. A woman was praying somewhat aerobically at another Buddha, and finished by repeatedly touching the Buddha’s arm and then wiping her hand against her hair. (What exactly did those gestures MEAN? Holiness by association? A plea to cure her husband’s baldness? I have no idea.) Similarly, a street market stuffed full of ordinary, or strange, or downright unintelligible produce. (We identified homemade tofu easily enough, but were the blocks of stuff floating in the bowl next to it chocolate tofu? Probably not – just our only available guess.) The giggling woman and smiling, rather satirical-looking monk who showed us into the smoke-blackened inner sanctum of the stupa that was essentially built around one of the Buddha’s eyebrows..

And so on: I bought a book about the genocide (“First They Killed My Father”) from a street peddler with no hands. First you feel terrible, and think - how do I even give a $5 bill to a person with no hands? But he seemed so delighted just by talking to us and showing us his books that he never stopped smiling, and it was infectious.

Kevin from the hotel took us to the airport. We had a long conversation that I could only follow parts of about the ‘graft’ system, how taxation works or doesn’t, how roads and bridges get built through Japanese and American aid, how taking his son to the hospital for a check-up works, why driving is better in some ways than his old job in the hotel but worse in others.