Cambodia -anyone been there?

details please!

thanks

nah blud

whatchuwannaknow?

I have a friend who is out there now... went last week. Not heard from her yet, will have a look at her facebook tonight and she if she has made contact yet

i am seeking any advice,wisdom,anecdotes as it looks as though i may be headed there for an extended business trip

while in country i am going to make a serious effort to record indigenous music for release and also for my own personal sampling library

problem is that many of the musicians who were carrying the khmer musical legacy were killed in the great genocide in the 70s

i have read all of the obvous immediate reviews/forums etc

but it is alwyas nice to get a lickle wattm per spex tive of tings mon

i wanna jam with these dudes

these guys shred!!

you must deal!!!

http://www.vidoemo.com/yvideo.php?cambodian-folk-music=&i=Q0hoVFhncWuRpOGtxTlU

cambodian music is fascinating, as is the country and phnom penh.

2008 was my first time there. i was blown away by the irrationality (its allowed to drive moto at night without light, but not with lights on during daytime f.e.), the corruption (passed a red signal on one of the biggest crossings in p.p. and it cost me 10 $, with a lil more talking maybe only 5) and the whole atmosphere (decayed colonial buildings, a street with a huge pile of trash in the middle, like 2 meters high and 4 wide, only having a meter on the sides to pass with the moto, big open road gullies on main streets etc.).

it has been far more extreme in the 90ies as ive heard/read and when i was there last year i saw an enormous progress going on in the city. but it is still mindblowing, VERY different from the western world. did you read "off the rails in phnom penh"? its sensationalistic but gives an impression what was (and in parts still is) going on in kampuchea.

advices i can give:

learn about buddhist culture ("losing face" especially, being loud/aggressive easily leads to trouble. discussing things western-style wont lead you anywhere, a "yes" can be everything as a "no" is rude), be careful with drugs (other then weed), girls and nightlife altogether (the walkabout bar is probably the most fucked up place i have seen, CONDOMZ), traffic (ive seen a big SUV running over a moto driver and he didnt even stop) and dont. mess. with. the. wrong. people! (at clubs f.e.).

cambodia is addictive. i love it.

some more...

i stayed always in the same guest house. last time we came there one of the younger guys from the crew (who were taking care of the motos) just bought himself a tuktuk. to be friendly we hired him for a ride to a restaurant. after one hour of driving around we became suspicious if he might not know where to go. but our questions were always answered with a "yes, yes, sir" (see above) and another 30 mins. later, me still laughing hardly, my friend pissed off, we decided to get back to the guesthouse. and, as you might expect, he wasnt finding the way back either. so we had to ask some mototaxi-guys and some dollars and time later WE finally found the way back.

i like stitched clothing. so i asked one of the older guys from the guesthouse if he knew somebody. he arranged everything, from getting me to a computer shop to make the "model" on paper (i wanted the word "acid" in khmer) to buying the clothes on the russian market, to bringing me to the stitching company, all on his own moto. after half a day everything was done (two caps, a shirt and hoodie been stitched for 10$) and he brought me back to the guesthouse. i wanted to thank him and gave him 10 dollares also but he looked at me and said it was too much. so i gave him 5 and he was happy.

depending on what you do.. this might turn out as a very intense trip!

went there in 2003 for 5 weeks, trip of my life.

A friend and me came over the border from Bangkok by bus, took a Taxi to Siem Reap (Angkor), touristed the temples a couple days, took a small boat down to Battambang (the boat trip i highly recommend), split up there, i went on to Phnom Penh which was a mind-boggling mess of a week. The colonial buildings were nice and all, but this town and its history (but also its present) basically sum up everything that's wrong with the human race in one spot… Where Angkor temples looked very hyperreal ("wait that's not a real tree.. it's a Indiana Jones backdrop made from styrofoam… no wait… it's really real. Awesome"), a sense of it's-too-real-to-be-true in Phnom Penh stemmed from (child-) prostitution, war- and mine-victims, poverty and idiots. It was an interesting experience but with a bitter aftertaste, as no matter what you do, as a Westerner who goes there you do your part to keep this machinery spinning. It's probably best to not care.

Anyway, after a week or so i continued to Sihanoukville. There i met some nice expats, they taught me how to ride a motorcycle, and we moto-crossed up to City of Ghosts (look it up) which was fantastic and a nice distraction from the fucked-ness of Phnom Penh. On to Kep near Vietnam border, where i had the best food ever. Back to Sihanoukville and the surrounding area (i wonder how it looks there nowadays, hotel business just started flourishing back then). And back to Thailand by speedboat which was a near-death experience. As an atheist i prayed to God to make the boat arrive in one piece.

A+ would do again.

practical tip: don't take anything with you from home, especially don't buy any fancy stuff or equipment or whatever you think you'll need. It's just ballast. If you need anything, you can get it there cheap, fullstop.

I was there this year and hated it. Sihanoukville. is OK though.

eichel and fling thanks so much taking the time for your insight and conveying your experiences in vivid detail

fenton-what did you hate?

pp looks like a dirty 3rd world nightmare of a clusterfuck from every angle.

Yet cambodia is slowly emerging into this century ...alive...intact....prospering slowly....due to an influx of korean and chinese hard cash.

its hard to imagine the after effects of pol pot and the huge amounts of bad vibes/karma that affects the collective psychology of the entire country .

50% of the population is under 17

imagine that for a minute

i was wondering how the weed is and how available "regular" [read-not whores] women are.

I am not at all interested in whore mongering though its certainly a popular sport in that part of the world.

np, i could talk/write hours about cambodia, its such a mindfuck. positive and negative.

the weed is naturally grown as you might expect. roll it pure and it will work very good. i had laughing attacks i hadnt had for years on that stuff, might have been the situation too ;) its very cheap, dont get ripped off.

the girls... an endless story. they are amazing, pure grace. you have to see them on their motos, in their pyjama-like clothing, arf...

traditionally they get married as a virgin, even holding hands on the street is not common among khmers. so its definitely not easy to get a girl for a short time if you dont tell big lies. if you find one, they probably see you as a cashcow. sounds harsh but sadly gets proven again and again from what i hear. money, status etc. is very important, romantic love seems to be linked narrowly to societies of wealth.

that leads to prostitution, but as you seem not interested, ill keep my stories for me.

Cambodia was great, one of my favourite places in that region.

In Phnom Penh, the main backpacker area is by Boeng Kak lake, if you want to find cheap accommodation etc. Or buy a pizza with weed on it.

Cambodia has such a fucked up history, but one thing about that means that most of the people there are under 25 now. When I was in Phnom Penh there were weddings happening anywhere, all the young people getting paired up.

You can go and see the killing fields and stuff like that. But weirdest of all, in the backpacker area, was the adverts trying to sell you day trips:

"We go killing fields and then go Thunder Ranch"

Thunder Ranch is a shooting range. You can go there (not that I did) and do things like pay $30 to fire an AK47, $100 to fire an M60 light machine gun, or $200 to fire a rocket propelled grenade. Quite an enterprising idea in a country so full of munitions, but the idea of people going to the killing fields and then wanting to go and fire weapons for fun totally baffles me. Also, as I heard someone point out, it must be very disconcerting for locals to see a tourist shoot a weapon for a few seconds for the price of 60 days of work.

That, then, might give you an idea of one aspect of the place: fucked up history, adapting to tourism. And hopefully with a much more positive future.

Angkor Wat is amazing of course, get over there if you can.

Preah Khan temple, Ankhor:

It's just a bit foul.

The backpacker area especially. Saw a lot of overdoses/robbery/nasty dirty sexy things going on.

I did stay there for ages because I did loads of drugs and kept on forgetting to check out.

I might of had a particularly bad time. hah