Thai Sunset, Cambodian Tales

The sun just set over the Gulf of Thailand. I can see the ocean through the glass doors and beyond the balcony of our room. After a week in Cambodia, we decided to splurge and found a gorgeous hotel on Ko Samui, an island off the east coast of Thailand. This morning we kayaked to a quiet beach where we spent the day swimming and lounging. This type of relaxation is just what I needed after last week.

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Cambodia was amazing, but upon our arrival I came down with a bout of food poisoning that I just couldn’t kick during my entire time there. Thank goodness for Cipro - after 3 days on this strong antibiotic, I’m finally almost back to normal. The food in Cambodia was delicious (according to Julie & Paul) and I’m excited to be able to join them soon in enjoying the Thai cuisine. We didn’t get to try the spiders, crickets, snakes, or fried little birds that were served up by Cambodian street vendors, but we did get a few photographs of these delicacies.
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We spent our first two nights in Cambodia in Phnom Penh. We visited S-21, a suburban school that had been converted into a prison during the Kmer Rouge massacres of the 1970’s. The stories of torture and murder were horrific and unlike a museum in the U.S. where exhibits are kept behind glass, you could walk through prison cells and see the weapons the prison guards used on their victims. The Kmer Rouge documented S-21’s prisoners with black and white photographs before and after torture, and thousands of photos of women, children, and men are displayed inside S-21. These images combined with being in the physical space where such atrocities had been committed became so over stimulating that I started to feel numb by the end of our visit.
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From there we went to the Killing Fields, where thousands of skulls and bones from mass graves are displayed in a multi-story shrine. To save money on bullets, victims were literally beaten to death with blunt objects and babies were smashed against trees. Before we went inside, our tuk tuk driver told us that it makes him sad to go there because he lost his entire family under Pol Pot’s reign. After that, I imagined that every local person we met in Phom Penh must have a personal relationship to the Kmer Rouge tragedy.
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We also saw more poverty in Phnom Penh than I’ve seen yet on this trip. There were many people on the streets with missing limbs, possibly as a result of land mines. Many children were on the street selling things to tourists and an entire family seemed to be living below our hotel balcony. The sex industry was also very prominent and was sad to see. Trafficking is a major problem and we saw blatant prostitution in both Phnom Penh and Siem Reap.
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I make Cambodia sound so depressing, but it wasn’t all sad stuff…there are just many painful elements to the country’s history and present that you simply can’t ignore. Despite that, it was vibrant and lively and we had some wonderful experiences there - like driving around town in a tuk tuk during a massive thunderstorm through the flooded streets, watching the local children splashing in the puddles.
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The majority of our time in Cambodia was spent in Siem Reap, home to the famous Angkor temples. Our first morning, we woke at 4:15 am and caught a tuk tuk to Angkor Wat to watch the sunrise. The temples were truly magnificent and we spent the day exploring this ancient holy city…climbing to the tops of temples, stumbling over fallen stones, and snapping a zillion pictures that I’ll have to trim down before I post. One day we took a boat to see a floating village - homes, the school, a church, a Buddhist wat, the shops - all of them were on boats. That evening, Paul & I took a cooking class at a lovely Kmer restaurant and then enjoyed a meal with an American couple from our class.
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I’ll post our Cambodia pictures soon and in no time I’ll have photos and stories to share from Thailand too!