Our tour through Cambodia

In some places, the history provides a backdrop for all the sights, lightly coloring your perspective on everything around you. In others, it hangs so thick you almost have to wade through it like the humidity in the air. Phnom Penh, Cambodia falls in that latter camp.

Cambodia used to be the great Khmer empire, ruling over much of present day Cambodia, Thailand, Laos, and southern Vietnam at its peak in the 12th century. It reigned for over 600 years, enjoying sophisticated architecture and administrative systems. Its capital city of Ankgor reached the size of modern-day L.A. and a population of almost 1 million, making it the largest pre-industrial city ever! And the legendary Khmer temple Angkor Wat is still the largest religious monument in the world.

I tell you all this to give you some perspective on what happened next. They were eventually invaded by the French and occupied for almost a century. After Cambodia enjoyed only a few years of sovereignty, the war in Vietnam wreaked havoc on the country and American strong-arming led directly (in my opinion) to the rise of the Khmer Rouge. Which brings us to the most infamous and brutal period in the country’s history: Pol Pot’s reign of terror, which forced all Cambodians living in cities (including 2.5 million just in Phnom Penh) to migrate – often walk – to the countryside and work on collective farms. Anyone suspected of not supporting the regime, like those who were educated or even just wore glasses, was imprisoned, tortured into providing names of other innocent people, and then murdered. It is believed that 2.5 million people (out of a population of 8 million) died as a result of the Khmer Rouge rule, with over half being from direct execution.

We visited the former prison where many of these “interrogations” took place and the small field just outside the city that houses the mass graves of almost 9,000 people. I’m not going to tell you what we learned during these visits because it really is too gruesome to share here. Instead, I ask you to consider: what does it do to the psychology of a society when everyone over the age of 45 has survived a genocide that wiped out over a quarter of the population? We found ourselves constantly wondering this as we chatted with our middle-aged tuktuk drivers, as we walked through the wide but decrepit French boulevards overrun by street carts and debris, as we planned our visit to Angkor Wat, a symbol of the country’s distant glory days. (Note: the pictures below aren’t very graphic but they aren’t pleasant)

Our trip wasn’t all solemn. The people are eager to forget the recent atrocities and the country provides plenty to divert tourists. After Phnom Penh we went to Siem Reap, which is close to Angkor Wat and features French architecture in much better condition. We enjoyed our visit to Angkor Wat while there, but the real highlight was seeing the “floating villages” on the Tonlé Sap river an hour outside the city. During wet season, the water level rises to completely change the village landscape. Rice farmers become fishermen and bike roads become canals. As a result, the houses are built on enormous stilts; some who can’t afford land just build their houses on barrels or boats and float directly in the river year-round. Kids swim in their front yards and row themselves to their floating school. It was fascinating seeing a place with such dual identities.

We made the trip to Siem Reap with Thomas, a new friend we’d met in Thailand who was heading the same way. While there, we ended up befriending a few backpackers from our Angkor Wat tour and a few more from our hostel and suddenly we were traveling with a crew, which was a new experience for us. After Siem Reap the whole group joined us for our journey south to the small town of Kampot. This area is famous for having some of the best black pepper in the world. We visited one of their beautiful pepper plantations and even tried black pepper vanilla ice cream, which is fantastic as it turns out. We also loved the town itself and ended up staying in it for over a week despite only planning to for a few days.

Our country tour ended in Kep, an even smaller nearby town known for its crab cooked in the local black pepper. The real way to enjoy this is to get the crab fresh at the seafood market and enlist someone to cook it for you right there, which was an intimidating experience. We cabbed (read: tuktuked, all taxis in Cambodia are tuktuks and you can order them like Ubers) to the market and made our way to the back where women were wading into the water to grab live crabs from their traps to offer us. I haggled for a kilo of crab ($7) while Jack and Thomas stood frozen and disoriented. An enterprising young guy immediately offered to cook it up for us for $2.50 using Kampot pepper and some kind of voodoo magic. It was phenomenal, easily our favorite meal in Cambodia. Best of all, you could lick the delicious sauce off your hands at the end, because you weren’t getting any utensils (process that for a moment… fresh crab, in the shell, and only your fingers).

After spending two months in its overshadowing big brother of Thailand, we weren’t sure if Cambodia would have much more to offer. But the country was a lovely surprise and left us charmed.

Some of our other favorite pictures from Cambodia are below, but you can head to the Photos tab to see more pictures, and the Where’s Mano Been? page to see all the cities we’ve visited so far (including where we are now!).