In Cambodia on
19 November 2008 with no comments
I am no stranger to getting sick while travelling. My first time overseas I managed to pick up some bug in France (France! Of all places!) that stayed with me for 18 months. In my travels so far this year, I luckily didn’t pick up any stomach bugs, but I didn’t manage to get off lightly.
The flu
I blame the taxi line at Sydney airport for the flu I picked up on my arrival back from New York. I arrived in Sydney around 9am after a twenty-five hour flight from JFK on a Qantas plane that seemed designed specifically to make my trip hell. By the time I cleared customs and quarantine (which is not always easy to do in Sydney), I was ready to throttle someone. And I was dressed inappropriately for the 30 degree Celsius day outside. I waited for a taxi for about 45 minutes, my blood pressure gradually climbing. By the time I went to bed that night, I was really sick and spent the next three days at work alternating between a cold sweat and hot flushes.
Motion sickness and persistent nausea
You know something’s up when you feel like you’re on a bus on a dirt track when you’re just getting ready for dinner in your hotel room. I had the worst motion sickness and nausea in Cambodia than I had had in about fifteen years. I was suspicious of my malaria tablets - I had been prescribed 200mgs of doxycline when everyone else was taking 100. When I started to run out of tablets, I realised something had gone wrong somewhere. So with only a few days before I flew home, my mother back at home called my doctor - and yep, I had been taking too much. The side effect? Severe nausea. And, oh yeah, that firey heat rash I got on my arm the day I passed out in a boat from taking Dramamine.
Malaria and dengue fever (suspected)
I got bitten a lot while I was in Cambodia. By mosquitoes, bed bugs, sand flies - you name an insect, chances are it was attracted to my blood. I spent seven hours in Bangkok airport before my flight home, and about halfway through developed a cough and a runny nose that I assumed was from the air-conditioning. When I got on the plane, I took some motion sickness tablets (see above), and passed out. I woke up when we were flying over Adelaide. By the time I went to bed that night, I had a fever and was completely delirious. I woke up at midnight convinced I had malaria and sobbed pathetically for a few hours before I finally managed to drift off to (a really crappy) sleep.
The following day the doctor rushed me in ahead of all the other patients (it was actually kind of cool). He sent me off to get some blood tests. Turns out I didn’t have malaria, and probably just had the flu. I still don’t know about dengue fever because my doctor went on holidays before the test results came back.
I wonder what I can pick up in Nepal and India? Some kind of stomach-destroying parasite, I’ve no doubt. Along with, of course, limbs covered in bug bites.
In India, Nepal, Pre-trip on
18 November 2008 with no comments
In exactly one month and two hours, I will be on a plane bound for Bangkok, and from there Kathmandu in Nepal. Ok, that’s not exactly correct. In exactly one month and two hours I will be on a plane bound for an irritating, one hour stopover in Brisbane, during which I will be required to get off the plane and sit in The Most Boring Place on Earth, the Brisbane International Airport Departures Terminal. How do I know it’s the most boring place on earth? I took the same route to Bangkok in September. Same flight number and everything.
But I digress. I never expected this to be my official year of travel, mainly because I never expected to be sent to the USA for work. I had always planned on going to Cambodia this year - that was decided mid-last year when I was still pinning away for South East Asia after my trip to Vietnam in January.
Nepal and India are a slightly unexpected turn of events. I had always planned to visit both countries, but certainly not this year. I had actually intended to go to Europe for Christmas, and spend New Year’s Eve in Amsterdam with my good friend from the UK, Dawn. Then fuel prices skyrocketed, and there was no way I could afford the taxes on a long-haul ticket from Australia. Somehow, another good friend and I had suddenly decided to go to Nepal, and within a few weeks, we’d booked our tickets.
So, come December 18, I will be departing Sydney bound for Kathmandu. Kathmandu is a bit of a holy grail for me - I can’t think about it without imagining the hippy trail of the 1970s, and wishing it had been me, arriving emaciated and exhausted from the Middle East in an overland truck. From Kathmandu we’ll travel overland through the Terai, and into India. No trekking in Nepal this time round - that’s a trip for the not-too-distant future (though I am hoping to do a scenic flight of the Himalayas from KTM with the exotically-named Buddha Air). Stops in India include Varanasi, Agra and Delhi, amongst others. I am terrified and excited about India all at once.
Surely if I can survive India, I can survive anywhere?
In Cambodia on
17 November 2008 with no comments
There were two places on my trip to Cambodia where my camera stayed in my bag. The Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum (also known as the prison S-21), and The Killing Fields of Choeung Ek, both in and around Phnom Penh. I visited them both on the one long, hot and emotionally exhausting afternoon.
After a morning of frivolity and shopping at the Russian Market, my roommate and I met the rest of our group at the hotel, and we took a minivan to the Genocide Museum, along with a local guide. From the moment I got in the van, to when we arrived back at the hotel around four hours later, I don’t think I spoke a single word. It seemed disrespectful to do so, and so I simply listened to the guide, and took in both the sites, lost in my own thoughts.
Before the Khmer Rouge tore into Phnom Penh, Tuol Sleng was a high school. From 1975 to 1979 it was turned into a prison and place of torture. Around 18,000 people passed through the gates over the four years, and I believe there were only 12 known survivors. Today, it looks virtually as it did when the Vietnamese stormed it in 1979. A single photograph on a wall of each of the ground-floor torture rooms, of the body that was found there, are the only additions.
You can still see stains on the floor.
By the time we left the museum, after listening to the stories of our guide about what went on in the prison, and looking at rows and rows of photographs of the victims and the Khmer Rouge child soldiers, I had a splitting headache from keeping my emotions in check. I was not the only person in our group happy to hide behind dark sunglasses.
Our next stop was the Killing Fields of Choeung Ek, about 17kms outside the city proper. It was late afternoon by the time we arrived, and we pretty much had the grounds to ourselves. The first thing you notice on arrival is the gigantic stupa, a shrine of rememberance to the people who died in the fields. It’s not until you look closer that you notice the piles and piles of human skulls, on display inside (I believe there’s around 8000).
Prisoners were bought to the site, a former orchard, to be executed. There were no bullets used here - those were believed to be too valuable, and instead more violent methods were used. Our guide shared specific details with us, like how the Khmer Rouge soldiers would play loud music to cover the sounds of screaming. Each detail or story made my stomach churn and my hands shake.
I walked around the site almost on tiptoes - thanks to the rains, there are human bones and the remains of clothing sticking up out of the dirt under the pathways. A number of mass graves on the site have been dug up, and these look like the B-52 bomb craters I saw in Vietnam. There are also some graves that have been left as is. One was marked to have contained the bodies of mostly women and children - and all were found naked. It was even more confronting than Toul Sleng. I have never before felt so much horror, disgust and sorrow.
Although it was a difficult afternoon, it left me with a new understanding of Cambodia and its people. Before this, I had only ever read about genocide in history books, or watched movies like Schindler’s List, The Killing Fields and Hotel Rwanda.
Visiting the sites made it real to me, but it didn’t help me understand why, or how. How could the rest of the world sit back and let something like this happen? How could the Khmer Rouge have a seat at the UN as recently as 1993? And why do we still let it happen, in places like Darfur? Will I one day walk through a similar site in the Sudan?
In Cambodia on
16 November 2008 with 2 comments
Of all the cities I have visited in Asia so far, I think Phnom Penh is my favourite. It’s dirty and it smells, and some of its inhabitants are a little bit dodgy, but it’s full of beautiful surprises. Like Sisowath Quay, by the Mekong River at dusk.
While I was in the USA on business a couple of weeks before I flew to Asia, I read First They Killed My Father by Loung Ung, for the second time. In Sihanoukville, I picked up a copy of the sequel, Lucky Child. As a result, I couldn’t walk down the tree-lined boulevards and rubbish-strewn back alleys in Phnom Penh without thinking about what the city would have been like when it was completely emptied by the Khmer Rouge in April 1975.
Most of the buildings have a heavy French Colonial influence, and seeing them in a crumbling state of disrepair was a constant reminder of very recent past. The city was left to decay for four years, and by the time the Vietnamese overthrew the Khmer Rouge in 1979, Cambodia’s economy was virtually non-existent. Much of the population was dead or dying. There were no doctors, teachers or professionals left. There had been no crops planted. People continued to starve.
Today, the country is still getting back on its feet. And like most cities, it has its enclaves of the very rich, the incredibly poor and the in-betweens. Phnom Penh is definitely not as modern as Bangkok or Saigon. And it’s noticeably poorer. But everywhere I went, its people were smiling (unlike the other two cities!). Wide and leafy boulevards, funky cafes and bars, and a young population. It’s definitely Asia’s Next Big Thing.
I hadn’t heard the best stories about the city. I’d heard that it was worse than Saigon for petty theft, and that the streets, clogged with cars and motorbikes and lawlessness, were dangerous. Leaving the bus on arrival at the bus station was a confronting, sweaty and irritating experience. But it’s those moments of travel that make a glass of wine on the roof terrace of the Foreign Correspondent’s Club, overlooking the river, or a cyclo tour around the city in the fading daylight that much sweeter.
See more photos of Phnom Penh on Flickr.
