Impressions of Cambodia

Cambodia, at least what we’ve seen of it so far, is a beautiful country. It’s very flat and, at this time of year, very green. Everywhere you look in the countryside, vast rice fields dotted with sugar palm trees stretch away to the horizon. Now that the rainy season is tailing off, the sky is very blue and often filled with great puffy clouds. The huge sky, combined with the flat land, makes for beautiful vistas as you travel down rural roads.

The main way we’ve traveled in Cambodia so far is by tuk-tuk—a two-seat covered carriage pulled by a motorbike. Tuk tuks are everywhere in Siem Reap. They’re a great way to get across town when you’re too hot to walk and a great way to explore the Angkor Wat ruins or the surrounding countryside. They’re comfortable (so long as the road isn’t too bumpy), fairly inexpensive ($1-$2 for a crosstown trip, $15-$25 for a daylong excursion), wonderfully breezy, and slow enough to let you see your surroundings without having everything go by in a blur. Plus, you leave the hassle of dealing with congested roads and uncontrolled intersections to someone who knows them.

And unlike with pedal rickshaws, you don’t have to feel bad that the driver is pulling your great American bulk, because the motorbike does that for him. Just about the only downside of tuk-tuks, from a traveler’s point of view, is the incessant chorus of calls from unoccupied drivers that greets you every time you venture onto the street.

This is both an easy and a hard place for an American to visit. It’s easy because virtually everyone with any relation to the hospitality industry speaks some English and because U.S. dollars are the most commonly used currency. Cambodia’s official currency, the riel (roughly 4,000 to the dollar), is used mainly for making small purchases or giving change in amounts of less than $1.

It’s hard because seeing prices quoted in dollars makes you tend to compare costs here with those back home. “Only $25 for a nice hotel room, only $6 for an entree or $3 for a glass of wine,” you think excitedly, failing to notice that such prices are higher than in some other parts of Southeast Asia (where the prices are quoted in local currency).

The soil in Cambodia is very sandy (similar to the soil in Michigan’s Leelanau Peninsula, for those of you who’ve been there). At some point back in geologic time, Cambodia must have been a giant seabed or river delta, because much of the bedrock is sandstone. Angkor Wat and many of the other old Khmer temples are faced in sandstone, which is good for carving but tends to erode over the centuries. In some places, the soil (and the stone used for old temples) is as red as anywhere in Georgia or Alabama.

There seem to be far fewer roosters here than in Bali, but cows are everywhere. Often they’re the big white cows I associate with India. You see them tied up in fields, grazing along the sides of the road, munching grass around some of the temples in the Angkor complex, or just standing around in parking lots. Water buffalo—big gray tank-like animals with curved horns—-are also common in the countryside. They’re the traditional engines for farm work.

The paved roads are much wider here than in Bali, with real shoulders for bicycles or slow motorbikes. The only thing that’s kept us from riding bikes is that most four-way intersections have no lights or stop signs. Trucks, buses, cars, motorcycles, and bikes just worm their way through the gaps in traffic in a way that seems to work for them most of the time but that looks daunting to a newcomer.

Rather than crowding right to the edge of the road, shops and houses are set back a bit. Most homes do not have walls around them, just well-swept sandy yards. The typical house in the countryside is squarish and built up on pillars, with stairs leading up to it. The height of the pillars sometimes reflects how flood-prone an area is during the rainy season.

The area under the house is used during the dry season for storage and for working or lounging in the shade (you frequently see hammocks hung between the pillars). Sometime people close in the pillared area to make a two-story house.

The poorest houses are made of wooden poles and consist of a single room with a wood floor and walls of matting woven from palm fronds. More substantial dwellings have multiple rooms and walls of wood or corrugated metal, while the richest houses are built of brick or concrete blocks and painted.

Unlike in Bali, we haven’t seen any women carrying things on their heads here. Although some women in the countryside wear a sarong-like skirt, many of them, and virtually all women in town, wear capris or long pants. Outfits that look to us like flowered or leopard-print pajamas are popular female daywear.

Now that it’s the “cool” season (with highs in the upper 80s or low 90s F rather than the upper 90s), you see Cambodians wearing long-sleeved jackets and even turtleneck shirts, especially in the morning or evening. When Australian, European, or North American tourists go by wearing tank tops and shorts, it looks like they and the Cambodians are living on different planets.

There’s a real taste here for shiny satin evening gowns. Even smallish villages will have a shop selling fancy clothing. Some of that demand may be fueled by Cambodian television, which appears to show a steady stream of karaoke videos. Those almost always consist of a singer in some picturesque location, surrounded by what look like scores of wedding guests doing line dances or swaying in an 80s-esque fashion. Interestingly, even the raciest Cambodian women wearing very short skirts—pop singers on TV or the bar girls in the Hooters-ish barbeque restaurant near our guesthouse—do not show even a hint of cleavage.

If there’s a national garment in Cambodia, it’s the krama, a cotton scarf woven in a checked pattern, typically in white, blue, red, or black. They’re worn by both sexes and used for everything: folded or wrapped over the head or neck to protect from the sun, tied around the neck for warmth or fashion, wrapped across the mouth and nose to serve as a face mask when traveling dusty roads, tied around the waist as a belt or around the shoulders as a rucksack, or even fastened to poles to make a small hammock for a baby. Melissa lost no time in buying one at an artisans’ workshop we visited (while Chris opted for a fancier silk scarf, plus a small face mask from the corner store for dusty trips by tuk-tuk).