A Khmer girl sleeps inside a temple at Angkor

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You go to a new country and in a few days you can make a reliable generalization. These people, they are cranky. These others, they are outgoing and festive. Those there, shy and gentle.

Cambodians stumped me. One week in and I couldn’t condense the national psyche to any nugget worth its air.

I was in a country with fast-paced cities, mind-blowing architectural aesthetics (ever seen a Khmer pagoda?) and a proud heritage of a bygone empire. But the people were a total mystery.

A people of contrasts

At first, Cambodians seem to be polite, smiley and shy. Then you run into pushy touts who grab your arm and don’t understand “no” after five times. You meet children who seem entirely robotic in their sales pitch. They come, one after the other, offering identical products with the same spiel:

“You buy bracelet? OK, not now, later? Pinky swear? You swore you would buy from me. Why you lie?”

And when you try to engage them in conversation, they go blank, reverting to their rehearsed lines.

You talk to locals who don’t seem to have any notion of abstract thinking. They look at a map like it’s a foreign alphabet. When you ask them any question beginning with “why” you get a silent stare in return. Even hand gestures that worked in every other country are lost on them.

Then you hear of the scams and the corruption that is so pervasive, it’s a normal part of life.

So to better understand the present, I turned to the past.

History explains a bit

Cambodian history is still fresh. Anyone over 35 lived through the bloodiest social experiment of the 20th century. They were torn from their homes and forced to work in the fields. They lost family members to starvation, disease, and assassination.

How this manifests in the present population takes some work to understand.

For one, the Khmer Rouge sought to eliminate anyone with an education. Intellectuals, artists, teachers, doctors, engineers… all of them murdered. Only “pure” and “uncorrupted” peasants, or those who could fool the executioners, were spared. To live, you had to act dumb.

“Imagine if everyone except the working class of your country was killed off,” one English expat explained to me. “Imagine that only they had kids and assumed positions of power.”

So you have an uneducated majority left in charge of the country. But that’s not all.

Poor education

“Most Cambodians only really learn two things at school,” another English expat, a hotel owner in Siem Reap, told me. “How to read Khmer and how to write Khmer. The lucky ones learn English.”

Creative thinking and scientific exploration, things we assume are universal in schooling, are sorely lacking here. Hence the Cambodian difficulty in abstract thought.

The same hotel owner told me he doesn’t let Cambodians swim in his pool. Not because of discrimination, but because he’s tired of saving them from drowning: “They see the pool and jump in. But they don’t remember that they can’t swim until they drown.”

Lousy wages

$1 a day. That’s what many Cambodians earn to feed and clothe their families. Not surprisingly, they will use other means of making money. And if the Khmer Rouge taught then anything, it’s that all’s fair in the fight for survival.

Including scams and bribes.

Yet another English expat I talked to no longer calls it corruption. To get anything done, you just have to grease a palm. “It’s commission, mate. It’s just the way things work here.”

History is still unraveling

The country is going through its first period of peace in a long time. Khmer Rouge leaders are still undergoing trials and appealing their sentences. Its people are encountering more foreigners than ever before.

It’s all going very fast: a mostly rural population is coming into contact with an ultra-modern Western world quicker than they can manage to assimilate it. This results in a display of behaviours that strike us Westerners as odd.

Recovering from cancer

“The Khmer Rouge regime was a cancer. We survived it, but we’re still weak from it.” Such was the explanation given by Meang, the immeasurably helpful owner of the Prohm Roth Guesthouse in Siem Reap. This simple thought explained as much as the hundreds of pages I read on the topic.

It seems the Cambodian people are in a collective post-shock syndrome, slowly coming to terms with what happened. Former Khmer Rouge soldiers and executioners walk among survivors of the killing fields. Children taught to smash babies against trees are hustling through adult life.

It can drive one mad if thought about too much.

With such a gruesome mix of causes and a strange set of effects, how can you not want to learn more about its history? Few places have made me this thirsty for knowledge.

Suggested reading and viewing

Books
First They Killed My Father by Luong Ung
Survival in the Killing Fields by Haing Ngor
Pol Pot: Brother Number One by David P. Chandler

Films
The Killing Fields
S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine
Neak sre (aka Les gens la la rizière)

Massage, sir? Only $3. Lady you buy something? Silk scarf only $2. Special price for lady.

You want cold drink? Coconut only 50 cent. Tuk-tuk, sir? I take you to temples, cheap price.

And on it goes. 50-cent beers. $1 frozen margaritas. $5 hotel rooms. $1 noodle soups. Nah, I’ll splurge today and have an amok for $4.

Little expenses, all so innocent on their own, but pile them together and you won’t believe you spent that much.

But how can you help yourself with so much cheap luxury?

If Sihanoukville is a backpacker blackhole, Siem Reap is backpacker Disneyland. More than a base for exploring the temples of Angkor, it has become a playground where responsible budgeting goes on a one-week bender.

In the main tourist ghetto around the Old Market, the only thing Cambodian are the prices. Pizzerias, French bakeries and thumping bars line the vibrant Pub Street, which would feel at home at any university city in Europe.

Happy hour from 8 am til closing.

Around it are myriad massage parlours where kids barely out of high school offer one-hour foot rubs for the price of a bad burger back home.

And as a testament to the unrivaled imitative prowess of the Cambodian people, there’s a “fish massage” tank at every corner. To compete, some offer a free beer while you get dead skins nibbled from your feet.

And so it quickly becomes routine: cheap beers everyday, frequent massages, culinary explorations, and trips to outlying temples. Things that back home would be a rare indulgence become tantalizingly accessible.

The result: you forget you’re a backpacker. You’re supposed to be on a crusade of austerity, proving to yourself and others that it takes precious little to live well and be happy.

But instead of growing tough skin, you’re getting it munched off by tiny fish.

Before you know it, you spent nine days in this city you had planned for five. And you leave facing some wicked withdrawal jitters, an emptier wallet, but with the testy relief of the cold-turkey quitter.

Cambodian BBQ: $4

When it comes to mobile travel apps, it’s a buyer’s market at the junkyard. There is not shortage of half-baked, vaguely useful apps that you may use once or twice then forget they existed.

So many location-based apps that suggest attractions close to you have incomplete and often outdated databases. Place-specific guides also tend to be limited, often listing the most obvious attractions.

An app like ProGuides has useful general information about a place, but like so many travel apps, it’s an abridged Lonely Planet in mobile form.

So it was a rare pleasure to test out a travel app that really gets mobility and all its possibilities: location, user-generated content, navigation, and augmented reality.

Disclosure: mTrip offered me a free iPhone app for review. The app sells for $5.99 in Apple’s App Store.

First of all, mTrip is not for every traveler. Because its city-specific guides are so complete, it may feel like cheating for more adventurous types who like getting lost in strange new places.

What sets mTrip apart is the itinerary advisor. The app asks you what kind of attractions interest you by using sliders. For example, I can tell it to suggest lots of parks and museums, but go easy on the religious sites. I then punch in the number of days I’ll be in the city, and it creates a customized itinerary for me. Ingeniously, it can organize the itinerary based on your starting position (like your hotel) and

by distance to minimize walking times. You can also specify the intensity of the itinerary, that is, how many attractions it should cram into one day. As such, mTrip acts like a tour planner without the large groups and cheesy T-shirts. You also have the freedom to change the itinerary anytime.

I tested the app for New York City, and the list of attractions, shops, bars and restaurants is impressive. mTrip gets its content from Germany-based Falk CIS, a firm specializing in mobile navigation and travel maps.

Users can also add new places and rate them.

The app also has an Augmented Reality function which I didn’t get to test, as I was neither in New York and don’t have the iPhone 4 or 3GS with the required video camera.

In all, mTrip is ideal for the traveler who likes to know where he’s going but would like to lose the bulky guidebook. Independent travelers who wear T-shirts with “Losers plan it” written in the Lonely Planet logo will find it an electronic babysitter.

The app is currently available for 17 major world cities.

Another reason I like mTrip: they are based in my hometown of Montreal.

Further reading:
Review: mTrip iPhone app uses augmented reality (AP)

Photo by Daniel Grosvenor

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When selling bootleg books didn’t work, the boy turned to begging for food. He looked 12 and was still perfecting his pity pitch.

After four days in Siem Reap (and another week in Sihanoukville), I got used to saying no to child sellers and beggars. I read enough articles to know giving them money does more harm than good:

It encourages them to keep working and begging instead of going to school.

It creates a dependency on tourists for their livelihood.

It undermines the role of parents as caretakers and of NGOs trying to keep them off the street.

It encourages irresponsible parents to stay at home (sometimes drinking) while the child goes out and works.

Worst of all, it robs a child of her childhood.

My girlfriend Bianca, however, let he compassion speak louder than reason. When the boy said he was hungry, she offered to buy him lunch and eat with us on our restaurant table.

It was too late for me to protest. She was already going over menu choices with the boy. All I could do was limit how much we’d spend. No more than $1, I said. Enough for a generous portion of fried rice.

As he ate, Bianca asked him questions about his life. I welcomed this idea. It would be an opportunity for empathy-building, a way to learn more about the people we sadly learn to regard as travel annoyances.

He said he needs money to buy powdered milk for his baby sister. This set off alarms, since I had heard this from other beggars, including a woman carrying her baby.

Traveling in Cambodia, you learn quickly that Cambodians are great imitators but lousy innovators. If something works for one person, you can be sure many more will do the same.

For proof, compare the menus of any three restaurants in Siem Reap. Listen to the sales pitches of souvenir sellers. Notice how every street corner has a “Dr. Fish Massage” tank full of little fish that eat dead skin off your legs. Half of them offer a free beer with the $2 service.

The boy said his father lost his legs to landmines. He kept going, and it all started to sound a little too tragic. Instead of sympathy, I felt suspicion. This kid was combining several pity ingredients in a clumsy way. As a result, I wasn’t believing a word of it.

Then what I feared happened. Two other boys, who evidently witnessed our charity, entered the restaurant. One of them asked for a plate of fried rice while the other looked on. These kids usually move on after three “no, thanks” but this one would not budge.

And this is what I hated the most: I had to be a hard ass with the kid. I had to look at him sternly in the eye and say, “I said no. That’s final.”

As we got us and left our table, the boy’s eyes followed me with a load of rage I had never seen in this country of meek and deferential people.

“You stingy,” he spat.

It’s a lousy thing to hear, especially after buying one of his comrades lunch. And it exposed the third world beggar’s logic, which is so often kept veiled behind so many Have a nice day’s and Thank you sir’s.

And that logic is this: if you have the money to travel this far from home, you have the money to buy me food. You have the money to buy all of us food. So why don’t you?

Never mind that I worked hard for three years to save money for this trip. Never mind that I chose this country precisely because it’s cheap and I’m not rich. Never mind that I’m helping his countrymen by just being here, injecting money into their economy and creating jobs in tourism.

The boy was simply saying what most beggars think all the time, whether it’s true or not.

And that’s a hard but necessary truth to swallow no matter what comforts our faith in tourism dollars may provide.

Tourists pose beside Maori performers in Rotorua, New Zealand.

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A benefit of traveling off the beaten track is that when you finally visit a well-trodden place, it’s a pleasant surprise.

The annoyances of tourism – hustlers, touts, tons of restaurants and bars catering for tourists, loud drunken backpackers – become a cultural attraction, no longer a burden.

We had this feeling in Sihanoukville, Cambodia. Arriving in Serendipity Beach, the city’s most popular quarter, we were mobbed by tuk-tuk drivers, offers for massage, 10 year-old bracelet hawkers, and a mile of beach shacks offering 50-cent beer pints and “happy” pizzas.

The last time we experienced something similar was in Airlie Beach, Australia. It was tame by comparison, consisting of a single strip of hostels, bars, and travel agencies. No one ran after us to sell a service.

Then we had a blissful two months in Papua New Guinea and the lesser-known parts of Indonesia.

Arriving in Sihanoukville gave us a kind of culture shock that assaults not your notion of custom, but of place. A town that transformed itself for tourism invites its own kind of lazy philosophical meanderings. You wonder what the pushy locals would be doing if there were no foreigners. You see the lengths local businesses go to make visitors feel at home away from home. You see how (young) people act when far from the eyes of parents and bosses.

It turns a strip of bars, cafes and souvenir shops into a museum as well as a hangout spot. And it inverts the logical purpose of travel: while some people escape a comfortable, routine life to rough it for a bit, you indulge in a few rare comforts between bouts of roughing.

And you leave recharged, ready to plunge into the unpredictable once more, forget the corny clubbiness of it all, and be surprised on your next shore leave.

I no longer look down on touristy places. But I had to avoid them like the plague to appreciate their delights.

Photo by emanuela marchiafava

To add a little challenge to my trip I did the following:

1. I stuck to off-the-beaten-path locales
2. I stopped using a guidebook
3. I started arriving at strange cities at late hours and without a clue

Result: it was still laughably easy.

This is because the world is getting more convenient each day. Even little-traveled places are getting smart to tourism and have reliable information close at hand. Most people in the world are happy to see foreigners and willing to help. If the people around you don’t speak English, they will know someone who does.

And even if they don’t, communication with hand gestures, noises and scribbles can get you close enough to what you want.

To have a truly challenging travel experience these days, you have to undertake days-long treks in countries most people never knew existed. You have to go to places blacklisted by most foreign relation ministries.

And such places today are quickly heading for extinction.

The Internet is everywhere, whether by fiber, cellular towers or satellites. Banks are connected to a global electronic system. There is always a place to stay anywhere you go.

Of course, there are places in the world where safety is a problem, where you can’t just arrive at 2 am without an idea of where to go. But taking simple precautions vastly reduce the chances of something bad happening.

This all distills to a single message:

There is no excuse to not travel independently and on the cheap.

After six months on the road, organized tours and all-inclusive packages seem utterly needless. They are the travelers’ nanny states, telling you how to live and protecting you from yourself.

They restrict you in what should be an exercise in absolute liberation: the freedom to choose where to go, when to go there and what to see.

Money is likewise a poor excuse. With more broke backpackers on the road than ever before, budget services vastly outnumber high-end options. No money? Start saving now.

So what’s keeping you form taking your dream trip?

Photo by Chris Schoenbohm

Around 2 pm – shortly after breakfast – the first flyers are delivered by pretty Finnish girls with hangover sunglasses. Tonight’s specials are the same as last night’s: 25-cent beers from 9:00 to 10:00, then free vodka “buckets” from 10:00 to 10:30.

It’s monsoon season, so the many bars in Sihanoukville have to compete for few customers. If one is feeling bold, it will begin its free drinking period 10 minutes before the other one.

You don’t have to move far to learn this. You don’t have to move at all. You can park your haunches in one of scores of shacks on Serendipity Beach and everything comes to you: drinks, food, and persistent hawkers selling grilled squid skewers, sunglasses, and pedicures. And promotional flyers from bars.

The Finnish girls try to sound excited about tonight’s specials, but it’s symbolic. It’s their fifth straight hangover, result of working at one of the bars for free food, accommodation, and drinks.

Turnover at Jam and JJ’s, Serendipity Beach’s rival nightlife spots, is high. A sign at JJ’s that reads “Western staff wanted” is never taken down, even when they have a full crew that night. They never know when one of their backpacker peons will finally escape the gravity pull of this tourism blackhole.

We had planned three days in Sihanoukville, a short, mildly ironic stop as we travel Cambodia. We always try to avoid resort towns and touristy hotspots, so when we do, it’s out of exhaustion or curiosity.

This is our sixth day. We met people going on their second month.

Fire dancers at Serendipity Beach. Photo by Tuomas Lehtinen.

I wish I could blame it solely on the happy confluence of cheap drinking, good food, and easy beach access. It makes time irrelevant. The bars’ flyers have titles like “Wacky Wednesday” and “Thirsty Thursday”, but it’s purely for the benefit of alliteration. Every day and every night is the same.

Even if you lose track of how much you spend, you quickly discover it’s hard to top $20 a day. You have the sea, a full stomach and a woozy head and money remains a minor concern. You read menus offering “happy” pizzas laced with marijuana and the place becomes more than a beach bum magnet, it’s a Neverland where for a few days adulthood is put on hold.

But Sihanoukville has an eerie allure that goes beyond price and convenience.

Though growing rapidly, it still has an underdeveloped charisma. Every available space on Serendipity Beach has been claimed by neighbouring shacks, but they are mostly family-owned thatched-roof huts.

Many have identical beach chairs and loungers with adequately comfortable cushions. Several offer free wifi, drawing the growing legions of netbook-toting packers.

But the town’s most fascinating draw shouldn’t be. On the middle point of the beach, there’s a red flag hoisted high. One you cross this mark, the beach bars become noticeably simpler. Plush loungers give way to foldable chairs. The liquor bottles on display aren’t bathed in colourful light and there are no more signs in English offering 50-cent pints and $3 barbecues.

And the clientele goes from European to Khmer.

On the tourist side, people sit in individual chairs facing the ocean and nibble at their own plates. In the Khmer side, large groups crowd around a short table and share huge trays of food.

In the tourist side, European girls in bikinis wade in the calm waters in solitude. In the Khmer side, packs of girls splash and shove each other dressed in jeans and T-shirts.

I don’t think it’s intentional, but if it is, it’s brilliant: by keeping the beach facilities Spartan, Cambodians are able to repel comfort-seeking travelers and claim a piece of the beach as their own.

By the same token, travelers at once fascinated by the country but intimidated by the language and cultural differences have a place from which to observe the locals in their habitat while safely surrounded by their own kind.

It’s too seductive to not stay.

Lady selling squid. Photo by Nick Amis.

In the town of Koh Kong, near the border with Thailand, there’s a Buddhist spiritual retreat with a bizarre collection of sculptures by its riverfront.

In the photos below you’ll see sadistic-looking sculptures killing people with the heads of animals. You’ll see a man being sawed in half while being pecked by a garuda, a bird of Buddhist mythology.

Ask different people about them and you’ll get different answers: it was made by the Khmer Rouge to turn people away from religion. No, it was meant to scare people to tell the truth.

This article says it’s a depiction of Buddhist hell – what happens when people stray from the moral path.

It’s difficult to get a straight answer, since the Khmer Rouge abolished so much knowledge and culture during its four-year reign of terror. So we are left with our imaginations, to which these statues leave plenty of space.

Click thumbnails to see full pictures. Click on arrows below photos to advance.

[View with PicLens]

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If you want a real mind screw, visit Phnom Penh’s killing field and its glitziest night club on the same day.

On one you will see what a genocidal nightmare Cambodia once was. You will be greeted with a tower containing hundreds of skulls arranged by gender and age. You will walk past mass graves and step on human bones that emerge from the ground with each passing rain.

On the other you will see young Cambodians in Gucci and shades spending lavishly on vodka bottles. You will see them dancing and effecting the same touch-me-not demeanour of their Western counterparts. You will see them in massive hotel-casino-shopping complexes that would make Las Vegas feel inadequate.

And you won’t believe that these two realities are only separated by 25 years.

Learning recent Cambodian history is one of those Stalinist paradoxes where the tragedy of a few get multiplied into the faceless statistic of the many. It’s estimated that two million people were murdered by the Khmer Rouge, roughly a quarter of the country’s population, between 1975 and 1979.

Even the infamous Tuol Sleng prison, where Phnom Penh’s intellectuals were detained, tortured and killed, tries to humanize the numbers with photographs of the victims. But even then, these thousands of faces blur into an anonymous crowd, too numerous for empathy.

And so the question that rings louder is a practical, not a sentimental one: if the nation’s brightest – the doctors, engineers, lawyers, musicians, poets – were exterminated and only the uneducated peasants remained, what does this make of Cambodia’s present society?

Are most of them uncultured simpletons? Is this why there’s so much corruption? And does this explain the decadence of the nightlife despite the wounds that are still open as Khmer Rouge leaders quietly escape justice?

But this would be reverse engineering, and when it comes to societies, it’s never that simple. There are no prescribed grieving periods for genocide. Should Cambodians put their lives on pause while an ineffective justice system fails to nail those responsible?

Perhaps, instead of being shocked and dismayed, I should be glad. Perhaps those young Cambodians are doing the right thing: enjoying the freedom that their parents were robbed of. And that includes the freedom to have stupid fun amidst so much lingering pain.

Photo by Lawrence Sinclair