Cambodia - Day Post

I arrived in Cambodia very early in the morning of the 5th of July. I am counting it as my 4th of July celebration since I did not sleep the night before...or the night of the 5th. But that is a different story (blog post).

Basically the best way I can describe Cambodia would be with phrase/title of Conrad's literary classic "The Heart of Darkness"...which coincidentally was the name of a bar we went to on our one night in Cambo. There is definitely an eerie feeling in the air and speaking as a vanilla face backpacker, I can say that I constantly felt like I was a mark for some scam...whether that is true or not I have no clue. I guess I'll find out in 9 months...just kidding.

After going through customs which charged $20 USD (or 1000 THB [$30 USD] in my case because I was too drunk from the night before to bother changing money to the "official" currency of USD...it's actually riel but almost no Asian country uses its own currency), I sat on a bench and waited for my buddy to arrive from Singapore.

We met up and walked out into the light of day of Phnom Penh. As is the case in all South East Asian countries, we immediately had 40 taxi drivers asking us where we were going. We finally settled on a taxi driver when we decided we weren't going to find a better deal and headed off into the wild city of Phnom Penh...

Or so we thought. Our taxi driver ended up speaking English and offered to take us on a tour and to the shooting range. It took us about 2 seconds to give in. So we headed off to the shooting range at 9:30AM...Keep in mind I was still feeling quite drunk at this point. On the way there our taxi driver told us that if we wanted we could shoot chickens or cows for a price. Apparently though, it is cheaper to go to the market and buy a chicken there. BYOC.

We got to the shooting range and chose to shoot the classic AK-47 from their exquisite gun menu seen below:It cost $50 for a magazine which had 30 bullets in it. Since we chose the automatic AK this took roughly 7 seconds to go through. For this 7 seconds we went into a shady ass building that looked straight out of some stage from 007 for N64 and proceeded to shoot a very loud gun. An aside: the guy in the video spoke very softly and bore an exact resemblance to the creepy Nam vet in The Simpsons. He kept asking us if we wanted to shoot a rocket launcher for $500...It was kind of tempting.

Instead we took some still shots as you can see above and dipped out. All in all it was cool but I felt a like I could have spent $50 better...or at least taken longer to spend it.

From there we went to the center of the city and found a place to stay. After throwing our stuff down we were ready to take Cambodeezy like a batch of crazy American devils...but we were not really sure what to do. So we did what all vanilla face backpackers do and caught a tuk tuk to "the killing fields."
We stopped at this gas station on the way to fill up. They had these on every corner.
The Killing Fields are where Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge slaughtered a few million Cambodians. All of the divots in the ground in this picture are where mass graves were uncovered during the 80s and 90s.

For some reason Pol Pot and his band of geniuses, all obviously possessing Mensa-like intellect, decided that they didn't like the direction Cambodia was headed in. So they decided a good idea would be to start Cambodian society over again their way. They rounded up all intellectuals, foreigners, people with money, and basically all of those who were established, in charge, and smart (or some combination of those), and tortured and killed them. The aim apparently was to bring Cambodian society back to "year zero" and start it over as a peasant/farming society. Well played gentlemen.

Of course I don't have to tell you that this plan obviously worked to perfection and Cambodia is now taking the lead on the world stage nowadays...er shit...they are now, by my calculations, at year 25ish. So they have a few thousand years of catching up to do. It shows.

The result of the shitstorm that occurred in Cambodia is that there has been a lot of war and poverty since the Khmer Rouge. There actually might have been some of that shit before, but I doubt as bad.

Suspected land mine explosion area...or maybe a place where they removed one.
This is the tuk tuk we took...took...to the killing fields. That is probably inappropriate.
These are the baller ass tuk tuks taunting our poor choice of tuk tuk.

After the Killing Fields we hit up an old school that was turned into a prison during the reign of Pol Pot to torture victims before taking them to be slaughtered at the killing fields.

You can imagine that this put us in the right frame of mind have a great night out on the town...so we headed home and got ready for just that.