If you’ve ever wanted to take your girlfriend to a brothel and pick up a couple of prostitutes to watch a little BBC World, I highly suggest you think twice about doing it now. As much as I imagined this happening to me, when it actually did it wasn’t quite what I had expected. Maybe it was the lack of porno music soundtrack that took the mystique away. Or maybe it was because there were two actual prostitutes in the room with us. Either way, this was a perfect example of our experience in Cambodia.

One of the guidebooks we read warned visitors about contracting temple burnout. It happens when a person can’t see another temple or they’ll go insane.

Causes: screeching Khmer women, unwanted child tour-gides, honking motobikes, Japanese tourists, burning incense, unpaved roads, more Japanese tourists posing for pictures, steaming hot sun, stinky public toilets and least of which ... the actual temples themselves. The tourist handbook, published by god-knows-who suggested each visitor take some time off each after noon and visit a nice restaurant in town or some of the not-so-fun tourist spots. We figured out a better cure: leaving Siem Reap.

But before I get to the point where we physically go the airport and leave Cambodia (the best part), I have to back-track a little to give some supporting evidence on why we wanted to leave so badly. I feel it’s necessary considering all the other positive stories we read online before we left and even some first-hand testimonials we’ve heard from people along our travels. Strange thing, I suppose, how one person can love a city so much and two other people can despise it so much.

The friendliest people we encountered while in Cambodia were the two prostitutes Susanne and I picked up after our first day of temple viewing. In nearly every country we have visited together over the past few years we’ve been able to meet local people willing to tell us a little about their cultures, customs, history and a few words of their language to get by (hello, thank you, goodbye, etc). In Cambodia we learned that everyone spoke pretty good English. Here are a few popular Cambodian greetings and phrases:

English Phrase - Cambodian Translation:

Hello - Give me a dollar!
Good Morning - You buy something?
Where are you from? - You buy something?
You want Buffet? - That’ll be $10 each + extra for drinks.
You want Guest House or Hotel? - How rich are you and how much commission can I make off of you?
When did you arrive? - Have you had a chance to figure out the real prices yet?

Nearly every conversation in Cambodia started with “where are you from?” This is a nearly universal phrase, but in Cambodia is merely a means to determine spending power. For the record, America is the wrong answer. Poland, Sri Lanka, South Africa and Tangalaskinazia (made up) all seem to put the script on hold for a few seconds.

I don’t mind giving money to a few lesser-privileged people, nor do I mind overpaying for some items I buy as long as the person I’m buying them from are somewhat genuine in their intentions. I suppose it goes back to when we arrived at the airport. We might as well had “Rich American Tourist” stamped on our foreheads. The problem is that we didn’t want any of the tourist trinkets, nor did we want to buy postcards from every woman and child in Cambodia. We simply wanted to be left alone to enjoy the temples in as much peace as possible.

Here’s how it all began. On the first morning of scheduled temple visits we had arranged a car for $20 a day, which would take us to any temples we wanted to and drive us anywhere in the city we needed. It was $20 for an air-con car, driver and all the petrol we needed. Simple contract. It was slightly changed when the driver we had arranged the night before “suddenly” had to do something else. Fortunately he called our hotel to inform them he wouldn’t be able to make it. Lucky for us, the hotel had their very own car! I hope my skepticism came through there ... We’re not positive, of course, but we’re pretty sure our original driver did not pass on the $20 fare between the hours of midnight and 6:00 am on his own. Either way, we still had the same deal in place; the only difference was that we got a much newer stolen Toyota Camry.

While eating breakfast we were approached by a Punky Brewster look-a-alike that asked us what we were paying for our transportation. She was pretty curious considering her and her travel companion had just arranged a moto-taxi (essentially a Honda motorcycle pulling a rickshaw) for 3 days for $80. Let me write that again, just so you don’t miss it: We’re paying $20 a day for a new air-con car with driver. They were being asked to pay $80 for 3 days to ride on the back of a motorcycle. Lonely Planet, Rough Guide and the local tourist publication list the moto-taxi at $6-8 a day (including driver). Not to forget that foreigners are forbidden to drive themselves to the temples. This serves two purposes: gives the local Mafia (did I write that?) more control over transportation and it ensures that everyone pays the inflated entrance fees.

The argument got worse once the young couple had additional ammunition to confront their con-artist moto-driver. It got pretty ugly, to be honest. Their driver was screaming about how he wouldn’t be able to eat and that we were “Killing Cambodia.” He even tried to claim it was $6-8 a person for the moto-taxi (which was clearly not the case). We offered to have the couple come with us for the day, since we had a pretty big car anyway and were heading to the same location. After the four of us sat waiting for 10 minutes inside the car, while the discussions continued outside, we were informed that our driver and hotel didn’t want to make the other moto drivers mad (bad for business, I guess) and that the other couple would have to find other transportation. Not wanting to argue, they got out and went to find a different moto-taxi.

We left for the temples on our own and the other couple, we would find out later, got a moto-taxi for $8 a day, including the distant temples. Since Susanne already wrote about the temples themselves, I’ll skip that part.

I’ll even skip the part where we went to a restaurant in what is referred to as “old market” or something like that. Since there really wasn’t a “new market” part of town I’m not sure where the name came from. What I could tell is that pretty much everything in Siem Reap was associated with tourism. The shops all sold the same things, you could get a foot massage three times on the same block and you could scarcely walk 10 feet without being asked to buy something.

When we found a restaurant that looked like it could serve humans, the food was all western and the prices were exactly what we would pay in America. $3-4 for a hamburger, slightly less for fried rice or noodles. The water you could buy in Bangkok for $.05 a bottle was now $1.00; a can of soda was suddenly $.75. This is either the brilliant bi-product of a tourist town or a country that lacks the production skills to make any goods themselves. Most things are “imported” from Thailand or Vietnam ... then marked-up accordingly. It didn’t matter where we ate, actually. The menus were all the same, with the exception of the buffet we were taken to on the second day ... that place cost us $20 for lunch. Flashback: our meals in Thailand ran around $5 total, including banana shakes and deserts.

Needless to say, we were disappointed.

In order to recharge ourselves at the end of a very long first day of temple visits, we decided to get a nice long massage someplace in the main town center. We pulled out the tourist guide our hotel had given us the first night and paged through the various listings. Knowing that there are “massage parlors” and “massage parlors” in Cambodia, we wanted to make sure we went to a legitimate one and not one of the “special” ones single male travelers seem to visit at night.

We picked an advertisement that showed a fairly respectable business that advertised something like “EVERYTHING you need to relax after a long day visiting temples.” I suppose we should have been tipped off by the all-caps lettering in everything (I’m going to try and scan the ad to post to the site). It really did look like the real deal. To be honest we weren’t really thinking about the ‘other stuff’ when we walked in, or we might have noticed the place was down a long alley and seemed to have unnecessarily dark tinted windows. The black lights in the lobby and the room full of young women behind a one-way glass window would have been some important items to note, as well.

We talked to the male-host at the front desk and told him that we wanted two traditional massages. He asked us, “one room, two beds?” We said yes. He grabbed a key from behind the counter and walked us up the stairs to a room at the end of a dark hallway. It was much like any guest house room we had stayed in previously. Two beds, tile floor, TV, air-con, bathroom with shower. This was the kind of place that went for around $15-20 a night in Bangkok, actually. It seemed pretty clean, but the lack of massage beds was kind of strange. I guess the traditional Khmer Massage can be performed anywhere, so why not a pair of full-sized beds? We were pretty curious why he needed to turn on the TV for us, however. The volume was rather loud and pretty much made it difficult to hear anything that would be happening in our room, or the rooms next to us. Perhaps he thought we might accidentally fall asleep during the massage and start to snore. It’s not like we were going to be making any loud noises, like screaming, jumping around or moaning.

To be continued ...

Counterfit Money

Our original itinerary had us staying in Siem Reap for between 4 and 5 days, ultimately heading south to Phnom Penh and then into Vietnam.

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