Halfway down the Danube

Cambodia notes

Been in Cambodia for a week now.

Truth to tell, I'm not liking it as much as Laos. This may not be fair to Cambodia. I'm working harder, because I have to write both my Laos and Cambodia reports this week -- no way I'm going to get much done in Romania, with kids and moving. So I'm not seeing as much of the city, never mind the rest of the country.

That said, Phnom Penh is kind of a mess.

Random notes on Cambodia:

-- Phnom Penh has even more mosquitoes then Vientiane. Which is saying something.

-- The touts here are more persistent than Vientiane. White guy walking along = money; okay, I got that. But how many times must I say "No, I don't want a motorbike ride" before it sticks?

-- I went to the death camp at Tuol Sleng over the weekend. I don't have much to say about that.

-- In Vientiane, my schoolboy French took me a long way. Everyone over 40 or so spoke French. Here, not; when I try a sentence or two, people just look at me blankly.

It took a while for me to realize that this is because French speakers were particular targets of the Khmers Rouges. IOW, the people who used to speak French are mostly dead.

-- I have a theory that one good measure of the strength of a country's economy is the cutoff point between coins and notes. The higher it is, the stronger the economy.

So, the US cutoff is at either $1 or $5, depending on whether you take the dollar coin seriously. The Euro is at 5 Euros. The Japanese yen is at 500 yen, which was about $4.50 last time I looked.

The Romanian leu is at 1 New Leu, which is about 35 cents. The Albanian lek is at 10 lek, which is about 11 cents.

The Cambodian riel is at 100 riel, which is abou 2.6 cents. You can have a fistful of riels, a horse-choking wad of bills, and it may not be enough to pay for lunch.

Not that you'd use riels anyway. This is a heavily dollarized economy. You can use dollars instead of riel pretty much everywhere, and people seem to prefer it.

-- The King of Cambodia is King Sihamoni, who is a son of the famous King Sihanouk. (Not the oldest son. Cambodia doesn't do primogeniture.) Sihanouk is still alive, but he's in his eighties, and not well; he abdicated in 2004.

Sihamoni is the child of Sihanouk's sixth, last, and favorite wife, Monique. "Sihamoni" is a combination of his parents' names.

-- The Cambodian alphabet is based on the old Pali (Indian) script. It only has 47 or so letters, and is phonetic, so it shouldn't be that hard.

But it is, because it's in the most horrible font. Imagine if all English writing, menus, novels, street signs, blogs, was in the densest, gnarliest, most ornate possible Germanic Gothic script, like a medieval manuscript. That's what Cambodian writing is like.

It's partly a religious thing -- for most of Cambodia's history, Buddhist monks were the literate class, and there wasn't much to read besides Buddhist texts. And partly a nationalist thing. Attempting to reform the font is too close to attempting to replace the alphabet. Which the French tried to do, and which was incredibly unpopular. So, even the Communists kept the current (complicated, difficult, ugly) script.

-- On the plus side, Phnom Penh has a very nice esplanade along the Mekong. In the evening, it's full of picnicking families, strolling lovers, young men playing hacky sack (very popular here), and vendors selling cool drinks and fruit. The river is broader and fuller than in Vientiane, and the lights of the houses across the river reflect and twinkle in the dark waters. It's nice.

-- There is a park down the street from the hotel, and there is an elephant there. Every day. For a small fee, you can ride the elephant around the park. I have never ridden an elephant, so I think I must do this.

Posted by douglas at February 20, 2006 06:08 PM