Phnom Penh – first impressions

Monday, August 25, 2008
5:11 PM ICT
Room 29, Golden Sun Guest House
Phnom Penh, Phnom Penh Province, Cambodia

I just realized that I’ve been in Phnom Penh almost four days now, and have yet to say anything about it. Also, it’s way too hot out and I spent the day sweating, so I’ll sit in the AC and blog.

Phnom Penh, compared to Siem Reap, is bigger, louder, dirtier (in places), much much cleaner (in other places), more Western, and much much richer. There’s a sense in Siem Reap (and, from my brief view of it, Battambang as well) of being removed, certainly from the Western world, but also from anything apart from it. It’s less of a city-in-a-country, and more of a lone village, the way much of the world would have been organized in an earlier era. City-states, tribal villages, nomadic tribes, that kind of feel. But no such feel exists in Phnom Penh. You’re clearly in a city-in-a-country, and not only that, but a capital city, a city-in-control-of-a-country. There is evidence of this in the size of the city (population is now over 1 million, which is huge here) and in the variety in the city (there’s actually separate industrial, residential, and commercial areas that are far away from each other). It’s also in the number of beautiful ornate temple-like government buildings, evidence of the rampant corruption in the Cambodian government. (Warning, this is a link to a dry US government report, but damnit, it’s an interesting dry US government report!) And it’s also in the embassies, which all have a fortress-like quality that attest the constant instability of the Cambodian political situation (at least one embassy – the French embassy – has actually become a battleground during at least one time of political upheaval – the rise of the Khmer Rouge).

Phnom Penh is not only a city-in-a-country, it’s also clearly a city-in-the-World. The influence of the West is everywhere, as billboards for KFC cover the walls around the construction sites where skyscrapers and casinos are going up. Unlike Siem Reap, the conversion to a market economy is almost complete (though, when we asked him to take us around the city, our tuk tuk driver still took us to the American-style shopping mall as a point of pride for Phnom Penh). When we went to the bar, it was last summer’s top-40s playing, as opposed to the stuck-in-the-80s selection in Siem Reap (and similar could be said of fashion). Phnom Penh is also a much more tourist-centred town. Almost all public employees speak passable English, the waterfront has been redeveloped to house a series of bistros and restaurants serving burgers and fajitas. It’s somewhat surprising, really, because it’s Siem Reap that really has a 90% tourism-based economy, while Phnom Penh has a much more diverse base (there’s a consistent pattern in Cambodia of any government initiative, be it economic development, traffic laws, or HIV/AIDS prevention programs, never making it out past the capital city’s border).

Phnom Pehn, crawling with tourists at dusk.

One tourist on a boat, in front of the Phnom Penh waterfront, shortly after nightfall.

It’s also somewhat frustrating, really, because the town is so tourist-y it becomes difficult to have an ‘authentic’ Cambodian experience. There’s no need to ever use the few Khmer words I've picked up, because everyone speaks English; and I never worry about doing some hand gesture that might offend a local, because all the locals have so much experience with westerners that they’re doing the same hand gestures themselves. The streets are in fact specifically designed to make it hard to find the areas where local, non-tourist-serving Cambodians are (it took me and Natalie accidentally wandering down a side street, through a temple courtyard, and down an alleyway to find a marketplace where Cambodians actually shop). You find yourself migrating to Western food restaurants, not because you want to, but because it’s hard to find anything else (a small obligatory ‘Khmer food’ section at the back of every menu and featuring the same five dishes notwithstanding). Even balut is hard to find in Phnom Penh!

However, I must admit that, despite myself, I do occasionally find it a relief to be able to find French fries that taste like French fries, or to be able to ask for a fork without restoring to a five-minute pantomime. I just sometimes wish the restaurant down the street didn’t have poutine on the menu.