What just happened?
Sabrina and I are on stage on the upper deck being dressed up in traditional Cambodian garb and ‘posed’ by crew members. It’s highly embarrassing and to make matters worse our daughter is sniggering in the audience taking photos.
Somehow this tableau vivant encapsulates all the doubts I had about this mode of travel. Hoping that it would be as magical as the sailboat trip we took from Aswan to Luxor a few years back, I’d persuaded myself that it wasn’t really a cruise, just a slow boat up a lazy river.
It takes a week to travel up the Mekong from Ho Chi Minh City to Siem Reap and we are now at the halfway point in Phnom Penh. Our fellow passengers are a cruising case study, consisting of a clutch of ‘silver fox’ Australian, French and German couples from cruise brochure central casting, a superannuated American gentleman with a ‘wife’ young enough to be his daughter, and two German guys from Bordeaux who have become our fast friends.
It’s the tail end of the rainy season and every morning before the shore excursion we get an update on the water levels in Tonlé Sap Lake, as it’s touch and go whether it will be deep enough for us to cross it without running aground. At the moment, prospects are hopeful as it has been raining non stop further north. None of us wants to make the final part of the journey to Siem Reap by coach, so these bulletins are greeted with cheers. Have we gone back to high school? It certainly feels like it.
This journey breaks every rule of how we like to travel, and yet it’s had its moments. First there was a humbling and affecting visit to Binh Thanh island by sampan through groves of white flowered water hyacinths and the floating pontoons of red tilapia and barra fish farms to a small village.
Here, we were welcomed solemnly by the community leader who invited us to attend class with the local children who proudly showed off their English to us. Then, close to the Cambodian border yesterday in Tan Chau we perched precariously on single seater cycle rickshaws and were ridden through frenzied traffic to the market, where amongst the lottery ticket sellers, deep fried tarantula snacks and produce stands we encountered cages of tiny birds which we were happy to hear are bought to be released for good fortune.
Back on board, we sailed through the darkness to Phnom Penh, kept awake by a massive electrical storm and welcome torrential rain. Earlier, the boat’s Pho chef, whose excellent soup we’ve been enjoying every morning for breakfast, taught Sabrina and our daughter how he makes Vietnamese Spring rolls and Cambodian Amok Chicken.
Cambodian Amok Chicken: Serves 2
Personally I prefer the freshness of Vietnamese Summer rolls to their deep-fried Spring counterparts but Amok chicken was completely new to me and is a beautifully fragrant dish which works equally well with prawns as the main ingredient.
1 red chilli
200ml coconut milk
1 handful of fresh coriander
300g diced free-range chicken breast
1 lime
1 handful of fresh mint
80g brown rice
1 shallot
80g baby spinach
1 tbsp tamari (Soya)
2 tbsp yellow Thai curry paste
2 tsp turmeric
80g green beans
Rinse the rice several times, then add 2 times the weight of water in a saucepan and bring to the boil until the water has reduced to just bubbling on the surface, turn down the heat to simmer, until all the water has been absorbed.
Finely slice the shallot. Thinly slice the chilli. Trim and quarter the beans. Roughly chop the coriander and mint leaves. Quarter the lime.
Heat a medium frying pan with 2 tsp oil on a medium heat. Add the chicken and brown for 5 mins, then add the curry paste, shallot, turmeric, beans and half the coriander. Cook for 5 mins, until the shallot is softening.
Add the coconut milk, tamari, spinach and half the mint to the pan. Season with black pepper and gently simmer for 10 mins, until the curry has thickened and the chicken is cooked through. Check your chicken is cooked through by cutting a large piece in half; the flesh should be white and the juices running clear. Cook for longer if necessary. Squeeze in the juice from 2 lime wedges.
Serve the curry with the rice. Garnish with the chilli slices, remaining herbs and remaining lime wedges.
With 24 hours to explore Phnom Penh we have opted out of the tour schedule and effectively ‘jumped ship’. Having watched ‘The Killing Fields’ on board last night we are even less keen to visit them with this morning’s shore party, let alone the Genocide Museum and S21 prison which are also on the schedule- a trifle shallow perhaps, but then we had our fill of these kinds of places when we lived in Poland.
This erstwhile ‘Paris of the East’ is today an uneasy mixture of conspicuous, tinted- window Range Rover driving wealth, gilded temples and palaces and abject, litter-choked poverty and blight. With no particular destination in mind we stumbled upon the Wat Phnom pagoda (ironically a critical symbol of Khmer identity) where we paid the $1 ‘foreigner entry’ (a stack of small denomination greenbacks is a critical accessory on this trip) and the Art Deco central market with its massive concrete dome where we were assailed by hawkers selling fake Rolexes. Far more interesting and fun was the Russian Market (so-called for its popularity with Russian expats in the 1980s) and a destination for everything from cheap clothes and motorcycle parts to some of the best street food in town (we grazed on wok-fired noodles for just $2 a plate).
The Khmer Rouge apparently still cast a long dark shadow over this city in particular, and we learned at dinner this evening from a French Professor of Linguistics and long term Phnom Penh resident who has joined the boat for the leg to Siem Reap, how dominant former Khmer Rouge leaders still are amongst the political and business elite, in this “nation’s collective amnesia”.
Eager for one final taste before our departure at first light tomorrow to the silk weaving island of Okna Tey on the Upper Mekong, we hailed a tuk tuk from the rank near the boat’s gangplank for a nightcap at the bar at the storied Foreign Correspondents Club. In my fantasy version of this episode we encounter a bunch of hard-bitten, chain smoking journalists nursing whiskies on bar stools as they file copy, but the sad reality was that we found ourselves surrounded by middle aged ‘fat whites’ necking bottles of Angkor beer while their bored young dates stared into space. A fitting close perhaps to our experience of a city we so much wanted to love, but couldn’t quite grasp.
The final word on this subject goes to the ship’s captain Sintot, a lovely man who we got to know a little on the voyage. I was asking him why there were so many flash cars in Phnom Penh. “I bet they didn’t earn them through agriculture” says I. “No, not agriculture, ugly-culture” he retorts, quick as a flash.
I passed through Phnom Penh this October on my way to Saigon and Hoi An.
Although much remains the same, a lot has changed in the seven years since your article. There is still a huge and widening gap between rich and poor. But it struck me that the levels of abject poverty I saw the last time I visited are now less evident. And this in spite of the recent turmoil associated with COVID.
The paved streets now extend much further from Sisowath Quay than I remembered. Plenty of new roads for all those 'ugly' cars — no doubt due to Chinese investment. On my first trip, one street back from the Quay was rubble and rubbish, and not much else from there on out.
Now there is a thriving and bustling city that extends further than the eye can see from the top floor of the Hyatt.
In 2015, looking out from the FCC to the opposite bank, all you could see were a few flickering lights. Now that stretch of land is teeming with new developments. These are not aimed at the tourist dollar particularly. Rather they are the result of an increasingly thriving local economy.
That said, Phnom Penh now has more than its fair share of new western interlopers. Starbucks, KFC and Burger King are amongst the many eyesores replacing earlier landmarks. The FCC is one of several that has disappeared to make way for these newcomers.
The 'Fat Whites', with girls barely half their age in tow, are still around but in smaller numbers, I thought.
It's not the 'Paris of the East' that my parents knew when we lived there in the early 60s and it never will be again. But it's heartening to see that conditions do seem to be improving for the majority of Cambodians — improving too slowly, certainly, but at least a change in the right direction.
The last bit about the Khmer elites still being in power and the reality of the FCC reminds me a lot of what I saw in Seoul and many parts of eastern Europe. People rarely change as easily as flags and names in many parts of the world.