We are eating samosas and drinking Angkor beer when we hear a loud metallic boom, a scream, and the screeching sound of brakes. It is just after 9 p.m. in February, and I am with my friend James at an outdoor table on the popular Sisowath Quay—the road and promenade parallel to the Tonle Sap river in Phnom Penh. The sounds startle us out of conversation.
Ninety minutes prior: In a taxi to my hotel after having just landed in Phnom Penh for an academic conference.
"How's life in Cambodia?” I ask the cab driver. I had a foolish notion that we would fall into comfortable banter about, say, local sport. He would say something like: “Couldn't be better! Our national football team just kicked Thailand’s butt in a friendly.” And I would reply with a witty remark that would be met with laughter. Instead, he thinks for a moment and then explains to me about a widening gap between the rich and poor that is on everyone’s mind. More and more reports about it in the news, he says.
“And this gap is nowhere more recognizable than here in Phnom Penh,” he says, as he helps me with my suitcase. He gives me his WhatsApp number and tells me to text him when I need a return ride to the airport. Day or night, he says, I can take you.
Thirty minutes prior: Walking from my hotel to an Indian restaurant to meet James.
The ten-minute walk from the Plantation Urban Resort to the Indian restaurant called Indigo passes by the Royal Palace complex where the King of Cambodia lives. The street next to the Royal Palace complex is quiet due to the barricades at either end blocking traffic. A few drivers nap inside their tuk-tuks. Further down the street a woman spreads out a sheet on the sidewalk with some snacks and water. A child runs around barefoot on the deserted street, laughing. The woman watches her with a calm expression on her face.
Once I hit Sisowath Quay, the chaos begins. I am reminded of a trip to Ho Chi Minh city 24 years ago with my old high school buddy Pete. After busy days of sightseeing, we spent our evenings sitting at sidewalk tables sipping 333 Lager and scooter watching. Hundreds of them. Fast, noisy scooters, often loaded with a family of four, battling for position in the scooter capital of Asia, as it's often called.
"How have we not seen one accident in this…this…chaos?” I remember saying to Pete on one of our last nights in Vietnam.
Twenty-four years later, I am again sitting outside sipping beer in a Southeast Asian capital. Sadly, now, the script has flipped. I jump up to catch a closer look. It happened on the street about 20 meters from where we are sitting. A young woman lay motionless on the pavement. Her scooter is down a few feet away. Was she hit by a car, which then sped away? I turn to James, but he hasn't moved. He sits calmly in his chair looking out at the street with a half-eaten samosa in front of him.
Most scooters slow, dodge, then speed away. A few stop and begin to help. Then, miraculously, an ambulance arrives. How did it get here so quickly? The woman is awake. She is moving an arm. The paramedics put her on a stretcher and take her to the ambulance. Then, just like that, the ambulance is gone.
I go back to our table. We sit in silence and watch the scooters and vehicles fall into their chaotic rhythm again. I order another beer.
“Hey,” James breaks the silence. “What time did you want to rent our bicycles tomorrow morning?”
The following day, we had a plan to rent bicycles and ride around Koh Dach, or “Silk Island,” which is known for its silk-weaving farms. The farms are unfortunately in decline due to competition from cheaper industrial fabrics imported from other countries. Silk island sits in the middle of the Mekong River, in the northeast part of Phnom Penh. We caught a tuk-tuk ride to the ferry landing, about nine kilometers north of our hotels, and took the ferry across the river to the island. The ferry carried men, women, and children commuting to school and work. There were also a few tuk-tuks, and scooters on board.
On Silk Island, we rented bicycles from a small open-air shop. An old cash register sat atop a long horizonal cooler that was almost empty except for a couple dead insects on the bottom and a few bottles of water for sale. Next to the register, small bags of potato chips hung from a rack. The shop had six, very old mamachari bicycles available to rent. I have written about them before—the mamachari bicycle is the all-purpose, step-through bicycle found all over Japan. The mamachari bicycles for rent here looked as if they might have been the ones that first debuted in Japan in the 1950s. The saddles looked the most dismal, showing what decades of baking in the sun will do. Their dry, cracked shells were patched up with duct tape, peeling at the edges, and all of them had lost their foam padding years ago.
It was early, so it wasn't too hot yet. And unlike Sisowath Quay, there were very few motorbikes and cars. We cycled through rural farmlands and followed the signs to one of the small farms to witness the operation. We saw how silk fibers from the cocoons that the worms spin are harvested and then spun on old looms into silk fabric. We spent over an hour wandering among the looms and admiring the operation. Before leaving, we browsed the many silk products for sale in a small shop. James bought a couple gifts for his daughters back in Japan.
It was approaching noon, and the temperature was reaching 32°C. The road that loops around the island turned to dirt, and the dust and humidity became unbearable. The old bicycles were becoming increasingly difficult to pedal too. I was out of water. But worst of all—the saddle was wreaking havoc on my ass.
We cycled past a dirt field where a few children were playing volleyball. One girl paused, waved, and yelled “hello” in English as we cycled past. All I could muster was a faint smile.
All over the island were signs for Ganzberg beer and Krud beer. Ganzberg sounds like a cheap German beer, but it’s a local beer brewed in Cambodia. James told me that he tried it in his hotel the previous night and it was awful. Krud sounds like, well, crud, but it’s also a local beer brewed in Cambodia. Despite the unfortunate names, I would have given all the riel in my pocket for a cold one at that point in our ride.
Instead, I settled for water when we finally returned to the shop after having circled the island. Then we caught the ferry and a tuk-tuk back into town just in time to clean up before some late-afternoon events at the conference venue.
The following morning began with one of the most difficult decisions one has when visiting Phnom Penh—which tuk-tuk to take from the assortment of guys accosting you when you exit your hotel. Twenty-five years ago, when I first visited Thailand, I fancied myself as a kind of savvy negotiator in similar situations.
“How much to Wat Pho?” I would ask. “$1.50? That’s way too much. The guy over there can take me for $1.20.”
Today, I am more relaxed, and my decision is solely based on the aggressiveness of the drivers, i.e. the one who essentially grabs me by the shirt and pulls me into his tuk-tuk. Tuk-tuk rides are great, by the way, if you can handle the heat. They are not only cheap, but you always feel more connected to the pulse of a city compared to a taxi ride.
In the tuk-tuk that morning, I was grateful that the driver’s style of driving was less aggressive than his sales pitch. We rode slowly through the city, which was perfect for my penchant for people watching. I will most certainly overlook the temples that we pass, and I will miss those historical buildings I was told to check out, but ask me what expressions the two old locals sitting on the curb were wearing, and I’ll have an answer. At one intersection, we came to a stop in front of one of the many open-air cafés and restaurants along the street, with men sitting on stools, silently hunched over bowls of something on plastic tables.
The moment gave me a few extra seconds to watch two young women who were working in the café. They both wore yellow shirts, matching the décor, with the name of the shop written on the front. They were chatting about something in a relaxed and breezy manner before suddenly locking arms and laughing at something. My stoplight turned green, though, and my tuk-tuk pulled away quickly, leaving me with a mental snapshot which I don’t think will ever be erased.
After a full day at the conference, including my own presentation, I was taking an evening stroll around the back of Wat Phnom temple when two cyclists stopped for water nearby. It was the first time I had seen anyone riding their bikes in the city proper. These guys were serious cyclists too, with expensive road bikes and colorful Lycra outfits. I stopped and said hello. One guy was British and the other was Cambodian. They worked in the city at a foreign bank. They told me commuting by bicycle in the city was impossible, but that there were some good rides further north outside the city, which they frequently did.
On the last night of the conference, I met James for dinner at Pizza 4Ps on Sisowath Quay. It’s an upscale Japanese pizza restaurant, and we were lucky to get seated. The place seemed to attract an equal mix of foreigners and wealthy Cambodians. A few minutes after we ordered, I saw the Japanese hostess leading two young guys, early 20s maybe, toward the vacant table next to us. One was looking at his smartphone; the other was wearing dark sunglasses and singing some English rap lyrics. As soon as they sat down, one of them—the "rapper"—leaned over toward our table:
“Wassuuuuup," he said, sounding like he had just come from an early 2000s Budweiser beer commercial.
We exchanged some small talk and I learned the two were Cambodian, but both born in different parts of the U.S. Apparently, they met a few years ago while attending an international secondary school in Bali. One of them mentioned something about his father being involved in international business, but I didn't quite understand because I think he was kind of rapping it. In addition to a rap-style of conversation, they also enjoyed dropping outdated slang from two decades ago.
“So, have you guys been here before? It’s pretty good pizza, right?” I asked.
“Fo’ shizzle, best in town,” said Rapper’s friend, before giving each other an animated fist pump. Oh, and the fist pump was another unforgettable feature of the conversation. It would usually follow an utterance like “sweet,” which itself would be stretched out and spoken with an intonation that sounded like Victoria Jackson from Saturday Night Live.
At first, I felt kind of hesitant to engage, having had an expectation of a quiet last meal after a several busy days at the conference. As the evening went on, though, I came to enjoy talking to them. Rapper told us of his musical aspirations for the future. But honestly, he was awful. He kept trying out new rap lines, awkwardly mixing them into our conversation. Yet they were falling flat, like bad jokes at a comedy club.
We finished dinner, stood up, and started to say goodbye. Rapper asked for my name, which we hadn’t exchanged yet.
“Brian.”
“Yo, Brian, one more, one more,” he said.
“No, no," I smiled. “Really, it's okay.”
He ignored my pleads, though: “Yo, this is my new friend Brian,” Rapper rapped. “He is such a lion.” Rapper and his friend fist pumped. It was both painful and endearing at the same time.
The next morning, I tried to contact my taxi driver by WhatsApp, but I couldn’t get through. So I found myself in a tuk-tuk on the way to the airport. It was still dark and relatively cool. I thought of Rapper and his friend from the previous night. And the two cyclists. I thought of the two girls in locked arms at the café. And the mother and daughter playing on the street. Pairs of friends and relatives from sectors of society that, as my cab driver mentioned earlier, continue to grow further apart.
I couldn’t help smiling while reading this! What a great story and experience! Living/traveling vicariously through you! It’s “Uncle B, the Lion” now 😂
cool story, dude