Bus operators and bar girls

Well, it's raining in the dry season here, so go figure (rainy season starts in June, so its not unprecedented). I'm now in Battembang.

This post isn't going to be in chronological order, as it is a summary of the past two days that I've spent on buses and in Phnom Penh, and will instead compile some common themes/experiences during the past two days.

As I have mentioned before, the giant elephant in the room when you visit Cambodia is the sex industry--not only the legal sex industry, but the child sex industry as well. Well, I ended up having dinner on my last night in Siem Reap next to a german couple with two young children. It turned out that the husband actually consults for an NGO trying to end the child sex industry in Cambodia. We start to talk, and he tells me some interesting tidbits. Though it seems that everywhere you walk in Cambodia you see publicly funded signs telling people to report child sex criminals, and to protect children, the reality isn't so simple. According to him, the Cambodian government acts like it is against the industry, but the problem is that the government and public safety officials are so corrupt because they are paid so poorly that they are often bought off by those who traffic in the child sex trade, and thus look the other way. Besides families actively selling their children into the trade, which is due to the extreme poverty suffered by lots of Cambodians, there are also active groups of criminals who raid primarily ethnically Vietnamese villages to take children. This guy has seen victims as young as three years old, and says that it is the Chinese and the Koreans, not Westerners, that are the main participants in the trade.

Its a clandestine, secretive world that the child sex traffickers operate in, and having heard plenty about it, you can't help but wonder what these places are like and where they are located. In fact, part of me wishes that the Cambodian government or an NGO investigating these matters would use me as a trojan horse--persuade somebody to take me to one of these places, and then call in the cavalry to bust the traffickers and then lock them up and throw away the key and then ensure that the children are spirited away to a safe and secure location where they can begin the process of recovery.

Meanwhile, in Phnom Penh, the legal sex industry is all around you--and you don't have to look very hard to see it. Just look for the mid-50s white males being escorted around by young Cambodian women who are young enough to be their daughters or granddaughters. They are everywhere--including the most popular/visited places in Phnom Penh.

Because Phnom Penh has such a notorious scene, I had to see one of these "girlie bars" for myself. Bad decision. It was quite possibly one of the sleaziest experiences of my life, and I will need at least a week's worth of showers (and quite possibly a sulfuric acid bath) to get the sleaze off of me. Again, think older mid-50s balding European males surrounded by women half their age and all over them--and not very attractive women as well. Some of these girls didn't look old enough to drive, let alone be in a bar--and these places were less than a block from the riverfront area that are lined with plenty of legitimate hotels and restaurants. To complete the sketchy scene, one woman even brought one of their kids to the bar. To paraphrase Reese Witherspoon, "you have a baby...in a [girly] bar."

In Siem Reap, though, you don't even have to go to a sketchy bar to be hit on by prostitutes--there is a bar in the pub street area that isn't a girly bar, but allows about 10 or so prostitutes to work there on any given night. I was talking to an American fresh off the plane from the University of Georgia, and he was attracting some unwanted attention by a working girl, so that's when I said another thing a straight single man should never say to a girl--"We're gay. We're together." It took her a second, but she figured it out and left us alone. Mission accomplished. In the interest of full disclosure, it's not the first time I've pretended to be gay--at Yale, we had this event called "casino night," and the per person rate for couples was cheaper than the per person rate for singles. So what did I and just about everyone else who went dateless but went with friends do to save a couple of bucks? Pair up at the door with someone in our party. Granted, this prompted more than its fair share of eye rolls, since the party was thrown by members of my dorm, and they knew that I wasn't gay, but they couldn't say anything since they would have done the same thing.

Meanwhile, I've had two more experiences that can be included under a list entitled "hell is..." being on a Cambodian bus with limited air conditioning, surrounded by screaming children, and stopping every half an hour for a good six or seven hours. I hate buses--I'd much rather prefer to either fly or take the train. In Cambodia, though, there is only one domestic air route, between Siem Reap and Phnom Penh, and the train tracks are, in the words of Lonely Planet, "more crooked than a Cambodian politician," which means trains are even slower than buses. This means that there is only one realistic option of getting around Cambodia--by bus.

Remember my description of the highway in Sumatra? Well, the main national highways in Cambodia are similar, but with less big trucks on them. There are, however, more pick ups and drop offs en route. Apparently, "express bus" in Cambodian translates to "stop several times en route to pick up and drop off people at random locations, and for several rest stops that are so rickety that they are a jet engine blast away from falling down." Khmer drivers also use the horn constantly--a necessity when they try to pass on the single lane roads, but I'm pretty sure when they installed the horns in the buses, they did it the wrong way--it seemed to be blowing in the direction of the passengers, not the outdoors. So, the blast occurs every five minutes or so.

If someone can invent a pocket sized cell phone reception blocker, I will pay them dearly for it. The only thing more annoying than people loudly talking on their cell phones in a language you can't understand are people talking loudly on their cell phones in a language you can understand. I also think that whoever invented the "customized ringtone" should be given a headset permanently strapped to their ears that plays every single annoying ringtone over and over again for the rest of their lives--and this includes Celine Dion's "my heart will go on" which is bizarrely popular for Khmer males.

There are also the adorable, yet annoying children. I realize that your children may be the apple of your eye, and its so great that they are exercising their bicep muscles by pounding and clinging to seat in front of them, and its so cute how they use their little legs to stomp all over the floor, and its simply a miracle of life that they can use their cute little lungs to squeal and cry and make all sorts of little noises, but to everyone else on a long bus ride, it is a form of torture that should be banned by the laws of the Geneva convention.

There isn't a lot to see out the window on a bus in Cambodia--just ricefields--lots of them, and without the scenic background of volcanoes like in Java or being filled with water and having good reflections. Just boring countryside.

What do Cambodian bus operators and Cambodian bar girls have in common? They both tell you want you want to hear--the bar girls, its obvious, but with the bus operators, they tell you it will only take four hours. Well, the Cambodian bus schedules are like the last five minutes of an NBA game--the time is pretty much irrelevant, and usually take an hour or two more to complete than you think. A general rule of thumb: add at least an hour to whatever time the bus operator tells you its going to take. If anything, this experience has only reaffirmed by stance that I have a five-six hour limit on buses--any longer, and I go nuts.

More to come on Phnom Penh...