Sick in Phnom Penh

Cambodia depresses in many ways. Phnom Penh is the same excrement cavity it was 5 years ago, littered with garbage and reeking of urine, and, as is the case with all 4th world countries, it is still expensive — featuring much lower standards for much higher prices than next-door 2.5th world Thailand. If anything, Phnom Penh is worse than it was five years ago: it now has hellish rush hour traffic, too.

(I suppose the minister of finance might argue that the extenuating circumstance for this traffic is that every other car on the road is a Lexus).

The National Museum’s collection is much less worth seeing than I had remembered it, perhaps because I have seen the Guimet since. Perhaps only one item’s really worth the trip — a shard of a gigantic reclining Visnhu from an island in the Western Mebon, disconcertingly smiling head plus fragments of three arms, which they will not allow you to photograph whether legally or illegally (too many staff busy selling offering flowers to bribe one’s way). There are also a gigantic Vishnu/Balarama/Rama group in black soap stone, and a sandstone headless squatting hunchback with a pigeon chest, a lintel with a Dhurodhyana-Bhima fight, and three pretty good Narasimhas — but none is worth the price of the trip.

There is no catalog for sale, either. I suppose I bought the last catalog they had — of female divinities in their collection — five years ago.

Airport departure tax is $25. This is an omission. It should be $1,000 and — I should have paid it.

Alas, the worst of the trip does not stay behind in Phnom Penh but packs into the airplane with me: they are my fellow tourists. Am I suffering from severe depression, or are they really what they seem to me: dirtier, poorer, uglier, more thoroughly tattooed and pierced and more disheveled than elsewhere? All look as if they’d been dragged out of garbage. And the faces, oh, the faces, goodness gracious, the faces: they aren't just ugly -- who of us dare cast the first stone -- they look positively wrong, misshapen, as if their maker dropped their freshly clay-shaped heads on the floor while they were still wet.

Mercifully, I say to myself, the flight is only an hour. But the seat’s so tight I am unable to move; and the back support curves inwards meaning anyone over 6 feet tall has to hunch. (Make sure you never ever fly Air Asia). Someone behind me opens a bag of some smelly... feed – chips? — and I nearly throw up smelling it.

I couldn't smell the thing without retching, but someone was eating it and no one else seemed to mind.