September 9, 2022
Happy Friday, travelers!
This week, I’m sharing a memory of my second week traveling solo. I was in a place often overlooked, with a history so complicated that the majority of what you see is new. Just fifty years ago, the city was reduced to rubble. Talk about building anew.
As the sun went down, I emerged into the breakneck chaos of Phnom Penh. A young woman. Alone. Foreign.
And on a mission to find tantalizingly good food.
In a place like Phnom Penh, I don’t have to look far. I’d tried my first dosa, oyster mushroom calamari, even curry from a banana leaf bowl. Tonight’s restaurant was a rooftop hideaway with trendy décor and a Cambodian take on an American menu. I typically stay away from these places, which are in every single country I’ve traveled to. I anticipate they will also make an appearance in the 173 I have yet to see.
This one was on deck simply because it stayed open long enough for me to make it there, and had a veggie dog that looked interesting enough to try. And when not much else is open, those two reasons are as good as any.
At the threshold of the small hotel lobby, I duck my head out of the peace and stillness into the roar of Phnom Penh at night. I will never, ever regret traveling there. I even had no problems there as a solo female traveler.
But Phnom Penh1 is by far the worst place I’ve been to for walking.
Cars, tuk tuks,2 motorbikes, and delivery trucks all tangle in a web of traffic that my outsider eyes could not for the life of me comprehend.
To walk was to enter into a frail negotiation with drivers whose feet seemed to rarely touch the brake pedal. It was go, go, go, all the time at breakneck speed.
Instead of hanging a right toward the Royal Palace, riverwalk, and Independence Monument like I had every time before, this time, I hung a left.
At the end of my Phnom Penh travel guide, I wrote this:
The uncertainty of travel can place you in the most unexpected of places, at the most unexpected times. And when all of that works together to push you out of your comfort zone, the magic of life, away from the comfort of familiarity, shows its true, potent colors.
Phnom Penh is technicolor, my friends. Captivating technicolor.
I hung a left, and walked into the technicolor of Phnom Penh.
Amidst the craziness of people going about their business, I felt a sense of comfort. There is something cathartic about being surrounded by thousands, even millions of people each on their own path. It is separation and congruence all at once. It’s having a solitude of sorts without being alone alone.
My path this night started out as a quest for good food, but became more than that. I didn’t have much time left in Phnom Penh, and I didn’t know if or when I’d be back. When you’re on borrowed time, the senses magnify. Small things you didn’t notice before are now significant and lasting. Sights, sounds, scents—it teeters on the edge of overwhelm.
I’m about halfway there when I see an elementary school-aged boy fall off the motorbike he’s riding. I’m almost to the rooftop when the sidewalk runs out. It’s usually a good thing to save money, but this time, penny pinching was a mistake.
I should’ve just taken the Grab.
But then, I saw the night market. The street was not for pedestrians, but the vendors took it over. It was ours now.
Did this stop young men on motorbikes from flying past? Of course not. But it did make me stop and sense the magic.
Now, the night market is no place for a vegan. Or, at least, a squeamish one.
Full-bodied fish, scales still intact, laid across tables staring back at you with one lifeless eye. For all intents and purposes, this was not my place.
But I lingered.
Night markets are like an organism of their own order and making. They are larger than life, and the unspoken rules are many. When I walked past their booths, little old ladies smiled brighter than the sun. Brighter than the lights in Phnom Penh.
A few more steps and I’d reach my own destination. But dinner wasn’t even at the forefront of my mind anymore.
Instead, I compared this city bustling with life that I’d just witnessed with the city it was not even 50 years ago.
Because in 1975, Phnom Penh was empty. Cambodians that lived there were on a supposed 3-day “evacuation.”
Three days became three years. Three years of toil, struggle, pain, and death.
I imagine how eerie this place was then compared to what it is now. The Phnom Penh of today is a bustling metropolis with its own strong heartbeat. That is what it is supposed to be—this hustle and bustle is a look in the face of the city’s painful past and tells it to stay in the rearview.
In the 1970s, there was civil war in Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge became the new government under dictator Pol Pot. For the few years they ran the show, they attempted to create an agrarian dictatorship. Farmers became the top of society, intellectuals the bottom.
People living in Phnom Penh were cast out of their homes and sent walking to the countryside for reassignment to work in the fields. The fruits of their labor belonged to the dictatorship, and the food rations they were given in return for backbreaking long days in the boiling heat were paltry. When people died, it was unclear whether it was from starvation, fatigue, illness, or all of the above.
After the Khmer Rouge regime fell, Phnom Penh had to be rebuilt from the ground up.
To see Phnom Penh today, in all its technicolor, is a privilege. So many people did not.
As I sat on the rooftop overlooking a vast expanse of the city, I saw the pulse of a place that is very much alive, against all odds.
Phnom Penh is a place that refused to die.
What’s on My Tray Table
Under the Banner of Heaven is a masterpiece. Absolutely majestic, unflinchingly honest, bone-chilling in its entirety. If you watched on Hulu, read it. If you didn’t, read it. Listen to it. However you prefer your nonfiction.
The book opens with a murder. But not a murder of any kind—a family murder. Even still, there are unfortunately plenty of murderers whose victims are their blood or marriage relatives. What truly sets this one apart is the motive of the crime.
When pressed by attorneys and reprimanded by an austere, take-no-nonsense judge, Ron and Dan Lafferty, remorseless and resolute, said six unbelievable words:
God told us to do it.
With this heinous crime at the center, Jon Krakauer presents a meticulously researched history of Mormonism. From its notorious past of polygamy3 to its forgotten past of violence,4 there is an almost overwhelming amount of information to take in.
Krakauer also highlights the steep divisions between Latter-day Saints and self-described Fundamentalist Mormon groups whose largest disagreement is over polygamy. Latter-day Saints say it should be revoked.5 Fundamentalist Mormons say it is part of God's rightful plan for humanity and must be lived out for the good of everyone involved.
Before they murdered two relatives, Ron and Dan Lafferty were raised as Latter-day Saints. Their transition to Mormon Fundamentalism was the beginning of the end.
How it transpired and the history that made it possible could be the stuff of bestselling fiction. Except it’s real. Very, very real.
This book gets five stars from me. Here are links for Amazon and Bookshop.
Be brave and stay that way,
Sarah
People that love Vietnam will say it offers the craziest experiences crossing the street, not Cambodia. I went to Vietnam right after this and Phnom Penh still takes the cake for me.
Highly recommend riding in a tuk tuk at least once in your life. It was my preferred mode of transport in Cambodia and you can hail one in the Grab app, similar to Uber.
Polygamy makes me next-level nauseous. Picturing myself in a polygamous marriage makes me want to jump off a cliff.
It’s important to note that the violence in Mormon history is able to be forgotten not only because of revisionist history, but mainly because their crimes were blamed on Native American tribes that lived nearby.
However, there is a belief in Latter-day Saint doctrine that there will be polygamy, or “plural marriage” in what they call the celestial kingdom (or heaven).