DRUG OVERDOSES BY BACKPACKERS

Backpackers relax on guesthouse terrace, on less than scenic Boeung Kak Lake

“I have to go support my heroin habit.”

I never expected to hear those shocking words in Cambodia. I heard this on the street, in the Lakeside neighborhood of Phnom Penh. The young man who said it was a British English teacher, on his way to work. To this day, I don’t know if he was kidding or not.

Lakeside is where all the cheapest accommodations are for the thousands of foreign backpackers who come visiting the city. It’s also where many of the foreign drug addicts live. Here there are cheap restaurants, cheap bars, and cheap guest houses. Plop down your backpack, and you can have a bed for five dollars a night. It also happens to be where the drug dealers come to prey on gullible backpackers.

I originally came here this morning looking for cheaper lodging, on recommendation of my buddy Kenny. He's a former US Marine, and Vietnam War veteran I met in Saigon. As he's a Southeast Asian nomad, I had run into him downtown on one of his swings through Cambodia to visit his Khmer girlfriend. Kenny recommended to me a hotel in Lakeside. But I’m finding this borough isn’t what I expected.

Most of the guesthouses here are built on stilts, backed up on Boeung Kak Lake. That sounds ideal, but the lake itself isn’t very picturesque, mainly because it’s so polluted.

This lake north of the downtown is one of the main destinations for area drainage during the rainy season. Unfortunately, developers have taken over much of the area's land. With money on their minds rather than good sense, the developers plan to fill in the entire lake. Environmentalists are concerned that this will cause even more flooding in Phnom Penh during the rainy season.

The shady Lakeside neighborhood of Phnom Penh

After a spaghetti lunch in a local restaurant, I step out in the street, to be greeted by a drug dealer. Then another. And another. It seemed that about every ten steps, somebody was trying to sell me drugs. I politely decline. I recall that Kenny likes to smoke marijuana now and then; now I know why he stays in this neighborhood.

I shouldn't be surprised that local pushers throng to Lakeside, since there are plenty of  hippie backpackers that stay here. Unfortunately, a few of them don't leave Cambodia alive.

Backpackers who smoke marijuana occasionally decide to try something new, with tragic results. They’ll ask the corner pusher for cocaine. Eager for money he agrees to get them cocaine, although he doesn’t know much about anything except marijuana. So he goes to look for a white powdery drug, and he ends up bringing back pure heroin. The backpacker goes back to his cheap guest house, and is dead by morning. The next morning, the hotel cleaning lady enters the room, and screams when she discovers his cold dead body. More than one foreign backpacker has ended up dead this way.

In another incident, the body of a backpacker was found floating out in Boeung Kak Lake. But this wasn’t a drowning accident, it was an overdose. My expat friends tell me that local police charge a guest house hundreds of dollars to remove a corpse. After the hotel staff found the foreigner's body dead from an overdose, they wanted to avoid this expense, so they dumped the corpse in the lake. So much for respect for the dead.

Back in the 1990’s there were occasional deaths of foreign backpackers, kidnapped and killed by the Khmer Rouge. Thankfully, they are no more. Today, backpacker deaths in Cambodia are self-inflicted.

View of guesthouses on Boeung Kak Lake

BIZARRE FOOD, GUNS FOR ART

Elephant walking on Phnom Penh's riverfront

As Phnom Penh’s main riverfront street, Sisowath Quay certainly has character. Besides the occasional passing elephant, I’ve encountered sights that you'd never expect to see in any capital city.

One morning on a downtown bus, I saw a macaque monkey calmly making his way crossing this busy downtown street! He crossed the road by walking along an overhead powerline, like it was a vine in the jungle. Well, that’s one way to avoid the heavy traffic.

Other animals found on Sisowath Quay are not live, but served for lunch! Riverfront food covers a very wide range of tastes, including the bizarre. Today I look at a street vendor's food, and to my surprise she's selling fried frogs! Not frog legs, but whole fried frogs! Smaller than the average frog, these munchables can be yours for only 24 cents a piece.

As frogs are not to my taste, I keep looking. In another bowl, she’s selling fried spiders! These are also fried whole, and they look like tarantulas. Another day I saw a street vendor selling fried snakes! They were cooked whole, and each snake was curled up, as if it was hibernating.

Local street food in Phnom Penh includes fried snakes!

Although most river front restaurants have menus with normal fare, some have equally bizarre food items. Right down the street, are a string of ‘pot pizza’ restaurants. No kidding. They have names like ‘Happy Herb Pizza’. 

I've never tried any of these pizzas sprinkled with marijuana, the only mind altering thing I consume is beer. Locals don't eat there much either, but I did meet some American university students who had tried the 'happy' pizza. They left disappointed; none of them felt stoned. The joke was on them, they probably had been served pizza with oregano.

As there are more reputable restaurants on the river side, I enter a doorway down the block, and walk upstairs to what locals call, 'FCC'. This is the Foreign Correspondents Club of Cambodia. An open air colonial style restaurant, it overlooks the Bassac River from its rooftop terrace. A horseshoe shaped bar has ceiling fans overhead. News photos line the walls, dating back to Cambodia's war years.

Would you like some fried insects to snack on?

I've worked with journalists in years past, so I occasionally eat here for nostalgia. Renovated in 1992 by a Hong Kong company, it’s now open to the public. Foreign reporters are rare in Cambodia these days. With no more war here, war correspondents are off in Afghanistan or Iraq. Journos in town today prefer a bar where power players go, like the Elephant Bar. 

The FCC's clientele tonight is mostly backpackers and businessmen, with a diplomat and deminer mixed in with the locals. The lack of windows means there are also many uninvited 'airborne' guests. I hear one patron say, “If you’re going to drink at the FCC, you have to be willing to take insects out of your beer!”

The fact that this 'Foreign Correspondents Club' isn't really for journalists is fitting for Cambodia, as there isn't a free press here anymore. Prime Minister Hun Sen gives only lip service to free speech, and freedom of the press. The fact is, he's Ex-Khmer Rouge - he's been slowly clamping down on press freedoms for years.

Restaurant sign, made from cut-up AK-47 assault rifles!

A recent Phnom Penh headline, detailed how a local newspaper publisher had been accused of 'defamation' by the Cambodian government. His offence: publishing three articles uncovering corruption by officials working for Deputy Prime Minister Sok An. Soon after, a public statement given by 21 rights groups said those defamation charges were a ‘threat to journalists’.

Nearby down the riverfront, is another odd eatery, the Mexican themed, 'Cantina'. I ate there another night with an American friend. That evening I didn't find the decor impressive, until I saw the restaurant’s sign on the wall. Made by some artist, the words ‘Cantina’ had been made out of dark, twisted metalwork. Looking closer, I couldn't believe what I saw! I got up, and approached the sign to make sure.

Clock made from cut-up Kalashnikov rifles!

All the letters on the sign were made from cut up assault rifles! The artist took those AK-47's, sliced them to pieces, bent them into shape, and welded them together to form each metal letter.

Looking to another wall I found a clock, made of the same deadly Kalashnikov rifle material. For the first time during my Southeast Asia travels, I finally saw guns put to good use.

Although disarmament after the Cambodia's wars was extensive, it's still common to see AK-47's carried by local police. A Kalashnikov is more firepower than they need, but they also use them for economic reasons. With many thousands of AK-47's left over when the wars ended, it was much cheaper for the government to convert them from military to police use, rather than to spend millions of dollars buying new pistols for every police station in the country.

Thankfully, guns are not often used here, and murder and armed robbery are rare. But like in Vietnam, purse snatchings are common. An English teacher friend, was a victim of the worst kind of purse snatching. One Sunday she left a church service, when two men on a motorbike approached her from behind. When they grabbed her bag, she tried to let go of her purse, but couldn’t, as the strap was wrapped around her shoulder. She was dragged more than 100 feet down the street. She suffered serious abrasions, and had to go to the hospital to recover.

As terrible as that incident was for her, Cambodia's crime rate is still far lower than in the USA, especially for violent crime. Culturally Khmers are not confrontational people, and don't resort to violence as quickly as Americans these days. Thankfully, it looks like Cambodia's era of violence is behind them.

BLOWN UP BRIDGE AND LAND GRABBING

#2459238 / Bridge was blown up by communists during the war - 1973 gettyimages.com

The 'Japanese Friendship Bridge' (aka Chruoy Changvar Bridge in Khmer language)  was a strange sight in Phnom Penh for years. Built in 1966 it towered over the Tonle Sap River, until it was blown up by the communists during the civil war in 1973. For years afterward, it was only a partial bridge. Like a long jump ramp for Evel Knievel, it stretched out over the river, and stopped, far short of the eastern riverbank. It was only a remnant of its former self, much like Phnom Penh.

After the Khmer Rouge fled, the bridge became a popular meeting place for courting couples. In dim evening light, young men would drive their motorbikes out onto the bridge, with their girlfriends on the back seat. They would park, and take in a rather romantic view of the river from atop the destroyed landmark. Eventually young lovers had to find another place to gather, as the bridge was rebuilt in 1995, again with Japanese aid.

Today is a good day for a stroll, so I decide to walk all the way across the bridge. Heading across, I note two inner lanes are for cars, with two outer lanes for motorbikes. A bored policeman sits in a guard shack part way across. His AK-47 rifle hangs by the railing. I remember another 'Friendship Bridge' that I had seen in Laos, but that one hadn't been destroyed. 

Crossing to the river's eastern side, I look under the bridge, and see an odd site. Directly underneath the bridge, huddled like trolls, a fence corrals a small herd of cattle. Beyond the bridges end, the level of poverty is noticeable, even for Cambodia. Homes are poor; some are no more than shacks. I don’t know it yet, but destruction will come to the people who live here very soon.

Rebuilt Japanese Friendship Bridge (photo: Phnom Penh Places)

Days later, I learn that 30 homes of this humble neighborhood were destroyed. Not by war, not by natural disaster, but by demolition crews. Guarded by a herd of civilian and military police, crews came in with heavy equipment, and leveled the homes.  30 families living here lost out. Their houses were bulldozed to make way for a traffic roundabout. Although the homeowners were given warnings about the demolition, some refused to move. All were offered a small plot of land in a distant district, but only 12 families had accepted. The rest turned them down.

I cross the bridge another day to find the neighborhood leveled, just as I'd heard. One of the better looking cement homes in the neighborhood was still standing though. Looking inside, I saw that on the wall was a photo of the homeowner, standing with Prime Minister Hun Sen. Some people have better connections than others.


Human rights groups have been pleading for improved land rights for Cambodia's poor for years. Some property rights laws are ignored, and evicted families are routinely denied due process. In this example at the Friendship Bridge, many families were considered squatters, even though they had lived on this land for more than two decades. During the Khmer Rouge years, most land titles and property documents were lost, so poor landowners and squatters end up being the the biggest losers in all this.

Downstream from the bridge, some Khmers still cross the river on small boats

Land grabbing is nothing new here, it's been going on for years. Take the case of a poor vendor I knew. After the fall of the Khmer Rouge, her family came to Phnom Penh and found a large house on one of the main roads. The rich, original owners were long gone. They were probably either dead, or fled the country. The young lady had survived the Khmer Rouge years with her widowed mother and younger brother, so they moved in as squatters. But that didn't last long.

“One day policeman come to our house. He say we have to go,” the vendor told me of that difficult time. “My mother cry so much.”

The family was soon evicted, without due process. After they were forced out, who moved in? The policeman and his family! Years later, he sold the house that he never really owned. “He sell the house for $500,000,” she told me.

Land grabbing continues to be a serious problem in Cambodia. In 2009 the government passed a controversial land law, which allowed the government to expropriate property for 'development', and to take away land to use 'in the public interest'. Rights groups rightly say that the law's vague wording leaves the law wide open for abuse, resulting in bribes for corrupt politicians, and the loss of land for thousands of poor farmers.

The Friendship Bridge squatters aren't just an isolated case. Other forced evictions have been well publicized, and rather than clearing land for government projects, they are often for commercial interests. Unscrupulous developers are reportedly paying unfair compensation to families for land, or even stealing it outright. Businesses owned by relatives of Prime Minister Hun Sen are sometimes involved.

There has occasionally been civil unrest due to this problem. I'm beginning to see for myself, that the present government of Cambodia has little credibility.