The Further Adventures of Lauren - Cambodia

Cambodia wasn’t on Lauren’s original plan for this trip, but it ended up being one of her favorite countries. This is particularly noteworthy given how her time there started.

She and Shai took a bus from Ho Chi Minh City to Phnom Penh, beating her Vietnamese visa’s expiration by mere hours, and their first day there passed pretty uneventfully. They had another hostel friend with them, and they went out a bit and explored the city and the surrounding area. She ate a lot of fish amok and lok lak beef while she was in Cambodia, both of which she reported as being very good. I tried to make lok lak beef in September and I have to say that even though it wasn’t what you’d get in Cambodia it was really tasty, and when I sent a photo of it to Lauren she said it looked like it was at least within hailing distance of the real thing, so now I have a project.

Not all of the food in Cambodia was a hit, though. Toward the end of Lauren’s time in that country she and Shai made their way to Siem Reap and were cruising through a market looking for something to eat when they found what appeared to be hard boiled eggs for sale. Lauren bought one and quickly discovered that looks were deceiving and there was a fully-formed duck embryo inside. This probably would not have come as a surprise to a native Cambodian, but it did for Lauren.

At some point even the most adventurous soul will discover their limits, and this turned out to be one of Lauren’s. I asked her what she did once she made this discovery and she said, “Looked sad, then disposed.” And you know, I get that.

Lauren’s second day in Phnom Penh was something of a challenge.

The first thing you need to know about this challenge is that while she was in Vietnam Lauren took the opportunity to get her nails done, and it has to be said that they did a very good job of it. Probably too good, as events would prove. But they looked nice and that has to count for something.

The second thing that you need to know is that Lauren, Shai, and their other hostel friend went to a small playground in Phnom Penh and were having fun on the equipment when Lauren fell and got her hand caught in something on the way down, the end result of that being that she mostly ripped off two of the new nails from her right hand. And because the nails she had done in Vietnam were glued on there good and tight they ended up taking her real nails and a good chunk of the nail bed with them.

Fortunately Shai managed to procure a tuk-tuk ambulance to take them to a nearby clinic, where Lauren got to experience Cambodian medicine firsthand.

The first thing the doctor asked her was whether she was up to date on her tetanus shots, as he couldn’t really vouch for the safety of any of the equipment that way. A quick look at MyChart proved unproductive as it didn’t really want to work in Cambodia, so Lauren checked with Kim – Cambodia is 12 hours ahead of Wisconsin and the timing worked out well that way – who reported that yes, she was. She was thus cleared to have the doctor use his finest medical equipment (a pair of pliers) to remove the nails completely.

There were two issues with this.

First, one of Lauren’s inheritances from my side of the family is a fairly strong resistance to anesthesia. If you’re going to numb us up or knock us out you need to give us about half again the dose and wait about twice as long for it to kick in, otherwise you might as well not bother. This is not a concept that Lauren was able to get across to the doctor in that moment, and that meant that Lauren essentially went through the procedure raw. “I understand why they use this as a torture method,” she told us later. 

After it was all over and she was telling us the full story – always the safest time to pass along stories like this – she said, “I miss American medicine; I woulda been put down like a damn dog and given opiods. All I got was a bill and Tylenol.” Fortunately Shai stayed with her the whole time and was a comfort in time of need, which is a very good thing to say about someone. He also helped her change the bandages for the rest of their time in Cambodia – a delicate procedure, and a further sign of good character.

The second issue was that the process of removing the two nails was sufficiently heinous that the doctor actually fainted halfway through and Lauren got to see the nurses drag him out, feet scraping the floor, into the hallway until he revived. It all worked out in the end, but at the time that cannot have been reassuring.

But she got through it all sufficiently well that she was able to negotiate the bill down by about 50% before leaving. The whole thing – which in the US probably would have cost more than my car – ended up being about $200 all told, and pretty soon they were back in a tuk-tuk heading toward the hostel. She spent the rest of the trip giving little “V for Victory!” signs to everyone, and that’s just how it goes.

They didn’t stay too long in Phnom Penh after that. Their main goal in Cambodia was to get up to Siem Reap, a little over 300km away, where the temples of Angkor Wat are located. 

Angkor Wat basically translates as “City of Temples,” and it is one of the most astonishing places on earth. The temple complex dates back to the 12th century CE, and at one time it had a population of about 800,000 people – bigger than London and Rome combined at the time. Everywhere you look there are temples, all set in an impossibly gorgeous location. Lauren and Shai bought a three-day pass to the place knowing full well that this wouldn’t nearly be enough time to explore it all, but they gave it their best shot.

You’re allowed to get pretty much right up onto many of the temples, apparently, and they’re amazing to see up close.

And if you’re lucky, there will be rainbows.

It took me a bit to figure out the trick to this photo, though in hindsight it probably shouldn’t have. Pay attention to the carved figure to the left of Lauren and suddenly it all makes sense. History is supposed to be fun, after all.

It has to be said that no matter where you go in this world, however many oceans and time zones you put between here and there, you cannot escape Wisconsin. Not fully. We’re everywhere.

There’s more to do in Siem Reap than the temples, though, and Lauren and Shai spent some time at the APOPO Visitor Center.

One of the things that most Americans forget these days is that the American war in Southeast Asia was not confined to Vietnam. It spilled over into neutral Laos, for example, and it very much encompassed Cambodia – a country that was also not officially part of the war but on which the US dropped millions of bombs anyway. The 1970 protest at Kent State that ended with the Ohio National Guard panicking and randomly shooting four people to death was a response to US attacks in Cambodia, not Vietnam. 

When I teach the Vietnam War in my classes I make a point of discussing this and it always comes as news to my students, most of whom honestly don’t know about the war in Vietnam either since it ended more than thirty years before they were born and was something that their grandparents’ generation did. Spreading the war into Cambodia was a deliberate policy formulated by the Nixon administration – particularly by his Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger – to try to pressure North Vietnam into ending the war, and it worked about as well as you’d think such a bizarre idea would work, which is to say not at all.

The bombings, overt actions by American troops and covert operations carried out by the United States were so intense and excessive that they destabilized Cambodia enough to lead to the Khmer Rouge taking over in 1975 and if you’ve ever seen the old movie The Killing Fields you know what a bunch of raging sociopaths the Khmer Rouge were. Fully a third of the Cambodian population were slaughtered by the Khmer Rouge and the responsibility for that ultimately rests with the United States. This is something that Americans should know, but don’t. The ones who do know understand what it means to be incandescent with rage at the actions of one’s own government even decades after the fact, or at least they should be. Ultimately it took an invasion by Vietnam in 1979 to get rid of them.

One of the consequences of all of this is that Cambodia is littered with old land mines and unexploded munitions that continue to kill people even today. The folks at APOPO train African pouched rats to detect landmines and other unexploded ordinance in ways that are safer, faster, more efficient and more effective than having human beings do that job, and they’ve since expanded their operations around the world. They’re also expanding into training the rats to help detect tuberculosis in human patients. They’re a worthwhile group, in other words, and their Visitor Center is just a quick ride from downtown Siem Reap. If you go they’ll let you pet the retired rats they have on site.

Lauren sent us a lot of photos on her travels and I enjoyed seeing every single one of them. It’s hard to choose a favorite out of all of them, but I think this one might be it. It was taken somewhere near Siem Reap, and I think it captures something about both Lauren and the trip as a whole that I really love.