When I arrived in Phnom Penh and made my way through the airport (which is lovely and surprisingly small), I befriended a rickshaw driver who took me to my hotel and offered to take me around the town. I was still pretty jetlagged and sweaty and hot when I arrived so I rested a bit and took a cold shower while the air conditioner started to work (gradually) before heading off with the driver at 3PM local time to explore a bit of the city. While this was perhaps an odd decision to make, it proved to be quite interesting and thought-provoking, and allowed me the chance to see the city of Phnom Penh and explore what is viewed as authentic Cambodian culture, which only proved to deepen the mystery of what it is that separates related culture from each other. How does one untangle the influences that a nation like Cambodia has been subject to?

For those who, like me, are students of history, Cambodia is most famous for two very different aspects of its history. On the one hand, the Khmer people who have lived in the area of Cambodia for who knows how long–it is thousands of years, for sure–formed the basis of a mighty civilization that ruled over a large empire in Southeast Asia known as Angkor. At the end of hundreds of years of imperium, a ruler moved from Angkor Wat to the area of Phnom Penh and set up what became the capital of his administration, leaving Angkor Wat to be tended by its monks and serve as a reminder of the imperial glories of a long-lasting empire that had ruled over a large area but which was eventually unable to continue its dominance in the face of rising pressure from the Thai and Vietnamese, who themselves were pushed into the region in their attempts to escape domination from the Chinese. Interestingly enough, my rickshaw driver was a patriotic Cambodian and decried the massive influence of the Chinese in the contemporary capital, their ownership of buildings and the like. He asked me if I wanted to see an authentic Cambodia and to enjoy what he viewed as authentic Cambodian food, and this I agreed to.

But what does that mean? The drive to dinner, which was my first object, seeing as I had not had anything to eat since my flight in the morning and had a whole day of fasting to look forward to after an early sunset at 5:45PM or so (no daylight savings time in Cambodia), ended up taking me through an interesting route. The driver passed the national stadium, the Olympia Mall (which had a different pronunciation, it appeared, in Khmer), as well as the German embassy, and we found ourselves at a classy hotel with a French name. The French, it must be remembered, were the colonial masters of Cambodia between the late 1800’s and just after World War II, as Cambodia formed a part of Indochina, including Laos and Vietnam as well. The restaurant proved to be a lovely place, and I ordered a bamboo peanut chicken salad with a spicy Italian vinaigrette salad and a chicken green curry with vegetables, along with some steamed rice, which I washed down in 2 liters of bottled water advertised as Angkor Puro. I hoped that my decision to eat what I saw as reasonably authentic Cambodian dishes, albeit in a form that was familiar to me as a fond fan of Thai dishes, would not be a bad one for my digestive system, and that proved to be so–my stomach apparently went into Thai mode and handled the food well, which I was grateful for.

After dinner ended, the driver took me to see the Khmer palace, which was located close to the Mekong River, and although it closed at 5PM I was able to snap a couple of photos of the building. We then drove along the Mekong, looking at many people crowded along the riverside, seeing little children chase around pigeons while others walked, stood, sat and looked at the muddy river, or fed the many birds that could be found. After a bit, we turned along a major road from the river and made our way back to my hotel as night fell on the crowded traffic caught in rush hour. That traffic was made up partly of cars, buses (including some buses of impatient saffron-robed monks), other rickshaws, and a large amount of mopeds and motorbikes emitting fumes of petrol and LPG (which is what the rickshaw I was in was being fueled by, my driver informed me, it being cheaper than petrol). The fumes had made me nauseous on my way to dinner, but once my stomach was full I was able to sit back and enjoy the sight of office workers and students and others driving on the sidewalk and treating lanes as optional weaving around larger and slower vehicles like minnows circle larger fish, whales, and sharks in the sea. I submitted fatalistically to being a minnow and letting what happened happen, and despite the traffic and my own exhaustion, we managed to arrive safe and sound back at my hotel where I rested and before too long napped for a few hours.

How does one distinguish between Cambodian culture and its later imitators? I am far more familiar with Thai language and culture than Cambodian ones, having lived in Thailand for a bit more than a year (as readers of this blog may know, especially those who are willing to search my older posts from May 2011 through September 2012, when I lived in a small village about half an hour north of Chiang Mai). Cambodian writing looks much like Thai writing, which leads me to think it may be an influence from the shared Pali-based writing system that was a common element of Southeast Asian rice empires like both the Khmer and later the Thai established. The city itself is vibrant and alive, showing the recovery of a population that had been deeply wounded by a troubled time in the 1970’s where a large percentage of Khmer had been killed by the Khmer Rouge communists who, like many ideologues (especially of the left) sought to destroy the remnant of the past to wipe out history that they could not accept or be willing to tolerate in the goal of creating a progressive new state in its place, and only ended up creating nothing of lasting value and destroying a great deal that is of considerable value, not least millions of ordinary people with glasses and an education like myself, who always seem to be the first ones iwth their back to the wall when the revolution comes.