I’ve Got the Sun Bears in the Morning and the Moon Bears at Night

Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, was probably the place I was most nervous to visit. Very few of the travelers I met liked it, and it is notorious for motorbike thefts: men on motorbikes will ride by your tuktuk, grab your bag, and speed off. But it was also the place where I could visit and volunteer with Free the Bears, a sun and moon bear sanctuary, as well as a convenient location from which to fly back to Thailand for the end of my trip. So I girded my loins and boarded a minivan.

At this point I am quite used to traveling on local buses, but my trip from Kratie to Phnom Penh was probably the most amusing and ridiculous one I experienced. No fewer than four motorbikes were roped to the back of the van, and the dashboard was literally held together with duct tape. Local buses often perform the role of unofficial mail transport, making the journey much longer as the van will stop to deliver packages and letters at random stops. To make things worse, when I turned on my phone and pulled out my headphones, I saw that my arsenal of downloaded podcasts had somehow disappeared back into the cloud. So I was left with no entertainment on the six hour sweltering van ride. Luckily a German couple were along for the ride with me.

The benefit of traveling local is that it’s cheap. The downside is that it can take a loooong time, and so we gasped into Phnom Penh after dark. I wasn’t thrilled about this as I knew I would need to take a tuktuk to my hostel, and navigating and negotiating transport is always easier and safer in the light of day. The van dropped us off not at a bus station but basically on the side of a major road. Phnom Penh was big, dirty, clogged with traffic. I was missing Kratie already.

The German couple hung around me so it didn’t look like I was flashing my iPhone while I oriented myself with Google Maps, and even stuck around while I flagged down a tuktuk driver and negotiated with him. It was really nice of them and I mentally added them to my list of guardian angels who have helped keep me safe on this journey.

I scooted to the middle of the tuktuk seat and wrapped my arms protectively around my bags. My tuktuk driver asked how long I had been traveling in Cambodia.

“I’ve been in Cambodia for two weeks, but this is my first day in Phnom Penh.”

“First day in Phnom Penh??” he squealed. “Welcome! Welcome very much!”

I was staying at Los Feliz Hostel, which, fun fact, is just around the corner from a cafe named Felix, and that is where we ended up. My tuktuk driver was insistent that this was the correct place. Have you ever tried explaining the difference between an ‘x’ and a ‘z’ to a tuktuk driver? This put my communication skills, and my patience, to the test. As much as I probably would have loved sleeping in a coffee shop, eventually I got us to the right place.

I didn’t spend much time in Phnom Penh, but I actually liked it more than I expected. I didn’t have any trouble with theft, and although I experienced the same tuktuk harassment as I had in Siem Reap, I managed to have a decent time. I can recommend coffee at Feel Good Cafe, pedicures at Daughters of Cambodia (providing employment for refugees from sex trafficking), and shopping at Trunkh.

And I can especially recommend visiting Free the Bears!

I chose to do the Bear Care Tour which included pickup in Phnom Penh, a guided tour of the facility, and a day of helping to feed the bears. Sun and moon bears are vulnerable species facing habitat loss from deforestation (like orangutans) and are also poached for their bile, which is used in traditional medicine. Free the Bears was founded by an Australian woman who learned about the plight of the bears and established this sanctuary; she rescues bears that have been cooped up in bile farms and kept as illegal pets. I had visited a branch of Free the Bears in Laos and was eager to spend more time with the bears in Cambodia.

Naturally, these are wild animals so I wasn’t doing any hands on work, but I got to make snacks! I chopped up fruits for the bears (after my week at Elephant Nature Park, I was an old pro at this) and filled bamboo with greens, jam, and bananas.

It was too much fun giving the treats to the bears and watching them tear the bamboo open to get to the goodies.

Later, I went into a bear enclosure (while they were gone, of course!) to hide bananas and dragonfruit. Since the bears are in captivity at Free the Bears, which isn’t ideal, the bearkeepers make sure they have lots of enrichment activities so they don’t get bored or depressed. They have a great sense of smell and it was a riot watching them root out the fruit when they came back into the enclosure.

And thus my time in Cambodia came to an end. It was up there with Vietnam as being one of the more challenging countries I had traveled through. The annoying tuktuk drivers, my bout of flu that I feared was dengue fever (it was not), and the general level of poverty didn’t make it an easy country. But the temples, the dolphins, the bears, the beautiful Khmer scarves and kind people, these I won’t soon forget.