Leave the souls alone

Phnom Penh :: Cambodia

When the "madness" completely took over.

Places: Phnom Penh.

Coolest thing I did: Dropped several quite good mojitos during happy hour at the Foreign Correspondents Club which has a balcony view over the confluence of the Mekong River & Tonle Sap for sunset.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: Comrade Duch, keeper of the Tuol Sleng prison is a skinny little runt of a guy in the photos. Some part of you thinks the face of evil really shouldn't have buck teeth and sticking out ears.

So my main goal of not just passing directly through Phnom Penh was to go and see the two main tourist sites that are still monuments to Cambodia's crazy recently history, those being the prison at Tuol Sleng (also called S-21) and the killing fields at Choeung Ek, about 20km out of town. While the Angkor temples were as amazing as expected, the average Khmer today is about as removed in time from the people who lived there as I do with William the Conqueror. The fact the Khmer Rouge came to power during the year I was born makes the modern history so much more interesting.

So I actually did the sites in the reverse order to the prisoners in 1975, who tended to be sent to S-21 for interrogation and once they'd confessed to whatever they were supposed to have done (apparently the KR never incorrectly arrested anyone...) they were sent out to the killing fields for liquidation. The KR were only in power for 3 and half years, but managed to kill somewhere between 1 and 2 million people in that time so they must have been putting some serious numbers on the board every day. It's chilling to think about how big those numbers must have been, or that anyone you see on the street here older than me must remember the whole thing.

Choeung Ek was once a Chinese graveyard set out in the rice paddies just outside Phnom Penh however for 3 years it became the final bloody resting place of thousands of people. Unlike the industrial coldness of the Nazis, the KR cadres killed these people using mostly farm implements, things like hoes to the head and the like. The site is now strangely peaceful, with a Buddhist pagoda built 3 stories high in the middle of it. You only realise as you get closer that through the glass windows of the pagoda that it's stacked inside with thousands of skulls recovered from the mass graves, and each one of those skulls shows the violent end most of the people received that the hands of the KR.

There's one spot that probably does it for most, and was apparently the point where Comrade Duch, head of the interrogation program at the S-21 building finally broke down and wept at what he had overseen when he was forced to visit the killing fields years later. There is a tree covered with bracelets to honour the hundreds of babies and small children that the soldiers had literally smashed to death against trunk. A parlour game for psychologists after World War 2 was to speculate how the average Nazi death camp operator went about their daily business without completely rebelling against their leaders. The question of how people follow such orders becomes even harder to answer when it involves physically smashing a baby against a tree. It's hard to be any more at a loss for words.

If the purpose of the killing fields was the killing of dissidents, deserters and suspected CIA agents, then the purpose of the prison at Tuol Sleng was to get confessions of the crimes first. The head of the prison, Comrade Duch remains the only high ranking Khmer Rouge leader to have been convicted of his crimes and sentenced - the unfortunate fact that so much time has passed means most of the top leadership have died before their trials were completed. Pol Pot, the head of the whole thing, died in 1998 and far from being kept under glass like Lenin or Mao, he was so reviled at the end he was cremated on a pile of tyres up near the Thai border and his ashes now reside in a highly vandalised grave.

The thing that gets you about Tuol Sleng is not the graphic nature of the torture (water boarding being one of the least extreme methods used) but the rows and rows of mugshots taken by the KR of those who passed through there. In the end only seven people are known to have survived their visit, the rest all eventually confessed to something and went into a mass grave somewhere. The word you hear used to describe all this is madness, but I'm not so sure. A whole country can't go temporarily insane for 3 and a half years and go around in organised groups killing people with shovels to the head. There has to be some kind of organisational dysfunction to make all that possible.

Pol Pot and most of the heads of the Khmer Rouge had been students in Paris and members of the French Communist Party at some point in the 40s or 50s and had all returned to Cambodia to follow the style of the time in South East Asian countries and set up a Communist guerilla army at home. This was, after all, the Cold War. There were already such groups operating in Vietnam & Laos and obviously Mao had been pretty successful with the whole thing in China. However, the KR took Mao's idea of a revolution of peasant farmers taking over and took it to new extremes. Never mind Mao had managed to nearly starve his country to death in the first decade, Pol Pot wanted the same thing for Cambodia. Taking advantage of the weak government of the time and the fact the US air force was bombing eastern Cambodia at the time to cut of the supply lines of the Viet Cong that ran through there it was after a short civil war that Pol Pot marched into Phnom Penh at the head of what was basically an army of heavily armed adolescents and children (like most dictators he knew it's easier to indoctrinate the young) and started a reign of terror not even Stalin or Mao came close to matching.

The starting point was the idea of making Cambodia completely self-sufficient by emptying the cities and sending everyone to the country to grow stuff. Anyone who was identified as an intellectual was immediately killed, along with their families to cut off future sources of revenge. Families were broken up and sent to various agricultural communes in the country, resulting in the death by hard labour of most urban dwellers who were simply not up to the work. This resulted in not enough food and an almost immediate collapse in crop yield, meaning everyone was working harder for less food. This resulted in paranoia in the leadership that they were being sabotaged, so the purges went on, cutting deep into the Khmer Rouge cadres themselves, causing mass defections of their troops across the border into the recently unified Vietnam. This only fuelled the paranoia even further, causing the KR to launch border raids into Vietnam itself and set themselves up for a fall. My theory is not that this was some kind of collective madness, it was simply a very small clique of forceful individuals using terror as a weapon against their own people in such a was as you would be mad not to go along with it. There would have been a descent into the solders thinking they had to carry out the torture and the executions because the alternative was to end up in a mass grave yourself. This is not to condone by understanding, the whole thing is evil, but it's a cop out to call it collective madness.

Unlike China or Russia, there was no post-personality cult figure like Deng or Khrushchev to restore sanity to the system. Instead Vietnam invades in 1979, took control of the basically empty cities and imposed a puppet government. This forced the KR into the hills and Thai border lands and kicked off another 2 decades of civil war. It also resulted in a 17 day war with China, as Vietnam was was backed by Russia at the time and the KR had China's blessing and they thought they should assert themselves.

The only other stuff to really do as a tourist in Phnom Penh is to see the palace and the Silver Pagoda, which was surprisingly not very silver. If you've ever been to the Grand Palace in Bangkok, you can almost skip it, because it's pretty much a mini version of the same thing. There's even an emerald Buddha too, and like the one on BKK it's not made out of emerald either. After the Angkor empire started to lose territory to both the Vietnamese and the Siam (now Thailand) the kings of Cambodia managed to somehow keep some kind of coherent nation together until the French invaded and colonised the place (along with Laos and Vietnam) in the mid 19th century. That actually helped the King, who the French kept in the luxury of emerald Buddhas and so forth in order to keep some semblance of legitimacy to their rule. I guess he must have gone to Siam, seen the palace and told the French he simply had to have one too.

The nightlife I've seen so far in Cambodia in general, but in PP especially borders on the creepy side, much like Bangkok used to be. Not wanting to sit in a bar full of prostitutes and old white men I instead found myself sitting in a kind of beer food court across from the prozzer pubs, still full of old white men and their "dates" but at least they're not like 3 feet away and you can generally have a beer without being propositioned. I guess I'd like to think I'm pretty liberal about what goes on between consenting adults, but there's something completely wrong about old white men with money with these young women (or in a lot of cases, with boys that might not yet be 18...). You probably don't want to peek under the lid and see how these women (or young men) got into their line of work, it probably wouldn't make for a pretty story. That's putting aside the thought that there's probably kids out there somewhere too.

So I'm pretty much nearing the end of my time in Cambodia, tomorrow I'm going 5 hours up the Mekong (in a bus) to a place called Kratie, the break point to make the final push into southern Laos.

Holiday in Cambodia

Siem Reap :: Cambodia

Things have changed since the Dead Kennedys sung that.

Places: Sihanoukville & Siem Reap.

Coolest thing I did: The much cooler-than-Angkor-Wat temple Bayon, with it's 216 benevolent looking faces.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: Thailand and Cambodia fought several border skirmishes over control of a temple in 2008. You know tourist dollars and temples are intertwined pretty heavily if you're willing to exchange live fire over one.

So after the cracking pace set in the two weeks of Myanmar it was time to get off the plane and directly onto the beach in Sihanoukville, named after the twice King of Cambodia. It's Cambodia's only well known beach resort and it's moved well beyond it's backpacker roots. We met a slightly deranged looking bloke from the Faroe Islands who had been living in Cambodia for a decade and told us even two years ago the main street wasn't paved. Well the beach is still a long white sand marvel, lapped by the warm waters of the Gulf of Thailand, but the back of the main beach from the old backpacker haunt of Serendipity Beach down the length of Ochheuteal Beach is now lined with basically undifferentiated beach bars selling the same mix of Khymer & Western food and selling the same beer for the same price. There is another long beach past the headland called Otres which has claimed the backpacker crown, but even that is pretty much built end to end with combination bungalows and beach bars.

Having said all that, it's still a very nice beach, and you don't have to walk far to find a stretch that doesn't have jet skis or flying boats buzzing you every 5 minutes or so. What I was most unprepared for was just how many middle class Cambodians come down to the beach themselves, even if they do have the bizarre habit of going into the water wearing all their clothes. We saw dudes in dress shirts and jeans coming out and walking up the beach dripping wet. What I will say is they've taken to smartphone cameras as strongly as the rest of us, and you can't get more than a few metres up the beach without some girl standing fully clothed up to her knees in the water taking a selfie. It's nice they can do that, because this is a generation that was born towards the end of the civil war and didn't know the craziness of it all. In case you need reminding you'll be pretty regularly be confronted on the beach by amputees begging for change, usually the result of the thousands of landmines planted and then forgotten about by both sides of the 3 decade long civil war. You simply wouldn't know looking at the country and the people today how truly brutal this country was for the longest time.

The thing you do when you're in Sihanoukville and you don't want to spend all day on the beach is to get on a boat and go to some nearby barely inhabited islands and go snorkelling. The coral and undersea life isn't going to knock the islands of Thailand off the diving map any time soon but the water is warm and clear and you can go through a half hour in the water chasing small fish about the coral pretty easily. The bulk of the day was spent on an island beach, deserted except for the 4 or 5 boat loads of people on similar day trips to us. It was here that our New Years Eve started to go wrong. Mark's ankle didn't survive the end of a beach volley ball game and by the time we got back to the mainland it was the size of a grapefruit. This meant our first brush with the local medical system for the trip.

The international clinic of choice for our Tuk Tuk driver thankfully took credit cards, but only had one wheelchair so Mark had to take it in turns with the girl from Brisbane who came in just before us with a knee stuffed up doing some sport that involved being towed behind a jetski I still don't fully understand the logistics of. Still $54 later Mark had two x-rays of his foot, pain killers, anti-inflammatories and prescription cream that smelled suspiciously like Dencorub. Of course we also found Mark really couldn't walk more than a few metres at a time before toppling over so instead of a big night in the beach bars we drank as much free beer jugs of beer as they'd give us a the function at our hotel and then moved onto duty free vodka as midnight approached. Around midnight the whole place sounds like a bad day in Baghdad circa 2003 with low altitude fireworks that at times sound like ordinance going off. Which, given the recent history of the county might actually be live rounds - lord knows how much live ammo they've still got left lying around the place. Anyway,  I know it was a big night for some as I was down the beach about midday the next day and one of the bars was still full of completely mong-ed out looking kids stretching the very last of what could only be some pretty heavy chemicals. By the time I passed by again about 2pm it was all over, even for them.

Due to my continuing attempts to nurse my belly back to some kind of health my own drinking abilities were not at their best. Despite coming closer to full meals almost as soon as we left Burma my first effort to get more than 4 beers down in one sitting resulted in first me being almost instantly drunk, but then queasy and sick in the street. Really, it was like being 16 again. Between my stomach and Mark's ankle Sihanoukville didn't turn out quite as Rock and Roll as we had anticipated.

So with Mark heading back to Australia and the joys of work I took a short flight to Siem Reap (translated: Defeat of Thailand), the town that owes it's entire existence to the tourist industry built up around having people visit Angkor Wat. If Sihanoukville had seemed normal when compared to Burma then Siem Reap is the on-the-map tourist town that jolted my system back into some kind of recognition. A mix of high quality Khmer food (which is strangely like Thai food but somehow not in a couple of crucial but indefinable ways) and good Western food had got me feeling quite human again and I've felt better than I have all trip. I'm back on full meals, beer and I'm not so tethered to the bathroom as has been recently true.

All that is good, because it allowed me to ditch any idea of getting chauffeured around in a Tuk Tuk or minibus all day, which would have been hell on my ego and allowed me to rent a bike from the guest house for $2 a day and ride around the temples of Angkor myself. The company that puts out the bikes (called White Bicycles) maintains them for local charities so the guest houses just provide space for the bike racks and pass the money on. Which is what I kept telling myself as I rode around on them all day, because the bikes can only be described as character building. Imagine a single speed bike with a self-correcting chain that comes off any time you don't pedal and a seat so hard you feel like orientation week in Long Bay Gaol and you start to get the idea. While the temples themselves are fairly spread out (well at least when compared to Bagan in Myanmar) the whole thing is built on a pancake flat plain so the lack of gears don't really kill you. It's more the traffic.

During the day there are tourists on pushbikes, driving or being driven on mopeds or motorbikes, tuk-tuks, cars, 4WDs, vans, jeeps, minibuses and full blown tour buses all sharing the same narrow, often poorly maintained roads. Which would be fine, except everyone drives and parks like a total dick. There's nothing to make your life flash before your eyes like a moped being overtaken by a van, being overtaken by a bus all barrelling towards you on a road that's half a lane each direction at best. Then you'll find just at the point you pass them some arsehole has parked his 4WD with the hazard lights on 3/4 in the road. You have to be serene and accepting, the alternative would be complete mental breakdown.

Luckily, the sights you came to see are worth it. Angkor Wat is only the biggest of the temples built on the plain during the Angkor empire, which dated from around the end of the Vikings until the Crusades and at the time were top dogs in South East Asia. Like Bagan, with which they overlap somewhat they were in the transition from the Hindu influence brought from Javanese influences to full blown Buddhism and like Bagan they too went a bit temple mad. While Angkor Wat is the single largest religious structure in the world, I found the city sized Angkor Thom far more impressive. Guarded by huge stone gates watched over by giant giant heads with a face on each side and surrounded by a moat there's a whole bunch of restored temples and stacks of assorted temple bits to look at inside. My favourite was the Bayon, which has 216 faces watching out from towers and stupas in every direction, all of which were described as benevolent by the Lonely Planet but I found more smug, or perhaps over confident. Like with all archaeology, most of what's told about Angkor veers pretty quickly into applied fiction writing but the consensus seems to be the faces all belong to the Angkor King that commissioned the temple. That could hardly be reassuring if you were a peasant working the fields nearby, having the hundreds of faces of the King staring "benevolently" down at you while you work. I suppose you'd hold off coveting your neighbour's wife or livestock, just in case the King could see you, which might have been an early version of the NSA.

It's interesting to ride around all day and realise that these Buddhists thought pretty big about building their religious monuments, when you consider most of this was being put up at a time that the big Gothic cathedrals of Europe were going up. You could quite comfortably fit Chartres Cathedral inside the gatehouse of Angkor Wat. Probably throw in Notre Dame too for the hell of it, and those absolutely dwarfed any building in Europe at the time.

The sandstone hasn't all survived the 1000 years intact as you would expect, but the carvings are being restored in places which brings up Ta Prohm. Now I've never actually seen Tomb Raider, and that was shown to be a bit of a problem for the Cambodians who point out at every turn which part of the temple was in which part of the movie and it becomes obvious you have no idea what they are talking about. I didn't even know Daniel Craig was one of the baddies in it, long before he became James Bond. These trips are always quite educational for the strangest reasons.

Ta Prohm, in start contrast to Angkor Wat, which has apparently been in constant use since it was built, has been reclaimed by the jungle, giving you all those cool photos of ancient temples with trees growing out of the top of them. You would like it to stay that way forever, however due to it's fame as being the only temple in a Hollywood movie, Ta Prohm is simply being loved to death and for safety reasons alone it's become a good idea to start propping up the crumbling walls and restoring some kind of structural soundness to the whole thing. When half of Russia and China descend on it in one morning, you can see why. There seems to be no limit to how many people are let onsite and with serious bottlenecks on any spot that is identifiable as somewhere Angelina Jolie stood while everyone has their picture taken. I'm not sure if the Russian women were all pouting in tribute, or if that's just how they normally pose when they have their picture taken.

So after two days of riding around temples it's time for me and bike #5 to part ways. We had our moments where I didn't think we'd make it, but I saw all the main temples in the end, and it allowed me to strut around them feeling vastly superior to anyone who showed up in a minivan. That alone was worth it. It's an early bus tomorrow back to Phnom Penh, an advertised six hours but from what I've seen so far some pointless milling around and then picking up people at the side of the road for no apparent reason will probably pad that out a fair bit.