Cambodia

After Phnom Penh was Angkor, the ancient capital of a huge prosperous empire dating back to before 1400 which included most of Thailand and Cambodia.

It is located at the town of Siem Reap (which means Siam (Thailand!) Defeated). A $10 luxury bus trip (with hostesses and all) got us there. We managed to find accommodation in this busy tourist town in a hotel that wasn't quite open yet for business. We had to come back 20 minutes later while they put together the beds! The main reason for the droves of tourists that come here is for the sights at Angkor, although Siem Reap isn't too bad itself. We ate some really good food there, but were also reminded by the countries past and its poverty by the many begging land-mine victims and children.

Our swiss hotel owner found us a driver for a whirl-wind 1 day tour of the sights at Angkor. All the guidebooks we consulted said a day was never going to be enough and that at least a week was needed to take it all in! I dunno, I had seen enough ruined temples after a long day in the heat, but some of the more remote jungle ruins are supposed to be amazing and then it is also more about the surroundings and the adventure. The main sites we visited were host to throngs of tourist groups bussed in from all over the world (mainly Japan it seemed at times) who were jostled from site to site after the mandatory photo opportunities. We were disciplined enough to leave our hotel at 5 am, in order to witness the sun rising at the most famous of angkorian attractions, Angkor Wat. I wasn't that impressed, and all my photographs were awful because there was hardly any light, or cluttered with large groups of tourists. The temple is ginormous and I didn't get a sense of size until we got closer and it was quite amazing.

The buildings at Angkor are basically large (some huge!) man-made hills. Because of the lack of various architectural/physical techniques the buildings lacked true three-dimensions. There were no rooms-above rooms or large contained rooms. Here Meli disagrees with me! She says: the point of these structures isn't to have rooms, it's to be visually stunning and they act as giant sculptures themselves very intrictaely sculpted.. not man-made hills anyway!

Ok so maybe I was a bit harsh, a lot of the work was very good and showed hard work, devotion and amazing skill and art. On top of the many large structures you also have to imagine in all the palaces and houses that made up the surrounding city. Building in stone was reserved almost entirely for temples, while everything else was made of wood, and has long since disappeared. Also, we did have a really nice day scrambling all over the buildings! We climbed with difficulty and trepidation up some of the steeper "stairs" leading to the summits, and wondered what on earth you were supposed to do during the rainy season when they would be extremely slippery.

Lucky for us it didn't rain till the night, and boy did it rain! By the morning we were on our way back to Bangkok, but as it turned out, the roads weren't really suitable for wet weather either... The usual 3 hour trip to the border took about 10 hours, all the while slipping and sliding, getting stuck in the mud, waiting for other cars/vans/busses/trucks to come unstuck. We were travelling side-ways for quite a bit of the journey! And all this in an outsized minivan packed with 28 people (and all their luggage!). We were very glad to bet back onto the roads in Thailand.

Pictures up soon.

As mentioned before, part of our stay in Cambodia involved visiting the genocide museum at Toul Seng, and the Killing Fields just outside of Phnom Penh. Both of these places are a painful but necessary reminder of the atrocities that occured under the Khmer Rouge's regime.

Even though it has been weeks since these visits (I'm writing this a little late) I am still unsure of how to write about them. I guess it's best to start with the facts.

The Khmer Rouge, a self-procalimed communist regime that took power in the late 60's after a bloody civil war not helped by blanket bombings by the Americans to flush out the Vietcong, used what had been a high school in Phnom Penh as "Security Prison 21" also called Toul Seng. The words Toul Seng roughly translate to "Poison Hill" or "Hill of the Poisoned/Guilty" and this detention centre was used to detain and torture any suspected subversive citizens. In all between 10,000 and 20,000 prisoners were detained and tortured here, only 7 survived. The average life-span of prisoners once they were detained was between 3 and 6 months, after this they were driven a few miles out of town and killed at what are now called the Killing Fields. The prisoners were usually told to kneel in groups in front of a pre-dug ditch used as a mass grave, and then they were either bludgeoned to death or had their throats slit. This avoided wasting bullets. Their bodies were then doused with DDT to kill those still alive and to avoid the stench of their corpses from alerting the locals. Despite this horrific death it must have been a relief to some extent as their lives at Toul Seng were pretty gruelling. Each prisoner was either locked in a tiny dark individual cell or, more commonly, shackled by their ankles to a metal rod/pole with 4 prisoners attached to each metre of the pole. Unless taken out for torture, or a wash once in a while, the prisoners had to lie there neither moving nor speaking without a guard's permission. I will spare you the details of the tortures, needless to say they were atrocious. The vast majority of the prisoners posed no threat to the Khmer Rouge but this intensively paranoid and controlling government chose to see signs of subterfuge in the simplest of acts such as chatting to one's friends or even writing letters. Many one-time guards of the prisons eventually became prisoners. Even children weren't spared the horrors of Toul Seng.

Given the past of Toul Seng and the Killing Fields you will no doubt understand how chilling and moving visiting them was. Toul Seng looks like your ordinary high school except for the barbed wired. Then you walk inside the classrooms to see hundreds of mug shots of its prisoner - men, women and children, or tiny cells, or instruments of torture. It is a quiet place these days - the signs that discourage visitors from laughing or smiling are not needed as most people seem numb from imagining what happened here. The Killing fields too are peaceful now: just a field of ditches where the mass graves were dug up, and a stupa built in the middle of them to commemorate those who died here. Upon entering the stupa you are confronted, literally centimetres in front of you, and not behind glass, with the 8000 skulls found here. Skulls of real men, women and children who were ruthlessly killed. The thought of these skulls still disgusts me and moves me in equal measures.

When I try to think of one word that describes what happened at these places, all i can come up with is unimagineable. I can't imagine living in constant fear. I can't imagine the pain of being tortured. I can't imagine being so scared of the consequences of refusal that I would obey orders to torture and kill another human being. I can't imagine that anyone could be so twisted as to give those orders. I can't imagine what it is to kneel blindfolded in front of a mass grave, hearing people around me being beaten to death and waiting my turn.

But these things did happen, they happened within the last 30 odd years, and perhaps the saddest thing of all is that similar acts of violence still occur in places today.

We've been trying to fit as much travelling into our last 2 weeks here so it's been very busy. I'd initially wanted to squeeze in trips to Cambodia, Lao and Northern Thailand but we realised we just didn't have enough time and decided to leave Lao for another trip.

As time-pressed as we were we even treated ourselves to a flight instead of a bus to Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia. We headed out on the 16th of March, the day after Matt finished work. Our first day in Phnom Penh wasn't as productive as we'd planned: we took a nap, walked down to the Royal Palace only to find that it was closed, wandered around a little more and then had a few drinks and a bite to drink a lovely bar/restaurant called the Foreign Correspondents Club. As the name suggests, it's where journalists used to hang out in Phnom Penh (still do in fact). It has a very colonial feel to it, and has great views of both the river on one side and the beautiful National Museum on the other (being on the 3rd floor) and it was the perfect place to relax and reflect on the day.

Although we'd planned to do more that day, it was actually a good idea just to wander around and get a feel for the city before doing some serious sightseeing the next day. Phnom Penh, and indeed Cambodia in general, has a very different vibe from Thailand. Although there is a lot of begging and drink/food/souvenir vendors who are very insistent/agressive, the people seem a lot less jaded than Thais. I guess Thailand has had its fair share of tourism and social-economic stability for a while now whereas both of these are relatively new in Cambodia. The people are warm and welcoming in a very genuine way, much more so than Thais (despite the infamous Thai smile). Phnom Penh also has a lot of funky little shops and places to eat and drink (a few of which support NGOs that work in the area) which makes the centre of the city to explore.

The next day we found ourselves a tuk-tuk driver to show us around. Other than being cheaper than getting individual rides to where we wanted to go, hiring a tuk-tuk for the day meant we benefitted from the local knowledge of our lovely driver, Sal. By the way, a Cambodian tuk-tuk is quite different from a Thai one: it is basically a little carriage pulled by a motorbike!

We started with the Royal Palace. It is similar in style to Bangkok's Grand Palace but is much less glitzy and infinitely quieter.We wandered around the grounds and into the Silver Pagoda (thus named because of the silver tiles that cover the floor) and took in the beautiful architecture and grounds with only a handful of other tourists around.

Afterwards, Sal suggested that it was a good time to go to the Genocide Museum and Killing Fields, both testament to atrocities committed during the Khmer Rouge's reign. Visiting them was a truly harrowing experience, and Matt and I feel that an account of it deserves an entry of its own.

Later that day we also visited the Russian Market - not Russian at all but just where Russians shopped for souvenirs and local specialities in the 80s. To be honest, after some of the Thai markets of the same sort, this one wasn't that impressive and in any case after the Killing Fields we were in no mood for serious shopping.

We then went to the National Museum - a truly beautiful building that houses many statues, carvings and artefacts from the Angkor period - a good taster prior to heading off the Siem Reap the next day to explore Angkor itself!