After one of the best sleeps I’ve had in a while (despite the wafer-thin mattres, I woke to a beautiful peaceful morning by the lake. A good breakfast of two fried eggs, some ‘bacon’ (curiously reminiscent of thinly sliced spam but it was fine) and the baguette (compulsory throughout Indochina – these were French colonies remember) was enjoyed in the lovely balcony overlooking the lake. I was starting to understand why Lonely Planet had recommended this place.
My tuk-tuk driver arrived promptly at 9am and we headed straight out of town to Choeung Ek, to the Killing Fields memorial. I wasn’t sure whether I really had time to come here as it was a solid 30 minutes each way, but I’m very glad that I did. Some 17,000 people were executed here and despite the very peaceful riverside setting I found it to be deeply disturbing. I bought a flower and an incense stick and paid my respects at the ‘bone monument’, a three-storey tower which contains the skulls of 8,000 souls, then walked around the dozens of mass graves that have been excavated to date (plenty more to go by the look of the map).
Next stop was Tuol Sleng Museum, aka Security Prison S-21, the initial detention point for most of the victims of Choeung Ek, though many others were tortured to death on site. Originally a high school, this is a group of otherwise nondescript three-storey 50′s era concrete buildings, not unlike many high schools of the same vintage in many other countries, however here the classrooms were subdivided into tiny cells and the inmates were shackled together by the ankles to long steel rods. I found this place to be unsettling but not to the same extent as earlier at Choeung Ek, possibly because I think it’s a very difficult mental leap to associate a building that looks like the science block at your school with some of the worst crimes against humanity from the twentieth century.
I’ve always found the Khmer Rouge period very difficult to understand, not just because of its unbridled brutality, but also because there just didn’t seem to be any intelligible point to it. It’s also the fact that it involved a people turning on and devouring itself in the most horrific manner while the global imperatives of the Cold War ensured that the rest of the world turned a blind eye. Not that these sorts of things aren’t still going on in other parts of the world today. There’s also the fact that it happened during my lifetime in a part of the world not too far from my own. Anyway, I could go off on a big rant here but I won’t. Suffice to say that it was clearly important for me to miss that bus yesterday, otherwise I would have skipped Phnom Penh altogether. I think subconciously I’d decided that I didn’t want to confront this period, on this trip at least – it would therefore appear that my subconcious is also a gemini.
On the way back to the guesthouse, we stopped outside the Royal Palace for a quick look and some photos. This is a large and impressive compound which my ten minutes of interest clearly did not do justice to.
I got back to the guesthouse with about half an hour to kill so I popped back around the corner to the Lazy Gecko for a quick beef curry and rice, which was really good (similar to thai red curry, which is one of my favourites).
The bus to Siem Reap was neither particularly clean nor in terribly good condition but it was clear that this was due to the maintenance crew spending all their time on the air-conditioning, which was powerful enough to cool a factory. The trip to Siem Reap was pretty uneventful, other than the old guy in the buffalo cart that we nearly ran down at about 100km/h (he was struggling to control his buffalo and was all over the road). This was such a near miss that we got to enjoy the acrid stench of burnt tyre rubber cycling through the aircon for the next 15 minutes. We arrived about an hour before schedule, just before the sun set, and I hopped in a tuk-tuk to my guesthouse (booked on the internet) that was a little way out of town on the other side.
The guesthouse was pretty nice, with a pool, though my room was swarming with mozzies when I arrived. I went to the bar and made use of their wi-fi (which they charged me for) while waiting for the can of fly spray they’d just emptied into my room to dissipate. After settling in, I headed into town to get some dinner and ran into Oli, a tour guide I’d met a number of times since Hue, and his group who were on the same mission. Oli invited me along as he was one short of what he’d booked for and I was more than happy to join him.
After an excellent Khmer fish curry (Oli’s recommendtation), I joined a large chunk of the group (there were at least 15 people in the group in total – way too big for my liking) around the corner at one of the bars on the aptly named “Pub street”. After a few drinks here a couple of group members (kiwi girls, from memory) appeared in full santa suit, beard and all, and coerced us into coming down to the night market, where there was an impromptu street party in full swing, with 50c beers flowing strongly.
The night continued through a number of different establishments, including one which a tuk-tuk driver took us too called “X-bar”, which instead of the girly-bar we’d assumed it was based on the name, was in fact a very chilled roof-top bar with a number of pool tables. The celebrations continued right through until dawn and I met an interesting array of people on this particular christmas eve, including three guys from my school in Canberra (though they were many years my junior).
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Cambodia - December 2008
