phnom penh

As i crossed the boarder into cambodia it becomes obvious from the landscape and the peole outside their dwellings that the poverty in cambodia is greater then the other countries in south east asia, on the boat crossing the Mekong there were gangs of limbless child beggars, out of principle i never give beggars money but is was heart breaking. Much of the poverty is due to the catastrophic rule of the Khmer Rouge in the late 1970's when an estimated 2,000,000 people died. the cambodians also look different to their neighbors in thialand, loas and Vietnam, they are much darker whether this is a result of a more agricultural economy or not wearing the masks i dont know.

By appearance the capital of cambodia is on the up, with tastefully renovated french colonial buildings, skyscrapers and a kfc, but this is worlds away from the struggle to survive that most residence face. Suz, (another of the people on the truck in india) had decided to meet us in cambodia and had emailed helen and i that she was staying in a hotel called the Floating Islands in the Boeng Kak area, i figured that helen had also headed that way and set of. Boeng kak is an area frequented by western travellers and is a shanty town of guest houses. the main street is narrow with an uneven concrete surface and is poorly lit is lined with bars, restaurants and hotels that are made from a mixture of exposed brick, wood, cement and corrugated metal. as my tuk tuk was taking me down this road i saw helen and suz i called out 'hey long lady you want tuktuk' i was ignored, 'what about your munchkin friend?' they looked around. i got of the tuk tuk and they led me down a narrow alley, with a concrete floor that was conversed with a pool of what i hope was water down the middle. we past a group of cambodians playing on an outdoor pool table and past another group sitting on the floor playing cards amongst the washing lines above. the hotel was made of wood and perched on stilts over boeng kak lake. it was knocked together with boards of wood, plaster board, and plastic sheeting, and had the sweet smell of a student house where the windows had been nailed shut for 10 years. but the staff were very friendly and for the next few days i called it home. the staff at the house were there to improve there english so they could attend university, the fees of which came from the prophit made from the hotel, making me feel batter about the limbless children i had past earlier.

it was the first time the three of us had been together since india so we headed our of our shanty town and into the center, where we found a great restaurant with fine rare roast beef and red wine. while i was at the boarder, i changed my vietnamese dong for cambodian reals, only to find out that although the cambodians will accept this currency they prefer US Dollars. Every thing is priced in dollars, from price lits in restaurants, fags, tuk tuk, everything. when we finished our dinner we were going to head of to another drinking haunt when i stumbled upon a club upstairs where we spent the remainnder of the evening dancing like the drunken westerners we are.

the next day helen wanted to go sight seeing 'the great palace and the silver pagoda' not feeling the best and having seen a zillion, pagodas, temples, tombs etc i was thinking about how to get out of this, when suz piped up, i feel terrible its just you too, helen looked up with pleading eyes, ok. the pagoda and the palace we the same as all the others, i have uploaded a photo, plat spot the difference from the others. the only thing that bothered me is that when the Khmer Rouge we in power they did not tear the building down, is it because they lived there? 'all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others' eh?

we had a quite night and stayed in a bar to watched the killing fields in preparation for the trip the next day to some of the old khmer rouge stomping grounds. our first stop was at the prison S21 where the prisoners were tortured before they were executed, of the 20,000 souls who passed through only 7 survived. it had an early feeling enhanced by the children’s playground equipment that remained from the prisons previous life as a school which the Khmer Rouge devised ways as turning into torture instruments. In what would have been class rooms they had crudley used brick and cement the knock together ramshackle cells that were less than 3ft by 5ft6 (90cm by 160cm), in other rooms they had the beds and torture instruments together with pictures on the walls of the people that had died during tourture. they had drawings by a survivor of the torture techniques used including one which today is referred to as water boarding, where the victim believes they are going to drown, its a technique that the americans freely admit to using in guantanamo bay. the walkways on each of the 3 floors leading into the cells are covered with barbed wire to prevent suicides by people that new they were going to die, death could only come how and when the KR decided. perhaps the most early were the rooms which contained all the photographs of the inmates, men, women and children, while in a cabinet there were sculls.

after this cheery expedition we headed of to the killing fields them selves, where the executions actually took place. Rising above the 129 mass graves is a white stuppa, inside there are 9000 human skulls rising through several shelves which serves as a memorial to the 17000 men, women and children who were executed here from mid 1975 to december 1978. most of the sculls bear whiteness to the fact that these people were bludgeoned to death to save precious bullets. the bottom shelf has in french, 'females 15-20'. having joyful children climb the fence to play with each over and pose for photos for you before asking for money while spotting human bone and clothing poking from the ground left me confused and in wonder of the contradictions that fill this country.

after that we had a silent and probably highly inappropriate trip to a shooting range. As we headed of i asked what we would be shooting he said targets, but if we wanted to stop at a market and buy a chicken that would be fine. we drove out of the town for for an our before turning of the main roads across dirt tracks past villages and sprawling rice fields, having learnt how the cambodians had slaughtered eachover all morning i was a little edgy about being so remote. this was not helped when i realised that we were heading to an army training facility, with all the usual krypton factor esque assault courses. our tuk tuk driver exchanged words with the century who did not seem best pleased that we were there, my unease heightened a notch. we drove up to a building with an outside area covered with a corrugated roof, there we met 4 butch looking cambodians, the notch turned again, cambodians are never butch looking. then down to business, they pulled out the price lists which depended on the type of gun you wanted, M16, AK37, uzi, M60 shotgun, bazooka etc and how many bullets you wanted. i was torn between an M16 and an AK47, but they were out of bullets for the M16 so there we go. we were taken into a firing range, these things are loud, although there is surprisingly little kick back. after a few shots on rifle more the guy running the show turned a switch and we were on to rapid fire. then helen had a go and screamed like a girl, then it was suz'z turn who right the way through did not want to have a go but as soon as the gun was passed to her she turned into an ice blooded assassin and calmly popped of a number of shots with flinching. surprisingly we were not up to much that evening.

---

---