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Published: April 18th 2009
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Vietnam has been a journey full of stomach upsets and food poisoning, so what better way to spend our last night in Saigon with Aaron up all night sick with gastroenteritis. Really, really, really bad gastroenteritis. We had a 7am bus the next day to Phnom Penh which was to take 6 hours; needless to say we didn't make it. But Aaron braved the bus trip later that afternoon when we were certain there was nothing left in his body to throw up.
En route to Phnom Penh we hit a baby calf on the road. The driver didn't stop; I don't think he even flinched. We then saw a dead motorcyclist in the middle of the road, arms carefully placed by his sides, as if someone had purposely put them there. He had a large gash on his head and there was a small pool of blood forming. He was probably a poor street hawker because scores of Pepsi cans and multi-coloured drinking straws were scattered across the dirt road, obviously thrown into disarray upon impact. It must have been a hit and run because no one had stopped. Everyone just drove around him. It was a very scary
dinner
amok (fish cooked in coconut milk and vine leaves) and khmer sausage (grilled with pork and garlic, garnished with cucumber and lettuce) scene and I hope that it was a freak accident, and that this sort of thing doesn't happen on a regular basis. But it re-affirmed our belief that you should NEVER EVER ride on a motorbike in Asia, and if you have to, make sure you at least request for a helmet!!
Whilst Aaron got some much needed R&R, I decided to venture out the next morning to make the most of the half-day we had in Phnom Penh. I shared a moto-remorque (motorbike with a carriage hitched to the back of it) with a couple of young British boys and made the 15km ride south-west to the Choeng Ek Killing Fields.
Between 1975 and 1979, a Cambodian who went by the name of Pol Pot instigated a political party called the Khmer Rouge, and enforced a number of genocidal and inhumane policies on his fellow nationals. This included the locking up of intellectuals, professionals, teachers, foreigners and anyone who dared to oppose him. People wearing glasses, people who could read and write, and anyone who uttered a foreign word were considered 'intellectuals' and locked up in a prison called 'S-21' for interrogation via torture. The prison was
phnom penh nightlife
it is actually a lot quieter than this picture portrays... a converted high school, the once-classrooms divided up into many 3x2m cells in order to save space.
When the prisoners were found guilty of 'treason' they were sent to the Killing Fields to be executed. In order to save ammunition, the prisoners were whacked in the back of a head with a hoe or large stick, and pushed into mass graves. Pol Pot had a disturbing vision to turn Cambodia back into a class-less agrarian society who worked in a communist regime, to re-locate Cambodians back into rural areas and abandon the 'evil' urban attitudes the country was supposedly guilty of. During these 4 traumatic years, Pol Pot's political party entitled the Khmer Rouge exterminated over 2 million men, women and children and indirectly killed hundreds of thousands more through famine and hard labour. That was about one quarter of the Cambodian population at the time.
There is a lot more to this genocide that I will not go into, but it really did put things into perspective for us. It has only been just over 30 years since all this has happened and everyone, and i mean EVERYONE knows a brother, sister, mother, father, son, daughter, auntie,
ant much?
that is garbage on her head. uncle, cousin, friend, teacher.....who was killed by the Khmer Rouge. It is only in the last few years that surviving senior members of the Khmer Rouge have gone to trial in an international tribunal for their crimes against humanity. But the Cambodians have fought hard to move on from their past and whilst extreme poverty and past tragedies are etched into their faces and eyes, they are an extremely optomistic and friendly bunch.
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