So Long and Thanks for All the Fish

It's 6:24am Vancouver time and we've been up since 4:30. This will not be our most coherent blog entry ever. It will, however, be our last.

Back in Van ... sigh. Such an overwhelming mix of emotions. Relief, regret (over having to end our travels), excitement (we both have A LOT on our plates now that we're home), dread (we both have A LOT on our plates now that we're home ... hey, wait ...), and so on. It's wonderful to be back in Vancouver where almost everything is safe, clean, and set-priced. I don't want to have to bargain again for anything, ever.

After we left you last we were heading back to Phnom Penh essentially on our way home. We made ourselves go check out S21, the highschool-turned-prison that the Khmer Rouge used to annihilate some 20,000 of it's people in a hideous attempt to purge sanity from the country. Attempting to sum up the devastation that the Khmer Rouge inflicted on the Cambodian people in a few lines is actually a bit offensive in how over-simplified it would be, but it still needs to be said on some level. The whole movement is now internationally recognized as one of the most inhuman moments in history with such master strokes as the abolishing of money and the persecution of anyone who wears glasses. In essence, the Khmer Rouge tried to violently and rapidly transform Cambodia into a modern agrarian Communist utopia by destroying anything and everything that might ever one day on even the most infinitesimal level challenge its position. Used to live in a city? Sorry, you could be a decadent evil person and thus need to be purged (read: tortured and killed). Went to university? Ya, that's not going to work either. You might KNOW things that could undermine the Communist transformation. Own land? Last mistake you'll ever make.

The Khmer Rouge then built places like Tuol Sleng (the Khmer name for the S21 prison) to terrorize, torture, and ultimately murder it's own. Well, actually, the murdering was mostly done in a place called the Killing Fields a few kilometers away where they clubbed people over the head into mass graves. With anyone and everyone as potential victims of this place (there are MANY stories of people being hauled in for NO reason) a state of fear was created (not unlike in China during the Cultural Revolution) that ultimately destroyed all trust between Cambodians. Families imploded under the strain. The prison itself is a knee-weakening experience as you quietly walk the halls of what was clearly a regular highschool adapted into a holocaust-style concentration camp. The current Cambodian government doesn't want to let it's own people forget it's past so there are pictures of victims (including many children) on huge partitions everywhere in the prison alongside cramped prison cells, torture beds (complete with battery pack for electrocution), and other preserved torture devices. On one of the buildings they left the barbed wire up that enclosed the balconies. They even made suicide impossible.

Needless to say, the place left a lasting impression.

After that, we only really had one last destination: Hong Kong. We did transit through Bangkok again to do some last minute shopping, but it was all in anticipation of visiting one of the greatest cities ever built by human beings. Hong Kong, for those who have never been, is a monstrosity. It's impossible to really describe it in a way that makes sense, but imagine a city crammed onto an island and a mountainous peninsula stuffed with millions of people who have nowhere to build but up. I think one of Dave's friends said it best, "It's like SimCity with all the cheat codes turned on." Anyway, check out the pics. They give a hazy impression of what it's like.

The city feels alive and clean and was actually a nice stepping stone back to the Western world, but I think what struck us most was it's juxtaposition to Angkor Wat. Weird, I know. But seeing the two, basically one after the other made it impossible not to compare. They're both human constructions on an unprecedented scale and grandeur. They both boggle the mind as to how and why they were built. And they both leave you breathless just looking at them. My uncle, Clement, lives there with his family and it was nice going to dinner with them (food in HK is amazing) and we wouldn't have minded staying longer to really check it out (two days isn't enough), but HK is also expensive in a way that made us cringe and frankly, at that point, home was calling somethin' fierce.

So there it is. We hopped a flight back to Van, got picked up by my mom, ate some food, saw some peeps (man, it was good to hang out with some of the old crew right away), and are now getting ready to re-enter the "Real World."

Frankly, we can hardly believe we're back.

Thanks for reading.

Derek and Lynn

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