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Published: April 19th 2009
Phnom Penh - Liberation Memorial
the flags of the two countries, thanking Vietnam for overthrowing the Khmer Rouge for Cambodia.
Thanks to Mark G for picking up the tyop in the title. It's nice to know that at least one person is at least reading the titles :-)
Phnom Penh seems nicer than I remembered it. Perhaps it has changed a little, for the better, in one year, although I can’t imagine that it would really have changed so much in such a short time. Perhaps I just saw nicer parts of it this time round. In some ways it reminded me just a little bit of East Timor, of course because in the back of one’s mind there’s always a vague knowledge of their horrible histories, but more so because of the open piles of garbage everywhere. This is more excusable in Phnom Penh which is quite a large city, and it’s nowhere near as bad as Dili. One thing I did not see in Dilie however (which doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen) is that in some of the streets in the middle of Phnom Penh at night there’s large numbers of people apparently moving the rubbish into the middle of the road, and sorting through it. I didn’t quite work out what was going
Phnom Penh
a fisherman on Boeung Kak Lake on, but it sure stunk. I guess they’re trying to find something valuable for themselves; they didn’t look like council workers, but then, in Cambodia nobody wears uniforms, half the time the cops don’t even bother. Apparently the main rubbish tip is a bit of a tourist attraction, for all the street kids who basically live there. Whether or not that sort of thing should be a tourist attraction, and what it says about people who go there, is an interesting question but regardless, if I’d had enough time, I’d probably have checked it out.
But parts of Phnom Penh are quite pretty. The guidebooks talk about how, despite the restriction on foreign ownership of businesses, skyscrapers are being built with Korean money. However I could only see one skyscraper, which kind of dominates the streetscape. It seems to still be under construction, and seems to have a huge helipad at the top.
Because I saw them last year, I didn’t feel a strong need to go back to the Killing fields or the Tuol Sleng (S-21) Genocide Museum. For my "friends", I have plenty of photos of them up on my facebook profile. I wouldn’t have minded
Phnom Penh
I don't know what this building is going back to S-21 again, particularly with it being relevant to the recent trial of the most senior of the surviving Khmer Rouge leaders. However with the Khmer New Year, everything was shut on my second day there. It appears I was very lucky to get a seat on a bus - I had to try a few companies, and the bus I was on was completely full. At the guesthouse I stayed I heard a couple with the most stereotypically working-class-British accents complaining repeatedly to each other about how they were unable to get out of the country because of the three-day Khmer New Year celebrations.
It however gave me a chance to see some of the stuff I didn’t see last time. Unfortunately the Royal Palace, with its Silver Pagoda and Temple of the Emerald Buddha, were closed in preparation for the New Year (they were closed on the “New Years Eve” afternoon, and on the morning of the New Years day, so if I’d known that earlier i could have rearranged my walk to go there first). Apparently it’s the place to go for ostentatious displays of opulence. I got there by walking along Sisowath Quay,
Phnom Penh
a mosque, near the lakeside tourist district which manages to be quite pretty despite following a rather ugly river. A first-time visitor to Asia might be annoyed by the abundance of street vendors, motorcycle taxi drivers and various other touts greeting you every few seconds, but I’ve become kind of desensitised to that by now.
So the main things I saw were the National Museum and Wat Phnom, a Buddhist temple which dominates the largest mountain in the city, a mountain measuring in at all of 27 metres (I don’t know if that includes the temple, or just the hill). Unfortunately for the sake of this story, this isn’t the same
wat where in the 1930s young Saloth Sar apparently paid more attention to the Buddhist talks about the natural order of things than the ones about compassion for all sentient beings, before rebranding himself as “Pol Pot” (short for, in French, “Political Potential”). If someone who actually knows anything about this stuff knows why someone who killed people for having studied or for speaking a foreign language would want a name based on French, please let me know.
If you've come to Cambodia from Thailand, then temple isn’t impressive by Thai standards, but it’s
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a rather weird and derelict statue, near Wat Phnom still a nice quiet spot in the middle of the city. The hill is surrounded by beggars and morbidly obese monkeys. It’s always a tricky question about giving money to beggars, I’m sure we all know the various arguments for both sides, some of which are specific to certain countries (e.g. Cambodia). Perhaps I picked up some of the Buddhist ideal of compassion for all living things, or perhaps it was because for once I had some lose change in my pocket which meant that I could give out money without opening my wallet, but after leaving the temple I gave a token amount to the beggar with no legs. On doing so I was immediately swamped by a mother with three or four young children. The kids followed me right down the hill, pointing at the baby, and signalling that they needed the money for food. As well as none of them looking mal-nourished or having obvious physical disabilities, I draw the line at paying child beggars. It might be too late for a middle-aged guy with no legs, but the kids should be going to school, so they can grow up to work in an office and suffer
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a morbidly obese monkey in Wat Phnom Park like the rest of us, rather than sitting outdoors all day begging. There seems to be a phenomenon whereby parents realise that they can get more money by sending their kids out to beg than by doing it themselves and/or sending their kids to school. The enduring image in my mind from my trip last year to Cambodia is the child beggars at the Poipet border crossing, in particular one girl aged about four silently begging and nursing her probably nine-month-old baby brother or sister lying there semi-naked in the blazing sun asleep or unconscious.
The Buddha images in the temple all had a neatly placed lotus flower and small banknote (mostly 500 riel, which is $US 0.12) in their hands. There also seemed to be more food offerings than one might expect. I imagine this is to do with the New Year. The frescos on the walls and ceilings were simpler and less subtle than what you’d see in Thailand. They all also had captions, in Khmer, so I imagine, although I can’t read a word of Khmer, that it’d be much easier to work out what the stories refer to. I think this is partly because it’s
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monkeys at Wat Phnom Park again a much newer
wat.
The next stop was the National Museum. This is a quite nice building, considering it was ransacked and allowed to rot under the Khmer Rouge not much over thirty years ago. It has a fairly good collection of Khmer and Angkorian art and some Buddhist stuff as well. Unfortunately photography isn’t allowed. There’s a really impressive Vishnu statue about three metres high on probably a one-meter plinth that’s got a real presence to it, but I couldn’t get a photo of it, and there’s none to be found on the web, which is a pity. I think I like Khmer sculpture better than the Buddhist art, at least that which you see around Bangkok. Those Buddha images seem all the same, and seem fairly polemic. Buddha often also looks fairly effeminate, which I guess is an inherent problem of Buddhism, although it seems to be a trait of the medieval Christian images too, and perhaps says something about biases in various societies. Anyway, they tend to have silly things like fingers (sometimes including thumbs) and toes all the same length, whereas the Khmer stuff tends to be much more realistic. Also, with an "almost infinite"
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The young monkeys had this game whereby they'd climb up a tree, find a thin branch, hang onto it till it bent to about a metre off the ground, then let go and fall to the ground. It was hard to photograph properly. number of gods, most with numerous different manifestations, they’re able to portray different things. Vishnu is of course a favourite, but an interesting local variation is Harihara, a mixture of Vishnu and Shiva (Shiva on the right and Vishnu on the left). No-one cares about poor old Brahma any more, though. Anyway that’s the National Museum, fairly good if you’re into ancient Khmer, Angkorian or Buddhist art, but disappointing if you want to get nice photos.
I stayed by the lakeside, which is the backpacker area. While it’s got a lot of internet cafes, tour companies, restaurants, a few bars, and plenty of places to buy pirated books or music, it’s still lacking something as a backpacker area I think. Some services such as ATMs would be nice. I gave all my clothes to be washed at the place I was staying, and they returned it late (a few hours before my bus left, the next day) more dirty than when I gave it to them and still damp.
Anyway, the next day I took the bus to Vietnam. This left in the mid-afternoon, so we arrived in Vietnam quite late. There was the usual dodginess at the
Phnom Penh - Wat Phnom
incense sticks by a tiny little Buddhist image border crossing - the bus attendant took everyone’s passports and filled in all our departure cards and Vietnamese entry cards for us, including signing for us. According to our cards, none of us had a cough, fever or diarrhoea, nor more than $US 10,000 in cash. I don’t know how he knew this, but I guess he’s a professional so he could tell. At the Cambodian side we all had to pile out of the bus, and then get back on as an official tried to read our names. Since she couldn’t read our names at all, this took a while, we each of us guessed what she was saying and craned our necks to see the photo on the passport she was holding up. Mine came out as “Mister eh-NEE-el” which was pretty close.
So I arrived into Ho Chi Minh City. This is the official name for the largest city in Vietnam, in the south. Historically and colloquially it’s known as “Saigon”, which is still the name that will appear on train or bus tickets, or (I think) airline tickets. It’s also in the name of many businesses, and the name of the central area within HCMC
Phnom Penh - Wat Phnom
an angel decorating the roof? itself. Shortly after the North Vietnamese tanks rolled into Saigon in 1975, several of them with “You are always marching with us, Uncle Ho” emblazoned on the sides, they renamed the city from “Saigon” to “Ho Chi Minh City” in honour of the recently departed glorious leader, out of whose arse the sun did shine. The Vietnamese community back home might have a slightly different opinion about Ho Chi Minh’s beneficence or otherwise, but I couldn’t venture a guess as to whether he was any worse than the various puppet presidents, coupe leader and petty despots who governed the south during his time. If you served in the “Vietnam War” no doubt you’d like to believe that he was. One might likewise have expected the vanquished South Vietnamese to have been somewhat bummed at having to change the name of the city to something that necessitates a four-letter acronym, but the story is that they were all so overjoyed to be free of the yoke of the imperialist oppressors that there was general dancing in the street, as pretty much everyone had been on their side anyway; in much the same way that there was dancing on the streets when
Phnom Penh - Wat Phnom
note the money in the Buddhas' hands the USA won the second Iraq war four years ago and peace broke out.
I know all this because I went to the Reunification palace. This palace was built by the French but was largely destroyed. It was then rebuilt, with an architect who carefully constructed it to represent a number of Chinese symbols - I don’t know why, since the two civilisations have had a fairly uneasy relationship for the last few millennia (including some “hot” wars in the 1970s and 1980s) except when China supported the Vietnamese during the American war (back home known as the “Vietnam War”, but as you might imagine, it’s not called that here, nor in Cambodia or Laos!) Anyway, these Chinese symbols are downright abstruse, and some simply are bogus, as in, the architecture looks nothing like them. Still, it seems to be a consistent story, that the building represents these Chinese characters. The building is still used occasionally, but is largely a time-warp of the 1960s, complete with all sorts of stately rooms including some earie underground corridors where some of the war rooms, and the telephone and radio rooms, are situated.
There’s not too much propaganda, other than the
history video playing in a small back room in English, French, Mandarin and Vietnamese (in different rooms obviously). This one is rather funny. In the West people might be confused about who won the American war, but the Vietnamese have no objections whatsoever to rubbing it in. At Cu Chi tunnels (which I’ll talk about later), the documentary there talks about the American soldiers firing indiscriminately into houses, stoves, Buddha statues, the ground, etc., “like a crazy bunch of demons”, and gives short biographies of a couple of war heroes who were awarded medals as “American Killer Hero” including one who by their own description was a child, a girl who on the video didn’t look more than 10, and even allowing that she might have matured late and that she was Asian, was no way old enough to be allowed under any rules of war. The Reunification palace has photos of Thich Quang Duc, the monk who burned himself to death to protest the South’s treatment of Buddhists, and black & white photos of various southern Vietnamese coupes and uprisings, including a colour photograph of slaughtered men, women and children with the caption “The massacre of Son My villagers
Phnom Penh - Wat Phnom
an example of the artwork on the walls, less intricate than what you'd see in Thailand by the US Army, one of a long series of sins to Vietnamese people” (which is true, the massacre of villagers at My Lai, as it is known to us, is surely one of the more shameful acts of the American side during the war). The documentary at the Reunification Palace contains some other almost humerously scathing comments about America’s role in the war and talks about “bombs from Washington D.C. thousands of miles away” being sent with no knowledge of the reality on the ground. It also talks about Ho’s later years when he was too ill to micromanage the way a good communist Dear Leader does, but said “Even in those days, like a loving Father watching over his children, Uncle Ho was still watching over us”. Ho died in 1969, having been at war constantly since leading the Viet Minh against the French beginning in 1948, never seeing the reunification of Vietnam under a communist flag.
It’s not an area of history I know anything about, but it seems that this story ties Vietnam together with Cambodia. As we all know, during 1975-1978 Pol Pot and his cronies systematically slaughtered everyone who looked like they might
Phnom Penh - Wat Phnom
a clearer picture of the little Buddha images with their money and Lotus flowers not have flunked out of college as he did, which was normally signified by wearing glasses, being fat, having un-calloused hands, speaking other languages, being foreign, or any other burgeoise characteristics. He did this largely through a willing army of teenage soldiers whom he had killed each other before they got too jaded or worked out what was going on. This regime was tacitly supported by the USA, thanks to Kissinger and Nixon, about whom the Left like to say that irony became obsolete when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace. Indeed, the Khmer Rouge maintained a vacant seat in the United Nations as the legitimate government of Cambodia until the mid/late 1990s. The Khmer Rouge were tacitly approved because they were allied with the People’s Republic of China, whereas the Vietnamese were more allied with the U.S.S.R., and it was in the USA’s interests to keep those two communist powers fighting a proxy war rather than fighting the USA. As soon as they finished fighting each other, and the Americans withdrew, the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia and deposed Pol Pot (although pockets of Khmer Rouge continued fighting until 1996). The good thing is that they’ve now left. Perhaps
the USA could take lessons from Vietnam about winning wars and about effectively bringing about regime change in a foreign country. So I think the attitude towards Vietnam in Cambodia is ambivalent - on the one hand, traditional animosities die hard, but on the other hand they’re thankful to the Vietnamese for freeing them from the Khmer Rouge. Hence the Liberation Monument shown in my photos was built, but apparently for many years was untended and uncleaned.
Back in Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh’s picture is on every banknote, and adorns many public buildings (for example a large photo in the Saigon Post Office) and he’s commemorated in numerous place names and suchlike (including the Uncle Ho’s Memorial Site in District 4) This is despite Vietnam, as far as I can tell, being a socialist country in name only. Looking at the number of well-off businessmen and the number of KFCs, and the large number of places that accept US Dollars, it seems like the Communists won the battle but lost the culture wars. I haven’t been able to talk to any Vietnamese people about what they think about Ho, which is probably just as well, but I understand that
Phnom Penh - Wat Phnom
I'm not quite sure what this little shrine was, it was just outside the door of the actual Wat. most believe the story. It will be interesting to compare this personality cult to that of recently-deceased President “Turkmenbashi” (Niyazov) of Turkmenistan if I get to go there in one month’s time, not to mention China.
A couple of blocks from the Reunification Palace is the site of the Cu Chi tunnels. This is a place near Saigon where the Viet Cong dug some fairly elaborate tunnels to fight the Americans. According to the tour guide, “Viet Cong” was just the American name for guerrilla fighters in this area, but according to Wikipedia they also had a regular army. Either way, they were Vietnamese "freedom fighters" in the South who were fighting for the North. According to the tour guide, the Viet Cong guerrillas would work on their subsistence farms during the day, keeping up appearances for the Americans, and then at night go around shooting people or bombing things. This made it impossible for the Americans to effectively contain them. If the Americans raided in strength the Viet Cong would retreat to the tunnels. Americans suspected the existence of these tunnels, but were never able to discover them. The guide told us that this was partly because the
Phnom Penh
Rubbish on the streets, just like in Dili Viet Cong used AK-47s which, being designed to float if dropped in water, have wooden butts that make a nice knocking noise when knocked against wooden trapdoors. They show one of the original entries, and most people had a go of trying to climb down it, but I didn’t have a hope of fitting into it.
The tunnels were apparently at three levels, the first at three metres, the second at six metres, and the third at 6-8 metres. Each level was progressively smaller. Tourists used to be allowed to be taken down to level two, but some idiot got stuck down there, so the story goes, so now we’re only allowed down to level one. Here we had the opportunity to crawl through it for 100 metres, with exits every 20 metres. For most people, including me, this was just too small to be able to walk through stooped over, so we had to either crawl on all fours, or squat and waddle (a position used by the Viet Cong in level two, because it’s quite a natural thing for them to do, given they’re used to squatting). There were small lights along the way, spoiling the effect
Phnom Penh
skyscraper under construction since the Viet Cong never had any lights. I made it for sixty metres and then decided that I wasn’t going to learn anything that I didn’t already know from doing another forty, so exited, plus even squatting I was too big and crawling gets old quickly.
As well as the aforementioned video, there’s also a display of the various traps that they used. The signage says quite proudly that the Viet Cong were good at these sort of traps as they were the traditional ones they’d used for catching animals. Most of them involved making the enemy fall into a pit of upturned spikes, or impaling them with spikes through their abdomen. The tour guide had no compunction about telling us that when the VC found someone trapped in one of these traps, they'd kill them and take their weapon, and that that was where they got their guns, and their metal (which doesn't explain his earlier statement that they mainly used Kalashnikovs, though), and showed a diorama of a “workshop” such as they’d use for filing down bombs or damaged tanks or whatever for the metal. Fighting against this sort of enemy, it’s easy to see how
Phnom Penh - Wat Phnom
near the Russian market ... here's an example of the French colonial architecture that still dominates much of the city. it’d be virtually impossible to “win”, whatever that meant. Less than thirty years later, in the early 2000s, you’d have thought that the USA would have learned to never get involved in fighting an insurgency in Asia.
On the way to the tunnels, the guide told us (a bus-full of more than fifty people) that there’s a cultural difference between the South and the North, and that any of us going up to the north should be careful of scams, He then listed a couple of common scams, leaving us with the impression that the Northerners are a bunch of bloodthirsty pirates. This sort of warning would be more credible if it’s not the sort of thing that I hear everywhere. In Kupang people tell me to watch out on Flores; in Flores people tell me to watch out in Bali; in Bali people tell me to watch out in Yogya; in Yogya people tell me to watch out in Jakarta. In Malaysia people tell me to watch out in Thailand, and in Thailand people tell me to watch out in Cambodia. I don’t know if it’s a part of the human condition to think that ones own country
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your guess is as good as mine is somehow safer or more friendly than the next country. Anyway, in this case the Hanoi warnings seemed to be fairly accurate in my limited experience, and to agree with what the guidebooks say.
After going to the Reunification Palace, the War Remnants Museum is the closest tourist attraction nearby, but given that it used to be called the “Exhibition House of American War Crimes”, I felt I’d had enough propaganda for one day, so I walked out to the train station, a fair walk in the tropical heat, to buy my ticket for the 30-hour train trip to Hanoi. I probably saved myself a few dollars doing it this way, as opposed to going through a travel agent, which is more a matter of pride. The ticket itself was quite expensive though, about 1.2 million Dong (about $AUS 95) but that’s for a “soft sleeper” which basically gives you a bed in a room with four other people.
I was going to include Hanoi in this blog, but I see that it’s already gone way too long. The précis is that I wandered around Hanoi today (Friday) after arriving, and tomorrow (Saturday) I will have gone on
Phnom Penh
a derelict house, apparently a one-day tour of Ha Long Bay, and on Sunday I will have done some other touristy things around Hanoi before leaving on the overnight train (“hard sleeper” - the cheapest class available, this time) to Nanning in China, arriving there on Monday morning and probably heading straight off to Guilin for a day or two before going on to Beijing to get more visas.
I might try to post one before I go, but if I don’t, remember that I’ll be behind the Great Firewall Of China for three or four weeks, and in countries that are still pining for the USSR for a few weeks after that, so I may or may not be able to post my blogs. By all accounts, websites are blocked and unblocked for no apparent reason in China, and many sites that use wiki technology are blocked. I don’t think Travelblog is blocked but you never know. Also I understand that some places make you install spyware before you can connect your own computer, something I’m not keen to do.
Note that on this blog you get all the text in the first page, but if you want to
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National Museum (photos not allowed inside) see all the photos you have to click "next" under the "extra photos" link. I really wish I'd gone with some other blogsite than Travelblog!
I hope you all had a good weekend around the first Sunday after the first full moon after the ecclesiastical vernal equinox. While of course it’s not celebrated in Cambodia (it might have been in Vietnam, if I’d been there, because Vietnam is much more Catholic than I expected, particularly in the South, since after the North/South split many Catholics fled to the South, because communists, of course, are right up there on the list of people that God hates), this year it happened to fall on the same date as Khmer New Year, which apparently this year was celebrated at some ungodly hour like 01:30 a.m. This meant that the day before, most people were sleeping. Presumably the day after would be even more sleepy, which is why it’s a three-day holiday.
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