Wat...on earth? Part One

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April 9th 2009

Published: April 13th 2009

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Travelwash

Balanced diet

Cambodia street seller

We left Ho Chi Minh City at 9.00 am for the 6 hour coach ride to Pnomh Pen in Cambodia; daylight hours allowing us to watch the countryside unroll outside the bus window.
The landscape is flat with patchwork fields of rice and a host of other crops in shades of brown and green. Random groups of buildings of wood or brick construction appear, cattle, pigs and chickens scratch and snuffle around as farmers wifes and children play or laze in hammocks away from the heat of the sun.
Whilst the landscape remains the same as you drive into Cambodia the poverty becomes apparent as farm houses are more often made from wood or grass, the cattle are more scrawny and the younger children run around barefoot and naked. Every time the bus stops it gets surrounded by people selling snacks and fruit from baskets balanced on their heads. The border crossing passed without incident and we arrived in Pnomh Pen around 4.00 where a tuk tuk took us to our hostel. We went to the curiously named Tat hostel but they had no internet so we were directed to their sister hostel...Tat too! The room was comfortable enough at only

S21

Rules

$7 and it was situated amongst small streets dotted with small shops and restaurants.
We ventured off in the evening and found a local eatery on a corner with not a western face to be seen, they offered cheap beer and a limited menu but we were not disappointed and were soon on nodding if not quite speaking terms with locals.

Pnomh Pen is a dusty bustling city still trying to reestablish itself and rebuilding roads and broken pavements and increasing street lights. It is hard to imagine the horrors that were so recently endured here, although the evidence is shockingly close by.

Just a short walk from our hotel, there is a school, a typical U shape of 2 storey buildings around a playground with climbing frames and a frame that once had climbing ropes hung from it. What isn't typical is the barbed wire and corrugated sheeting around the walls and the front of the former classrooms.

Because this is S21 the notorious interrogation centre, now a museum, which bears witness in its physical presence of torture rooms and tiny cells, and the photographs of victims enclosed within, of the brutality inflicted on everyone who

S21

Torture room

entered.
Pictures, taken by their captors, of mothers and babies, young children, teenagers, adults and the elderly, whose eyes show, bewilderment, incomprehension, fear or terror. Printed signs explain what happened in chronological sequence, the displays reveal the shackles and instruments of torture, more pictures taken by the liberators show brutalised bloodied bodies chained to beds, for whom death was a prayed for and welcome relief.

Many died in S21 those who cooperated and signed a confession were released and taken by truck just a 15 minute drive out of town to Choeung Ek ostensibly to work but more accurately, to be executed.

Better known as the Killing Fields this barren area on the edge of town is where thousands of people were murdered and buried during 3 years of the Khmer Rouge terror campaign. The central obelisk on closer inspection is a tower of glass shelves holding skulls row upon row segregated into age and sex. The impact is like a punch in the stomach it is hard to breath your eyes fill with tears and you realise why it is so quiet here, because everyone is stunned into silence. The land is pock marked with holes where

Former school

S21 looks innocent

bodies were dug out of the earth and punctuated with signs indicating what had happened or had been found at various points around the grounds. It was a hot day at Choeung Ek, it was an orchard and former Chinese burial ground. There were the sounds of birds and cicadas, the odd rooster crow, distant cattle and goats and you wondered if the people that came here to die heard the same things and thought maybe they would be safe after all.
Although the mass graves were liberally covered in a cocktail of chemicals to stifle the smell of rotting flesh there must still have been the scent of death pervading the camp invoking the human self preservation instinct, provoking heartbreak and fear.
When you visit Cambodia although it is a harrowing and upsetting experience you must visit these places, so what happened will never be forgotten.

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