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Published: February 23rd 2008
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As I walked through Phom Penh to Tuol Sleng a man was boiling clothes in an iron tub over an open wood fire by the side of the road. Occasionally he would pull them out and dunk them back in with a long metal pole. This has no relevance to anything, I just thought it was curious.
The most noticeable thing about Tuol Sleng, former school and infamous former Khmer Rouge S21 prison in the quiet outskirts of Phnom Penh, is its likeness to a school. The conversion in the 1970s into a holding prison for capitalists, foreigners, peasants, spectacle-wearers and even card-carrying KR fighters before being shipped to the Killing Fields at Choeng Ek, was a crude one. Former classrooms look like classrooms. The only difference is the rusting iron bedstead left in the middle of the floor and on the wall, the blown-up photograph of a torture victim. Upstairs, the tiny prison cells consist of little more than cobbled-together wood or brick partitions. The poignant thing about S21's lingering school-ness is the fact that the ruthless guards were mostly ten to 15-year-olds, brought into stark relief by the chattering groups of children visiting the museum on school
trips with their teachers. The Khmer Rouge atrocities were brought to an end less than thirty years ago.
At the the Killing Fields, which happen to have a laughter-filled school playground right next door, a large white memorial stupa containing the skeletal remains of those so far exhumed stands in the middle of a plain-looking field. Irregular signs eerily point out 'mass grave', 'truck stop', 'tool shed'. It is no easier here to imagine what went on than it was at Tuol Sleng. At both sites I felt like I should be recoiling at the inhumanity and injustice of it all, but in fact I felt nothing. The immensity of it makes rationalisation impossible.
I was in Phom Penh for two days, recuperating from another bout of exhaustion and waiting for my Lao visa. My room on the first night was quite possibly the worst I have ever stayed in. For $3 I got more than my money's worth of no-window and the stench of stale sweat. I'm not going to describe the communal facilities here.
Not well and not keen to linger, I was up and out early searching for new accommodation. The "Backpackers'
Street" in Phnom Penh is well developed. The 20 or 30 tuk-tuk and moto drivers who line the alleyway day and night start out with a polite "Please, sir! Tuk-tuk?", one finger in the air like well-trained school children. By sunset, they have graduated to "Smoke, sir?", mouthed with two fingers to their lips. I was also offered out loud just about every drug I've ever heard of.
The bus to Ban Loung, Ratanakiri province, was 14 hours and Chinese. The signs were not good from the start: as I got on at 6.30am, two workmen were still fiddling with some piece of the internal mechanism (I suspect just applying the sticky-back plastic which held the whole contraption together). For the first 45 minutes out of Phnom Penh it was relatively empty and I stretched out on the back seat and dozed. That is, until the floor beneath me blew open and the whole bus filled with dust, dirt and dry leaves. The makeshift mat was replaced, a generic iron object placed on top of it, and all windows opened.
It wasn't too surprising then when, at about 4pm, the bus broke down. For an hour,
we sat by the side of the road as ten people squatted round the exposed engine rubbing their chins and humming. Occasionally someone would reach forward to fiddle with the battery, get an electric shock, and jump back to where they were squatting. Somehow, eventually, it got started again and we were back on our way. But that was while the road was still sealed...
The dirt track which made up the last three or four hours of the journey was the dustiest road I have ever travelled on (and led, it transpired, to the dustiest place I have ever been). Every vehicle we passed in the other direction led to half a mile of minimum-visibility dust-cloud and many conflicting demands to
(a) open the window to let all this dust out and
(b) close the damn window to stop all that dust getting in!.
For most of the journey I was sitting next to a pair of friendly, wrinkled old women for whom I passed money and bags of sugar cane back and forth through the window at every stop.
I was listening to Douglas Adams read
The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and
when he got to the guide's entry on towels (and the absolute necessity of carrying one for infinite reasons), I looked around me. A man over the aisle took his
kroma and hooked it up over the window as a curtain. The wrinkly women next to me took hers from her head where it had been wrapped as a dust mask/head scarf and sneezed into it.
The
kroma is a checked Cambodian scarf used by everybody for everything. Apart from the obvious head-wrapping uses, I also saw it employed as sarong, towel, waistband, rope and (my favourite) welding mask.
Not far from our destination, the land around us began to undulate. The gently rolling hills came as a shock after the rest of Cambodia which is as flat as flat thing run over by a faulty Chinese bus full of 50lb sacks or rice, if not flatter.
Ratanakiri Province is situated in the far North-East of the country on the way to the Lao border, stuffed with uncharted national park and scenic waterfalls. Again I gave myself only a day. Again everyone thought I was mad.
In that one day, I had a good
nose in the market (
holding my nose for most of the time) and got on the back of a motorbike to see Katieng waterfall, a reclining Buddha and Yak Lom Crater Lake where I had a dip to wash at least some of the orange dust/fake-tan from my body.
The following morning I was on the same bus down the same dirt track (it broke down only once, with a flat tyre) back to the junction with the main road where I caught a minibus to the border and Laos...
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