Country of the Khmer: Cambodia, part one

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As promised, I’ll continue my update with the next country on our list: Cambodia. It will be in two parts since there is much to tell and the temples of Angkor Wat really deserve their own blog.

We left Saigon on the Mekong Express bus to Phnom Penh after an enjoyable stay in Vietnam, very much looking forward to coming back some time to explore the beautiful coastline and many other sights Vietnam has to offer. There are many bus companies running this 400-odd kilometer route, but Mekong Express came highly recommended by many other travelers and with good reason. The buses are clean and comfortable with friendly, English speaking guides, a toilet and even a complimentary breakfast or lunch, cold water and a wet wipe. While this may seem fairly normal, bus travel in Asia, I have to explain, is not always that comfortable. Even when the bus is modern, clean and has air conditioning, the trip can be quite arduous due to the drivers’ love of random bouts of accelerating, braking, honking and swerving, preferably while being on the phone or sending text messages. Add to that the utterly confounding Asian karaoke that blares out of the speakers loud enough to drown out the sound of even the most ambitious of mp3 players and you really don’t need chickens or overcrowded buses to make for an uncomfortable trip, although they often throw these ones in for good measure anyway.

But, as I said, the Mekong Express trip was perfect. For an extra five dollars on top of the normal $20 for the visa on arrival for Cambodia the guide takes care of the whole border crossing process. You don’t have to pay this and are certainly welcome to make your own arrangements but as this slows everything down and you often end up paying a small bribe to the border guards anyway, you might as well pay. None the worse for wear we arrived after six hours in the capitol of Cambodia: Phnom Penh where we were greeted by blue skies and a nice temperature, as well as dozens of tuk tuk drivers clamoring for our business; that goes without saying.

Instead of taking them up on their offers to take us to a guesthouse, we walked next door and sat down in a plastic chair among a great many Cambodians who were drinking what looked like ice coffee. It turned out to be exactly that, and damn fine ice coffee too. Coffee is one of those things that vary greatly in quality the world over. Indonesia of course is home to some of the greatest coffee in the world -no doubt the reason for the quality of coffee in Holland- but in most other countries it hasn’t been that great. I can highly recommend Cambodian (ice-) coffee to anyone. The places are easy to find: plastic chairs facing the street or one or more tv-sets and men sitting around low tables drinking big glass mugs of dark liquid are a good hint. Prices are quite reasonable too, 1500-2000 riel with 4000 riel making a dollar. Money is interesting in Cambodia. Although they have their own currency, they make use of the American dollar as well. So prices are usually quoted in dollars on menus and in shops but you’re free to pay with either riel or dollars. Change is given either in riel or dollar, depending on availability and amount. If you find a good place to change your money you can use this to your advantage as you can sometimes change dollars to riel at, say, 4300 or even 4500 to one, but the going rate when paying is 4000 riel to a dollar.

After this refreshing drink we checked into the Royal Guesthouse and although the room was not too great, the price was reasonable. We’ve adopted the policy of often just taking the first decent room for one night and then walking around a bit the next morning, unencumbered by our luggage and with a bit better sense of what’s where in the city to find a nicer place to stay. As it happened though, we ended up staying at the Royal Guesthouse for all of the days we spent in Phnom Pen after leaving and coming back, on which later more. We walked around town for a while, visited the markets and had a beer on the riverfront before finding a nice local place to have dinner. A famous dish in Cambodia is whole calf roasted on a spit. The meat is carved off the carcass and served with vegetables and a very interesting fermented fish sauce. While perhaps somewhat unappetizing at first, it’s actually very tasty as you add limejuice, crushed peanuts, chopped lemon grass and chillies to it. Also used as a dip and perhaps even tastier is a simple mixture of salt and pepper into which you squeeze limejuice. Although they had no English menu, one of the waiters spoke good English and sorted us out with some of the veal, some fried rice and a pitcher of beer. We had a great meal after being enthusiastically greeted by a group of locals who raised their glasses and welcomed us to their country. A great day!

The night was not so great, as you already know from my earlier blog on the subject. At night a water pipe broke in an adjacent room and our whole floor flooded. All our clothes got wet, my laptop was ruined along with a few books and other assorted items and we were generally faced with one of those things which can thoroughly ruin a vacation. However, since our vacation is a bit longer, we spent a day or two recovering and picked up the pieces and moved on. The hotel was of course very sorry and provided us with a nice room for the same price as our old one, washed and dried our clothes and, being bereft of things like third party damage insurance, could do little else.

Cambodia was the first time we were exposed to the Khmer architecture which is so dominant in this part of Asia. From roughly the ninth until the thirteenth century the Khmer empire encompassed most of Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand and Laos as well as parts of Myanmar (Birma), China and Malaysia. As a result this type of architecture is common in those countries and as you can see from the pictures, it’s also very beautiful. We rented another motorbike and toured much of the city, sampled the food and visited most of the sites. This is also where we started encountering the dark side of Cambodia: the government. It’s an extremely poor country, yet nowhere in Asia have I seen so many expensive cars. It’s quite normal to see a Mercedes SL600 or a BMW 570L, not to mention the numerous Landcruisers and big Lexus 4x4s. In a country where the average wage is somewhere below $200 a month, that’s quite astounding. The government squeezes as much money as possible out of both its own population and the tourists; police seem to do nothing else than stand by the road issuing tickets for perceived violations of the traffic laws (something that’s actually also common in Vietnam) and tourists have to pay for basically anything they want to see. Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind paying a dollar or so to see a temple that locals can see for free; it’s their country after all and we’re not going to the temple to pray. However I draw the line at paying $6,50 plus an extra two or three dollars for a camera to be allowed to walk in the gardens of the King’s palace. Prices for sending a package by sea mail to Europe were almost 1,5 times as high as for doing the same from Australia; the list goes on. It’s hard to put my finger on it exactly but you’re continually assaulted by the feeling that something is somehow not quite right. It’s not relaxing.

It did bring me back to the old days of driving fast cars around Holland and of my training as an executive driver: Using other cars to shield you from being spotted by the police, finding back roads and alternative routes, etc. However after our time in Cambodia we both came away with a bit of an uneasy feeling, as if we didn’t quite enjoy it that much and it’s largely because a lot of the country just feels fake. Much of it has only been put there for the convenience (or perhaps exploitation depending on your point of view) of tourists and you really have to search long and hard to find the real Cambodia. So if I have any advice to people coming here with a bit of time on their hands it would be to avoid the tourist track, get a motorcycle and just travel around by yourself. Yes, you’ll probably have to pay one or two dollars to the occasional police officer -something we actually managed to avoid, I say with no small amount of glee- but you’ll probably enjoy it a lot more. The traffic was also something we had to get used to; people in Cambodia are incredibly bad drivers compared to the rest of Asia. Normally everyone here works together and through a bit of give and take, they all arrive at their destination in the minimum amount of time with a minimum amount of risk. Not so in Cambodia. People turn randomly and without signaling, are hesitant when stopping or going and generally don’t pay attention to what’s going on around them. The results of this were immediately visible: in over two months in Asia we hadn’t seen a single accident yet, even though we’d been on some pretty crazy roads. In Cambodia we saw three accidents in two weeks. My Indonesian driving experience really paid off here as we could weave through the sluggish and halting traffic with relative ease, but it was still frustratingly slow at times.

Two of the things on the ‘must do’ list of any visitor to Phnom Penh are S21 and the Killing Fields; the former being the place where the Khmer Rouge interred and tortured many prisoners, the latter the place where those and many, many other prisoners were subsequently executed. Between 1975 and 1979 Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge basically destroyed Cambodia, killing an estimated 1.7 million people in the process. Their ideal was to turn Cambodia into and agrarian utopia based on the communist ideals, where men and women alike toiled the fields for the greater glory of the people’s party without such silly things as freedom, education, literacy, humor, music and anything else that might distract from the common goal. After they seized power they evacuated everyone from the cities, driving them into the countryside. Then began the torturing and the killings, of supposed enemies as first but, as the inevitable megalomanic paranoia set in, more and more of Khmer Rouge cadre thought to be aiding the enemy or at the very least undermining progress towards the ideal.

They introduced ‘Angkor’ which was something like the state, the government. There was no individual leader or even a party but simply Angkor. After their initial campaign succeeded in emptying the cities they realized that they needed some kind of goal; something to work towards. So they hastily drew up a three year plan that laid out precisely what needed to be achieved. The classless socialist society was thrown out the window straight away and they introduced two kinds of people: ‘new’ people and ‘old’ people. The new people were the former city dwellers; those without any useable skills who basically contributed nothing to Angkor and were deemed of very little value. The old people were the farmers and former occupants of the countryside; they were the real backbone of society. The new people were harshly treated and persecuted. Anyone with glasses was killed. Anyone who spoke foreign languages was killed. Teachers, scientists, doctors were killed. Of course as always in these cases, the people in government were all educated men; the head of S21, a man known as Duetch or Dutch, had been a teacher, but never mind that. He was different.

And so it went and it got worse and worse. In their three year plan the leaders had decided on the amount of rice that needed to be produced. Some of it would go to feed the people and the military and the rest would be exported to pay for anything Angkor might need to buy. But the amounts were set impossibly high and the levels of rice expected to be harvested from one acre of land could never be met even by an industrialized society. Of course, rather than admit this and question the validity of the three year plan, the leaders decided that it was because of sabotage by people in their own organization that things weren’t going as planned so they started arresting officers and soldiers in their own cadre, questioning and executing them. All this achieved was to take away the organization and structure which led to even lower crop yields and meanwhile most of the rice went to feed the army and the population went hungry.

Because Angkor had another problem. In their infinite wisdom the leaders had decided to start a war with Vietnam, who they accused of harboring fugitives, actively trying to capture border provinces and generally instigating trouble. This war drew a lot of resources and eventually led to the downfall of Angkor because in January of 1979 the Ho Chi Minh government rolled into Phnom Penh with their tanks and put an end to Angkor, if not to the Khmer Rouge’s power in Cambodia. Shockingly, for over 15 years after this event the United Nations never officially recognized the new Cambodian government and the seat in the UN General Assembly was still held by Khmer Rouge. Similarly many official posts would remain occupied by former Angkor officials, some very senior and none of the criminals were arrested, let alone tried, until the late nineties. Pol Pot died under house arrest without ever facing any charges and many of the senior members of the Angkor government are still awaiting trial; Duetch was brought before a court only months before our visit to S21. It is no wonder that after all this Cambodia is still a country with two faces; the happy face of progress and youth and the sad and tortured face of an injustice that can never be undone, but should at least be judged.

We visited S21 on a sunny and scorching day. It’s located in a back alley in an old school. The buildings look the same as many Cambodian schools today: uninspired, gray soviet style square construction of three levels with five or six rooms on each level. As you walk into the complex you see two rows of tombs where the final victims were buried. These were the bodies that were discovered in the private cells on the top levels of Building A; most likely senior Khmer Rouge officials who were quickly executed before the place was deserted.

I found it very hard to imagine the kind of horror that must have taken place there as I walked around. There is very little evidence left of the daily operation as there are virtually no eye witnesses. Only a handful of prisoners survived and they were the lucky ones; painters and sculptors working on pictures of Pol Pot and his cronies and carpenters and metalworkers enlisted to build more cells and chains. They were not treated particularly brutally and kept apart from the general population of the prison. I read the book ‘One year in S21’ by a man who was one of these lucky handful and although very interesting in its own way, it sheds little light on the situation in the prison. There are some paintings of the types of torture employed as well as mug shots of all the inmates who were once held there on their way to the Killing Fields but in the end it didn’t really hit home. I guess that’s a benefit to the soldiers employed at S21 as opposed to the SS soldiers working in the concentration camps: it’s easier to forget something that hasn’t been meticulously documented in word and image.

I’ll come back to the story of Angkor and the Killing Fields in a little while but first we decided that we’d had enough of city life for a while and needed to get away. Luckily, Cambodia has a coastline and although perhaps not as nice in the wet season as in the dry, we decided that a rainy beach is still better than no beach at all and so hopped on a bus to travel 4,5 hours down to Sihanoukville.

Sihanoukville is a good example of the strangeness of modern Cambodia. It’s geared heavily towards tourism and backpackers and there is anything you might want: Bakeries, restaurants, hotels, bars, nightclubs, etc. Most of these are western owned and while it’s nice to eat a proper baguette with rilette made by an actual Frenchman, it’s not exactly a taste of Asia. Still, we enjoyed a day or two chilling on the beach and even though there wasn’t much in the way of snorkeling it was nice to swim in the ocean, or to have an uninterrupted view across the water. It’s also the place where my French scuba instructor normally works from so a lot of the people there actually knew him. We wanted to pay a visit to one of the islands but bad weather put a stop to that. Our passports were still at the Laos embassy awaiting a visa and since you can’t rent a motorbike anywhere in Cambodia without a passport we couldn’t tour the country side either. Instead we went back to Phnom Penh after a few nice days of beach life.

We checked back into the Royal Guesthouse, rented another scooter and drove out to the Killing Fields on another nice, sunny day. For some reason we’re almost always lucky with the weather on arrival; any time we’ve changed venues for reasons of bad weather we’ve been met with nice weather on the other end. The Killing Fields are some 20km outside of town. In what is perhaps a telling turn of events they have recently been purchased by the Japanese who feared that the place might fall into neglect and disappear altogether.

Again, there’s not much there to really bring home the horror of the place. All the original buildings are gone. In its place a big pagoda has been built which houses all the bones uncovered from the mass graves (which are still there but are now just shallow holes in the ground) and there’s a museum with explanations and pictures of the excavations. Where the buildings used to stand are signs; “This was the site of the shed which housed the torture instruments” and so on. Hardly imaginative. You’d think they would’ve been able to dig up or recreate some of the original devices and put a bit more effort into it, but then again the government, even today, seems to have very little interest in reliving and condemning the past. The mountain of skulls and bones is quite impressive, especially if you read the results of the pathology work that was done on them; bashed skulls, broken bones, that sort of thing. As far as organized genocides go, I would have to rate the level of professionalism of Angkor as very low. They mostly used farm tools such as axes and metal axles to bludgeon people with and even in S21 a lot of the torture was done with 220 volt mains electricity which is hardly very effective as the capacity of the human body to withstand that kind of electricity is very limited. Then again, they were probably not really interested in finding out what they had to say in the first place. The main reason they managed to kill so many people was because of the sheer number of killing fields in Cambodia; almost every temple was turned into a small destruction facility, literally thousands of miniature extermination camps all over the country. The Killing Fields near Phnom Penh are merely the most famous.

To me the most shocking thing about the whole situation is not the number of people they killed and certainly not the planning or efficiency that went into it; on both counts it scores low in comparison to other genocides in the same century. The crazy thing is that these weren’t Jews, or heathens or anything like it. They were killing their own neighbors, friends, and co-workers. It’s scary to see how easy it is to brainwash basically good, law abiding citizens and make them torture and kill the very people they’ve been happily living side by side with for generations, all for some crazy and ill conceived ideal. I’ve never believed that most people are inherently good, there’s too much evidence to the contrary and the Khmer Rouge’s four year reign of terror is certainly an exhibit for the prosecution in that case.

Anyway, after another couple of days of sightseeing, eating brilliant and cheap Chinese food and dodging the dodgy officials it was time once more to leave Phnom Penh, this time for the ancient capital of the Khmer Empire: the temples at Angkor Wat. For this we took a bus to Siem Reap; a small town very close to these sprawling and enchanting city temples. I’ll tell you all about them in the next blog and there will be many pictures to illustrate.

For now the best of wishes from the north of Thailand and I hope those of you in Europe are enjoying the beautiful summer weather.

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