Phnom Penh

We got off the flight and picked up a visa on arrival. This is some event to witness. Basically you and everyone else hands in their passports; they pile them up inside the counter, and then they pass along through about nine different sets of hands for scrutiny and processing, while the customs officers are busy-busy filling in forms and conversing amongst themselves. One by one the passports finally get to the end of the line, and one official shouts out the names in bad pronunciations (this is funny to listen to!). When you hear what sounds like your name being called - you go “that’s me” and collect your passport, inside which you now find a big Cambodian sticker taking up a full page. Seems to work, who am I to complain?!

Once outside we were immediately bombarded with offers to take us to different guesthouses. We didn’t have one in mind, so we decided to let one of the tuk tuk drivers take us to one, where we assumed he’d get a commission from, but we didn’t mind either way.

Sadly the tuk tuk trip around town really highlighted for us how dirty Phnom Penh

Terrace of the Elephants at Angkor Wat

was - your eyes start to go red and get sore from the pollution after ten or fifteen minutes, and the smell of rotting food and sewers is evident on many roads, which made for some very interesting smells. Many people live in poverty and Cambodia takes the gold ribbon for the highest HIV rate in Asia.

Could it be that the Lexus jeep is the official vehicle of Cambodia? Well it's not, but it should be! I have never seen so many shiny Lexus jeeps in one city, in my entire life. It was absurd. Cambodia is supposed to be a shining light of democracy in the region, but the veneer of democracy wears thin, as it’s supplemented more by cronyism and nepotism it appears. The government seems to have moved to being a Kleptocracy where corruption remains a cancer; the elite in urban areas seem to get richer, and the poor remain poor and subjugated. Where are the ordinary “family cars” I kept asking myself as we traveled around?

History

Just like Vietnam and Laos, Cambodia also suffered French encroachment and became part of French Indochina in 1887. Following the Japanese occupation during World War II,

A cricket anyone?

Cambodia regained full independence in 1953.

Through the Vietnam War years Cambodia was seen as U.S. friendly, and even allowed the U.S. government to bomb much of their countryside, with the aim of flushing out the Viet Cong, who were both hiding out in Cambodia and transporting weapons through the countryside down to southern Vietnam. This didn’t go down too well with the countryside dwellers and as a result a bitter army grew. The peasant army became known as the Khmer Rouge, who began to challenge the government policies. After a five-year struggle, the communist Khmer Rouge forces captured Phnom Penh (the capital) in April 1975, and ordered the evacuation of all cities and towns.

Their psychotic leader and the bad-est of all the Khmer Rough was Pol Pot, or “Brother No. 1” as he preferred to be called, began his rule by re-setting the calendar date to year zero! He had devised a plan to turn the country into an agrarian utopia through an ultra Maoist regime. This social experiment was an attempt to return the nation to a primitive agrarian society, devoid of any sign of culture, where all signs of the past were destroyed. The

Snake and Crocodile dish!

Behind the scenes we weren't so confident....

country was also renamed to the ‘Republic of Kampuchea’. Not surprisingly the West did very little at all by way of intervention, and memories of the Vietnam War were way too fresh in the mindset to even think about doing anything more practical. Whatever happened to: “let us never forget” after the genocide of the Jewish people during the Second World War, and to preventing atrocities like this taking place again in any country?

The Khmer Rouge was responsible for over 1.7 million deaths after overthrowing the country's government in 1975. The majority of these deaths was an act of blatant genocide, which they called 'social engineering'. The Khmer Rouge wanted to create a purely agrarian based communist society, by moving the city dwellers to the countryside and subjecting them to forced labour. They specifically targeted and attempted to wipe out Cambodia's educated and intellectual elite.

A 1978 Vietnamese invasion drove the Khmer Rouge back into the countryside, and led to a 10 year Vietnamese occupation, kicking off almost 13 years of civil war. 625,000 people died of famine afterwards. Factional fighting continued over the years and it took many painful years of negotiations between contending political parties,

Faces of some of the children who perished in the S-21 prision

several topsy-turvy governments, before eventually a coalition government was formed.

S-21 Museum (Tuol Sleng Museum)

The following day we woke up early and headed to S-21 via tuk tuk. It was a former high school which had been converted into a prison during the Pol Pot regime; it now serves as a museum to educate visitors of the atrocities caused by the Khmer Rouge over a four year period. It was a somber visit to say the least as we slowly walked through the prison, viewing photographs and reading captions that told the story of S-21. They had much of the original torture equipment that was used still left in the rooms. The cells were tiny and some walls had blood stains on them, left from prisoners 30 years before. There were coils of barbed wire covering the front of each building, as a deterrent to anyone from jumping off in a desperate attempt of committing suicide. We then proceeded through several rooms viewing photos of the several thousand prisoners that had passed through the death camp. It was very personal, being able to place faces to statistics, especially with the children.

The Killing Fields

The following day

Uniform of the Khmer Rouge

we got a tuk tuk to the Choeung Ek Memorial, or the “The Killing Fields” as they are known. It was 14km outside of the city, and was a location where most of the 17,000 detainees at S-21 were executed. Walking around the fields at the Choeung Ek Memorial is definitely not a pleasant experience. However, strolling in the humid air under a beautiful clear blue sky, surrounded by the newly planted draping trees that grow there, its impact can somewhat be diffused… and it’s difficult to even imagine that such evil had transpired in this very place we stood.

As we walked in we saw a tall glass structure - a shrine containing the skulls of over 8,000 victims, along with discarded clothes, all of which had been recovered from the mass graves in the surrounding area. We walked around between the seemingly endless pits, which are in fact mass graves. I'm still not fully able to comprehend the atrocities that took place there. The prisoners were brought to the fields by truck, bound and often blindfolded. Music speakers were set up in the trees to play music at such a high volume that the other prisoners awaiting

Prison cell in S-21

execution, or passers by, could not hear the screams of the victims. Not even children were spared.

There is a particular tree there that was used in evidence during the trial of one of the Khmer Rouge leaders. The soldiers would seize babies and young children from the arms of their mothers, and then whilst the mother watched, they would swing the baby around holding them by the ankles, smashing the child's tiny skull repeatedly against the tree, before tossing his or her by now lifeless body into the waiting pit.

The brutality of the murders and the crimes against humanity which took place at Choeung Ek is far beyond a level which is comprehendible to most rational people. People were bludgeoned to death with sticks and other instruments; those who didn't die straight away from their injuries would have been left buried alive under the bodies of others, subsequently dying from the chemical substances that were then thrown on the pile to eliminate the stench.

Comrade Duch is the man who was responsible for both the S-21 prison and the Choeung Ek Killing Fields. He was the person who ordered the horrendous acts of evil that

First day on the job.

& yes I bought some stuff...

took place there. He is currently on trial at the moment.

* * *

Siam Reap

After spending a few days in Phnom Penh we took a 6 hour bus to Siam Reap. This was a small, but pleasant town, which thrives on the tourism generated by Angkor Wat and the many other temples in the surrounding areas. Our search for accommodation didn’t even have the chance to get off the ground, as the touts where there to advise. A guy picked us up from the bus and told us the best places in town to stay… and he was right! We decided upon a hotel that was four-star luxury at two-star prices!

Well, we ended up spending 4 days in Siam Reap. Its whole raison d’etre from a tourist’s perspective is as a launch pad for the Temples of Angkor, but actually it’s not such a bad place to just sit and chill for a few days in French colonial grandeur, after all the traipsing around - and just watch the world go by.

Angkor Wat

The Angkor Empire extended over much of Southeast Asia and reached its zenith between the 10th and 13th

A-47 ... my new favourite toy!

centuries. They built incredible Hindu temples (the most famous being Angkor Wat) around the area of what is now known as Siam Reap. Subsequent attacks by the Thai and Cham (from present day Vietnam) weakened the empire ushering in a long period of decline.

Angelina Jolie as the venerable Lara Croft has surpassed Harrison Ford as everyone’s favorite archaeologist, in Cambodia at least, as this is where a lot of the original film ‘Tomb Raider’ was filmed. As a result Siam Reap has been transformed from sleepy backwater into tourist Mecca.

We toddled off at 5am for several hours of our very own hardcore Tomb-Raiding at the temples, which fully excelled our expectations. It’s the sheer scale which is mind boggling that makes the biggest impression of all, and the levels of detail engraved on each and every temple is incredible. Angkor Wat is the world’s largest religious monument and a microcosm of the Hindu universe. There were loads of places to explore there, and despite the myriads of people at some of the bigger temples, some were like you were discovering them for the very first time! Crawling over stones and through windows…

The famous Angkor

On location - where Tomb Raider was filmed

Wat - even I who feels at times, after seeing so many temples in so many countries at this point, that I have become part of the “seen it all before” club, couldn’t fail to be in awe of this magical place… Wow indeed!! There we sat with our hot tea and camera in hand, and watched as the darkness disappeared and the sun rose over this majestic temple. To do the temples justice though, it would take several days to cover them, such is their scale, for even the most cursory of glances.

* * *

We did a load of other things while we were here in Cambodia, such as:
* I got to shoot a full magazine of an AK47 at an army compound…. priceless! Also on offer was the opportunity to fire a missile launcher amongst other things!
* I had a fish massage - i.e. fish eat dead skin cells off your feet to encourage the cell regeneration process, while you sit there with your free beer!
* Ate crickets (tasted like Tayto!), crocodile and snake, and many times we succumbed to the traditional Cambodian dish of ‘Fish Amok’ (out of this world

Victims skulls on display in the shrine at the Killing Fields

tasty!)
* Got an hour long hot stone massage for the princely sum of $7 (it’s about €100 at home!) - wellness and pampering is not just for girls anymore!
* We paid a visit to the Royal Palace in Phnom Penh
* Watched a sunset from the heights of Phnom Bakheng in Siam Reap

We loved Cambodia. It has certainly left a mark on my memory. The local people were warm and genuine and happy-go-lucky. Even though Cambodia has been through a lot, they seem to be a resilient people, who don't let the past tarnish their day-to-day attitudes. If you have the chance, you must go to Cambodia and see it for yourself.

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