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Published: August 11th 2010
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Apologies that this blog is a bit of a history lesson! If you’re not interested then just skip to the funny stuff at the bottom….
Vietnam - Ho Chi Minh City We only had one day here so we made a beeline to the Chu Chi tunnels; which are located on the outskirts of the city. The tunnels at Chu Chi are one of last surviving sections of a once huge underground tunnel network that stretched 250km from the Cambodian border across to Ho Chi Minh City. They were dug and used with great effect by the Viet Cong during the Vietnam War and featured underground living quarters, hospitals, meeting rooms, weapon stores and even a honeymoon suite! Apparently the deepest tunnels were far enough below ground to be protected from the B-52 bombs, of which many craters were still visible as we walked around in the jungle nearby.
The clever design of the tunnels included various methods of disguising them, secret entrances, secret lookout posts and many different types of booby trap. The American soldiers really didn’t stand much of a chance against such an organized and determined resistance. The Viet Cong were also masters of using
the resources they had available, including the recycling the unexploded American bombs to make their own grenades and using shrapnel to make big metal spikes for the booby traps. These traps were basically pits of spikes covered by false floors that the Americans would fall into - really nasty stuff.
The tour was very interesting; however, we felt the site had been turned into a bit of a theme park which was highlighted by the area where you could pay to fire a machine gun yourself. The “educational film” we watched also seemed to be an old Vietnam War propaganda film. Whilst something may have been lost in translation, it did seem to have a very hypnotic voiceover that in nearly every sentence repeated the virtues of “killing Americans”, “The enemy”, “Americans”, “Killing the enemy”…and so on.
The high point (or rather, low point!) of the trip was the chance to go down inside the tunnels themselves. Even though they had widened them for the tourists (they think I’m fat?!) they were still very small, dark and claustrophobic. We had the option to crawl along a distance of up to 100m but both of us bailed out after
20m! It must have been horrendous living in the tunnels for any length of time.
Cambodia - Phnom Penh This is another SE Asian country of contrasts, on the one hand we had the most efficient boarder crossing ever and on the other hand there were ladies selling cooked chili crickets by the road side.
A lot of people just pass through the capital Phnom Penh without stopping (lured on by the amazing temples in Siem Reap - that’ll be the next blog!) but we felt we couldn’t come to Cambodia without learning about the atrocities inflicted by the Khmer Rouge government, led by Pol Pot, back in the 1970’s.
The aim of the Khmer Rouge government was to revert Cambodia back to a classless, peasant society described as ‘Year Zero’. Basically a country where everyone was totally self sufficient and nobody would be able to challenge their power. After years of violent civil war Pol Pot took power and between the 1975 and 1979 anybody with a good education, strong religious beliefs, a high power job or even just because they wore glasses were rounded up, tortured and then killed. Their families were also killed
to reduce the chance of any uprising fueled by revenge.
The Khmer Rouge also abolished the monetary system, closed hospitals, closed schools, outlawed all religion, burnt books and sent anybody living in a city back to the countryside- where forced labor was widespread. During those 5 years it’s estimated that 1.5 million Cambodian’s died, which was about one fifth of the population.
The first stop on our tour was to S-21, an old school which had been converted into a prison where people would be interrogated and tortured. The aim was to get confessions out of these people so that they could then be executed. Each cell was no more than 2 meters square and had no window. In order to force confessions guards would use techniques such as waterboarding and electric wire lashings. People were even punished with lashes for crying out in pain. Many of the confessions were obviously false; there are only so many people from small farming villages in Cambodia that can be Russian spies working for the KGB! Of the 17,000 prisoners that passed through S-21 only 7 people survived.
We both struggled to see the point of such horrific violence turned
against a countries own people. We’ve travelled through a lot of countries which have suffered under corrupt/misguided/power hungry dictators, but in each case we could at least see a grain of ideology behind their actions. Although we kept reading about what happened in Cambodia the goal of the regime was never really clear to us, except its own preservation. In reality there wasn’t even a ruling class, as even the S21 torturers were victims of the regime- many of them were forced to work there by the government. Refusal would only result in your own death and then the death of your family.
After a stint in S21 those who hadn’t died under interrogation were sent to the Killing Fields, about 10km outside of Phnom Penh. This is the site where the mass executions of the ‘guilty’ took place. It’s estimated that about 20,000 people were killed there and then placed into mass graves. To save on the cost of bullets a lot of these people were killed using axes and other such instruments. Since the excavations of the mass graves the bones and clothes they found have been placed inside a monument at the site. Walking around the
site it’s so hard to take it all in. I still don’t think I can fully understand how something like this can happen.
On a lighter note… On our last evening in Phnom Penh we visited a small temple called Wat Phnom where our guidebook promised a sighting of some ‘cheeky monkeys’. Sure enough we quickly spotted a couple of monkeys running around so walked over to get some pictures. To bond with our monkey friends I tried offering one of them an acorn but was met with a most disapproving look. After ignoring my outstretched hand for a while he looked at me with utter contempt and then hit the acorn out of my hand as hard as he could. Lesson learned - monkeys don’t like acorns!
The following day we took a 6 hour coach journey to Siem Reap. As we were now entering a malaria zone Liz started to get a little paranoid when we realized that the bus was full of mozzies. The coach was calm; everybody was busy reading or sleeping….. and then ‘THWACK’. The back of Liz’s’ book would be thrust against the glass in the hope of killing a mosquito.
By this point however, the mosquito had seen it coming, flown off and made itself a cup of tea. To be fair, I think Liz did manage to kill quite a few of them. Proof of this was one particularly juicy one that left a big red smudge on both the glass and the back of the (thankfully laminated) book! Eughhhhhh….
And the book? A Farewell to Arms!
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Pat
non-member comment
Back to housework
It's difficult to imagine anything more mundane than cleaning when I've just read your latest blog! Astonishing to think that some of the worst attrocities committed by the people against the people have happened in the last (civilized?) 70 years. Your blogs have been both entertaining and informative - we travel with you in spirit if not in body, luckily for you! Lots of love from Pat.