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Published: October 17th 2017
The kindness of the Cambodian people was apparent when Jenny and I first arrived at Phnom Pen airport ... our pick up had not arrived and as we stood there a guide from another company noticed us maybe looking a bit “ lost ” and he then phoned and arranged a driver to pick us up .... problem solved !! Having lost a night sleep on the journey we had a couple of hours kip then we were off. The hotel was in a great location , the Mighty Mekong river at the end of the road, the old market at the other end and Palaces and temples 5 mins walk. Hot and humid, we were also very happy to think that after our walkabouts we could have a cooling dip in the pool or sit on the rooftop with a beer overlooking the Mekong. We are on an organised tour with Intrepid , and met the rest of the group and our guide on the first evening. What a great group it turned out to be.. 8 Australians, 2 from New Zealand and us. The business end done we set about getting to know one another over a group dinner.
And so it was for the rest of the week... fantastic company , great fun , lots of laughs and to top it all the best guide ever. He was so intelligent, knowledgable with great organisational skills ...we followed our leader with no disagreements , all like minded for the whole week. And so it was we learned so much about the history of the Khmer KIngdom visiting the most beautiful palaces , the French occupation of Indo China , and also the bombings of Cambodia and Laos by the USA during the Vietnam War . This country has suffered enormously and more was to come when the Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot ( and did you know this name stood for Political Potential !) supposedly liberating the population set about a regime under which everyone would be equal ... in other words equally poor. All the population was moved out of the cities to the countryside and made to work in agriculture, graduates and educated people , those who wore glasses and could read were executed first , as people started to starve they were killed if they could not work , everyone had to wear the same clothing,
barbed wire
Barbed wire was put across doors and windows to stop people committing suicide .
children separated from parents .... rice harvests were exchanged to China for arms and so it went on .
The history is so recent ..in the 70s , and was all the more poignant because our guide had experienced many of the horrors...being moved as a child he didn’t know his real birth year, he had escaped to Thailand with his mother, his father had been killed with a hammer blow to the head with his mother having had to carry the hammer to the site of the killing. That was his personal story which set the scene for our visit to the former high school , now the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum where we witnessed the cells where 15000 prisoners were tortured and then sent to the Killing Fields. The Khmer Rouge kept meticulous records and photos of prisoners which you see .... it’s horrific and extremely moving . At the end of our visit we met 2 of only 7 survivors..now an old man of 84 one described how he was tortured but then was saved because the typewriter broke and he managed to fix it so he was kept prisoner to fix them, and the other
Cell 22
Where our survivor was kept man was an artist and painted a good portrait of Pol Pot so he was saved however he told how his wife was killed because she wasn’t such a good artist.
These people of Cambodia are a wonderful example of the goodness of humanity as they said how they can forgive they want the world to witness what has happened so we don’t forget. It broke my heart to see what suffering there had been , and I can barely write about it without the tears coming. More was to come when later in the day we visited one of the many the Killing Fields ... walked around where there were mass graves and saw the Stupa skulls and bones ,which have been excavated , are displayed. Not wanting to waste bullets on the executions you can see how people have been killed with hammers, hoes, spades and bamboo poles . Jenny and I found it unbearable and both of us in tears But we wouldn’t have missed this experience.
As our guide said the country was brought down to Ground Zero in just a few years and is still building up , many people having lost out
on education and the infrastructure.
It was important for me to record how it felt for us in this one blog and then will write about the other side of Cambodia in the next one... so Cambodia and it‘s beautiful temples to follow.
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Angela Ardington
non-member comment
Unforgettable experience
Yes the recent history of Cambodia leaves a lasting mark. The brutality and suffering are such that we hope no human ever has to experience again.