A Bucket and Spade and a Hand-Grenade

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As we began our descent from 30000ft I was entirely oblivious to the air-crew’s requests to stow our tray-tables, return our seats to the upright position and fasten our seatbelts as I was entirely rapt by the stunning views laid out for before me from my window-seat. A vast glistening blue lake was encircled by endless emerald green fields, themselves sparkling with the waters sustaining the rice-paddies below. It was hard to believe that such a glittering marvel, a scene straight out of a fairy-tale, had just thirty years earlier gained notoriety worldwide as The Killing Fields.

Back in the 70s these lands weren’t such a great place to be. In those days, only Punks would tout a Holiday in Cambodia. It certainly wasn’t on offer down your local Flight Centre or Lunn Poly. Madness had gripped the land, and not the Baggy Trousered, I’ve Been Driving In My Car variety on offer in the UK singles charts, but a rather more full-on version even the Sex Pistols would find hard to stomach, as endorsed by the Khmer rouge and their psychotic leader Pol Pot, or Brother No 1 as he preferred to be called.

I have to say I might have had a hard time adopting this moniker, as my own brother number one has never tried to relieve me of all my worldly goods, sentence me to a life of hard labour in the fields, or have me put to death.

Well not yet, at any rate.

In fact in the punishment stakes he’s something of a lightweight, at least by the standards of Pol Pot, who raises the bar for even the most despotic of tyrants, a definite candidate for the Worst-of-All-Time list. He began his rule by resetting the date to Year Zero, at a stroke alienating a hefty portion of the population who were inexplicably looking forward to the Eighties. This social experiment was an attempt to return the nation to a primitive agrarian society devoid of any sign of culture, shoulder-pads or, most importantly of all, Dallas. And you can kind of see how he might claim to have had a point there.

In Cambodia though, it wasn’t so much Who Shot JR as who shot your mother, father, friends and neighbours. They couldn’t all have moved to Ramsay Street, surely? Before long there was nobody left to take charge but the children themselves, kids too young to even catch a rollercoaster drafted into the army for the scariest ride of their lives.

Predictably the West did very little at all in the way of intervention. Sure, there was much wringing their hands and muttering into cups of tea, but memories of Agent Orange, napalm and downed Hueys were way too fresh in the mindset to even think about doing anything more practical. So it was left to the Vietnamese, of all people, to eventually mosey in and forcibly point out to our Pol even the most basic concepts of Human Rights. Somehow or other (call it Pot luck) he wasn’t rapidly dispensed like Saddam, but managed to argue his case for the next twenty years before snuffing it of natural causes, much to the chagrin of the surviving Cambodian populace, not to mention the third who didn’t make it.

Or did he?

Perhaps old Pol shared an undertaker with Elvis, as blow me, if he didn’t pop up a few years later on Britain’s Got Talent, singing opera and claiming to have worked at Car-Phone Warehouse all the while.

And while we’re on the subject, has anyone else noticed what happens if you take an old snap of Mussolini and draw on a dodgy wig? Why, it’s Susan Boyle! No wonder she’s gone into hiding.

That Simon Cowell’s got some explaining to do, if you ask me.

Keep your eyes peeled for Ghengis Khan and Attila the Hun popping up next season in a heavy-metal combo. Caligula will be on drums. Those with long memories will already recall Hitler playing keyboards for Sparks, just around the time our Pol was making his bid for power.

Coincidence?

I don’t think so.

Twenty minutes and a bollocking from the hostess later, back in our world we touched down safely at Siem Reap.

I’d been trying to make this trip for years, but every time I came close some wannabe warlord in Phnom Penh would loose-off a few rounds and the country would go back to being in lockdown. Luckily the shooting’s been stopped for quite some time now, and the whole world is waking up to the wonders of the Cambodia. For most people (with the possible exception of Gary Glitter) they chiefly revolve around the Temples of Angkor.

Siem Reap turned out to be yet another spot which completely confounded expectations. In the last decade or so since my first abortive trips, Angelina Jolie has usurped Harrison Ford as everyone’s favourite archaeologist, and proved that when it comes to pulling-power, bigger is always best.

As a result Siem Reap has transformed from sleepy backwater into tourist boomtown, and, at least in my experience, these things rarely go well. I was fully expecting a town about as attractive as Harrison dressed up as Lara Croft, and I suppose that’s what I got, though I must commend his surgeons and make-up team as this is one Extreme Makeover with reasonably agreeable results.

Actually, I think the people we really should be thanking are the French.

Now there’s something you won’t often hear me say!

The fact is, wherever the French have been in the world, you can count on two things; Style in abundance, and simply great food. Any semblance of a reasonable economy or system of government are pretty-much a non-starter, but the food and decor are sumptuous. Strangely prostitutes also seem to feature prominently, and not all of them female. Quite why this should be, I’ve no idea, though possibly recent revelations suggest we should be asking the French Minister of Culture for his input, so to speak.

And so it is with Siem Reap.

Its 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, watch the world go by. Cunningly I persuaded Debbie to take some local cookery classes, so hopefully we’ll be able to recreate its delights back home, though preferably without the constant hassles from hookers and beggars, unless the neighbourhood’s gone well and truly to the dogs in our absence. Meanwhile I toddled off for three days’ hardcore Tomb Raiding at the temples themselves, which fully lived up to the billing as the Double D-cup of all ruins. Appropriately it’s their sheer scale that makes the biggest impression of all, not just the size of the megaliths themselves but the levels of detail engraved on each and every one. Let’s just say the whole thing must have taken a wee while, which kind of makes you wonder why they were subsequently abandoned for centuries and allowed to be swallowed up by the jungle, until a very lost French explorer stumbled across them in the mid 1840s.

While the 21st century claims to be the age of adventure travel, really it’s got nothing on the old days. Sure, you can now bungy, parasail or white-water raft, but way back when, you might just bumble across an entire lost civilisation while out searching for a decent cup of coffee. Where now you might be stuck on some god-awful bus dying for the toilet, in days of yore you’d be more likely becalmed on some dodgy boat just plain dying. Back when it was James rather than Thomas Cook who planned your travel itinerary, the insurance premiums must have been horrendous, as half the passengers, the skipper included, would fail to make it home alive. Ponder that the next time you’re whinging about your plane being delayed twelve hours.

Back at Angkor it’s not the visitors that are dying but the temples themselves. Centuries of neglect have seen them slowly reclaimed by the forests, sending walls askew and roofs perilously close to collapse. It’s really quite an eye-opener how much destruction a humble tree-root can cause, even to such solidly built structures, and gives a glimpse of the future of a few years hence when we’ve all succumbed to whale-flu. There’ll be a tree growing right up through your sofa where you’re normally sat, it’s roots splayed out across the floor, the cushions enveloped high up in the canopy, and the leaves completely obscuring the views of the flat-screen telly, which in any case will have been encased by a thick layer of moss. Which is a real shame, as it will rob you of any chance to see Charlie Dimmock displaying her own prodigious talents in the mother of all Backyard Blitzes.

There’s an interesting dilemma here once the buildings hit a certain state of disrepair; whether to intervene and preserve or simply sit back and let nature take its course, enjoy the slow natural disintegration with the passing of time. Personally I’m all for the earth-ripped-asunder look, as would be obvious to anyone with even the most passing acquaintance with my wardrobe. There’s a certain majesty in their graceful decline, their ancient origins only magnified by the present-day roots prising them apart.

It’ll never be allowed to happen, though, as every once in a while a passing tourist would be wiped out by a thousand tons of falling masonry. Even in Cambodia the Health and Safety mob aren’t likely to turn a blind-eye to that one.

What’s more, once all had crumbled away to nothing the mighty tourist dollar would also disappear quick as a flash, not something that's going to be permitted anytime soon. For now we’re stuck in a bizarre limbo, half-crumbled remains desperately held aloft by ever more Heath-Robinson repairs. It does give each temple its own individual character, dependent on its state of decrepitude.

Such is their scale that the temples of Angkor take several days to cover for even the most cursory of glances, by which time you’re starting to suffer from temple overload. It’s not just the ruins themselves but the crowds which wear you out. If you’re lucky you’ll rock up in a lull and have the whole place almost to yourself, but before long the next wave of coach-parties will descend and you’ll find yourself swamped once again by the hoards.

At Ta Phrom, for me the most stunning temple of all, I found myself rapidly overcome by tourist-party hell, and, rather than battle it, elected to simply surrender, take a pew, and watch them all pass by, astonished by the sheer numbers as wave after wave were hectored through by their local guides. These guys seem a knowledgeable and efficient bunch, proficient in a bewildering array of languages, though regrettably not a single English-speaking group passed by so I wasn’t ever party to their whole memorised spiel. All I know is, whatever the language, the same five words invariably crop up towards the end of the presentation, immediately followed by the flash of a thousand camera bulbs:

‘Angelina Jolie’, ‘Tomb Raider’ and ‘Cheese!’

It turned out I’d plonked myself down right in front of a particularly photogenic tree, through whose roots Angelina had once famously sashayed on celluloid, followed thereafter by a million other Angelina wannabees, gurning like idiots. Unfortunately it seemed none of their mother-tongues contained a single word likely to replicate a grin of her epic Hollywood proportions.

I reflected that ‘Cheese!’ could just as easily have been replaced with ‘Sheep!’ as one by one they struck their best Lara Croft pose, something of a Big Ask for some of the tubbier of blokes.

Somehow there was something hypnotically fascinating about the entire spectacle, played out time and again by all nations of the globe (predictably the Japs living up to their reputation as the most prolific of snappers) and I spent a good hour quietly looking on pondering just what, if anything, was going through their minds, and whether or not some of them had grasped the whole place was anything other than an elaborately constructed film set.

Fortunately most temples were within cycling distance, so we ourselves escaped the joys of tourist-bus hell, and luckily the roads were distinctly less frenetic than Kathmandu. On our last day, though, we ventured further afield to Banteay Srei, an intricate little temple 32kms away. Wisely we took a tuk-tuk rather than a coach, but at least it gave the chance to see a bit more of the real Cambodia, which proved every bit as pretty as it had looked from the plane. It’s a land completely belying its tortured past, the locals themselves being remarkably happy-go-lucky. I don’t know if it’s down to some sort of defence mechanism, or the fact that most of them don’t actually remember the terrors of old, with a staggering 40% of the population under 15 years of age, and almost everyone we came across under 30.

Certainly on first acquaintance you’d never guess at the horrors that lurk beneath, but we were about to be reminded in the most graphic manner, as we chose on our return trip to detour through the Cambodian Landmine Museum.

Now, let’s face it, this was never going to be a barrel of laughs.

Litter seems to be an increasing problem in most parts of the world, but in Cambodia it’s a particular nuisance as the whole place is littered with landmines. Unfortunately these are not the sort of thing you can just scoop up and shove in the bin. Luckily one man has started a campaign to Keep Cambodia Tidy, and has set up the Museum as a charity to both provide funds for landmine clearance and take care of their victims.

This is no easy task.

Mines, despite the name, are not something you want to have any part of, but that doesn’t stop them wanting a part of you. They’ve been labelled as silent indiscriminate killers, but actually they’re worse than that, as they’re specifically designed not to kill but to maim, blasting off any stray extremity which crosses their path. At least that’s the case with anti-personnel mines. Anti-tank mines, which they also have here in abundance, you really don’t want to mess with, even if you did somehow manage to smuggle your own Sherman through customs. The theory is that an injured soldier takes up more resources than a dead one, conveniently forgetting that even once all the soldiers are dead or gone, the mines will be still out there, performing impromptu surgery on anyone unlucky enough to pass their way.

Knowing this, you or I would perhaps be trifle circumspect with where we placed such things, but in Cambodia successive competing armies have simply sprinkled them around like Hundreds & Thousands, and in their hundreds of thousands, with nobody keeping any records of just where they all might be.

Tragically the landmines go on killing way after the conflicts are gone and forgotten. Given their brutal legacy most civilised nations have now banned their use and signed the International Land Mine Treaty, but there are still a few rogue nations holding out. Their roll-call sounds like a Who’s Who of the International Most Wanted list; Burma, Cuba, Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Somalia and, oh yes, the good old US of A. That’s some pretty exalted company you’re keeping there, fellas! You may have been Born on the 4th of July, but it turns out any day’s a good day for blowing off a few more limbs.

In Cambodia alone there have been 40000 landmine victims injured since major conflict ended, with another 18000 killed. 60% of these are civilians, a good number of them children, some purely by accident, others having been sent out deliberately to retrieve scrap metal in some Russian-roulette treasure-hunt. Worldwide the figures are even worse, an estimated 20000 casualties a year, making it quite likely that someone somewhere has been blown to bits while you’ve been reading this blog, and will be joined by an entire coach-load of others by the time you go to bed, managing to look even less photogenic than those posing prats at Angkor. And tomorrow the carnage will start all over again first thing. Really, it’s enough to put you completely off your cocoa.

Sleep well now, won’t you.

Setting mines is cheap but hardly cheerful. They cost only around a dollar a pop, yet Western mine-clearing agencies need to spend a thousand times that much to clear each and every one. Unsurprisingly they largely don’t bother.

Once your country’s been war-torn that kind of cash proves even harder to come by. Local clearing agencies are few and far between. In this case the founder of the Landmine Museum has a life-story which reflects his country’s turbulent history. He’s no idea exactly how old he is, or even what’s his real name. At an early age he was drafted into the Khmer Rouge as a child soldier and brainwashed, at around the time I was busy learning my times-tables. After a few years’ experience, aged around eleven or twelve, he was put in charge of a mine-laying team to lay a trail of destruction across the land far worse than any my Mum ever had cause to complain about.

As time passed by he came to realise the futility of this exercise and swapped sides to the Vietnamese, who, on learning his history, had him do exactly the same for them. Eventually with conflicts over he was picked up by a Japanese demining operation keen on tapping his expertise and trained to retrieve mines rather than lay them. The irony is not lost on even him that many of the mines he now risks his life to clear he may have had a hand in planting in the first place. The adult pays the price for the child’s mistakes, quite a turnaround in this most tumultuous of lives.

Lacking the grand-a-throw that the safe retrieval methods demand, his approach is by necessity rather more basic. Utilising mostly a stick and the tip of his sandals he pokes away at the ground until he hits something solid. His workday literally revolves around a bucket and spade and a hand-grenade, though I’ve no idea if he sings on the job. Mine identified, he carefully digs it up and defuses it by hand, aided only by a spanner and, rather more alarmingly, a hammer, all with the minimum of fuss. As he marches off on his next sortie, we’re left to reflect that while he may be no Snow White, his efforts certainly dwarf anything most of us will ever achieve, and it’s us that should be Bashful for being Dopey enough to let things get to this stage in the first place from the safety of our Sleepy little lives.

And on that rather Grumpy note, I’ll be Happy to leave you.

Cambodia certainly leaves a mark on the memory.

Some treasures you’ll hope to seek out, while others should be avoided at any cost, but if you do end up heading this way, check out the museum and throw a few shekels his way. It’s not hard to find, just as well as this is one country you’ll not want to stray too far off the beaten track. So stick to the trusted trail, and eat, drink and be merry, but always remember to watch your step, as away from the friendly smiles, thrills and spills of Siem Reap, the country hides the sort of hidden secrets most of us couldn’t possibly begin to imagine.

Let’s not beat about the bush on this one; at the end of the day, it’s a minefield out there.

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Comments

[William]

Bucket & spade !!!!
Another brilliant post. Always a pleasure to read. Thanks.

[Lou]

Jealous,moi?
2 kids with chicken pox ,a halloween party full of toddlers and a 3 year old who appears to be Pol Pot reincarnated.Why would I be jealous! Just keep swimming,just keep swimming......!!