What you need my son is a holiday in Cambodia

N 11 33 397 E 104 54.988 21m - Phnom Penh, Cambodia - 16 December 2008

Of all the countries that were on our schedule, the one that seemed the most exciting, or maybe compelling (ok, maybe besides Mongolia) was Cambodia. I knew some about the country and history but when you really look at it, it is so much worse than that. There have been so many catastrophic events happen there in the last generation, it is amazing that the country works at all and isn't complete anarchy like Somalia.

For those who haven't seen much more about Cambodia than the Killing Fields and some Doonesbury comics about secret bombings (ok, this is kind of my list), Cambodia has had a horrible 30 years or so. Before that, the country, the Khmers, had been passed back and forth between Thailand (Siam) and Vietnam. They had previously ruled the entire region as part of the Khmer empire. When the French moved into Indochina back in the 1800s, the pressured Thailand to give them control of Cambodia at the same time they took over in Vietnam. The French though were more interested in Vietnam and sort of ignored Cambodia.

They then achieved a sort of independence from a war weary France after WWII but almost immediately got sucked into the the Vietnam War (known as the American War in Vietnam) by forces crossing over from Vietnam to hide out there which led to American bombing (the secret bombings of Nixon and Kissinger) further destabilizing the area and creating civil war. By 1975, the Khmer Rouge won the civil war and immediately turned the country into a nightmare, turning the population out of the cities in an effort to bring about an instantaneous agrarian Communist society and then proceeded to kill 1/4 of the population through violence and starvation. Their border war with Vietnam then brought down their downfall and by 1978, Vietnam invaded and installed a government of former Khmer Rouge and Khmer exiles. Pol Pot and the rest of the Khmer Rouge fled to near the Thailand border and waged a civil war until the late 90s.

So, it is only recently that active civil war has been ended and the Khmer Rouge era left the country on the edge of starvation and destroyed to its foundations. After you have killed all the teachers (or could read, knew how machinery worked, etc), how do you really rebuild a country. And despite what any money changers at the border will tell you, Cambodia's economy runs on the US dollar. The Khmer Rouge abolished currency and when later governments tried to reestablish a currency system, there was no confidence in it and informally the country formed around the dollar. Even now, the majority of banks only accept deposits in dollars. We had some Cambodian money with us and found you mostly get bewilderment when you try to pay for thing with it. If something costs less than a dollar, you will get change in Riel, but for the most part will never see any.

I've found the politics of the region interesting to see and to see how normal people in the country feel about things. China and Vietnam were obstensively Communist countries (or were perhaps just run by the Communist party of China/Vietnam) but it seems strange how that happened, considering that wheeling and dealing just seems to be part of the genetic makeup. The reality of it is that both countries seem more like oligarchies, run by well connected people with no time for less well connected ones (social net, ha).

Cambodia is technically a democracy, they even had major election a few months before we got there. I asked somebody how they went, what happened in them since I had read that things were mostly run by the Cambodian People's Party (CPP - mostly people installed by Vietnam of Cambodian exiles during the KR period) and a few other parties, old monarchists, human rights parties, etc. He didn't know, he had to go look up what happened, was even confused by talk of elections. Later, he reported back, oh the CPP won some more seats, the people with power and money just stayed. In an essentially one party state, elections are not terribly important.

My main memory of Phnom Penh might be dropping my camera (my nice shiny new one) on the first day there and bending the lens housing, making it so that lens wouldn't come out anymore. It took two days to find somebody (Lux Photo, hurray for them) to take it apart and bend it back into shape, for 20 USD. Much relieved. And I guess the guy waving the gun around. I still don't know if it was a real gun but it was really freaky. Just outside the big market, the one with the big dome (Psar Thmei), crossing the street, which is scary in of itself, luckily C was distracted by that and didn't see the guy with a silver handgun walking quickly and pointing it at everybody, cars, waving it around, towards me, aack, walk fast, don't look, just go, then wandered off down the street still waving it around. Surreal and strange. And then into the market which is really known for their fried bugs (spiders, crickets, and whatever, look horrendous and smell pretty bad too).

But ok, stuff to see and do. We walk down 240 Street a few times, the trendy hip arts and crafts sort of place to be. The vast majority of the streets in Phnom Penh are just number streets. I guess another relic of the KR days, if you have to quickly rebuild society, easier to name things 240, 242, 244, etc, than try to come up lots of names for them. We head through there on the way to the Silver Pagoda, closed for lunch at 10.30 (officially closed for lunch 11 to 2, guess they left early) so off to the National Museum which doesn't close for lunch. There were lots of moto drivers lurking outside the Pagoda who were more than ready to take us somewhere that wasn't closed, or just somewhere, anywhere, so we would have to pay them, but we ran by and went to the National Museum.

The building is quite cool, lots of pointy horns on the roof (sort of like bull horns on the front of a Texan Caddy). It was one of the major architecture points that changed quite a bit crossing over from Vietnam. It seems to be a big style point in Thailand too. Maybe it is supposed to be pointy dancing arms. The museum had a room full of thousands of Buddhas which was quite amazing. It had loads of things that had been carved off temples in Angkor and other things and all of these things had amazingly survived the KR era. There was an amazing head of Siva, 10th century I think, this smooth rounded face appearing out of a big block of sandstone which had lost half the face, sheared off or something. It was like seeing the face just forming out of rough rock. And there was a pretty amazing partial cast (I guess what is left of it now) of Vishnu lying down and floating through the cosmos. So, there were a few cool things in it I really liked.

After the previously mentioned camera incident and gun play, we make it back to the National Palace. A $6 entry fee, pretty expensive, it did have loads of shiny things in it. The throne room was quite gilt. The silver pagoda was silvery, with a silver floor, although a lot is tarnished or covered with carpeting. Rooms filled with various sized silver elephants, lots and lots of stuppas, a big golden Buddha footprint, well, lots of other shiny things I can't remember now. I guess you have to go see that sort of stuff even if it is so over the top.

We then move up our timetable for Phnom Penh, staying one more day and then heading off to Siem Reap the day after. We considered going south to the beach and ocean there but decide to save that time for a beach and island in Thailand instead. We are starting to run out of time on this trip.

I go to see S-21, Tuol Sleng Prison, the next morning. In the bad days of the KR reign in the mid 70s, most of the victims were just killed - ended up on a list, taken away, killed, no discussion or anything elaborate. There could be lots of reasons for it, caught singing the wrong sort of song, or there didn't need to be a reason at all. Some of those people, 17,000 or so (a very very small percentage) ended up at S-21 before they were killed to be tortured, sign confessions, or just be held a while before they too were taken off to some killing field somewhere and shot or bludgeoned. Some of them were relatives of former high officials and some of them were just normal people, and towards the end, some of them were KR members who had fallen out of favor and were being purged. Cambodia had been divided into regions falling under different groups, but by 1977, the entire eastern part of the country was deemed to be too liberal and was ordered to be completely purged.

S-21 then was then the main center for torture and confessions and all that. It was previously a high school with some classrooms converted into cells and others into torture rooms. I guess that was one of the really surreal things about it, it is pretty much a bog standard SE Asia school with just a lot more barbed wire around it. I expected it to be quite disturbing and gruesome but it was those things but not quite as much as I expected. There are walls and walls of pictures, those initial mug shot pictures when they were first brought in, and a few of some of them after they had been tortured. There is a 1 hour film about the search for what happened to one woman who was known to have been processed (and later killed) by S-21. There were also lots of exhibits about the guards (mostly small children who were indoctrinated and set to work as guards) and one that I really liked of pictures a Swedish guy took of a tour of Cambodia in 1977, a PR effort, see Cambodia isn't so bad, with his thoughts at the time and then updated thoughts from the present and his sorrow and regrets over being used in this way at the time.

So, it was a rather depressing but informative morning. I don't end up seeing the Killing Fields, a few kilometers out of town, but I've seen pictures and they look pretty much like fields with pits, and I wonder too, just how much do you really need to see. I mean I'm pretty strongly against genocide and I've read quite a bit about why it happened, how it happened and all that, but then how much do you kind of need to see and wallow in it. Am I really the right target audience for it either? I'm well educated, well traveled, have a decent grasp of politics and cultures around the world. But in Cambodia, apparently the KR years contain a few too many controversial items for the CPP, the ruling party, and the genocide isn't even being taught in schools right now. What a shocking state of affairs. Here I am kind of overloaded with information about it and where it happened, the descendants of those it happened to are not even learning about it.

Anyways, the day gets much better when my camera is fixed and I can put away my old one again, back in the bottom of my backpack. Some last minute running around, booking bus tickets and all and we are ready to head off to Siem Reap on what hopefully is a nice bus, we book the VIP one, with the intention of seeing loads of temples (the mega famous Angkor temples) and spend some time on the huge lake and at the bird sanctuary and probably spend Christmas there. Some of that could happen, you never know.