Please Don't Walk Through the Mass Grave

1 September 2009

As September begins and the Odyssey part of this really rather epic journey just starts to wind down a bit, we find ourselves in Cambodia. On a shared tourist-class bus from Saigon, where we spent our last evening celebrating Tim's birthday at both a Mexican restaurant and a bowling alley above a department store. As you do. Cute shoes.

Anyway, very posh bus with purple seats, that spent about 2 hours getting out of the traffic nightmare that is Saigon—the motorbikes are truly astounding in their sheer numbers, and also in the balls of steel that their riders exhibit. We booked out the back of the bus, they gave us water and doughnuts, and off we went. Left around 11:30am, and arrived in Phnom Penh last night at about 6:30pm. The border was sorted for us by the bus company, not even requiring photos this time. Ate fried morning glory and ginger chicken at a rest stop just inside Cambodia. As you do.

Phnom Penh was in the middle of a torrential downpour when we got here, and although the bus was meant to deliver us to the Angkor Bright Guesthouse directly, they suggested that with the deluge, we'd be better off in the Cambodian version of tuk-tuks—which consist of a motorbike pulling a cart with a roof...they sort of look like Ford Model T's, if your average Model T was driven by a Khmer in a poncho. Piled into a bunch of these contraptions, and through the Flood we went. The hotel is lovely, big rooms, separate shower (I can't recall the last time we had that—the usual is what is optimistically called a Wet Room in the UK, and is in fact usually a hose over the toilet), balcony overlooking the lake that is the road outside. David and I popped off to the waterfront for dinner, though pretty much everyone else seems to have opted to stay in the hotel rather than get wet. Sissies.

Then this morning, David went down the street to the market to get some fruit for breakfast...and declined to buy a drink from a kid with a cane. Said kid whacked him on the back of the knee in punishment, leaving an impressive welt. Cambodia is not our favourite country.

But we're only here once, so joined the group for the must-see, um, thing, in Phnom Penh.I hesitate to use the term 'attraction' and you'll soon see why. First to the former Tuol Svay Prey High School—better known as Tuol Sleng, or Security Prison 21. In the late 1970s, Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge brought Cambodians guilty of awful things like being a diplomat, wearing glasses, or being related to anyone who did, here to be tortured and then executed. At one point, they were getting through 100 people a day in this place. Single metal bedsteads in each room hold instruments of torture, and black and white photos on the walls show exactly what can be done with them. Grim. The rooms have hundreds of mugshots also of the staff who tortured their own people, and of the victims, all documented by the rather impressively evil Khmer Rouge. Babies and small children, grannies, everyone in here suffered intensely, and of the something like 17,000 people brought here, about 7 lived.

And on that bright note, we motored on down the highlight of today's offerings, the Killing Fields themselves. Fifteen kilometers from the city (which was completely evacuated by the Khmer Rouge because cities are inherently evil), the residents of Tuol Sleng were brought on trucks in the middle of the nights to have their heads bashed in with poles (so as not to waste bullets) and be dumped in mass graves. The nutjobs who did this had a loudspeaker tied to a tree to play music and cover the screams. There's an enormous memorial column, filled with some of the 9,000 skulls they've dug up. There's also bits of bone in all the walkways, as well as clothing that's constantly working it's way to the surface.

They managed to kill 17,000 people here between mid-1975 and December 1978, and this is by no means the only such place in Cambodia...up to a third of the population by some estimates was slaughtered in that brief time, as Pol Pot tried to return the country to the Stone Age. The Khmer Rouge turned the clock back to Year Zero, abolished money, and completely eliminated anyone who wasn't a peasant. And then when a Vietnamese-backed government ousted the Khmer in 1978, the west declined to recognize it (Vietnam being Communist and thus Very Bad) and allowed the Khmer to keep the nation's UN seat until 1991. They pretty much let the murderers represent their victims for 12 years. Why are people so stupid?

On a happier note, you can still get $2 bills in Cambodia, did you know that? Denis got one as change yesterday...there is a currency here, called the riel, but pretty much no one wants it. All prices are printed everywhere in US dollars. Even tuk-tuk drivers will only take dollars, and ATM's only dispense them. I had my suspicions about the $2 bills, personally, as like most Americans I haven't actually seen one in circulation in my lifetime. But the infallible Wikipedia tells me that in fact they are still produced on demand from banks, which admittedly is rare—1996 and 2003 saw some produced, but they're less than 1% of bills printed by the Federal Reserve. Loads in Cambodia, though. Who knew?

David has gone with a bunch of people to some place where you can fire guns for $1 a bullet—this is cool in Cambodia, as apparently it's better to let western tourists use the ammunition up than have another civil war themselves. Or something.