Phnom Penh

Following my time in Siem Reap, I had to keep moving so made Cambodia's capitol, Phnom Penh my next stop. The journey there was one of the best so far. In the public bus, a little girl's ticket had positioned her next to me, with her mother and toddler sister in the seats behind. Having my valuables with me in a backpack, I was hopeful the local family would move and spread out as soon as the bus got going so I could take my heavy bag off my lap. Instead, both little girls thought they'd actually quite like to squeeze in next to me for the 5 hour ride, which was lovely, incredibly comfortable and not at all annoying to see the rest of the bus was more than half empty. I also certainly didn't find it at all unnerving to have the two girls stare at me the whole way and give the occasional, gentle poke to my leg or arm! The trip only improved when another family got on, a man with two kids of similar ages, and sat in front of me. The older of the two, the girl, leant over the back of her chair to have a look at regular intervals whilst the un-nappied little boy found he couldn't wait any longer and the bus quickly filled with a horrific smell and a terrible mess appeared. Joy!

Pleased to arrive, I was of course was unable to reason with any tuk-tuk driver to take me anywhere but a guesthouse they were affiliated with, so fast gave up the fight and went to check it out. Actually it was nice, a rustic, stilted set of huts and outdoor lounge area perfectly positioned to watch the sunset across the city's lake. A place to rival some of the higher level of accomodations, only let down by having to sit up most of the night in my room on rat patrol. I could hear them directly under my floorboards and one in particular that was determined to gain entry to my bathroom via the drain. Still, at just $4 a night, it's a small price to pay.

Phnom Penh is the first capital I've been to for a long time that I've actually been pleased to see. It could be that Cambodia is still so far from developed that it just doesn't feel like a city, but I think it's more than that. The atmosphere is good, calm and welcoming, somehow more than anywhere else. It's hard not to be happy being here. What is amazing is that for a place that's so positive, it probably has the worst recent history of anywhere I know of. Cambodia, still littered with US landmines will suffer for many years to come as result. Walking off the path out of the towns poses a very real danger you finding (and detonating) one for yourself. You won't need to be in the country long before realise amputies are a surprisingly regular sight. But on top of that, now in the capitol, I can learn more about more tremendous suffering to the Khmer people at the hands of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.

I find it hard to comprehend how things like the Holocaust could happen in an era in history so close to the lifetime of my parents. Learning more about what happened with the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, very nearly in my lifetime, is something that to me is almost impossible to understand. I won't give a fall rundown of the history, but essentially Pol Pot lead his people to take control of Cambodia, killing (not before torturing) millions as he went, clearing the city of Phnom Penh. Anyone from large towns or cities were considered to be affected by the modern world and were likely to face a brutal end. Only those that were convincing as low in intelligence might survive, but would be classed lower than the peasent workers from the fields that were felt to be 'pure' in mind. All would be sent to the countryside as slaves to produce an impossible quoter of rice intended for world trade. Even doctors and nurses were believed too intelligent to be spared and the Khmer Rouge to gave the roles of medical practitioners to the illiterate, untrained peasents.

This reign of terror lasted four years until the Vietnamese invaded, although amazingly, the Khmer Rouge still had a hold of regions until 1998. Anyway, something that makes this history even more remarkable is that with a quater of the population dieing at the hands of this movement, any Cambodian over 30 will undoubtably have been seriously affected by this time, some were the victims, others were the Khmer Rouge, and all have to live side by side seamlessly.

I took a trip to the Choeung Ek (The Killing fields), the most notorious of many that can be found across Cambodia. Here, 131 mass graves of the 200,000 (and counting) across the country have been found. Victims were regulary delivered to this site by truck from places such as Toul Sleng Security Prison 21, a 're-education center' that existed for interrigation and torture. Many bodies, men, women and children, were found beheaded, naked or tied up. The whole area was silent, unlike the mausoleum of Lenin or Mao, visitors here are genuninely sobered by the experience as the walk between deep recesses of excuvated graves, past 'killing trees' against which people were beaten, and step over rags of disguarded clothes that appear out of the dirt paths. The bones of excuvated bodies have been piled within a white tower to stand as a monument to all that lost their lives here.

Thinking it best to have one depressing day rather than split it across two, I headed back into Phnom Penh center to see the Toul Sleng Security Prison 21 (S21) that now operates as a genocide museum. Once a primary school in a quiet neibourhood, it was taken over April 17th, 1975 at the start of Khmer Rouge's reign of terror, and was transformed into a primitive prison and house of torture. Now it stands almost exactly as it was, with the 14 disfigured bodies found left in rooms after the guards fled, now burried in the front courtyard. Walking through 4 3-story buildings, I saw classrooms and hurridly built cells, all full of evidence of unimaginable tortures. It's a surprisingly big place that takes several hours to take in, again full of silence. It's only made worse by walking past other fully functioning schools in the area, and realising aside from a distinct lake of barbed wire coating, it looks no different to S21, and makes me wonder what this scene would have looked like 30 years ago had it undergone the same transformation.