Phnom Phen – Chau Doc – Ho Chi Min
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The last few days have been an absolute whirlwind of emotions and travel.
We visited the Teoul Sleng Prison and the Killing Fields in Phnom Phen – places of such recent horrific history that it takes a few days to recover from the shock of the brutality humans are capable of towards each other.
The Prison was a former public school the Khmer Rouge converted into an interrogation and torture holding camp before marching prisoners to the killing fields for mass execution. Apart from the coils of formerly electrified barbed wire lining the compound walls, the prison looks very much like a school from the outside, until you see the 14 graves of the last victims in the center square of the grounds, and the fates of their occupants are explained to you by the tour guide. The cruelty of Pol Pot’s brain washed child soldiers is beyond comprehension. The extent of their cruelty is laid plain for the visitor when you enter the school rooms that were used for interrogation, and the beds that were used for torture, along with the crude ankle shackles are left as they were found by the liberators, along with unapologetically graphic black and white photographs of the conditions the occupants of the graves in the compound were found in mounted on the wall above the beds. Pictures of people with their stomachs cut open, and their livers taken out for the soldiers to eat…pictures of people with their faces peeled off, or their legs cut off for the sake of the soldier’s “entertainment”… The sights leave you feeling stunned and empty inside.
The killing fields themselves are a mass of open pits where literally thousands of bodies have been exhumed by the liberators. You are told before you go that there are still human bones and clothes of the dead all over the grounds, as they are brought to the surface every year with the rains, but nothing prepares you for the reality of actually being there and stepping over those bones and remnants of such recent cruelty. To realize that this madness only officially stopped in 1997 is to realize that every single smiling face of every local over the age of 15 would have seen someone they knew and loved killed, or they may have been forced to be the killers themselves, makes you slightly ashamed and embarrassed to be a citizen of a Western nation that took too little action too late. It is a sobering, unsettling feeling.
To help us recover from the necessarily depressing visit to the prison and killing fields, we spent the next morning at the orphanage of the children who did the dancing display at the restaurant for us the previous night. I can’t imagine any tourist attraction being more enjoyable or important to see than a visit to where these children live, learn and play. We took part in some of their English lesson, played with lego and toy cars, tried to learn their dances, and taught them some dances we knew. It was pretty funny to see everyone doing the Macarana together in the small room where they learn and live. We taught them some jive dance moves also, and the kids screamed with delight at being thrown in the air on some of the moves. When they tried to teach us the delicate, intricate hand motions of their traditional dances we came off as elephants would in a ballet – we have nowhere near the skill and grace they have, but the kids were patient and laughed with us. I fell in love with one very serious little girl named Jasmin who took to me quit strongly. It was hard for us to leave.
That afternoon we took to the Mekong River in a boat to cross the border from Cambodia to Vietnam. The trip took us past beautiful river life scenes in Cambodia. We saw clusters of thatch roofed stilt houses with carefully tended garden plots beside them. Women and children bathed and played in the river under the stilted houses, and men brought huge white cows to the river’s edge to wash them. Fishermen out in long narrow wooden boats cast loop nets in graceful arcs out over the river while their wives in conical banana – leaf sun hats crouched at the stern of the boat. Little boys stood on a rare stretch of flat beach, waiting for their soccer ball to be retrieved from the river by one of their team mates before continuing their game… It was magical.
The difference between the Cambodian and the Vietnamese sides of the river are stark. As soon as you cross the border, the boats become bigger, the houses people live in are bigger, and a forest of TV antennae stand above the roofs. The boats motor up and down the river at the speed of commerce, and their wakes and exhaust denote an urgency of lifestyle not felt on the Cambodian side of the river.
We came ashore in Chau Doc, a little town whose port just opened to Westerners in the last year. The locals are still unaccustomed to Western travelers, as is evident in the reactions you get while walking through the central market. We experienced everything from stares, to curious welcome, to outright dismissal (“Boo-yow” from one lady in a shop – a term we were familiar with from China, meaning “don’t want”). We were taken to a restaurant for supper by a friendly group of cyclo drivers who took us on a tour of the city that included what they obviously thought were Chau Doc’s greatest hits – “Look – coffee shop!, Disco!” It was good fun.
The next day we left for Ho Chi Min (Saigon) on a 8 hour bus ride that I recall very little of, as I was very ill the night before, and spent the entire journey laying down, trying to keep myself together.
Now we’re in Saigon, and we’re heading off for a cyclo tour of the city that will include the War Crimes Museum. It should be educational…
As usual, we miss our friends and families and doggies…
Take care, Noel & George
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