Phnom Penh is hard to spell
Trip Start
Mar 19, 2008
1
14
31
Trip End
Jun 05, 2008
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Phnom Penh,
Phnom Penh,
Cambodia
Sunday, April 27, 2008
As soon as our boat arrived at the port in Phnom Penh we were swarmed by the usual horde of tuk tuk drivers trying to secure business (some things don't change). But off in the background there was one man in a straw hat who was completely quiet and held a sign up rather than rushing the boat. Somewhere in that sign he mentioned the word "boisterous" and we thought that anyone who could put that in context derserved the business.
Mr. Lim turned out to be a wonderful guide and a treasure. He found us a good hotel (not brilliant but things are a little more run down here) and took us around Phnom Penh for the day. His first hand experiences of the Khmer Rouge was terrifying (his father starved to death and sister died of malaria in the over-worked paddy fields). He also had a lot to say about modern day Cambodia and its cronyism and corruption. By and large, though, the normal people of Cambodia just want to work and make a life, but that seems pretty hard.
If all that is pretty depressing, it's about to get a lot worse. After taking in the regal elegance of Phnom Penh's boulevards and royal palaces we headed out of town to the notorious killing fields were thousands of Cambodians were beaten, hacked, shot to death or buried alive under the paranoid Khmer Rouge government in the late 1970's.
A leg manacle lies in a S21 cell
This was murder on an industrial scale, and shockingly primitive. Truck loads of people, who sometimes had done nothing more than be educated and therefore a threat, were dragged out into these fields and killed in any way possible - along with their wives, husbands, kids.The fields themselves are fairly nondescript apart from the huge Pagoda containing 8,000 of the skull found at the site. The fields around are dotted with exhumed mass graves. It's grim and very depressing what people can do to each other. The most disturbing part was the fact that a lot of cloth rags lie around the area. These are the clothes that the condemned wore to these fields. They haven't been cleared, partly as a grim reminder of how true and haphazzard the whole thing was, and partly because there's no money to exhume more graves and tidy up the rags.
We went along to S21 prison (formely a large school) in the heart of Phnom Penh where most of those murdered in the fields were photographed, imprisioned, tortured and beaten before being dragged out to the country to be killed. It was eerie. Some of it had been left as the liberating Vietnamese had found it in 1979 and had a horrible feeling to it. The bloodstains on the wall will stay in my memory for a long time.
Mr. Lim made the whole thing a lot more bearable, because he's the perfect example of how the Cambodians have come out of that nightmare. He's intelligent and eager. He wants to work and is happy to leave the past where it is which is pretty remarkable considering how bad he's had it.
After all that, we took to the drink. Well it was happy hour in the splendid Foreign Correspondents Club in central PP. We got trapped though, as a huge thunderstorm rolled in. Eventually we did a runner in the pouring rain and made it only as far as a little English bar. Never got the name. In there we had a great night with a bunch of ex-pat guys (Aussies, English, American, Swedish) who were either working over here or playing house husband (2 of them!). It was a good night full of laughs which was probably a good thing after the stuff we'd seen. Oh and look out for us in the next edition of Asia Life magazine. One of the lads is the designer!
