Beware of the Mines

Trip Start Nov 12, 2008
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Trip End Apr 30, 2009


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Flag of Cambodia  ,
Sunday, November 30, 2008

Cambodia. A fairly easy 6 hour bus ride from Saigon and we're into another country.  After a very strange border crossing in which we only realised we were crossing the border when we strolled into a building to ask for something to eat.  Then it was on the bus, drive, off the bus, presentthe passports, back on the bus and off.

Immediately the country looked different to Vietnam.  The people have more of the 'indo' in Indo-China.  The country is much less developed, much less dirty.  The houses are much more traditional wood on stilts variety surroounded by wetlands and fields with the occasional black ox.

Phnom Penh itself is a strange mixture of stunningly beautiful buildings and absolute sh*t.  The usual proliferation of slums sit right next to beautiful grand temple like buildings.  The roads in places are like the surface of the moon, some of the streets you walk down are filthy and ghetto-like.  On the whole, the place is exactly what it is - developing.
We hooked up with an American and British girl travelling here and all went to the Killing Fields yesterday.  Much smaller than I imagined, its dominated by a huge white monument in the middle piled high with bones found on the site.  Apparently the site was created by the Vietnamese not the Cambodians.  I never realised it was the Vietnamese that pushed the Khmer Rouge out of Cambodia, and ironically the Americans who then funded the Khmer Rouge to fight the Vietnamese.  Anyway the Cambodians would like to raze the monument and the killing fields, in their religion they burn bodies and they are scared of bones.  It seems the only thing stopping them from wiping this off the face of the map is international pressure.  Have to say it is a little macabre, seeing the bones behind the glass is one thing, but these are only a percentage of those left on the site, and as you walk around, some bits of bone stick through the ground.  Some people were going off into the denser parts of the field for what I though could be no other reason then bone-hunting.
After we went to the S-21 Detention Museum.  A former High School in the capial, it was used by the Khmer to house, torture and kill 20,000 people.  Terrible things went on there and the museum doesn't pull any punches graphically.  Its a grim, concrete place and understandably its very quiet.  Struck me that you have to chose with these things, do you knoick them down because of what it represents or do you keep it and make sure no one ever forgets? Think the Cambodians would prefer the former.
Catching a bus to beach today, forecast looks good...
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