The Killing Fields
Trip Start
Sep 17, 2007
1
146
272
Trip End
Oct 08, 2008
Phnom Penh,
Cambodia
Saturday, March 29, 2008
Our goal of the day was the Killing Fields of Choeung Ek, which is said to be a relatively pleasant bike ride once you get out of the city. All in all it's 14 km. And LP said it was well sign-posted. I say, if you consider three signs, none of which is at a rather crucial fork, "well sign-posted" then you are daft. So Travis and I went on for maybe five kilometers in the wrong direction after braving the insanity that is motorbike traffic (never has my opinion on the matter changed - I HATE motorbikes - they go whereever they want, whenever they want, concerned with absolutely nothing that's going on around them). When we finally reached a place where I decided there absolutely MUST be a sign if we were going the right direction (and there was no sign), we asked a traffic officer which way we should go
the killing fields
. He said backwards. Lovely. About half-way back to the point where we should have gone left instead of right, Travis stopped and demanded that I get a second opinion before we rode on to the ends of the earth. I tried, but I could not pronounce the name properly and "Killing Fields" rather distressingly meant nothing to anyone, including the one guy I found who spoke English. Turns out it's pronounced more like Choeung IKE. I will never understand why transliteration cannot be straightforward. I seriously wonder what some people were thinking when they designated certain things they way they did. Anyway, a motobike driver knew where it was, but would rather have taken us there than given us directions. We had bicycles, so even if we had wanted the motorbike we couldn't have taken it, so finally someone gave us directions.
As I said before, at a rather critical point where you can go either right or left but neither is straight, one would expect a sign. At one point I stopped before I stopped to ask the officer if Travis thought I'd made the right choice in going right. He said he thought so. Later he changed his tune and said he'd stopped at the fork to check but I kept going. Naturally I kept going; I was in front, I was navigating, and he didn't say anything. Anyway, this is when a map is particularly handy, and not a Lonely Planet map. It was marvelously inadequate in this instance. So, if you are going to ride a bicycle out to the Killing Fields, know that when the road forks and there's a petrol station on the island created by the road, you must go LEFT.
By the time we got to the Killing Fields we were parched, dusty, and disgustingly sweaty
bone stupa
. First thing we bought tickets, then cokes, and chugged them right down. Then we could continue. We'd learned a bit about the Killing Fields of Choeung Ek while touring S-21, due to the fact that most of the prisoners were killed and "buried" here. The mass graves, more than 100 of them, were full of bodies showing signs of terrible trauma. Most died of blunt force trauma to the skull because the soldiers were meant to preserve their bullets. There were men, women, and children, including babies. As with any other story of genocide, they were killed for no reason. Learning about the Khmer Rouge is, I have discovered, truly distressing and terrifying. Soldiers would cart prisoners out to the fields, and the prisoners knew they were about to be murdered, but the guards would say they were wrong. Then the soldiers would bludgeon the prisoners and slit their throats to kill them, and pile them into a mass grave. One pit was discovered with more than 100 decapitated bodies. There is really no explaining the Killing Fields.
When you enter, you first see a stupa. It is filled with skulls from bodies discovered in the pits, and is dedicated to the memory of all those who were killed and buried in the Killing Fields. Visitors are asked to take a moment and meditate at the stupa before continuing their exploration
in memory of the victims
. Along the path that leads from the stupa there are signs explaining the layout and purpose of buildings that once stood on the site. It was all distressingly methodical. One shed had chemicals that were poured over the bodies to prevent the smell from tipping off the people living nearby. And before it was a graveyard Choeung Ek was an orchard - the whole area is covered with trees. To be perfectly honest, I was expecting it to be bigger. I had just read The Killing Fields and we'd watched the movie the night before. And it's plural - fields. Descriptions I'd read indicated that bodies were just everywhere. I suppose finding any number of bodies spread over an area is too many. After we'd walked through and seen the pits in the ground - there were many, and barely any space in between - we walked around a lake. I believe that in the lake are more unexcavated graves, but I didn't see anything in the earth to betray this. I had read, however, that as you walked you might see bones and bits of clothing sticking out of the ground. I'd seen clothing. Some of it seems like it's just been discarded, so it was hard for my mind to grasp the possibility that it had been on a living person thirty years ago. Then, as we were leaving the fields, Travis pointed to the ground. I looked, and there next to the tree root was a bone with cloth fragments on either side of it. And then it really hit home. That belonged to a person who had been murdered in that spot thirty years ago.
We left, bicycled back through bad traffic and were glad we had the versatility of a bicycle. We had a beer and a burger for dinner. We just couldn't get our minds away from the terrible things we'd learned and seen, first in Vietnam, then in Cambodia. And for my part I was sad that the US had played any part in it at all.
Erin
