Sunny Cambodia

Wrapping my head around my experience in Cambodia and sorting through the 400 some-odd pictures I took is a somewhat daunting task, but I'll do the best I can. "Why Cambodia?" is a question I often heard before I left, and I wasn't exactly sure myself. I guess I was looking to see a different culture and gain a broader viewpoint of the world around me. As a certain idiot-buffoon (I could fill a book with descriptives, but I'll stop there) said: "Mission Accomplished." I arrived late on a Wednesday evening and did little except check into my guest house and chat a bit with the owner--a nice Irish expat named Rory. We stayed up a bit, drank Irish whiskey, and talked about travel and Cambodia. This was in Phnom Penh, the capital. My plan was to hang out in Phnom Penh Thursday, and take a bus to Siem Reap Friday morning. I would start my tour of the capital at 8 am the next morning, which was the latest start I would have all week.


After breakfast at the guest house, I employed the services of a tuk tuk driver. A tuk tuk is a covered wagon pulled by a motor scooter. I would spend a lot of time on these in my time in this country. These drivers will cart you all over town wherever you want to go and wait for you while you look around--all for about 12-15 bucks a day. It's a great way to see the city in an insulated environment. While I am an avid walker, Cambodia is definitely not a place you'd want to walk around in. In the confines of South Korea, I can walk freely down any street in any city and have never once felt unsafe. I wouldn't say the same here.

See what I mean? This is not exactly a pedestrian's paradise. This country is POOR. It was striking to me when I rode a taxi from the airport to the guesthouse how ghetto the capital looked. I thought it might have just been that stretch of road, but it certainly wasn't. Riding in the tuk tuk from one tourist attraction to the next, I witnessed poverty like I'd never seen. The majority of these people live in shacks, with no running water or electricity. Public utilities and sanitation are nearly non-existent here. Building codes?? Yeah, right. Families are happy to have a roof over there heads where they can take respite from the blazing hot sun.

Since the ride had been so inspiring so far, my driver wanted to start at the killing fields. Briefly, the Khmer Rouge regime, under the leadership of Pol Pot, came into power in the late 70's and worked to transform the populace into a peasant slave class. Within days of their rise to power, they had sent men, women, children, and elderly to the fields to work grueling 14 hour days. Any form of dissent warranted execution. In fact, they executed innocent people just to keep the populace in fear. The skulls in this picture fill the entire building pictured at the beginning of this entry. On this day, the killing fields were a quiet and pleasant place with trees and flowers masking the horrors of the past. To their credit, the people of Cambodia are not in denial about this cruel and disgusting part of their recent history. They've used it as a tool to bring tourism and help their impoverished economy, and it feeds their national identity. After all that horror, they're still here. It would be impossible for me to visit this city and not admire the peoples' tenacity.
After the killing fields, I went to the genocide museum, but there's a stop in-between that I want to mention first. My driver was taking me on a circuit that appealed to tourists, so I figured he knew the places better than I did. My ears were tweaked from the flight, so I was a little hard of hearing as to the next destination--not to mention his thick and hard to understand accent. We ended up at a firing range on a farm where for 15 dollars you can have the privilege to fire an AK-47 at a target. I refused to do it, and bought a beer to be polite. After seeing the carnage of the killing fields, the last thing I wanted to do was fire a weapon designed to kill other humans. By the way, the vast majority of the victims were bludgeoned to death because they couldn't afford to waste money on bullets. I wasn't allowed to take pictures at this place, but I did witness an American tourist posing with his freshly fired AK for his complimentary picture. This left me with a really uneasy and disturbed feeling. I felt quite sick at that moment, actually.
The genocide museum was no less gloomy than the killing fields. This was a high school that was renovated into a prison where the Khmer Rouge would detain and torture peasants and soldiers alike. They took tedious records of every prisoner and kept their photos, much like the Nazis did. With the above picture, one can use their imagination how these devices were employed in the torture of helpless victims of one of the cruelest regimes ever. Sadly, some of these techniques are still employed by so-called civilized societies. This is a picture of a cell in which a prisoner was kept. Trust me, this was tiny. Prisoners would be kept in these cells for months on end and would be fed porridge (a very nice way of putting it) out of rusty bins. This was a holding facility for the poor souls that were killed at the first stop of the tour.




After all this immediate poverty and gloom, I decided to take a break. I stopped on the riverfront at a famous pizza joint and had some of the most delicious pizza I've ever had. My heart and mind were heavy at this point, but I also realized that I was on vacation and wanted to enjoy myself. I dined at "Happy Herb's Pizza". The name is a play on words... the owner is a jovial guy named Herb. Nobody told me that and I never met him, but I'm pretty sure that's why the place is named that. The pizza was great and later that afternoon I ... I ... well, I don't really remember what happened. I remember the Heineken cost 80 cents. This pizza must have had elements of Chinese food, because I was hungry half an hour later.