Phnom Penh. Elegant low-rise colonial buildings lining the Mekong. The Royal Palace and Silver Pagoda gleaming behind high, guarded walls. The Russian Market, packed and panting under its low roof. And ghosts.
I couldn't walk the crumbling, pot-holed streets of Phnom Penh, currently home to a million people, without remembering that once, not so long ago, no one lived here. Despite the crowds of Cambodians strolling along the river promenade in the evening, the expats and the tourists drinking in the Foreign Correspondents' Club or shopping along the side streets, I felt an emptiness in the city, echoes of April, 1975, when its two million inhabitants were evicted by the victorious Khmer Rouge, herded to the countryside to become peasants. And often to be killed, or to die of famine or disease. To be educated, to wear glasses, to stand out in any way could be a death sentence.
During the three years, eight months and 21 days of Khmer Rouge control, only the leaders occupied the city, including the omnipresent King Sihanouk, who had hailed the Khmer Rouge victory from sanctuary in Beijing, and soon found himself imprisoned in his own palace. There were many worse places to be, including the Tuol Svay Prey High School, reborn as prison and torture chamber S-21.
The prison is now the Tuol Sleng museum. The corridors are hushed and haunted, even the harsh sunlight seems muted. Iron bedsteads, cuffs and chains and pincers beside them, stand in the middle of empty rooms. Head-high brick walls that turned bigger rooms into a warren of tiny cells, have been left in place. Full face photographs of the victims stare at the visitors. One fact, delivered in low tones by the guide, stood out as symbolic of the crazed and genocidal regime: each year when a new set of torturers entered the prison, their first act was to kill their predecessors.
Only seven people were liberated from S-21: those who did not die under torture were taken to Choeung Ek, 8 miles southeast of the city, to be slaughtered. Nationality did not matter -- nine foreigners died there. Age did not matter -- babies had their heads bashed against a tree: the guides point out the tree. Position did not matter -- one of the photographs at S-21 shows the wife and child of the then-foreign minister. The glass-walled Memorial Stupa at Choeung Ek is packed with skulls. Bones loom whitely through the thin soil. It is a silent place, but unquiet.
The Vietnamese, goaded by raids across their border, invaded Cambodia in 1978 and forced the Khmer Rouge back towards Thailand. The Vietnamese would stay for ten years: thanks to aid to the Khmer Rouge from the Thais and the Chinese and to their allies from countries including the U.K. and U.S. it would take almost 20 years before a final peace deal was reached between the Khmer Rouge and the Cambodian government. Reading about the history of the last 30 years, contemplating the four years of U.S. bombing in eastern Cambodia and the belt of land mines laid across the country by the Vietnamese, it is surprising that there is any country, or any people, left.
But the country did survive, although it is still mined, still poor, and still rural. Phnom Penh survived too, and despite the pot holes and the ghosts it joined Luang Prabang and Hanoi in my personal pantheon of cities worth revisiting. The river drew me, where I walked the wide promenade with flags snapping in the breeze above me, flanked by quintessentially Cambodian golden lions, tails folded neatly up along their spines. Second-floor restaurants with river views tempted me -- green mango salad with dried shrimp and beef curry with snake beans at the Globe, for instance, along with an unexpectedly delicious lemon and lime soda laced with angostura bitters.
The city was full of the unexpected. I took a cyclo north in search of Seeing Hands Massage (blind masseurs raising funds for the disabled) and found as well a huge floral clock decorating Wat Phnom's hill, where the lazy could rent an elephant to reach the sanctuary. I passed gas (petrol) stations where the gas was stored in bottles, sometimes in Coca Cola bottles. I visited the Russian Market, part of which is given over to souvenir sellers, to find wall-to-wall Cambodians trying to get a glimpse of the visiting Miss Universe, a small woman with a lovely smile. Unimpressed by the 5,000 silver tiles that form the not-very-shiny floor of the Silver Pagoda, I was captivated instead by the 600 yards of detailed murals of scenes from the Ramayana that cover its compound's walls, and amused by the very French villa nearby given to Cambodia by the Emperor Napoleon III. The delicate grey building was born in Egypt.
The most surprising oddity was the river itself. The heart of western Cambodia is not Angkor, or the land, but the Tonle Sap Lake, which provides food and water for half the country. During the dry season, from October to May, the Tonle Sap River flows south from the lake, joining the Mekong at Phnom Penh. But during the wet season the Tonle Sap flows north, draining excess Mekong waters into the lake, which rises by as much as 25 feet. The result of this reversing river is a delicate and unique ecosystem now under threat from upstream dams and deforestation.
At Wat Ounalom, all fresh paint and neon-haloed Buddhas, I was reminded of other threats. The lone monk was worried about President Bush. I was unable to reassure him. Or myself.
In Phnom Penh I joined up with my second Intrepid tour group -- nine other well-traveled clients and an Australian tour leader. My roommate was another recently retired IBMer -- while she turned out to be a New Yorker and a marketing type it felt initially as if I was meeting myself. The group, evenly split between men and women, and all singles, seemed to mesh well.
After two nights in Phnom Penh we headed north to Siem Reap and Angkor, the slow way. By plane, Siem Reap is 40 minutes from Phnom Penh, and just one hour from Bangkok. It would take us two leisurely days, by boat and minibus. We started fast, powering up the Mekong on the Kratie ferry. After an hour on the roof with the other backpackers, the wind and the spray drove me inside to join the locals on blue "leather" airline seats, where I found fierce AC, a music and dance video, noisy kids and women selling fruit.
We left the ferry at Kompong Cham, a provincial capital, and carried our packs along the river front to the cavernous Mekong hotel. Tourists had yet to replace the Japanese engineers who filled the hotel's big rooms and echoing corridors while they built the Spien Kazuma bridge that will be an important link in the planned Bangkok-Ho Chi Minh City highway. Kompong Cham's streets were wide, but carried little traffic: the action was in the market, where my two words of Khmer (hello and thank you) were greeted with delighted laughter. Thank you is transliterated from the impenetrable Khmer script as "aw kohn," but pronounced as "aw gone," which I found easy to remember.
We spent a hot afternoon wandering around the Wat Nokor complex, where a brightly painted modern temple had been built incongruously inside the sandstone and laterite walls of an 11th century shrine. Cows grazed in the graveyard and a barber plied his trade beside the tank, where half-naked boys were playing in green-coated water. As the day cooled towards evening, we rode motos an hour each way to Wat Hanchey, a more sensitive amalgam of old and new temples spread around a hill with wide views over the Mekong. I had bought a hat in the market in preparation for this trip which at least kept the red dust we raised out of my hair, but the rest of me was thoroughly powdered. What with the dust and the seat on my moto -- the edges cut off the circulation to my legs -- I was surprised to find that I quite enjoyed the ride.
Next morning we settled into a comfortable minibus for the drive to Kompong Thom, a case where the journey was definitely better than the destination. The obligatory tourist stop in Skuon left me glad that I had already breakfasted on an excellent baguette and omelet: I had no difficulty resisting the big fried spiders for which the town is (in)famous. A further endurance test awaited us at Phnom Suntok, where 980 stairs separated us from the hilltop shrines. Children skipped school to earn tips fanning the sweating climbers. I had brought my own fan, having learned its value in China and India, but my would-be fan girl still tagged along as a guide. The shrines, images and immense Buddha footprints, not to mention the views over the flat countryside, were worth the climb, but getting down was almost worse than going up -- I arrived at the bottom with my legs literally shaking.
The highlight of the day was Sambor Prei Kuk, where thin forest has grown around and over some of the oldest temples in the country, dedicated to Shiva and dating to the seventh century. A few buildings were more tree root than brick, the tree's clasp seeming almost protective. The late afternoon sun lit carved lintels and guardian lions: hefty hindquarters and bared teeth offset by the ringlets that formed their manes. We had the site to ourselves, and again I was conscious of emptiness: the priests and people who once worshipped here were very long gone.
That night some of us ate in the market, where we were confronted by the present in the form of three dirty and ragged street children. While a few people in Cambodia appear to be doing well out of aid agencies and tourism, most are not. Corruption is widespread and jobs must often be bought. Despite high infant mortality rates, nearly half the population is under 15. We gave our uneaten food to the kids, who shared it equally and appreciated it much more than we did. I donated virtually all my chicken curry (bones and gristle) and ate baguettes and meat paste instead, which may have been how I avoided the sickness that was to strike several others in the party.
Sick or not, Angkor beckoned.
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