McGee Blog - Kampot

We are in Kampot now, a little village in the South of Cambodia that sits on bay that comes from the ocean.The guest house is on stilts over the river and we have been lazing around in hammocks on the balcony watching all the fishing boats head out to the sea for the morning fishing. The river also totally pongs but we have been smoking cigarettes to fend off the pong.
The view from here is totally stunning. Across the river are layers of hills, indistinct with a low mist. Palms line the banks, interspersed with tall, boxy houses on stilts.

Both Josh and I were really affected by our last few days in Phnom Penh. We took a bus from Seam Reap which as Josh explained is kind of torturous, not because of the roads or the bus but because of the relentless presence of asian Karoake in all its synth glory.

At one point we got off at a little market town for a rest stop and Josh and I were totally unprepared for it as we got off. We were hit by a throng of people selling, begging, tugging at our clothes. We stepped into the shade of the bus for a cigarette but instantly several kids surrounded us demanding " you buy mango! you buy pineapple! Only 2 dolla!"

There were a lot of beggars, many with no legs or no arms. We felt stifled and anxious by it all and tried to ignore everyone and just smoke but it soon became overwhelming- the heat, the dust, the people.

Trying to get back on the bus we had to fight of the sellers. Out of the corner of my eye i ssw this little boy, maybe 5 or 6. He was scrawny and his hair and clothes were filled with dust. He put his hand out for some money and i shook my head. Then i realised that he was leading man, his father or his grandfather mybe, and the man had no eyes. I don't mean he was just blind, I mean he had no eyes. Just these rough hewn mass of scars where his eyes should have been. Shocked i shook my head again and got on the bus.

As we drove on to Pnomh Penh I just watched the countryside pass by. I felt guilty and wilfully ignorant for not giving that kid something. Like my fear had just propelled me onto the bus before my humanity could jump in with some compassion. I thought about this man with no eyes a lot. How had he lost them? It had to have been an act of violence of some sort. Was it torture under the Khmer Rouge? Was it a mine? I just thought tht t some point in his life he could see and then he must have endured some terrible violence- deliberate or accidental. And now this is how he makes his way- this tiny kid and him begging money off rich tourists passing momentarily through their lives.

It's the same with so many people we meet here. The violence and trauma is everywhere. Beggars with no limbs, a woman in the market selling postcards with scars that have melted her face, shoulder and arms.You would think then tht the people here would be suspicious and fearful and yet culturally everyone here is so open. As Josh said to me one night, as soon as you get talking to the kids they are just like every other kid. They want to be entertained, their attention moves from one thing to another and they are delighted by new things.

Phnom Penh was this dirty, colonial glory of a city faded by war and dust. Its probably the most dangerous city we have been to and you felt that walking through the streets. It gave us a chance to learn more about Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. The crazy thing is tht he was only in power for a few years but the damage he did in that time was beyond comprehension. 2 million died, either killled or by starvation. He evacuated all the cities, including Phnom Penh and moved everyone into co-operatives in teh countrywhere they were to farm rice that was exported to China even as half the country starved to death.

Pol Pot was, basically, a genocidal nutcase with a dream for communist Utopia. He believed that the taint of the old world had to be completely eradicted and so he killed everyone who was educated, who lived in cities with professional jobs, who spoke more thn one language. Even wearing glasses could have you killed.He also believed that you had to destroy the rotten tree you had to kill the roots, so he also killed everyone in the family, babies, kids and grandparents.

The Toul Sleng museum that Josh wrote about is the most brutal of the 'security centres' that these people were sent. Called 'S-21'20,000 people passed through and only 7 survived. Here they were tortured with calculated,efficient brutality. They were numbered and photographed and their confessions recorded for posterity. Now, the main building is an eerily peaceful museum that still feels like the school it once was. Some of the rooms have been left as they were. Stark and disturbing they contain bedframes, shackles and shell casing. On the wall of each cell is a huge photograph, maybe a metre and a half square, of someone who was tortured and died in the room. They are bleached with age, the dark spots of the starved, brutalised bodies look like bloodstains on overexposed film.

One floor of one building is simply rows and rows of stands set up lengthways down the halls. On each one are hundreds of small photos in black and white. These are the photos they took of each person to come through. Each is a different face, some are old, many are children. Some of their eyes are wide wtih fear, but surprisingly few. Most are just blank, or haunted or numb, depending on how you interpret. Walking through these long corridors of faces, the simple horror of it is overwhelming. Sometimes you stop, pick a face and just stare. Trying to see past the picture and into the life of this person, into their death.

After Toul Sleng they were taken to the Killing Fields. This dusty parcel of land is so banal. Just dust and trees and the huge indentations of dirt that mark the place where thousands of bodies were dumped. I was a bit of a mess within a few minutes of being there, just looking at the piles of skulls in the stupa. So matter of factly organised into 'female- 0-20 years, female 0-30 years' and so on until at the top level are the oldest. Walking around we scuff over human teeth jutting out of the ground and thousands of bone fragments that have been pressed into the hard dirt. I think its maybe the worst thing i've ever seen in my life.

We have definitely fallen in love with this country, and its tragedy just makes what it is today even more contradictory. It's by no means a happy country, the corruption is immense and the poverty is everywhere. There's also a strange disconnection to its history. Kids aren't even taught about the Khmer Rouge in school- maybe because some of them are still, i do not lie, high in the government. Still, moving on from here is going to be a relief though i will never forget that stupa with its skulls or those thousands of faces at Toul Sleng.

Kampot

Kampot province is pretty much hammock town. Everyone is lazing around in hammocks. Shopkeepers, kids, fishermen, they are laying low and easy in the shade. Our guesthouse is on the river, on stilts. I'm drinking Angkor, the local brew. Dry, easy-drinking and tasty.

We met a local guy named Sarrat who is really cool. He took us to a local 'bar' where they make and serve the 'palm wine' that I've heard so much about. This place is a shanty by a water hole with mats rolled out in the spots of shade. He translates the chirpy old lady who runs the place, turns out we're the first foreigners to grace this fine establishment. He does the ordering and we get some chili pork and also some chili duck. Delicious.

The palm wine is like a spirit, it tastes fine and sweet by god damn it gets you drunk. Fast. The three of us shared a small water bottle and get ultra-tipsy while this old guy orders a bottle for himself. We pay next to nothing for this meal because Sarrat does the ordering. There is a foreigner tax for EVERYTHING here. If you don't speak the language people try to get you to pay a good 90% more. We're fortunate that Sarrat agrees to be our guide for the next day.

Ain't no party like a Cambodian bus par-tay-ho-hey

Cambodian local buses. Allritey, here's how it rolls. Two words: Cambodian Karaoke. There's a TV there in the front, there's speakers above your head (mine is the only one working for this particular journey, typical) and yeah. It goes nuts really. The whole 6-hour trip. Hit after hit. Off key, bad takes, HORRIBLE SYNTH TRUMPET they just love it. McGee half-jokes that we should get off at an earlier town to escape the wailing. I half-agree, we're trying to sleep but the volume fluctuates randomly. At one point it sounds like a kettle slowly comes to boil in the background and I wonder if this effect is intended by the artists, or if I've overlooked kitchen appliances in my own music production. One song ends, there's three seconds of silence tops before a synth drum fill introduces the next symphony of horrible noises and I nearly wet myself laughing every time because it's as grating on the senses as it is hysterical. Ah the public bus. Looking forward to the next one.

Phnom Pehn

Phnom Penh is unlike any other place we've seen in southeast Asia thus far. It's dirty, and everybody wants your money. I don't feel safe here at all. This kid selling us books is telling us how often the kids will try and see if you have a lot of cash on you and then phone an older brother or someone who will then follow you around for a while and find the appropriate time to rob you. He says he saw this happen a month ago, this guy slashes a tourist's money pouch with a knife cutting her arm in the process. He reports it to the police and runs away, because corruption is big here and this mugger is probably going to beat the crap out of the kid. Luckily the mugger is in jail for 15 years. The kid says he's confident that he'll be big and strong enough to defend himself from a middle-aged man when the sentence is up. I'll be he's right.

For McGee's birthday we went to a highly regarded and recommended Italian restaurant run by a real live Italian gentleman. We're both craving not-rice at this point and I order a carbonara. You can't go wrong with carbonara. Pasta, egg, bacon, cheese oh how I've missed you all my friends. Instead of a regular birthday cake we had banana pancakes in our room which was pretty neat. I had burgers for the following two nights here then it was off to Kampot on the first local bus in the morning.

Tuol Sleng (S21), Phnom Penh

Again, this isn't a very pleasant read to skip it if you like.

S21 is an equally horrific place. It's one of the 'security base'(detention / torture / prison) that the Khmer Rouge dumped people in before they were murdered. It was a highschool which was then enforced with chailink fences, guard posts and devices of torture coming in a variety of terrifying flavours. People were held here and tortured mercilessly until their number was called and they were sent off to the massgraves a few kilometres away at the Killing Fields. If someone came in to take your phyoto, your thumbprint or made you write a journal, your time was up and you were taken from your cell. The photographs and thumbprints are displayed here. First the 'before'photos (mugshots) and then in a later detention room, the áfter'photos (battered corpses). Some less recognisable than others but with the number cards still on their chests. This was pretty much it for me. This is the worst thing I have ever seen in my life. FUcking gruesome. After exploring the area for 3 gut-wrenching hours we're emotionally exhausted, angry, sad and confused. We hit that point that day and it's no longer possible to interact with the information anymore, it's just another picture of a dead person perhaps holding her baby. We head back to our guest house in Phnom Penh to watch Seinfeld and Friends, and something that doesn't showcase humanity at its very worst. I've learned a lot about this country's tragic history and I feel like I understand the current day situation a lot more so I don't regret visiting these places. It was draining though and I could go without seeing them again.

Horrible pictures alert

[ S21 ]

The Killing Fields (Phnom Penh)

The Killing Fields is something you really have to witness for yourself in order to begin the struggle to make sense of the horrors of the Khmer Rouge regime, which began in 1975 and only ended very recently. The high-up members are still till this day awaiting trial.

It's a mass grave site. It is a horrific place. It stepped on numerous skull fragments, collar bones, all just barely covered by the dust. Victims were tortured here by the most barbaric methods I've ever heard of (using banana tree branches like a saw to decapitate because it saves on bullets) and often dug their own graves before they could lie in it. Almost a quarter of the Cambodian people were killed during the regime. This and Tuol Sleng (S21) are the most horrifying and difficult places I have ever experienced being in. Stop reading now if you're squeamish or don't feel like a depressing blog entry.

There was a mass grave for infants next to a big tree that they were hit against to crack their skulls before being ditched in. There are infant bones around here. I cannot stress this enough, there are human bones everywhere. Under my shoes, a leg by a tree, a rib by some bushes, everywhere. Our guide fled Phnom Penh when the Khmer Rouge took over, but his parents and sister were killed here.

There is a pagoda here filled with the skulls that were found in the graves. Underneath the shelves is a heap of the clothes they wore when they were killed. This happened less than 30 years ago, it's difficult to interact with it at times. People who worked for the Khmer Rouge have now returned to villages to live amongst the people who suffered under the regime. They're in their 50s now. I find that hard to understand, how the people of this nation are just concerned with moving forward, within the same generation. I don't see forgiveness like that anywhere else in the world. It's a complicated time here in Cambodia.

Don't look at these photos if you think you'll be disturbed.

[ Killing Fields ]

Leaving Siem Reap

'Siam Reap is such a nice place. The people are so very friendly and interested in travellers. Everybody wants to have a chat with you and they're inquisitive about where you're from and what your life is like. We could have easily stayed for longer, exploring more of this village which has the main draw for tourists of Angkor Wat and the many other temples in the region. It has a really easy-going vibe and despite being home to a range of restaurants and the famous 'Pub Street' you could totally have a very relaxing couple of weeks in Siam Reap. We decided to head to the nation's capital after our 4 day stay here.

Fortunately we were able to have a big night out on Pub Street at a nice little bar with comfy chairs and cheap 2-for-1 cocktails. We met a Swedish guy and an Irish girl who had recently met and teamed up for cheaper travel adventures. It was refreshing to sit around and crack jokes, not so common as far as other travellers we've met thus far goes. They were really funny and we got hammered till early in the morning before we managed to stumble successfully back to our guesthouse.

I'm learning that in Cambodia you really shouldn't mention the Khmer Rouge to the locals. It's understandably a difficult thing to discuss, the tragedies are so recent (and ongoing, this trial is just not happening). Pol Pot died in jail a few years back while awaiting trial and the locals refused to believe this until they saw pictures on the news. He didn't even get the chance to be convicted and sentenced for crimes of genocide. Seriously though this guy is up there with Hitler, he takes a substantial slice of the genocide-leading asshole pie.