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I was up at 6:30 the next morning and I dropped my laundry off just around the corner from the guesthouse then located a driver and agreed a price for a day's driving. The first stop on my agenda was the killing fields of Cheoung Ek, located about ten miles outside of the city. I was fortunately prepared for the climate, so when it started raining, it took me about ten seconds to locate and put on my raincoat, protecting myself and (more importantly) my camera from what because a heavy rainfall. I was expecting my driver to find shelter, but after ten minutes in the driving rain he was still going strong. I was at the point telling him to find shelter (he didn't have a raincoat), when he told me we had arrived. I got off the bike, bought a ticket and the rain suddenly turned into drizzle.
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| Soakapon, my driver for a day in Phnom Penh, looking terribly pleased with himself after driving through a torrential rainstorm. Perhaps he considered it a mere shower. |
At first glance, singularly unimpressive, it didn't take long to sink in that the holes in the ground were exhumed graves, each having contained hundreds of people. In the middle of the field a small tower rose up, filled with shelves of clothing and skulls, all arranged by sex and age. The whole experience was made even stranger because I could hear a class of young children happily chanting their lessons in a school less than 100 meters away. Not all kids were at school though. An enterprising foursome of young children asked me for money. When I refused they started dancing, singing, clapping and generally being as obnoxious as possible. "You give me Thai Baht, I go away". Not being one to succumb to this kind of blackmail, I said no and proceeded to ignore them.
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| The Killing Fields of Cheoung Ek, a miserable plot of land filled with large holes. About 17,000 men, women and children were buried here. The Memorial Stupa contains more than 8000 skulls arranged by age and sex. |
If the Killing fields were the last stop in the lives of those that offended Pol Pot, the leader of revolutionary Cambodia, then my next stop was what kept the killing field in business. Tuol Svay High School was converted to Security Prison 21, a facility where those " suspected" of being KGB or CIA agents were held and tortured. Family members were also interred, tortured and killed to prevent the children taking revenge when they grew up.
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| Soh Me Li stands in the grounds of Tuol Svay High School. About 17000 people were imprisoned and tortured here before being taken to Choeung Ek |
I got a guide, Soh Me Li, who herself had been relocated when Pol Pot decided to empty all the cities and have the population live on farms growing food. I found it impossible to process what I saw. A room with a metal bed in it on which a prisoner would be chained. An ammunition box that would have been strategically placed underneath the victim to catch his waste. A classroom divided into 11 tiny cells in which a prisoner would live chained to the wall, his only friends a box for his solid waste and a bottle for his liquid waste. Playground equipment converted to torture devices.
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| The private rooms at Security Prison 21 (S-21), for important guests only, were well appointed with a bed, shackles to pin a prisoner to the bed and an ammunition box placed under the bed to collect waste. |
Prisoners were interrogated for ten or twenty minutes each day, and this was the only time a prisoner would be unchained. Prisoners were washed twice a month. Important guests stayed at the prison for up to six months. The paranoia and control of the regime started to be revealed when I was informed that after a while the guards at S-21 started becoming prisoners themselves, being tortured and killed like those they had tortured and killed.
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| Several foreigners were held at S-21, and for their convenience, the camp rules were printed in French and English. |
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Meticulous documentation was a key feature of S-21. A special chair was designed to prevent prisoners from moving their heads when photographed, and pictures were taken of each prisoner when they arrived. A photo was also taken of each dead body so that the interrogator could prove to his superior that the person had actually died. When the Vietnamese liberated the camp in 1979 they found seven survivors and 5000 negatives. At it's peak the camp was killing 100 people every day. If they worked 24 hours a day, that works out at more than one person every 15 minutes.
The whole experience left me feeling shocked. This was so far from my experience that I had no frame of reference for understanding, or even beginning to understand it. I had just seen photographs of Humanity's dark side.
I went to have lunch, and after eating I didn't want to do anything for over an hour. I eventually kicked myself into gear and visited Wat Phnom (temple hill), the only hill in Phnom Penh.
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| Rows of picturs of the victims of Pol Pot fill classrooms in the converted school. Whole families were exterminated to prevent later revenge. |
Temple hill was beautiful, and I spent about an hour relaxing there. There were a lot of monkeys playing on the roofs of the temples, and I enjoyed taking pictures of them. A few monks were also relaxing there, and I chatted with them. They admired my digital camera, and started pointing at the monkeys whenever they did anything so that I would take a picture then show them. I bought a couple of gifts at a small kiosk and then went to head down, but as I walked around the corner I saw I man with malformed legs crawling along on the ground, and I just stood watching him go past.
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| Monkeys do what monkeys do on the rooftops and telephone cables of Phnom Penh. |
My experience with children begging had been sad, but seeing a grown man with no legs crawling around begging left me feeling sick to the stomach. Despite having heard believable rumors that the begging in the city was controlled by the mafia, I emptied my pockets of small money and gave something to as many beggars as I could. I will never forget the look on one beggar's face as he struggled to get to me before I left. He looked more than desperate, and he took the $1 bill from me between the two stumps where his hands should have been. One dollar is nothing to me, but the average worker in Cambodia feeds his family on $20 per month. It disgusted me to think that my boots cost more than most people make in a year in this country, and they would be shocked if they learned how much my camera cost.
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| A beggar with no leg sits at the bottom of the steps to Wat Phnom (temple hill) and a begger with no hands sits at the top. |
The royal palace was beautiful, but I didn't find it too special. I guess not much is while the Angkor Wat is a recent memory. I was accompanied around by a monk named Un Sum Ah who spoke little English but enjoyed pointing at things and saying 'Oooh' or 'Aaah'. He was good company even given the lack of conversation. He had our picture taken by a photographer who was hanging around to take pictures of the domestic tourists who may not have cameras of their own. I paid for the picture, even though he was going to. He even got to the point of lifting his robe and revealing that he had a whole row of pockets underneath. Practical as well as stylish!
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| Tourists admire the main gate of the Royal Palace in Phnom Penh. |
The strain of traveling was beginning to tell and after a massage, dinner and a quick beer with a couple of fellow travelers I was ready for bed. I bought my bus ticket to Vietnam and got an early night.