Cambodia - Phnom Penh

We're in Phnom Penh now, the capital of Cambodia. Its a funny place, many of the buildings are newer and nicer than any in Vietnam, and it seems much better set up to deal with us tourists (eg the restaurants are much more likely to serve Western foods, and be clean-looking and nice). Things seem to cost a little more here too, from tuk-tuk rides to entry fees. But there is clearly a greater number of people in severe poverty; I get the feeling that there's a much greater gap between the rich and the poor. We've both been having trouble dealing with it, just having kids begging for money all the time and seeing the dirty, ramshackle and sometimes precarious way in which people live. The sewerage system is a bit bodgy too, and you can't necessary put toilet paper into the toilets (but I suppose I should be thankful there are toilets at all!)... We've seen a number of amputees around too (mostly begging), which we presume is a consequence of all the land mines in Cambodia.

Its been a rough couple of days really, and I'm hanging out for Angkor Wat tomorrow to remind me that humanity can create as well as destroy. We spent today learning and seeing what we could about the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot. In a word, "Brother Number 1" was a real monster of a man. In a few more words, its hard to understand how anybody could sentence nearly a quarter of their countrymen to death by torture, but here's a man that did. We visited the Killing Fields of Choeung Ek, one of hundreds of execution centres across the country. What was amazing was that it had been left so unaltered from the time that they disinterred the bodies. It was basically a huge square plot with 129 mass graves in it (about a third of which haven't been disturbed), so we just walked around these huge holes in the ground and read the sign-posting, which were things like: "here is where 148 headless remains were disinterred", or "this site contained the naked bodies of 253 women, children and babies", or "this tree was used to beat young boys". If you looked at the ground under you, you could still see clothes in the mud.

After that thoroughly chilling experience we hit ourselves with more death by heading to S-21, the most famous of the "Security Centres" set up by the Khmer Rouge to "interrogate" (read "torture") political prisoners, I can't remember numbers, but hundreds of thousands of people were brought there, and less than a dozen ever walked out. To give context, between 1 and 3 million people were killed by the Khmer Rouge (estimates are difficult because the Vietnamese and Americans also killed many Cambodians who have disappeared), and this all happened in the late 70s.

It sounds crazy, but Pol Pot wanted all those people dead because of a simple risk assessment: it was better to kill thousands of innocents than let one CIA or Vietnamese spy get away. So, the psychopathic moron set about forcing confessions out of anyone that arouse even the slightest suspicion. Obviously, the people he was most paranoid about were those in his own ranks, so many soldiers and politicians themselves were tortured to death. I don't know how he could have possibly thought the systematic murder of his own political party and army was a sustainable strategy, but he clearly did. His economic policies were equally bizarre and demonstrated a complete and utter lack of insight into the most basic economic principles (he herded almost everyone to the countryside and made them farm rice, dismantled the schools and unis, and killed anyone educated).

But anyway, S-21 itself has been left much the way it was found, the same as the Killing Fields. As an old high school, it has a particularly creepy feel about it. When the centre was found abandoned after the Vietnamese invaded, all 12 of the classrooms in one of the buildings had a single bed in it, each with a tortured dead body chained on it (or by it). They have left the beds there, and each room simply has a photo on the wall of what it looked like when it was found. Very haunting.

So, basically we've been learning about the horrible things that have happened to the Vietnamese and Cambodian people, and coming to terms with the fallout of those things (ie the lack of money and infrastructure, and all that they bring). It makes you feel really guilty and undeserving of being so ridiculously rich, but also so powerless to do anything really meaningful.

Bus to Siem Reap (near Angkor Wat) today. There are some new photos of Saigon and Phnom Penh in our album. There are a couple of particularly good ones up today I think.