Genocide Day

Catching a tuk-tuk early in the morning, we ride a few kilometers outside Phnom Penh to Choeung Ek, finally arriving at a tall white monument surrounded by rippling green grass.  An Asian tour group poses perkily for a group picture in front of the monument, which as we approach it, reveals itself to be filled with shelves and shelves of human skulls.  Nine thousand of them.  The field around it ripples because it is pitted with mass graves.  These are the killing fields.

It's quiet here, and a few other somber tourists meander through the fields.  Matter-of-fact signs posted here and there tell of the horrors that happened here.  "Mass Grave of 450." (unbelievably small)  "Mass Grave of over 100 women and children, majority naked."  "Killing Tree against which executioners beat children."  We are told that the executioners sprinkled DDT over the mass graves, partly to cover the smell, and partly to kill any potential survivors.  To save bullets, victims were beaten to death with shovels, or sometimes suffocated with plastic bags.  How practical.

Wandering around the perimeter of the field, local children sing to us (specifically, Sean Kingston's "Beautiful Girls") and ask us for money, but I am not in the proper state of mind to be charmed.  Our tuk-tuk driver tries to rip us off on the fare to the next place.  I am used to people trying to shake me down for money while traveling in Asia, but it seems disrespectful to do it right here and right now.  He wants us to pay extra to go to a different destination afterwards instead of back to our hotel, except the other destination is actually a much shorter drive than going back to the hotel.  We refuse to pay on principle, returning stubbornly to our hotel and getting a different driver to take us to the next location: Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, also known as S-21.

Before it became a museum, S-21 was a prison used by the Khmer Rouge.  More horrifying is the fact that before that, it was a middle school.  Asian schools are built quite differently than what we are used to, so to the Western eye, this place doesn't look very school-like.  If I had come here a year earlier, this fact probably wouldn't have registered much.  However, to a pair of Taiwanese elementary school teachers, the original purpose of this building is painfully clear.  Walking through rooms of cramped cells, I notice the marks where a blackboard used to hang, and automatically picture rows of desks where now there are iron beds and shackles.  Even the playground equipment has been transformed into tools for interrogation and torture. What was once a home for education was transformed into a place where the anti-intellectual Khmer Rouge imprisoned and tortured people for offenses like wearing glasses and speaking another language.  The absolute completeness of this perversion amazes me.

Walking through the complex, we come upon a series of rooms filled entirely with faces.  The Khmer Rouge were chillingly methodical about producing photo documentation of each prisoner that passed through here.  Each picture is a portrait of certain death: of the thousands of people who passed through this prison, only 4 ever survived.  In the walls and walls of pictures, all kinds of people are represented.  There are wrinkled old men, young boys grinning defiantly into the camera, mothers holding babies.  I find an entire wall filled with the faces of children, and my eyes begin to blur.  Vicky articulated it best later on: when there are so many faces, sooner or later some of them are bound to start looking like people you know.  Standing in front of that wall of children, I couldn't help but see in them the faces of my children in Kaohsiung, playing in the halls of a school just like this one.

Leaving the museum, my sadness was mixed with a sense of anger and indignation.  The atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge were so extensive; how is it that nobody had ever told me about them before?  I suppose members of older generations know more because they lived through it, but before going to Cambodia, all I knew were the names Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot, and that there had been some kind of genocide.  I didn't know when, or why, or to what extent.  I only knew the names because I had seen them somewhere or heard them offhand (Eddie Izzard does a little bit about Pol Pot); in years of history class we never really touched upon these things.  I know we learned about that time period, because I've definitely studied the Vietnam War, which was at the same time.  I feel so ignorant about Cambodia; was I just not paying attention?  How come nobody ever brought up the fact that while we were trying to beat back communism in Vietnam, the Cambodians were busy slaughtering a third of their country's population right next door, in the name of communism no less?  The genocide in Cambodia took 1.7 million lives, leaving the population decimated (and a whopping 70% female) and the countryside dotted with countless land mines, as well as around 20,000 mass graves.  Children were brainwashed to become killers.  People were executed indiscriminately, for all kinds of seemingly minor offenses.  The question plagues me: how did it get so far?  We learned about the Holocaust multiple times in school, and the motto "Never Again."  Well, genocide happened again, and again, and still happens.  How is this getting swept under the rug?

We were told that even in Cambodia, people aren't really being educated about the horrors of the Khmer Rouge.  At the museum, we ran into a group of Cambodian high schoolers, part of a new program to educate Cambodian youth about the atrocities of their nation's recent history.  Aside from that, however, most visitors to these places are foreigners, and most of what the locals know about the Khmer Rouge era comes from stories they've heard.  In contrast, however, Cambodia is completely plastered with references to its less recent past: bus companies, hostels, and the country's most popular beer all bear the name Angkor.  I can understand why Cambodians are so quick to embrace their Angkorian heritage.  It's not like the recent past has given them too much to be proud of.

Getting Back to Phnom Penh

The night before we left Siem Reap, we had tried to get bus tickets to leave in the morning, but they were already closed by the time we got around to it.  This just meant waking up extra early the next morning to see if we could snag some tickets in the short window between the ticket place opening and the bus departing (it was an early bus).  Being extra fancy, this time we took the $9 bus!  The only noticeable differences between the $5 and the $9 buses were that the $9 bus was full of Westerners, and had a hilarious on-board bathroom.  It was down in the baggage compartment, and the room was only about 4 feet high and just big enough to squat in.  Besides the tight fit, there was nothing to hold onto, so you just had to brace your legs against the wall and hope that the bus didn't do any abrupt braking!  Good times.

In Phnom Penh, we got a hotel in a little nicer part of town than last time, and went off to see the Royal Palace and Silver Pagoda.  Unfortunately, you are not allowed to take pictures in these places, so you will just have to trust me when I say that they are pretty sweet, and in some places very very ornate.  The Silver Pagoda is not silver on the outside, but the inside has a silver floor!  Of course it is covered thoroughly with rugs so tourists don't step on it directly, which is a shame, because it would be a pretty amazing sight otherwise.  Later in the day, we moseyed over to the Independence Monument, a striking structure that stands in front of a long grassy park.  We spent hours there just hanging out and people-watching.  At night, there were fireworks by the monument, and a horde of excited young people rode past on motorcycles cheering and celebrating.  The reason for the celebration, which we actually learned from Chaa before leaving Siem Reap, is that UNESCO had ruled a temple on the border with Thailand to be a Cambodian possession.  Booyah, Thailand!

(Another unrelated but interesting fact that we learned from Chaa: the guy at our hostel had told us that Angkor Wat is owned and operated by a Vietnamese company, and Cambodia only gets a smallish percentage of the profits.  Chaa confirmed this when we asked him, but said that people don't mind, because the Cambodian government is so corrupt that giving them more of the profits wouldn't make much of a difference anyway.  Ooch.)

Cambodia Continued

After one very full day of many many temples, I was a little bit worried that I would get templed out.  Fortunately, my worries were unfounded, because the Angkor temples turned out to be fabulously diverse!  No temple sunrises for us on Day 2, but we did get up at a sufficiently bright and early 6 am to get on our way.  This day took us farther afield, heading towards the far-off but reputed-to-be-impressive Banteay Srei.  We took a brief and rather sleepy stop at another temple called Pre Rup on the way:

And then we were at Banteay Srei!  Banteay Srei is built entirely out of stunning red rock, which was a sharp contrast from the gray temples of the day before.  Its intricate carvings seemed to be quite well preserved, and there were few tourists.  We like.

Awesome carvings!

Monkey guards!

Peekaboo

This picture is dedicated to Shana "Preserve Cultural Relics" Fung:

We escaped just as a giant group of Chinese tourists in matching hats arrived...

After seeing Banteay Srei, we stopped at the land mine museum, a small establishment run by a man named Aki Ra.  Aki Ra was conscripted as a child soldier for the Khmer Rouge, where he planted numerous land mines.  Later in life, he became a one-man force to rid Cambodia of land mines.  Using the most decidedly unfancy of equipment, he singlehandedly removed thousands of land mines in the Cambodian countryside, created the land mine museum, and took in a number of children who had been victims of land mine accidents.  Pretty much, this guy is the man.  Unfortunately, he has his work cut out for him: although highly populated areas are now quite safe, many areas of rural Cambodia still haven't been cleared of land mines.

Moving on from the museum, we hopped back in the tuk-tuk and took off, only to be stopped shortly thereafter by a flat tire.  It didn't take long to fix though, and I am pretty sure the fix cost our tuk-tuk driver 25 or 50 cents total.  As cheap as things were for us in Cambodia, they are definitely even cheaper for Cambodians!

Fixed up, it was time to head off to Eastern Mebon:

And Ta Som:

And Neak Pean, a dry reservoir.  They say that the reason the Angkor Empire expanded so far was their efficient water management system, and the reason for its collapse was expanding too far.  Sounds pretty plausible to me, and these guys definitely had a lot of empty reservoirs hanging around:

At the next temple, Preah Khan, we had a longish road up to walk up to the temple.  Just like at any other one of these temples, we were immediately assailed by small adorable Cambodian children trying to sell us trinkets.  These children were persistent enough that they succeeded in distracting me so much that I walked straight into a tree branch.  With my eye.  And it was a prickery branch, too!  Bleeding copiously from my eyelid, I fished around in my bag to find something to put on my wound.  Amazingly, the children didn't miss a beat, and kept up their bracelet-selling spiel like nothing had ever happened.  An amused Vicky caught the moment on film:

Once the eyelid-bleeding was under control, Preah Khan turned out to be a really lovely place, with interesting Grecian-looking structures that were unlike anything we had seen at the other temples:

Also, super-huge trees never stop being awesome

We finished all of our templing for the day by early afternoon, leaving plenty of time for crucial activities like lunch and napping.  That night, on the recommendation of our adorable tuk-tuk driver Chaa, we went to a restaurant where they had an apsara dancing show during dinner.  Apsaras are celestial dancers, and are heavily featured in temple carvings.  Our apsaras seemed to be less of celestial beings and more of bored local teenagers, but it was interesting to watch anyway.

Unrelated to anything but nonetheless intriguing: we stopped at a little grocery store on our way home and discovered a product entitled "Instant Pink Nipple."  Apparently it is a product for people who feel that their nipples are too dark and would like to make them pinker?  Up to this point, I was unaware that there was much demand for such a product, but it exists, so I guess there must be...

(we got yelled at when we tried to take pictures, so I only have indistinct ones)

We still had one more day on our entrance pass to Angkor, so the next morning we grooved on out to the Roluos group of temples, which are older and smaller and not so frequented by tourists.

Preah Ko:

On the way up to the temple of Bakong, we noticed that men were lining the streets with colored flags, and there were strings of colored cloth hanging all along the road.  As we were wondering why, a group of boys came through with a wagon carrying a large box.  It was a funeral procession.

The temple itself:

When we emerged from Bakong, we found Chaa waiting for us with corn on the cob!  Chaa was a really sweet guy, which definitely improved our Angkor Wat experience a lot, because we spent a pretty large amount of time with him every day.

After seeing the temple of Lolei (so small and unremarkable that I don't even have any pictures), we headed back into town.  Interesting sight on the way: a couple of men carrying huge live pigs on the backs of their motorcycles!  They were strapped on face-up, one pig per motorcycle, and were so remarkably docile that at first I thought they must be dead.  Sadly we just caught a glimpse of it while we were moving on the road, and they had sped off before either of us could pull out a camera.

That afternoon, done with temples, Chaa took-took us to visit Artisans d'Angkor, an artisan cooperative where local people learn different artistic trades.  We watched some sculptors and wood-carvers, browsed around their store, and then caught the bus off to their silk farm, where they produce, spin, and weave their own silk.

No longer in need of a tuk-tuk, it was time to say goodbye to our pal Chaa :(

It was really interesting to see silk go from the initial raw substance to fine, colorful threads being woven together on a loom:

Soooo shiny!  And so expensive...

That evening, we bought random street foods composed of unknown substances (one of them looked like a muffin: it was not.) and poked around the local market, but mostly we slept, because the next morning we had to get up early to try to catch the bus back to Phnom Penh!