Oh, Phnom Penh! Where do I begin!?! Might as well start from the beginning, with a warning to would be travelers in this part of the world: treat bus time tables as mere approximations! Our bus from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh was meant to depart at 8:30am, and that's when the courtesy bus came to pick us up from our guest house. On the courtesy bus with us were a couple of people from another guest house who were booked for a bus departing at 9am. After doing a circuit of Siem Reap, we went back to these people's guest house to pick up another couple of travelers who were booked on a bus leaving at 9:30! When we finally got to the bus station (9:25) we were shuffled onto the same bus, which eventually departed at about 9:45.Once on the road, we quickly came to realize what the Lonely Planet guide books mean when they say that Asians rely on the horn as a method of defensive driving. A more appropriate description would be to say that drivers have a certain quota of horn use per minute that must be adhered to - I would say that it stands around 25 honks per minute. If there's a bike on the road, you honk so it gets out of the way. If there's a car coming the other way, you honk so it doesn't suddenly swerve into your lane. If the road is empty, you honk anyway, just in case there's a bike hidden in the trees just waiting to swerve out in front of you! Added to the incessant hooting of horns is the unnaturally loud Cambodian pop music, complete with lyrics for would be karaoke stars. Fortunately for everyone's eardrums it seems that Khmers don't aspire to karaoke stardom, as no-one was singing along to the music!
After about five hours of the best that Cambodian roads could throw at us we pulled up into Phnom Penh's night market area,
where we were instantly swimming in a sea of túk-túk and moto drivers offering to take us to great guest houses, or to the killing fields. An offer of a ride to the killing fields would become the running theme of our stay in Phnom Penh - its the most lucrative ride a driver can offer you, as it is the only 'attraction' that lies outside of town, so naturally its the one they're trying to sell. Once we'd settled into OK guesthouse (an OK place) we took to the streets to explore some markets where we got a bit of fresh fruit (rambattan, mago and lychee) and street food, though our plan for a cheap eat backfired, as we neglected to negotiate a price in advance for our food… not that we ended up paying an extortionate amount for our meal, but for the same money we could have had a sit down meal at the guest house. There are two sorts of market in Phnom Penh: those for locals and those for foreigners. In the former you'll find anything and everything: dried fish, herbs and spices, motorbike spares, clothing, barbers, tailors, beauty therapists etc etc, whereas tourist oriented markets tend to stick to textiles and souvenirs. Needless to say the local markets are much more interesting for a wandering photographer, though the smell of raw fish can be a bit daunting at first!
On our first sightseeing trip in Phnom Penh we walked to the National Museum. There isn't much to see here, and the information boards struggle to live up to their name, but one hopes that the rather pricey $3 entry fee will go towards improving the museum. An interesting exhibit displays the remains of a giant bronze statue of Shiva, said to have stood around 7m tall. This was discovered in a rice field in the 80s thanks to a paddy farmer who decided he should inform the French researchers about what lay buried in his field. Much of the museum is dedicated to exhibiting Angkor-era artifacts and carvings, but rather than displaying artifacts originating in Angkor Wat the museum strives to display pieces from all-over the country, thus showing the viewer that its not just Siem Reap that is home to fabulous temples. An ingenious ploy for expanding tourism to the rest of the country, if only the Cambodian authorities worked a bit harder on it! When its not dealing with the magnificent temples that dot the country the museum presents some relics from the Royal Palace next door.
Our visit to the National Museum left me thinking that the entry fee was inflated, but I was proved wrong when we visited the Royal Palace and Silver Pagoda, where foreigners are expected to pay a whopping $6 to catch a glimpse of his royal highness's function room! As with many Cambodian attractions information is almost inexistent at the Royal Palace, and even the Lonely Planet guidebook doesn't say much about the place. The Royal Function room is all you'd expect from a room where the king throws his parties - plenty of gold leaf decor on intricately carved woodwork and lots of larger than life portraits of the top dude and his family.
The Silver Pagoda, so called because of its floor made of some 5000 silver tiles, is home to a Baccarat crystal Buddha that sits at the top of a platform in the middle of the room. Rivaling this emerald beauty is a life-size, 90kg solid gold Buddha encrusted with more than 2000 diamonds. Keeping these two precious deities company are hundreds, if not thousands, of other statues of Buddha, ranging in size from a few feet tall to ones that could fit on the tip of a finger, and all made of various precious and semiprecious metals.
After a near-overdose of Buddha statues we took a short stroll around the perimeter wall that depicts scenes from the literary epic the Ramayana, after which we visited some exhibition rooms housing various royal howdahs (elephant saddles) and a model of the royal cortege for the reinstatement of the King following the turbulent years of civil war.
During the years of the Democratic Republic of Kampuchea, 1975-79, the years when the Khmer Rouge took control of the country, Cambodia underwent a massive, horrible humanitarian disaster. Thousands fled from the violence in the countryside into Phnom Penh, where they thought they would be safe from the Khmer Rouge, but this changed when in April 1975 the Red Khmers marched into the city. In their quest to establish an agrarian society they forcefully transferred city dwellers to the countryside, but not before imprisoning anyone they deemed an intellectual. By intellectual they meant - anyone who spoke a foreign language, anyone with education beyond secondary school, people wearing glasses, land owners, teachers… the list goes on and on. The detainees were housed in what once was a secondary school, but later came to be known as Tuol Sleung S21 (S for Security Prison, 2 for the district, and 1 for Pol Pot, brother number 1). A visit to Tuol Sleung will make for a gloomy day, but it is disrespectful to the Cambodians to visit their country and not learn about the atrocities they suffered at the hands of their own brothers. The school boundary wall was redoubled with a corrugated iron fence topped with barbed wire; several classrooms were subdivided into dozens of cells no more than 80cm wide and 180cm long. Others had dividing walls torn down to create mass detention rooms, where twenty prisoners would lie next to each other shackled to the same metal rod. High ranking prisoners were "lucky" enough to get their own cell, but the only furniture they got was a metal bed. The balconies of the school buildings were fenced in with barbed wire - not to prevent prisoners escaping, but to stop them from jumping to their deaths, thus escaping the system. Not that many of the prisoners would end up anything but dead - at the height of its activity S21 was claiming as many as 100 deaths a day, and of the estimated 9000 people to go through Tuol Sleung only 7 survived by the time of the liberation in 1979.
Those who made it through processing at Tuol Sleung invariably ended up at the Killing Fields of Cheung Ek, a site with as many as 129 mass graves where they were blindfolded and murdered at the edge of mass graves. Some 17,000 bodies have been recovered, but without further digging it is hard to tell if there are more mass graves hidden in the area. The remains uncovered around Cheung Ek reveal that it wasn't only prisoners of S-21 that breathed their last in the area - one mass grave was found to contain over 160 headless corpses dressed in military uniforms, whereas a particularly knobbly tree bears the chilling notice "Tree used for beating children". It seems that in an effort to save on bullets the executioners would beat children to death against the tree, whereas adult prisoners would be bludgeoned to death with farm implements of have their throats slit.
The memorial at the Killing Fields of Cheung Ek serves a dual purpose - not only does act as a memorial for the thousands that perished here, but it bears witness to how low human beings can sink in their evil.
After the sobering day spent discovering the dark side of Cambodian history we felt that we needed some time to recover our senses, and so it was that we booked ourselves on an early bus to Sihanoukville, a beachside town overlooking the Gulf of Thailand.
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