Indo China 5

Cambodia

 

This was the final stage of the tour of Indo China and it started pretty inauspiciously with a trip to the public bus station!

I have no idea why we changed from our usual arrangement of having our own minibus, but in all honesty the public transport was fine and in fact there was more leg room than on most of the private buses we had used.

We were bound for Phnom Pen, the capital of Cambodia, and were told that it was impossible to predict the time that the journey would take because of the border crossing bureaucracy. It may take half an hour, it might take as long as 4 or 5 hours, and there was no rhyme nor reason for it, sometimes you were lucky, other times not so. As it happens we must have caught them in a good mood and sailed through in about an hour, meaning that the whole journey only took about 7 hours.

We stopped just over the border for lunch in a pretty grotty service area and immediately noticed how comparatively expensive things were. Cambodia has its own currency, the Riel, but it is not the preferred method of payment as they are linked to, and really want you to use the US Dollar. But they also have a little trick up their sleeves, because they will usually give you dollars in change, but not cents! So spend $4.10, tender $5 and get what looks like a handful of washers in return and it is amazing how many things cost just over the dollar!

We arrived at our hotel, quite a nice place, but just two blocks from the busiest, smelliest market we had seen and soon after we were mustered for a group outing. We all climbed aboard cyclos, the pedal rickshaws, and set off like a green ‘conga’ through the capital for a look at the principal sights.

Whether as a consequence of his choice of passenger, or the sudden onset of  complications relating to a previous life as perhaps an asbestos worker, my chap seemed to develop a chronic bronchial condition half way through the tour and  coughed and spluttered his way into last place as we arrived at each attraction. This was not too much of a problem for me, although a little bit noisy, until it started to rain, whereupon everyone stepped up the pace apart from Mr Wheezy, who managed to return me to base a full 10 minutes after the first arrival, soaked!

The following day was probably the most emotional and disturbing of the tour as we delved into the horror of the Pol Pot regime that beset this poor country in the late 70’s.

Again I stress this is not meant to be a history blog and if you are interested there are thousands of pages of information about these atrocities on the net.

In very basic terms Pol Pot took the thoughts of Mao Tse Tung to the extreme and concluded that true communism, and ultimately success for his country, could only be achieved by returning to a 100% agrarian economy.

To this end, when he came to power, he changed the date to Year Zero and set about emptying the cities and forcing people back onto the land to work. He was assisted in this by the magnitude of the American bombing campaign during the Vietnamese war, which of course, similarly to Laos, had already resulted in huge amounts of ordnance having been dropped on Cambodia, his huge propaganda machine convincingly persuaded people that to stay in the cities would put them at a high risk of death as a result of the bombing.

Unbeknown to the former city occupants, and in particular the more educated members, upon moving from their cities they were automatically categorised as lower class citizens in the new order as they were the ones that were most capitalistic and were deemed a higher risk to the regime, consequently they were detailed for extra work, given poorer living conditions, less food and often subjected to interrogation.

WARNING  I have re read what I have written below and it may be upsetting to some. I make no apologies, this is what I saw, heard  and experienced but if you would rather skip it scroll down to this mark ***  in the margin

We first visited a former school that had been turned into an interrogation centre for ‘VIP’ detainees, politicians, teachers, lawyers etc. the intelligentsia that were at the forefront of the perceived threat to the administration

 Former classrooms, sub divided into tiny cells where people were kept in subhuman, unsanitary conditions, overseen by trigger happy, sadistic guards, and the interrogation, or more accurately, the torture rooms, where barbaric and gruesome techniques were employed to extract information from what had been the pillars of the previous society. The barbed wire on the front of the buildings, we were told, was not to stop escape, there was no escape, rather it was to prevent suicide.

The walls are now covered with drawings and paintings of the despicable

 practices and conditions that prevailed, painted by people that survived them

Cabinets house recovered items from when the camp was freed and include many human skulls

 

some of these bear evidence of what must have been execution ...... all of the evidence suggests that this was a common occurrence.

And then, if this experience had not been disturbing enough, we were taken to the local ‘killing fields’, one of the countless out of town extermination camps that existed all over the country to dispose of the former interrogation camp detainees, objectors, family members of the above and/or just about anyone else that refused to go along with or work for the new regime, or even so much as thought an anti-regime thought.

The barbarity of the system really manifested itself here. It was a very simple operation, turn up in a lorry, be killed, get thrown in a pit or, dig your own mass grave and be buried alive.

We were told that, as either a cost saving exercise, or because they just ran out of bullets, executions would sometimes be carried out by beheading ........ using the stem of a palm leaf, (something that resembled a hockey stick with a flat end) but as this was not ‘blade sharp’, it might take up to 30 or 40 strokes to decapitate the unfortunate victim.

 

 

The best guess, and this is all it can be, is that there were in excess of 1,000,000 people executed, our guide (pictured above) lost his father and explained that there was no extended Cambodian family that had not lost someone!!

Probably most disturbing of all, however, was the ‘baby tree’, against which guards would smash children to death before tossing their bodies into a pit, dead or alive. The body pits were covered in strong chemicals, including DDT to kill any survivors and to stop the smell of decomposition

But, this was not the whole story as it does not account for the estimated (and this may well be a wild underestimation, no one knows) further 1,000,000 people that died through overwork, (actually being worked to death) malnutrition and disease.

And even after the above, the catalogue of disgrace and misery continues, because the other appalling side effect of the genocide was the innumerable number of orphans created and there are no records of either how many of these there were, or, how many died.

The rest of our day was a little subdued

***

Our final destination before heading back to Thailand was to Siem Reap a city rich in both colonial and Chinese architecture and culture, but primarily a staging post for visiting the local temples, most notably Angkor Wat.

Now I know I have put myself on record as behind a bit fed up of temples, but this is far from your average experience and frankly awesome. It is the largest religious monument in the world and part of a huge ‘I can build more temples than you’ competition between successive kings of the Khmer empire in the 11^th and 12^th century, that resulted in well over a thousand being built, although clearly not all on this scale.

 

 It is documented that it took over 30 years to build just this one temple and took 300,000 workers using an estimated 6,000 elephants It became the centre of Angkor, which was home to over 1,000,000 inhabitants at a time that London had a population of about 50,000.

Other temples, like the Bayan temples were built with  'signature' 4 heads on the principal towers to show that they were from a different king

 

 

 

 

One of the most amazing things about Angkor is that, after a succession of wars against Thailand, the Empire collapsed and the whole area was abandoned and lay dormant and at the mercy of nature for some 400 years!! The true extent of the area was not even known about until the French involvement in Indo China in the early 19^th century. The whole area had become entangled in jungle and this is a photograph of an area that has been deliberately left to show the extent of the previous jungle but with a path cut through it

 

 

 especially at Ta Promh, which was the temple made famous by the location shots in the Tomb Raider movie series, it is most striking how the trees, particularly the silk cotton and strangling fig trees grow right out of the walls themselves in an incredibly dramatic fashion.

And then.......that was it!

A final 7 hour minibus journey, during which we stopped at another roadside toilet/coffee/buy a kit kat for £4 area and I was introduced to my final wildlife of the trip by some local children,

and then it was back to Bangkok for a farewell dinner and a few drinkies

The trip had been fab, we had seen and experienced so many things, the group had got on really well and I don’t think any of us will ever forget it.

Next stop .....  a bit more of Thailand