Sorry for the Group Email

After some of our epic bus journeys, the trip from Saigon to Phnom Penh was a relaxing six hours. It was air-conditioned, there were no maniacs on board, and even the border crossing, which we’d steeled ourselves for, took under an hour.

Phnom Penh was dead. Mid-April, you see, is the Khmer new year. Obviously we didn’t know that, but it meant that nothing was open. The tuk-tuk drivers never stop working, though, so we found one and the next thing we knew we were at the Okay Hostel. We were on a bit of a saving kick at the time so we opted for the fan-cooled room with a shared bathroom.

It was horrible. You know that bit at the beginning of The Beach? (The film. The book starts differently.) It was like that. The walls looked like the room had once hosted a small but bloody re-enactment of the Normandy Landings, and where the walls weren’t spattered with who-knows-what, they were covered in phone numbers for local prostitutes. And the fan didn’t work properly.

That was enough penny-pinching for us. We’d spend the next night in the magnificent-looking air-conditioned rooms.

Leaving our hot and sweaty room behind us, we went to see Phnom Penh.

As I say, it was mostly closed. Even the palaces, which are normally tourist-friendly, were largely shut.

The two bits that weren’t, though, were the museum at Tuol Sleng (also known as S-21, the notorious jail and interrogation centre for many of those arrested during the Khmer Rouge regime) and the Killing Fields, the torture and execution centre. Tuol Sleng was a school converted into an interrogation and torture chamber. We saw a set of gallows from which prisoners were hung by their ankles until they lost consciousness, and the excrement-containing jars into which their heads were thrust to revive them.

The thing with the biggest impact, though, were the rooms full of photographs of Khmer victims. Cambodia isn’t a large country, yet the Khmer Rouge killed fully two million people in just four years, ending in 1979. Those arrested were imprisoned as part of a “year zero” policy, designed to return Cambodia to an agrarian, anti-intellectual society. Those imprisoned included teachers and academics. Some were imprisoned, apparently, because they wore spectacles.

The Killing Fields offer a similar perspective. In themselves they are a selection of shallow graves, but the memorial in the middle is a stack of thousands of skulls. The scale of the Khmer Rouge’s terrorisation of its own people is really quite staggering, although not quite as staggering as the fact that it was a government officially recognised by the UN.

Dave can also be found here.