Phnom Penh
Cambodia

October 23 - 28, 2003

Wow, it's nice to be out of Vietnam. It was an almost tangible difference in crossing the border, just in the way it felt, the way people interacted, and the speed at which things get done. It always surprises me, too, how different people look from one region to the next, and how by walking a hundred meters you can see an entirely different race of people, that the primary race dominates so extremely is not something that I'm used to noticing, I guess probably because my experience has largely been part of the dominating race...

Anyway, Phnom Penh is nice. Despite what you may hear to the contrary-wise, affordable accommodations can be had. The price of food is about double that of Vietnam, though. The streets are as hustling and dirtier probably than Vietnam, and the moto-bike drivers are as aggressive, but friendlier if that makes any sense. Near the end of our stay in Phnom Penh the drivers were starting to recognize us and realized that we walked everywhere.

That didn't stop them from approaching us though. As we were having breakfast one morning, one of the more regular drivers was harassing me a bit, telling me that I was a bad guy for not supporting the local economy. "You come to my country, spend no money!" he said as we ate a $3 breakfast (two days wages), "You must be millionaire!" I laughed, and noticed that his sour, mean snarl was a mask for his mirth, and he was also laughing. I guess he had nothing better to do.

SO.... Phnom Penh. What's there? It's a dirty, busy, loud city. Once you get away from the main tourist strips, people are kind and keep pretty much to themselves. We were able to walk around the Orasey market without a single shopkeeper asking us in, or following us down the hallway. It's the capitol city, and there are monuments, palaces, Wats, Museums, and food in abundance. There are also many ex-pats and foreigners living and traveling. One of the more common books for sale is called Guns, Girls and Ganja and apparently explains the local ex-pat lifestyle and why foreigners choose to live there. I was offered all three just walking down the street in a corresponding frequency. The Shooting Range tour is $3 plus ammo. We didn't go.

There is an active waterfront scene along the river where the Tonle Sap and the Mekong meet. The foreign restaurant/cafés offer the typical fare. We went out to the Foreign Correspondent's Club (FCC) for dinner one night.  It was the last stop on the things-we-must-see-from-Tony Bourdain's-book list. We were particularly enchanted with the place, not because of the extremely expensive and delicious menu, but because of its proximity to the Royal Palace and National Museum.

In A Cook's Tour Mr. Bourdain describes a scene that was familiar to me from my trip to Australia in '93. One evening I was staying near Schute Harbour, and I was walking back to the hostel I was staying in. It was quite late in the day, and I had taken a rather long hike. The sun started going down, and I didn't realize how close the western mountains were, or how completely they would block the light once the sun was behind them. Darkness started settling in and I began to hustle back instead of getting caught on the open road in the dark with no light. Just at that point where the sun had finally gone down, and the surrounding landscape was bathed in darkness, but the sky was still a deep indigo slate color, the forest beside me came to life.

I first noticed a single, very large bat flying near me. One became 5, 5 became 20 and 20 became 2000. About that quickly. I stopped and stared in awe at the sky as it literally filled with thousands of large Australian fruit bats flying out to raid the nearby banana plantations.

It was a very magic moment for me that I remember clearly from 10 years ago, and when Tony describe the sunset flight of the bats, I knew I had to go to the FCC. Kathy and I went, had a FANTASTIC meal from pumpkin soup to literally the best Antipasto plate I've ever had and spent our average daily budget on one meal. We moved from our cozy table to some stools by the window and waited for the bats. Sunset came and went, and darkness settled in. From where we were sitting we could see both the river and the Royal Museum. We waited.  Finally, while talking with our waiter, I explained how we had happened to be in his restaurant, and that we wondered about the bats. He said they had fixed the roof in the Museum and the Palace so the bats couldn't live there anymore, and that they'd moved away. Good for the artifacts, bad for us. SO, no bats.... Guess we'll have to go back to Schute Harbour.

Shoot! J

So enough babble, on with the pictures....

Wat Ounalom
Ounalom means "eyebrow" and the Tat in the back is said to house one of the Buddha's eyebrows.
You will notice an interesting mix of Buddhism and Hinduism. The monk that we talked to explained that the local Buddhists understand that every country had different religious traditions and they try to be respectful of this. At least I think that's what he said....

The five statues are of Hindu gods, and they stand in front of the Hindu story of the Gods and Demons working together churning the ocean of milk for the elixir of life to give them immortality. They also face the entry to the Tat where Buddha's eyebrow is.

        
East entry gate, looking back out into the market. The main meeting hall of the Wat. The Tat holding the eyebrow. The Hindu Statues and relief across from the Buddhist Tat.

              
Inside Wat Ounalom: a mahogany door, a stairway with a spire in the background, a spire in the front, the south gate facing Sisowath Quay, and an internal side street in the Wat.

        
The waterfront: Kath standing in front of Wat Ounalom, the boardwalk, a river boat, and a market side-street just off the main drag and just east of the Wat.

        
Waterfront Scene: Chaktomuk Theater, a lion with flags, an interesting lamp post, elephant walking down the street.

           
Daily Scenes: Orasey Market (meat section), daily traffic pattern, a quiet side street downtown, Monks walking down Sisowath Quay with the Royal Palace in the background, and a sunset.

I had to finish the triangle. They didn't get it, but they were speaking French, so go figure....

Royal Palace

1&2: the Throne Hall, 3: The Elephant Pavilion, 4: The Dancing Pavilion, 5: The Royal Treasury

Cats with Cats (we couldn't get Spaz close enough to play), Garuda column heads, a side detail of the Throne Hall with doves.

An interesting friend we found to play with. She was missing one arm...

Silver Pagoda

The courtyard of the Silver Pagoda, named for the 5,329 silver tiles used to make the floor of the Pagoda. The Pagoda houses an Emerald Buddha (made of baccarat crystal), and a life sized gold Buddha covered with over 2,000 diamonds stands just in front of the central dais.

Some stupa outside, and a statue of Norodom, which is actually a statue of Napolean with the head switched out (a gift from France in 1875).

Some little statues around the courtyard.

There is a huge mural of the Ramayana myth (with the Monkey warriors) around the inside of the wall.

Some cool musical instruments and a gateway.

A less beautiful side...

I already mentioned the Shooting Range tour. There are also tours for the Killing Fields and Tuol Sleng....

Communist elements, termed Khmer Rouge in the '50s by a despotic King Sihanouk, fled to the country side to avoid persecution. Sihanouk formed an alliance with the North Vietnamese  and allowed them to use Cambodian soil to transfer supplies to the south. From 1969-1973 the Americans bombed eastern Cambodia where they thought the Viet Cong were hiding out, killing hundreds of villagers. This bombing is commonly acknowledged as leading to the rise of the Khmer Rouge.

In 1970 General Lon Nol and Prince Sisowath Matak deposed Sihanouk while he was in France. They ordered the Vietnamese to leave the country, but instead they pushed deeper into Cambodia followed by the South Vietnamese and U.S. troops. As the countryside turned into a battlefield, refugees flooded into Phnom Penh. The Khmer Rouge took advantage of the chaos and started taking control of large areas in the outer provinces.

After the Americans left Vietnam and stopped supporting the local government in Phnom Penh, the Khmer Rouge, known to themselves as Angkar, stood largely unopposed and took power quickly. On April 17, 1975 the Khmer Rouge rolled into Phnom Penh to cheers and revelation from the Cambodian people. They thought the war was over.

All over Cambodia, people were forced out of the cities to work in the rice fields for the Khmer Rouge, and anyone that opposed was immediately executed. When Phnom Penh fell, there was literally no one living in the Capitol city.

Anyone that opposed the regime was killed. Anyone with glasses was killed. Landowners, teachers, politicians, foreigners, and people that had worked for foreigners were killed. From 1975 to 1979 up to 2 million people were tortured and executed by the regime and buried in mass graves. Some people were put in prison and tortured.

The term Killing Field is a western term made familiar by the movie of the same name. We went to visit the Choeng Ek (pronounced CHAENG AI) genocide center and the Tuol Sleng prison. I will put the pictures from these trips on separate pages and you can choose to view them as you will. There are pictures of dead people, mass graves, prison cells, torture chambers, and human bones.

Seven foreigners were killed in Choeng Ek. Choeng Ek was the genocidal center for Phnom Penh. Every village, town and city had their own genocidal center.... The world sat by in complacency as Pol Pot and his cliqué murdered 2,000,000 people, a quarter of the population of Cambodia.

Everybody knew, and knowledge led to outrage, but outrage did not lead to action.

The Vietnamese, however, had continued their struggle against Cambodia, and in 1979 reached Phnom Penh. They installed a government under Hun Sen, a former Khmer Rouge, who had defected to Vietnam. The Chinese were concurrently backing a Sihanouk and Khmer Rouge coalition government-in-exile to oppose the Vietnamese government. Though the Vietnamese occupation was not ideal to the Cambodian people, it was a nice relief from the previous four years of intense genocide.

The international community sided with the Khmer Rouge because, though they were Communist, they were not expansionist and only slaughtered their own people so they didn't pose a threat. Thailand, Britain and the US conspired to provide training, arms, finances, shelter and the Cambodian seat at the UN to the Khmer Rouge.

In 1985 Gorbachev cancelled aid to Vietnam, and Vietnam needed to pull out of Cambodia. Negotiations began, and the coalition forces struggled internally for power. In 1991 the Paris Peace  Accords were signed, and granted the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) authority to conduct and protect elections in Cambodia in 1993. The 1993 election brought power to the royalist FUNCINPEC party which ended up sharing power with Hun Sen and reinstated Sihanouk as the Constitutional Monarch.

Amnesty was offered to Khmer Rouge members which managed to attract huge numbers of soldiers to the new government including Ieng Sary, Pol Pot's number two and 10,000 soldiers. Pol Pot died in April 1998 as the Royal Cambodian Armed Forces (RCAF) invaded Anlong Veng, the 'last' Khmer Rouge stronghold. It is said that Pol Pot died of a heart attack, but it is possible he was murdered by his own cadre.

There are apparently Khmer Rouge still active in the Northwest of Cambodia along the Thai border, but they are small and not very influential. The amnesty for Khmer Rouge has held with most of upper members of the Khmer having either died of old age recently, or still walking around today. Some investigation has been made into the atrocities but it would seem that mostly the lowest levels of prison guards and cadres are the only ones getting any jail time or punishment, with the highest levels claiming ignorance of the genocide.

Choeng Ek Genocide center

Tuol Sleng S-21 Prison

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