Cambodia, briefly

After a(nother) very long day of busing, and another scramble to get together enough money to obtain our entry visas (bringing back painful memories of our entry into Indo), we arrived at midday into the capitol city of Phnom Penh. Being very short on sleep, having celebrated George's birthday the day before, we let most of the evening festivities go to waste. Outside of our lake-side hotel was a small stand selling hamburgers to rival those of Dicks', something that Ian and I have been aching for over the last months. Between the four of us, 10 burgers were demolished, and several servings of french fried (a particularly endearing misspelling found all over SE Asia).

The next day, we went on a bit of a soul-shocking tour, learning about the horrific recent history of cambodia, and most notably the khmer rouge. We started, however, at the local fun range. hmm, freudian slip. the local gun range, where one can fire almost any firearm they could hope for, at targets ranging from the mundane (a paper target), to the awful (a selection of short lived livestock). We tried a russian AK-47, an american M-16, and the quintessencial "I have no money in counter strike" MP-5. Although tempted by the full size machine guns, the $120 price tag was a bit steep.

Here's a Cambodian fact which we would all prefer not to dwell on: 40 years ago, 1/5th of the Cambodian population was killed by the Khmer Rouge regime. Today, the youth are not taught about it in school, and only learn of it from their parents or during their post-secondary educations. One and a half million dead, from an original population of only seven million. After our celebration of Americanism at the gun range, we were seriously sobered by a visit to the S-21 prison, where thousands of "enemies" were incarcerated. These were the educated, the wealthy, political enemys, foreign journalists, and anyone who broke any of the many rediculous laws established by the Khmer Rouge.

These were the rules at the S-21 prison:

• You must answer accordingly to my question – don’t turn them away.
• Don’t try to hide the facts by making pretexts this and that. You are strictly prohibited to contest me.
• Don’t be a fool for you are a chap who dare to thwart the revolution.
• You must immediately answer my questions without wasting time to reflect.
• Don’t tell me either about you immoralities of the essence of the revolution.
• While getting lashes or electrification you must not cry at all.
• Do nothing, sit still and wait for my orders. If there is no order, keep quiet. When I ask you do something, you must do it right way without protesting.
• Don’t make pretexts about Kampucheas Krom in order to hide your jaw of traitor.
• If you don’t follow all the above rules, you shall get many many lashes of electric wire.
• If you disobey any point of my regulations you shall get either ten lashes or five shocks of electric discharge.

These prisoners, once tortured beyond the limits of their strength or usefulness, were taken to the killing fields about 20 km away. By the time of the Vietnamese invasion in early 1979, only 7 people of 20,000 had survived. There is a giant monument to the dead erected here, encasing the sculls of those killed in a glass tower. Needless to say, this was a very heavy day, and we looked forward to the Angkor temples a great deal.

We decided that another long day on a bus was in order, and got on the road early to Siem Riep, home of the largest temple complex in the world, at Angkor Wat. But before we could go to the temples, we had to spend an evening unwinding. We did this at BSC Entertainment, a brothel skillfully hidden inside a snooker hall. We were amazed to see this George had been there before, to pose for the sign outside. There was a beautiful girl assigned to each table to keep score, bring drinks, and place the balls, and by the end of the the night, she had been offered to each of us independently. very strange place indeed.









I will let the photos of Angkor speak for themselves. the day was very hot, and the temples were delightful places to hide from the sun. We arrived before sun rise, and saw it come up over the main complex. Interestingly, although this is the most well known temple, it is (in this simple man's mind) one of the less impressive in the complex.









I prefered this one. double click on this picture (making it larger), and look closely at the towers. Very trippy temple.













This was my personal favorite, still overgrown with gargantuan fig trees. At one point, it housed over 2000 monks.

These temples so completely dwarfed anything that we have seen so far, that i cannot imagine going to any more temples and fully enjoying them in the near future. There is a term for this, often quoted by people fresh from Angkor. We are templed-out.

On to Vietnam (by bus, ugh) !