Adventuring in the Wild Blue Yonder: Log 30: Local bus ride, Phnom Penh, and The Khmer Rouge

Our ride came to the guest house to take us to the bus stop and once boarded we definitely knew it was the local bus. Families with small children, old ladies with plastic bags of items, men on their way to what looked like important business meetings for Cambodian standards (not exactly suits but dressed up at any rate) and we were the only two westerners on board. We were saving $2 dollars by taking a local bus instead of the VIP bus with all the tourists, but is was actually quite nice hanging with the locals even though we stuck out like a sore thumb. The whole ride we were entertained by the Khmer pop music/music videos that played on screen up front, and the bus driver was a really suave looking dude that was loving these videos. We stopped twice for toilet stops at the Cambodian equivalent of a truck stop with squat toilets and a hole in the ground, where I couldn’t decided if I was supposed to ‘tip’ the lady standing there that was ‘attending’ the basic toilets. By the time we reached our destination we were dropped in the middle of Phnom Penh near the central markets and were immediately swarmed with tuk-tuk and taxi offers to get us to our hotel, which we hadn’t even booked yet. After a hold-up on a bus station bench, a consult with “the book”, and a nice tuk-tuk driver that really wanted our business and spoke English true to his little sign he held, we were off to a guesthouse we hoped had a room. We also signed up our driver, Mr. Sokhom to drive us around the next day to the sights.

The above story is basically every transit and entrance into a city in Asia, and I think I’m finally getting used to it, instead of the small panic and rushed feeling that I have to hide in order to get to where we want to be. It is still strange being without a car for my own transit from place to place, its also the concept of having to be served that’s still hard to get used to. I am DYING to cook myself a meal, make myself a juice or coffee, or even just get to where I’m going on my own and park.

Phnom Penh is just how I remembered it, though last time I definitely remember being culture shocked for a first few days, so the amazing newness of the Cambodian lifestyle was a bit less fantastic to me but that was about it. I must say I think there are more tourists here now and the riverfront area is finished and looking quite posh, a good push for the tourism industry even if it didn’t need that much of a push.

The next morning as I headed down for breakfast, the news was on and all over it was the devastating earthquake in Christchurch, that had happened just a few hours previously. This one being much wrose than the one last September, buildings were crumpled, the cathedral steeple had fallen in, and roads in the city center were cracked wide open. Tragically, this time was during the middle of the day so people were in the city working, and its high tourist season so many more people were there. I was instantly a bit shocked and rushed upstairs to contact my friends to see if they were ok in Ashburton, as well as Christchurch. After the initial news broadcast and the e-mails there was really nothing left to do but go about my day, as there was nothing I could do.

Mr. Sokhom picked us up and our first stop was The Killing Fields at Choeung Ek, I had been before but this is not a place you don’t go to just because you’ve seen it before. During the Khmer Rouge regime from 1975-1978, the soldiers and leaders killed 3 million people across Cambodia in an attempt to cleanse the country of imperialism and western ideas to create a pure agrarian based society. If you were educated, an intellectual, didn’t join ‘the party, said anything against the party, etc, you were killed or sent to a prison before being tortured and forced into confessing that you were CIA or KGB. They would also kill your whole family because they didn’t want to leave anyone capable of taking revenge in the future. The Killing Fields is just one of the many sights around Cambodia where people were killed and buried in mass graves, but it has become a national monument to the people that perished during the rule of the Khmer Rouge. A monument has been erected with the bones and clothes from the graves they excavated housed inside. There is also a museum of sorts off to the side with more information on the evils of the regime. We walked around the mass graves and the tree that was used to killing children in a very somber state, just trying to realize the horrors that happened here.

The next stop was Toug Slang a school in the city that was renamed S-21 and converted to a torture prison for the Khmer Rouge. The 30,000 people that were killed at The Killing Fields were all housed and tortured here first. Individual chambers were built within the school rooms, as well as the larger classrooms used as mass containment areas. Victims were tortured to get confessions of crimes against The Party, or for being a spy for the CIA or the KGB. On Liberation Day when the Vietnamese invaded to put an end to the Khmer Rouge, as the regime was also crossing into Vietnam and killing civilians by the thousands, only 8 people were found alive in S-21. Only 4 survived to tell their story. This was another very somber place to walk around, talking was discouraged, but this was not a place that you wanted to talk or be chatty.

We walked up to the river front area and checked out the café’s and restaurants. I found the café that my friend and I had frequented and found it to be just the same, except the bamboo trees along the edge had grown considerably. I sent a message to Amrit, the Green Peace worker from India that we met in Siem Reap, and he met us at the café for dessert and conversation. We were headed to Vietnam the next day so we had an early night of it.