the one about dark past
phnom penh. there's basically 2 ways of getting to phnom penh from siem reap. by bus..which costs like USD 4, or...by boat via the Tonle Sap Lake which costs USD 25.
for wanting to save money....again...i opted for the bus ride. departed from siem reap to phnom penh at 7am sharp. took a tuk-tuk from the guesthouse to the bus station with this young mexican couple. totally awesome ppl. The guy had visited malaysia and claimed he liked KL alot..haha..i couldnt help it and laughed to his face when he said that..jesus...KL!!??...i quickly apologised and explained my love-hate relatioinship with the malaysian capital.
He was very understanding haha. on the bus i sat pretty close to them so the wife offered me some of the baguette she bought from one of the many sellers outside with trays of various foodstuff balanced on their heads. the bus took around 6 hours to reach the capital. pretty uneventful journey i'd say. i even had the time to finish a few chapters of my gabriel marquez's 'Love in the time of cholera' on the bus. The road was pretty straight and blissfully..... tarred.
reached the capital around 1pm. phnom penh is probably the most unimpressive capital in the whole of south east asia. it's kinda like alor setar...with more vehicles on the road (lots of bikes!), more crowded streets, and without any skycrapers whatsoever. the bus station was located right next to the ziggurat-like marketplace. awesome building. the entire area was very crowded indeed.
Unlike Khao Sarn Rd. in Bangkok, Phnom Penh doesnt have it's own backpakers' haven. i randomly picked a guesthouse from the guidebook and looking for it wasnt all that easy. i had to walk with my heavy backpack for bout 40 minutes under the scorching sun before i managed to find the guesthouse. Capitol Inn was the name. It was located at the intersection of 2 pretty crowded streets.
The place looked horrible, of course. haha even looked a little bit too suspiciously like the filming location of many a hong kong horror movie. haha...dirty and old, but at least they had clean sheets. definitely not the worst i've seen...and i wasnt too keen on walking for another 40 minutes under the sun to find another place. They charged USD4 for my room.. a tad too expensive if u ask me, but i got my own toilet and thats always a luxury when u're backpacking.
still a little bit weary from all the walking in angkor, i decided to head down to the little restuarant downstairs and just do a little bit more reading. it did me good. by 5pm i felt like i've gotten enough rest and off i went, hired a moto driver to send me to Sisowoth Quay for a little bit of sunset photography. Scary as it was riding pillion on a motorbike on Phnom Penh streets, it was cheap, and fast. cost me just 20Baths to get to Sisowoth.
The riverbank seemed to have a life of its own when nite encroaches. it's where most of the bars and cute cafes were located. the crowd's a great mix of foreigners and locals alike. the former sit in air conditioned cafes sipping cold beers and chain smoking, the latter take strolls along the riverbank with family members and frens, where young girls gossip, old ladies sell trinkets and foodstuff, and adults converge to pray at the nearby shrine of Vishnu. it was a pleasent evening. Calm, yet still foreboding in a peculiar way.
next day:
got up at 9am. grabbed some breakfast from one of the food stalls downstairs and hired a moto driver to take me to the Cheung Ek killing fields, bout 30 minutes away.
I've read alot about the killing fields of cambodia prior to this but nothing would've prepared me for the visit today. it was a forlorn place, so full of sadness. rows of skulls stacked up upon skulls made up a 10 storey pagoda. walking around the shallow trenches in which the khmer soldiers used to bury murdered victims, you could still see articles of clothing partially potruding from the ground. Broken bones....and even a tooth or two.
The sturdy tree whose trunk khmer soldiers used to smash babies on was still there. Reading about it is one thing. Seeing it with my own eyes is another different thing altogether. after walking for bout half and hour i sat on a bench under a shady tree in one of the quiet corners on the field. since i bring my rosary with me on my travels i took it out and quietly prayed the Holy Rosary.
Got back to the guesthouse bout half an hour later. showered and headed out again. This time it's the Tuol Sleng museum.
Formerly a high school it was turned into a torture center by the khmer rouge during the dark period of 1975 to 1978. Khmer Rouge ruled from 1975 to 1979 but during this short period of time, 2 out of 8 million cambodians were massacred.
it's beyond my simple mind. How drastically the communistic khmer rouge wanted to achieve a fully funcitonal and obidient agragian society that they chose to kill ministers, engineers, professionals, foreigners, intelectuals, ppl of religion, artists, and resistant cambodians alike. Killing is probably an understatement to the atrocities committed by the khmer rouge soldiers on the cambodian public. women and children were also turtored at detention centers like Tuol Sleong (called S-21) before they were sent to the killing fields for extermination.
Every prisoner who was sent to Tuol Sleng was photographed before they were locked up and tortured. And today those black and white faces line the walls of the museum, looking out at visitors with doleful eyes. dead pairs of eyes with no trace of life whatsoever in them even before they were murdered, pleading to tell their unfinished stories to the world.
there's a dark overcast, as if the skies hadnt stopped it's seemingly perpetual mourning of the cambodian genocide.
not many visitors were there today. snapping away with my camera, many a time i found myself alone by the rows of dark cells hastily built in the classrooms with bricks and wood. it was eerie, and very very sad. a very very sad place indeed. if you close your eyes and listen really carefully, you could almost hear the walls replaying sounds from the past, as if they were the ambassadors and advocates to those who were robbed of their lives so unjustly.
it's indescribable. it's a depressing but urgent place nonetheless. It has stories that need to be told within the calm of today's peace, but the authority of death is still ever present there. in every window, along every corridoor, within every black and white potrait, every row of barbed wire, and every scrawling on the weathered walls.
i found a quiet spot under one of the many frangipani trees that lined the museum's courtyard, prayed the rosary and wrote my journal.
like many other war criminals who committed despicable atrocities in the form of genodice, the ones responsible for the extermination of nearly 2 million cambodians are still untried. PolPot, the ruler of the khmer rouge died peacefully in his sleep after he fled into the jungle in 1998 (there's many versions of how he died). Ta Mok, khmer rouge military chief died in a hospital just a few weeks back from this entry. i was surprised to read about his death in TheStar that day, because he had a fairly respectable funeral, attended by many family members and members of the public.
now...27 years after the fall of the khmer rouge, the government has yet to put anyone on trial for the genocide. However with help from the UN, things are slowly changing with persecutors launching into investigations that would help put the first defendants in court by 2007. personally i think it's already too late. most senior officials have already died or made peace with the current government.
But Cambodia needs to heal, it's a country that has lost it's soul. everyone needs a closure.... hopefully this is it for them.
