See the gallery Koh Kood & Phnom Penh for photos from this post.
Arriving back in Chiang Rai from Luang Prabang on Friday the 13th November, I headed for the now-familiar Orchids Guesthouse to meet up with my friend Maddie, an Australian volunteer who had been with me during the September crisis, and who had been traveling through Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia for the previous 6 weeks. She had come back to Chiang Rai for a few days to catch up with me and Sara, and to see the kids at the Center again before heading back to Australia, and I had decided to share a room with her in town during her stay. I was going to be hanging out in Chiang Rai until 22 November when mum and Rusty were due to arrive, and was really looking forward to just enjoying the town and spending some time with the kids that didn’t involve me shouting at them. Carol the founder and CEO of IHF was arriving the following Monday and I was looking forward to finally meeting her. Little did I know that everything was about to go so completely and utterly to shit. En route to Chiang Rai from Bangkok Carol emailed Caty and told her that she didn’t want anyone not “officially” part of the Centre to be there when she arrived; she wanted two of the older boys to meet her off the bus, then spend some time alone with them before going to the Centre to spend time with just her and “her” children. When she got there she told the new Director and the volunteers, two of which had been there only a week, that she also wanted them to leave and they would have to stay somewhere else for the night. So Maddie, Caty, me and the ejected others met up at Coconuts to look at each other and wonder when we’d be given the green light to go to see the kids.
The next day I was doing some stuff around town; finding out about posting my bike to Sangklaburi, sorting out things to do while mum and Rusty arrived, stuff like that, when I decided to get a coffee from the coffee shop next to the bike place. Imagine my surprise when I walked in, to see a woman who I instantly knew to be Carol, with the gone-away-to-Chiang-Mai-boy, and my nemesis Brett and Kitt. Of course Carol didn’t know who I was so she didn’t look my way, but I made eye contact with Kitt as I walked past, smiled and mouthed “hi” at him while my mind was saying “WTF?????” as I casually walked up to the counter to order my espresso. No green light that day, and Caty wasn’t getting any response from Carol by email, so she and I decided we’d just go up there the following afternoon.
We arrived at about 3 o’clock and when I introduced myself to Carol I got a cool reception to say the least. I was a bit surprised, especially as she’d been sending me emails a couple of weeks before telling me how she was looking forward to thanking me in person, and if there was ever anything that she could do for me blah blah blah…. Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t going there looking to get a medal or anything, but she had been so effusive by email that it just seemed weird. It was about to get a whole lot weirder. Caty and I were just kind of hanging around in this odd atmosphere when Carol invited us to sit in on a meeting with one of the new volunteers (who had been allowed to go back after being barred for a day) to talk about the finances. This discussion was very brief and somehow turned into something else all together. Carol started talking about how “her” children were unhappy and how she’d never seen them like this and that something was wrong and she didn’t know what it was but whatever it was it was probably her fault and probably having so many volunteers coming in and out of the home for so long was a bad idea and that she needed some time alone with her children to work it out and she didn’t know how long that would be but that the volunteers that were there at that time might be the last volunteers that IHF has and that she didn’t blame us she blames herself and she needed to fix it and she can’t do that with outsiders there and so she thought that maybe it would take three months for her to “huddle” with her children and that it would be best if we weren’t involved with the children at all during this time. Caty was leaving for the US in three days and mum and Rusty were arriving in four. Mum had got the Queensland Basketball Association to donate twelve basketballs because I’d mentioned how much the boys love basketball, and she was already in Chiang Mai, having lugged them from the Gold Coast on the train to Brisbane, to Bangkok, and then to Chiang Mai, so I asked Carol if Caty and I were going to be able to spend any time with the children between now and then, and was told that she thought it would be best if we didn’t. I asked if I would be able to visit on Sunday with mum and Rusty and explained about the basketballs, and was told that that would be ok, but we really should be leaving now because the children were starting to arrive home from school and she thought it would be confusing for them to see us there. Didn’t see that one coming. I have some thoughts on Carol which I had started to form in the previous six months that were all confirmed there and then, but I don’t want to get caught up in any slanderous litigation, so I’m not going to write about them here. Anyway, it seemed to make perfect sense to her that these children, many of which already have severe abandonment issues, would be more confused by seeing me, and Caty who has been the only stable and consistent presence in their lives for the last two years, and us saying goodbye to them, than by us simply disappearing. Wouldn’t they wonder where we were? Why we left without saying goodbye? If we were coming back? Didn’t we care about them….? But we didn’t have a choice and had to leave immediately. I was speechless and Caty was absolutely devastated, as she has chosen to live in Chiang Rai, entirely based on wanting to be exactly NOT the person who would leave them.
Over the coming days all the volunteers decided to leave permanently, Carol went to Indonesia to sign some papers and there were NO adults sleeping at the Center apart from Kunu, man about the house, who wouldn’t know how to deal with any kind of kid issue, nor is it what he is there to do. WTF????? At least Carol wasn’t there when I went with mum and Rusty on the Sunday, and I had a chance to say goodbye to all the kids. It was really hard, and even though I was leaving Chiang Rai anyway, not being able to spend the time with them that I had planned to in the previous days made it feel like I hadn’t wanted to. It felt cold and I know they felt it too. As with all the dramas that had played out during my time there, this one has a very long back-story that I couldn’t possibly write about because it would take too long and I don’t have the skill to make it sound interesting to anyone who wasn’t involved in it, but I believe that I know why Carol treated Caty and I as she did, and it has a fair bit to do with that meeting in the coffee shop that I accidentally walked in on. It also has a fair bit to do with my thoughts on Carol, as well as the actions of the eldest boy to whom Carol listens without question, and who has been manipulated by adults who should know better. Like I said, long story, and I suppose I shouldn’t really be surprised that this would be how things would end for me here, going on how the past months had played out.
And so it was that I met mum and Rusty off the bus from Chiang Mai and I set about the business of showing them Chiang Rai. For the next couple of days we ate the best food Chiang Rai has to offer, drank at Coconuts, looked around the night bazaar, visited the White Temple and some working monasteries, spent two nights in an Akha Hilltribe village, I shipped my bike to Sangklaburi, and before I knew it we were on the bus to Chiang Mai for a flight to Bangkok. A quick overnight in a very flash hotel in Sukhumvit close to the eastern bus terminal made for a short taxi ride the next morning to catch the 6:00am bus to Trat (five hours), where we would connect to a speed boat which would whisk us to the white sands and crystal clear, warm water of Koh Kood in just over an hour. Koh Kood is one of the last of Thailand’s islands that is virtually untouched by tourism. That isn’t to say there aren’t tourists there, just that it’s a little bit further, a little bit more expensive to get to and stay on, and not really a whole heck of a lot to do. Perfect. By 3:00pm I was in the ocean and can’t remember ever having enjoyed it more.
We were staying at Ngamkho Resort, owned by a very chilled Thai man called Uncle Joe and his wife, smack bang on the most perfect section of the most perfect, palm-fringed, postcard-perfect beach. We each had a bamboo bungalow with hammock strung across the balcony, looking straight at the water. Did I mention that it was perfect? We’d brought a bottle of Thai whiskey with us, so dug it out and organized some glasses and ice for happy hour on some deck chairs we dragged onto the beach. For the next four days and nights we barely left Uncle Joe’s, and why would you? We did venture out one day, to visit a fishing village built on stilts over the water, purely because we read that they have good fresh crab. It was true. As much as I like the idea of eating crab, and love how it tastes, I usually can’t be bothered with all the work, and of the crabs I’ve eaten in Australia I generally think “to much work for too little reward”. Not so these. With Rusty’s expert tuition on how to crack the little suckers open we discovered enormous chunks of sweetness that came away easily and were very rewarding indeed. God it was delicious. I picked up another bottle of whiskey to replace the one that had already done its bit for the past few happy hours, and we rattled our way back past the rubber and banana plantations to Uncle Joe’s in his pickup truck in time for the late afternoon massage we’d booked the day before. Just off the shore there’s a small reef, and Uncle Joe loaned us masks and snorkels so we could check out the little bit of live coral, loads of tropical fish, and my favourite – clams with the most amazing colours and patterns on their velvet cushion lips. Our time here was over far too quickly and before I knew it we were heading back to the mainland and another five hour bus trip (which turned into nearly seven in the interminable Bangkok traffic) back to Bangkok. We made it just in time before the kitchen closed at the Lotash Seed restaurant, where I wanted to introduce mum and Rusty to some amazing dishes that I’ve eaten there before, and they weren’t disappointed. Back at our guesthouse I picked up some documents that had been sent to me there by Baan Unrak to support the application I’d be lodging in Phnom Penh in a couple of days for a new 90-day Thai visa, and spent a couple of hours online sorting out a few things that had been left hanging while I was hanging in a hammock on Koh Kood, and mum was asleep before her head hit the pillow.
A few weeks before going to Phnom Penh I’d done some research on accommodation, and narrowed my findings down to a pretty good-looking short list. No one told me that the pick of hotels and guesthouses gets snapped up early during the high season (maybe during the low season, too?), so when I tried to book about a week before I was traveling, I was shocked to be told that all the places on my shortlist were fully booked.
I thought I had plenty of time before my flight from Bangkok at 3:30 in the afternoon to find somewhere decent to stay when I arrived, so we had a fairly leisurely breakfast, then I set about printing my ticket and searching for guesthouses to contact. It turns out that the celebrations for the King’s birthday, (the big day was 05 December) were continuing for 9 days, and so the various road closures around Bangkok meant that there could be delays getting onto the expressway to the airport, so I was advised to get a taxi at 12:15. This, and the very slow wireless connection put me in a slightly stressed state, and still without anywhere to stay in Phnom Penh that night, I said goodbye to mum and Rusty, and sped off to the airport.
Once I’d cleared immigration at Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi airport I went in search of one of the free internet kiosks they so brilliantly provide. There were two of them at my gate, so I picked one to stake out and waited, and waited, and waited while the guy checked every email and social networking account he has… Eventually he got off and I jumped on, hoping that one of the hotels or guesthouses I’d emailed earlier had replied with positive news. My inbox revealed no good news, but it wouldn’t be the first time anyone has turned up in a place without somewhere to stay, and I was happy to work it out once I got there.
An hour later as the plane descended out of the clouds, preparing to land in Phnom Penh, I was struck by how absolutely flat-as-a-tack the landscape is. In every direction – flat. When I entered the terminal building and jostled along with the rest of the passengers in the line to get a visa on arrival, I was struck by a unexpected feeling of heaviness low in my guts; a feeling familiar to many travelers in foreign lands.... After a quick assessment I decided it was nothing and continued on through immigration and to the luggage carousel; and there it was again. Was it really something? I didn’t think so, so I picked up my bag and headed outside to the slew of waiting tuk tuk drivers, hoping one of them was about to become my new best friend and help to find me somewhere to lay my hat.
And so began the next hour, rattling around in the back of a tuk tuk, each bump in the road making that “nothing” in my guts into something, after all. First he tried to take me to a place on a busy intersection, and from what I had observed of Phnom Penh traffic on the journey from the airport, busy was going to equal noisy. And difficult to cross the road. I told him to take me somewhere near the river, but on a quiet street. He took me to a dump that would be a great location for a scene in a movie that calls for “seedy – very old and never renovated”. I looked just to be polite, and by now the gurgling in my guts was getting serious, but told them no thanks, and back to the tuk tuk it was. Next he took me to a place that had a very nice-looking lobby, and they told me the room rate was US$50. More than I wanted to pay, but this driving around was getting old, so I looked at the room. This turned out to be one of those places where they hope to lock you into paying for a room before you’ve seen it, based on the flashness of the lobby. The moment I stepped into the creaking lift with frayed and worn carpet, I had a pretty good idea of what the room was going to be like, and I was right. US$50 I was not going to pay for a room that smelled like it had been holding a Marlboro conference for the past 20 years, and the sagging bed looked like it would make me into a human taco. I told the smiling receptionist no thanks, but could I use the bathroom please? I could tell the tuk tuk driver was getting a bit over this whole driving around thing, and wasn’t really wanting to be my best friend for much longer, but I told him we needed to keep looking. I told him the address of a place I wanted to look at, but he insisted that it was very far and he knew a good place for $20. I had to keep telling him that I didn’t need to pay $20; $40 was ok, but he didn’t want to keep driving around and wanted to offload me asap. I had the address of a place on the riverfront that I’d read about so we drove up and down the quay a couple of times without being able to find it, and him starting to get insistent about taking me to this $20 place. Another stop found a place with a room available but $70, but they didn’t take American Express, so the answer had to be no. Back out onto the quay I recognized the name of a place I’d read about online, so went in to check it out. No, they didn’t have a room available, but they would phone their sister hotel just up the road. Could I use the bathroom while they called? Great news! They have one room available – the Director’s Apartment. How much? Usually $165 but they offered it to me for $110, and yes, they take American Express. Sold. At only 3 times my budget. And so it was that I paid my tuk tuk driver and was driven in the hotel car to the FCC (Foreign Correspondents’ Club). It turns out that the FCC is a bit of an institution in Phnom Penh (or “the Penh” as I’ve heard it called). Occupying an enviable spot on the quay overlooking the river, the FCC nowadays incorporates a ground floor café, hotel, bar/restaurant and rooftop terrace. Once I’d checked in I was lead back outside and up a steep, dark staircase and for a few moments started to wonder if I should have asked to see the room first. But I shouldn’t have worried. The door opened into a long hallway, which after several meters dog-legged to the right, and continued along for several more meters. Eventually we came to the bathroom, and after several more meters we arrived at the bedroom, where the porter offloaded my backpack, and then spun around to give me the rest of the tour. Back down the hallway toward the river, we turn a corner to the left and a couple of meters down this hallway, the room on the right turns out to be the living room, with a balcony overlooking the river and the quay below, which wasn’t bad at all with the just-past-full moon hanging heavy and golden in the sky, reflecting in the water…. The living room was appointed with a massive leather sofa, wall-mounted plasma tv, huge desk, and mini bar with full-size bottles of spirits and wine; no gone-in-one-drink mini’s here. Should have been called the maxi bar. Looking back through the living room toward the hallway, I noticed that there was a doorway leading to another room… oh, of course, the second bedroom…. This place was ridiculous. My gut was on the move again & I couldn’t get the overjoyed-to-be-showing-me-around porter out fast enough, so that I could ahem, make myself at home. After a long (hot!) shower I ordered room service and planted myself on the brilliant couch for a couple of hours. I think it’s easy enough for anyone who hasn’t been without the option of hot water in their shower for over 6 months at a time to imagine how great it is to have a hot shower, but I’m not sure if I can convey how amazing it is to sit on an actual couch after half a year of nothing but concrete benches or tiled and wooden floors. There has been the occasional triangle cushion, which definitely serve a great purpose, but in terms of comfortable seating, I have been almost totally deprived. Thus, the prospect of having an enormous one all to myself was quite terrific. Hot shower, room service, movie viewed from fabulous couch, nothing from maxi/mini bar due to dodgy stomach, the only thing left to do was go to bed. I should have guessed – the most comfortable mattress and pillow, ever….
Unfortunately a sleep-in wasn’t on the cards, so after the extravagant breakfast included in my room rate, I hot-footed it off to the Thai Embassy to lodge my visa application, then back to the FCC to spend the rest of the morning back in my living room using the free WIFI to search for somewhere else to stay, and telephoned the new shortlist to see if they had any vacancies. Before grabbing a tuk tuk to take me to check out the potential new digs for my remaining nights in Phnom Penh, I even managed to find a place that would swap my long-held 400,000 Laos Kip at a terrible rate, but you get that with the black market. My new shortlist had only one place with availability for that night, and it would have to do, and after a quick squizz at a couple of others I had signed myself up at yet another place for the following 3 nights. So, back to the FCC for lunch, then I moved to the new hotel. Happy hour at the FCC, like most places in Phnom Penh starts at 4pm, and they had New York band, Ratatat playing that night, so I showered and changed and took myself off to get happy. It’s pretty easy to while away a few hours with a good book and $2.50 margaritas, and before I knew it the place was packed with expats and tourists, crammed in to see the band. At 2am it was definitely time to call it a night and I tuk tuk-ed back to my hotel room with no windows, where I slept unsoundly on my mile-high, rock-hard, not the most comfortable pillow ever. When I woke up I thought it was still the middle of the night (being no windows to let in the telltale pesky daylight), but a quick check of the time revealed it to be 8:30am. A quick check of my head revealed a hangover, so I decided to pass on the standard finish-at-10:00am hotel breakfast and opted to stay put for another couple of hours after a paracetamol breakfast in bed. Of course then I had to check out and change hotels again, finally happy to have somewhere decent to stay that wouldn’t break the bank. Back to the FCC for dinner that night with my new Swiss friend who was keen to check out I heart Hiroshima, an Australian band playing there that night. Another 2am finish for this out-of-practice drinker had me renouncing breakfast again the next morning, but at least this time the pillows were comfortable. This turned into another lazy day, reading, watching movies, and only venturing out for a massage across the street. The movies (apart from Michael, with John Travolta playing the role of the archangel which was on HBO – hey, I was hungover…) were at least relevant – S.21, a documentary, and The Killing Fields, to prep me for my impending visits to these important Phnom Penh sites.
Ravaged by civil war until very recently, Phnom Penh seems to be a city of contradictions. The 15km drive south west to the Choeung Ek Killing Fields bears witness to the desperate poverty of its people, far worse than any I’ve seen before, is in such stark contrast to the shiny new Mercedes and Lexus 4WD’s jostling for right of way with the bicycles, motorbikes and tuk tuks in the insanity that proves the chaos theory and is the reality of Phnom Penh traffic.
I spent a devastating morning visiting Tuol Sleng; the former top-secret prison (S.21) where the Khmer Rouge systematically and brutally tortured and subsequently killed an estimated 20,000 teachers, intellectuals, traitors of the Democratic Kampuchea party, children, or anyone considered to be an enemy of Pol Pot’s regime, and then the Killing Fields of Choeung Ek. Entire families of so-called dissidents were arrested and interrogated to extract their “confessions” of crimes against the regime. If not accidentally killed at S.21 due to some over-enthusiastic interrogating, prisoners who had given their confessions were then sent to Choeung Ek to be killed. Babies and children were not spared for fear that in the future they would seek revenge for their slain family members. In this way over 2 million Cambodians were executed in the Khmer Rouge genocide.
Prior to 1975 the Khmer Rouge had been infiltrating and taking over rural villages, recruiting children as soldiers, who would come to denounce their fellow villagers, even their own families, who were then arrested, interrogated and killed. Many villagers had relocated to Phnom Penh, lured by the prospect of jobs and lifting themselves out of the dire poverty they found themselves in. In April 1975, Phnom Penh was “liberated” by the Khmer Rouge and the city evacuated, foreigners ejected and it population forcibly sent to rural areas to work on the land.
I felt apprehensive on my way to S.21; a former high school converted by the Khmer Rouge into its secret prison in the heart of the city. With the city emptied of its people, there was no one in the surrounding streets to hear the screams of the prisoners, or to witness what was taking place there. The Khmer Rouge were meticulous documenters, photographing and keeping detailed files on all of its detainees, and these records were revealed when the Khmer Rouge was ousted by Vietnamese forces in January 1979. Of the estimated 20,000 people who had walked through the doors of S.21, seven male prisoners were found alive by the Vietnamese. There are many hundreds of these photographs on display, the expressions on the faces and in the eyes of these men, women and children range from fear to hatred, despair and disbelief. Some even smile, perhaps not realizing what lay ahead of them. Some can’t even bring themselves to look at the camera lens, perhaps more certain of what lay ahead.
The school buildings were transformed into a variety of cell types. A few were kept as individual rooms for interrogating and torturing former high-ranking Khmer Rouge officials who were suspected of betrayal. Others were made into long rooms with many tiny cells crudely constructed of brick or timber, where the prisoners were shackled for the duration of their imprisonment. The front of this building was gift-wrapped in barbed wire to prevent any prisoners who may have had any such opportunity, to jump over the railing to commit suicide. The dried pools of blood on the tiled floors and splattered on the ceiling doesn’t leave much unsaid. The words keep going ‘round and around in my head, what happened here?? How could this happen? Once these “traitors” of the Khmer Rouge had “confessed” to their treacherous activities, their confessions carefully documented, they were told they were being moved to a new home to work for the Democratic Kampuchea Party. Don’t worry!, they were told. Blindfolded and wrists bound they were then shipped off by the truckload to the Killing Fields of Choeung Ek. On arrival, loudspeakers blared the cheerful song of the DKP, as one by one they were lead off the truck, their identity noted for the accuracy of the records, and then through the field to a ready-made pit. Sometimes they had to dig their own pit. Few were shot as ammunition was expensive, so after being made to kneel on the ground at the edge of the hole in the ground, most were clubbed across the back of the neck or on the head. This didn’t usually kill them straight away, so they then had their throats cut before being kicked into the mass grave. Babies were held by the legs like a cricket bat, so their heads could be smashed against a tree (with the inspired name The Killing Tree) next to the pit. Another large tree, mysteriously named The Magic Tree had loudspeakers also blaring the DKP song, to drown out the screams of those being killed. There are an estimated 350 or so killing fields across Cambodia, and at this particular location just outside Phnom Penh, about 8,975 skeletons have been exhumed from 86 of a total 129 mass graves. The largest, 5 or 6 metres deep, contained 450 bodies. This is a deeply disturbing place, where you walk – literally – on the bones, and clothes they once covered, poking out of the eroding earth; the remains of innocent people who came to a horrific end.
I couldn’t bring myself to photograph either of these terrible places apart from a couple of signs at S.21, as I wondered what sort of souvenir they would be. I don’t need a photograph to remind me of images and imaginings that I won’t be able to forget. My guide at Cheoung Ek was a young Cambodian man who grew up 200 metres from the site. I couldn’t bring myself to ask him how people can live there, or anything about his family’s history. Instead I told him his English was excellent.
It confounds me that the Cambodians I meet as I venture around the city are smiling and warm, when this recent atrocity is all around them and must touch all their lives in some way. I suppose life has to go on. The long-awaited Khmer Rouge trials are currently underway in Phnom Penh, but many Cambodians as well as outsiders are skeptical about the way they are being conducted, and many question the impartiality of the judges and what the outcome will be. Almost comically, there is no death penalty in Cambodia, so the surviving members of the Khmer Rouge who directed and committed the unspeakable 30 years ago, will at worst spend the rest of their days in prison. Pol Pot died under a supposed house arrest in 1998 after continuing to run the Democratic Kampuchea party from the jungle for the previous 20 years. It’s also pretty hard to get my head around the idea that he simply got away with it. That it took so long to rustle up a UN-sanctioned trial. It’s impossible for me to convey how confronting and absolutely devastating S.21 and Cheoung Ek are. I don’t have the words to describe how it affected me; how sad and angry it made me feel, and my overwhelming sense of disbelief and lack of comprehension that these things really happened here. I guess they’re a couple of those places that you just have to see to believe.
New visa in passport and back in Bangkok, I realise that I haven’t been to backpacker-central during the high tourist season before, and I don’t think I want to do it again. Soi Rambutri, usually a sort of sea of calm around the bend from the insanity of Khao San Rd was awash with backpackers; it’s usually salubrious atmosphere transformed into an annex of the carnival side-show that is Khao San Rd. Every stackable plastic chair in every restaurant and makeshift street-side bar had the arse of a “same-same but different” t’shirt-wearing backpacker planted on it, sculling Beer Chang and polishing their stories of “doing” Thailand, for their captive audience of new travel buddies, who were just waiting for the current narrator to stop talking so they could jump in with their own version of crazy stories from the road. I couldn’t wait to get out of there.
