My $4 bus ride to Phnom Penh was a grueling one. No air con, a bus driver with an obsessive compulsive horn tooting disorder and a mother with her 10 shopping bags and her 5 year old daughter munching on a bag of crickets pressing me up against the shadeless window was not what I’d call a picnic! However I met two lovely dutch people Rose and Roland with whom I ended up spending all my time with in this amazing, emotionally exhausting city.
We climbed straight off the bus and onto a tuk tuk that transported us to the Tuol Sleng Museum. The site’s simple origins as the Tuol Svay Prey High School was turned into Security Prison 21 (S21) in 1975 by Pol Pot’s security forces. This was the largest centre of detention and torture in the country, run by the notorious Khmer Rouge.
Delving into the former classrooms shatters any illusion of normalcy as you see a single rusty bed, shackles and blood stains on the floor and roof. You can almost hear the gut wrenching screams and cries of the victims. This place truly knocked the wind and speech from me, and left me feeling nauseous.
The next day we hired push bikes and lost ourselves in the kamakazi traffic of the city. This is what I call organized chaos! The traffic just seems to come from every which way, but somehow it just works!
A 2 hour bike ride (including giving some children a lift to school on the carrier)
got us to the killing fields of Choeung Ek. Rising amid 129 mass graves is a blinding white stupa that serves as a memorial to the aprox 17000 men, women and children who were executed here by the Khmer Rouge between mid 1975 – 1980. This is where all but 7 of the prisoners of S21 eventuated.
Behind the stupa’s glass and rising upward shelf my shelf are over 8000 skulls found during the excavation in 1980 – some of them still bear witness to the fact that they were bludgeoned to death for the sake of saving precious bullets. Wandering the grounds you can still see human bone and clothing poking up from the soil.
In total approximately 3 million people died (either by murder or starvation) under the Khmer Rouge’s regime to keep Cambodia an uneducated, equal, communist nation. Absolutely discusting and saddening to the soul.
I changed guest houses that afternoon to the Number Nine Sister Guesthouse where you had to jump sand bags and murky waters to get to the accommodation, and was introduced to Rose and Roland's friends, Anna and Sabine (Germany), Jaimi (Canada), Arjen (Holland), Chris and Mia (England).
Being in this part of town was fantastic. The guesthouse had a serene deck over Boeng Kak lake, made especially for watching the sun set and rise in the comfort of a hammock.
They had the best damn fruit salad – dragonfruit, pineapple, mango, pomello and melon with a base of coconut muesli and dressed with lashings of European yoghurt, and that became my staple breakfast while here. Outside was a narrow street lined with tour agents and cheap eats, teeming with children wanting food and money, scrawny women trying to sell you books, tuk tuk and motorbike drivers hunting you down and following everywhere trying to “take you anywhere for good price lady”,
vendors selling deep fried tarantulas and other miscellaneous insects, and mangy drug dealers trying to hook you up with opium, weed or what ever else was going. Many an enjoyable night/afternoon/morning was spent sipping $2 Long Island Ice Tea or 80 cent beers in this grotty, buzzing wonderland.
My final day in Phnom penh was the most memorable. Instead of busing to Vietnam, Jaimi persuaded me to stay one more day to seek out and visit an orphanage.
We began our day climbing aboard the ever-faithful tuk tuk and finding a rice merchant to purchase a food donation for the orphanage.
It was so much fun running around the different rice shops learning how to tell what was good rice and what was shit. After much hard bargaining we got a 50kg bag for $18 (the price started at $40!) only to put a hole in it loading it onto the tuk tuk! A patch up with band aids and much laughter and we were off again.
Over 2 hours of heat, dead end roads and communication breakdown
we accidentally arrived at a hospice run by the Mother Theresa organization.
This particular hospice was for people with TB and other illnesses, but particularly for children with HIV/AIDS.
We were first taken to the classroom where the kids were doing singing. They were so excited to see us, and bellowed out their tunes with such enthusiasm and happiness that it was hard to come to terms with the fact that they were terminally ill and would eventually die here.
When the sang “If you’re happy and you know it” I couldn’t help but cry. Such a sad, beautiful thing to see and be part of.
There was also a mentally handicapped boy who had been abandoned at the gate of the hospice, and he had so much affection (even if a little aggressive!). Such a simple, lovely child.
Spending time with the ill there was hard on the emotions but at the same time I felt so privileged to have had time with them, and hoped that somehow they would remember me, as I will always remember them.
This was an amazing send off from Cambodia. This country has such a sad, painful history yet such gentle, warm, forgiving people. I will never forget my experiences here.
