Saigon, Phnom Penh, Kampot

Well the travel gods tested me again this week. At about 2 am, walking back to our hostel in Saigon, after a night out with some Vietnamese guys we met playing basketball, I was accosted by a ladyboy prostitute. This is not uncommon, although this particular hooker was particularly grabby and aggressive. After eventually pushing her off of me and thinking nothing of it, about 10 steps later a guy on the side of the street told me he thought she stole my wallet. I told him I didn't have a wallet just as I realized that my iPhone was missing. By the time I turned around the thief had already ridden off on her motorbike, and I never even saw what she looked like.

As with losing my passport, I am looking at this as another facet of the adventure, and am not too upset about it. My travel insurance will most likely cover the cost of the phone, and the only thing I really need it for was the camera, but I just bought a cheap digital camera off the street so I'm fine now. Plus how many people can say they were pick pocketed by a ladyboy in Saigon. It's a good story.

Anyway beyond that Saigon was not very eventful. We spent most of our time playing pickup basketball at a court we found with decent games, and met some really friendly and cool locals. Basketball has been a great way for us to meet and interact with locals on our trip, and in each new city we always check if there are any courts near us.

I don't have any pictures of Saigon obviously, nut it was pretty much just a big bustling city, a bit like a smaller version of Bangkok. We spent one day doing a trip to the Cu Chi tunnels, which was a tunnel system used by the Vietcong about 100 km outside of Saigon. It was amazing to crawl through 100 meters of the tunnels and feel so exhausted and claustrophobic by the end that you need to get out, just to realize that many Vietcong spent whole days and weeks down there. But the tour was very tourist oriented, including an AK-47 shooting range, and was packed with large groups of fanny-pack-clad foreigners, which Arni and I prefer to avoid.

After Saigon, we took a sleeper bus across the border to Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Cambodia is an extraordinary country with an unbelievably horrific history. Many people, Americans especially I'm sure, don't know anything about Cambodia or the gruesome genocide that occurred here less than 40 years ago. Much of our time spent in Phnom Penh had to do with seeing leftovers from the genocide, so I will give a brief history lesson before diving into the pictures.

In 1975, shortly after the fall of South Vietnam, and about 2 years after the US withdrawal from Vietnam, a communist group known as the Khmer Rouge took control of Cambodia. Under the leadership of Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge attempted to create a perfect, classless agrarian society. They evacuated all of the cities, including Phnom Penh, the capitol, which at that point had swelled to a population of 3 million people, most of which had fled to the city to escape the encircling Khmer Rouge. Overnight, the Khmer Rouge made all 3 million people get up and leave their homes behind, and walk to a farm somewhere in the countryside, leaving Phnom Penh a ghost town.

The Cambodians who were relocated to the countryside became essentially slave laborers, working 12-15 hours a day farming or performing hard labor, and were given extremely small rations, usually one small bowl of rice gruel a day. The food that they were farming was being used to buy weapons from the Chinese for the Khmer Rouge to fight the Vietnamese on the border. Many workers starved to death, but if the starvation didn't kill them then often the Khmer Rouge did. The Khmer Rouge envisioned a completely equal, classless agrarian society, so outright killed anyone with any sort of education; people with ethnicities other than Khmer (many Chinese-ethnic people lived in Cambodia); people who worked in any capacity under the previous regime; or just people considered "city people", as opposed to what the Khmer Rouge called "base people", who were the darker skinned farmers. If you wore glasses, this was considered a sign of education and intelligence, and so you were killed. 

As Khmer Rouge regime wore on, they became ever more paranoid about infiltrators, traitors, and Vietnamese agents, and so increased their killing regimen to include anyone who did anything that was not in the best interest of the regime. A story stands out in my mind of a woman who was caught with 2 bananas, which she had been given as a reward by a Khmer Rouge soldier. When another soldier discovered these bananas, he scolded her for believing she was above other Cambodians to deserve this extra food, then immediately shot her. The Khmer Rouge believed in a completely equal society, so if everyone else was starving, you should starve too.

In 1978, in response to Khmer Rouge soldiers attacking Vietnamese border towns, Vietnam invaded Cambodia, quickly and easily deposing the weak Khmer Rouge regime. In the 3 years, 8 months and 20 days that the Khmer Rouge ruled Cambodia, they killed between 2 and 3 million Cambodians, out of an original population of only 8 million. Imagine a quarter of the population dying at the hands of your countrymen. In the context of the US, that would be 80 million people, killed by other Americans.

In the aftermath of this terrible period, Cambodia has tried to find its way back into the modern world, but it has been a tough journey. A study conducted in the US found that 62% of Cambodian immigrants suffered from PTSD. All of Cambodia's infrastructure and educated class was destroyed by the Khmer Rouge, and Pol Pot succeeded in bringing his country back to what he called "Year Zero." So they had a long way to go to catch up with the rest of the developing world.

Despite this, they are growing very quickly, with a GDP growth rate over 10% in many recent years. And my personal experience so far has been very optimistic, as I've seen many signs of the emerging modern world, including wifi on a bus we took, phone shops on every corner, and a few skyscrapers in the capital. I take all this with a grain of salt, as I have only been in heavily populated areas with a developed tourist infrastructure, but I've still been impressed. 

OK I realize that was a bit long, but this country has really amazed me with its friendly people and its atrocious history, so I had to share it. For more on the Khmer Rouge I highly recommend the documentary Enemies of the People (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1568328/), which follows a man whose family was killed by the Khmer Rouge trying to find some answers by interviewing many actual Khmer Rouge killers, as well as Pol Pot's number 2 guy. Also for a personal account of the horrors of the Khmer Rouge, I recommend the book First They Killed My Father by Luong Ung (http://www.amazon.com/First-They-Killed-Father-Remembers/dp/B0017ODVCW), which is the very powerful story of a little girl who lived through the regime and her family's struggle to survive. 

Now finally on to some pictures.

You see the funniest things on the backs of motorbikes in Southeast Asia. They carry everything on them. In Vietnam we saw two people on a motorbike with a full size mattress between them. Here is a ladder.

Just me and my pig.

The CPP is the dominant political party in Cambodia today, and you see these signs everywhere. The party is led by Hun Sen, a ruthless and corrupt leader who has been in charge in some degree since the Vietnamese placed him at the head of their puppet government in 1979. In Phnom Penh we saw multiple CPP rallies in the streets, which were essentially an excuse for teenagers to ride around on their motorbikes honking and yelling at everybody they passed. One rally we came across was pretty much just a dance party in the middle of the street. All of these passionate rallies were interesting, but slightly scary, as these kids I'm sure know and care little about the actual politics, yet still show complete, passionate devotion to the party. In my mind this is how regimes such as the Khmer Rouge or the Nazis come to power. But I might be overreacting a bit to a simple rally.

About 10 km outside of Phnom Penh there is an exhibition at one of the killing fields used by the Khmer Rouge.

This small hole was a mass grave of 450 victims, discovered by the Vietnamese in 1978 after invading Cambodia. Like the holocaust, there were many rumors and refugee stories coming out of Cambodia of genocide, but most westerners did not believe them, until real evidence was found by the invading army.

A photo of the mass grave when initially discovered.

The field looks like a grass moonscape with 40 or 50 large holes scattered throughout. These are all dug up mass graves.

Bones and teeth fragments occasionally come to the surface when it rains.

Farmers still work the land surrounding the killing fields, despite knowing that many dead bodies lie under the ground that they work  on and in the streams and rivers nearby.

Clothes that have come to the surface of the fields in recent years.

Mass grave of 100 women and children.

The infamous killing tree. This is one of the most horrendous things I have ever seen. This tree was used to kill babies and small children, by smashing their heads against the tree until they died. When discovered by the Vietnamese, there was still hair, blood, and brains on the side of the tree. The Khmer Rouge killed entire families of suspected traitors, because they wanted to prevent any surviving family members from seeking revenge. The Khmer Rouge mantra was, "to dig up the grass, one must also remove the roots."

More bone fragments found in the fields after the original excavation.

Mass grave of 156 headless bodies, later identified as Khmer Rouge soldiers. Near the end of the Khmer Rouge rule, they started getting more and more paranoid, and killed any soldiers showing hesitance or anything but complete devotion to carrying out their mission.

A jaw bone, found in the fields recently.

The central monument of the killing fields. This memorial contains the skulls and bones of thousand of victims found in this killing field. Around 20,000 people are thought to have been killed in this field.

Skulls of the victims, up to the sky, as far as the eye can see.

Pol Pot is quoted as saying, "It is better to kill 99 innocents by mistake than to let one enemy go free."

Pol Pot was fond of saying, "it is no gain to keep you, it is no loss to lose you." 

Tools used to kill Cambodians in the killing fields. Bullets were too expensive to waste on killing Cambodians, so the Khmer Rouge used whatever was at hand.

The S21 prison was originally a school in Phnom Penh. When the Khmer Rouge took over, they abolished education, and converted the school into a torture prison. All of the prisoners of S21 who did not die from being tortured, starvation, or disease inside the prison were taken to the killing fields above. Like the Nazis, the Khmer Rouge kept meticulous records of all the prisoners of S21, including an entrance picture, some of which are shown here.

The mass shackles used to hold prisoners.

Barbed wire around the prison to prevent prisoners from committing suicide.

A chronology of Cambodian history.

Alright, I'm done with the depressing stuff. After Phnom Penh, we went down to Kampot for a couple days to chill out. Our guesthouse was on the beautiful Kampot river, which we spent a lot of time swimming in and just hanging out on.

The river again.

We played some barefoot basketball for a bit with these guys, but my feet weren't as tough as theirs and after a few games I had to stop because of blisters.

Chilling out at Bodhi Villa. It was good to have a few days without doing much after hectic Vietnam and the depressing realities of Phnom Penh.

We just arrived in Siem Reap, and tomorrow we will go see the temples of Angkor, which many of you might know from the Tomb Raider movie. We will be going from the low of Cambodian civilization, the Khmer Rouge, to the high, the civilization centered at the city of Angkor, which was once the world's biggest city, having a population of over a million people when the population of London was around 50,000. So it should be a happier tourist experience than Phnom Penh, so we are excited. 

Again sorry for such a long, depressing post, but I think knowledge of atrocities such as the Khmer Rouge regime is important for people to have, and an understanding of these atrocities is the only thing preventing their repeat in the future.

Till a happier next post, 

leah hai