Genocide and Bacon Butties in Cambodia

Last two weeks of May, 2006

Leaving our Laotian and Cambodian border guards pleased with their one dollar tips, Susanna and I continued south by overcrowded minibus and ferry to Stung Treng, an unremarkable town in the northeast of the country. There we had lunch with the other people who had arrived with us from Laos, and we arranged with the guys who had brought us that far to take a further bus to Kratie, the town on the Mekong we wanted to get to before evening.

But there was disquiet brewing among the other travellers. Some people were trying to get to Phnom Phen, some to Siem Reap, others to Kampong Cham, and there seemed to be a good deal of confusion on the part of the "travel company", (comprised of one young Cambodian guy running around). Travellers started to get irate as he told them that there had been "an overbooking" and that some people would have to share seats on the rickety old chicken buses parked in front of the restaurant; either that or pay more than they already had to get a taxi to wherever they were going!

People weren't having it. You expect a certain amount of discomfort travelling this way in this part of the world, but the general feeling was that this was stepping over a line in what people will put up with. In our case, Susanna and I were told to get in an old Toyota Camry with two other people, which was fine. However, they then tried to make us pay more because we were taking a "taxi" to Kratie and not the bus that we had paid for, and they told us that there would be six passengers in total - two in the front passenger seat, and four in the back! Along the dirt-track "roads" of Cambodia's northeast, in thirty-something degree heat?!? Hmmm. I don't think so.

A girl who was already in the car got out and had something of a fit, and for my part I made it quite clear to the "travel company" that no-one was likely to accept this. Eventually we set off towards Kratie with an acceptable complement of four passengers, but on the way we saw the bus from the same "travel company" going to Phnom Penh, bodies and backpacks on the roof and hanging out of the windows...

We arrived in Kratie and found a nice hotel, the entrance to which was flanked on each side by a excellent statue of a lucky rabbit waving from the back of an elephant. Good enough reason for choosing somewhere to stay, in my book. The attraction of Kratie is really that the Mekong flows through it, and in particular that there are freshwater dolphins to see in that stretch of the river. So we hired a taxi and visited a temple on a hill, followed by a place where the river produces rapids you can swim in, or more accurately where you can hang on to rocks in the water so you don't get swept away! We then hired a boat to take us out to see if we could spot some dolphins.

The freshwater dolphins in the Mekong aren't the sociable creatures you see doing tricks in captivity, or playfully swimming alongside boats in the open sea. If you sit out in a boat on the Mekong and are very quiet, you might see them breach every once in a while in the distance. So we did that, and sure enough we saw them...... very far away! However, it was nice to just be floating quietly, on the river and in the sun.

Kratie's other attraction turned out to be a restaurant near our hotel that did cornflakes and bacon baguettes in the morning, and excellent pasta dishes in the evening! I had done the whole "noodle-soup-for-breakfast-just-like-the-locals" thing by that point; you need variety in everything if you're away for any considerable period, so bacon sandwiches and cornflakes were very welcome!

After a couple of days, a "proper" bus took us along "proper" roads towards the capital Phnom Penh, (it seems that, in general, things tend to get more "proper" the further west you go in Cambodia!). We liked the capital, it was a lot bigger, more vibrant and more "advanced" than I had expected; I think that I still had Vientiane on my mind, and expected Phnom Penh to be similar. Here there were upmarket shops, (I was able to replace my broken ipod charger.... I almost had to go without sounds for a moment there!), good restaurants, bars etc. There were also the historical sites to visit, which mainly revolved around the brutal history of the Khmer Rouge who ruled the country from 1975 to 1979.

One of the main sites is Tuol Slong, also known as S-21, a school in the city that the KR turned into a detention centre for anyone that they felt like putting in there. It's now a museum reflecting the building's past, and they don't really need to do much there other than present the facts and let them have their own impact. The sheer inhumanity of what people are capable of doing to other people leaves you a pretty dazed by the time you walk out.

The other site is the Choeung Ek Genocide Centre, better known as the Killing Fields, which is some distance outside the city. As the name suggests, this is a place that the KR brought people to be killed as part of the genocide the organisation carried out in the country. The place is quite chilling. It's not even so much the 12 metre tall monument to the murdered which is comprised of the skulls of some 8000 victims, it's how much of the field is still untouched. As I walked around, right on the path you could see white fragments in the hard mud ground. If you nudged them with your toe and unearthed them, they turned out to be fragments of human bone, or sometimes an entire intact one. Also everywhere, embedded in the hard mud, were rags of victims' clothing just sticking out of the ground. Although since the seventies they have disinterred many remains, clearly there are so many dead, (an estimated 20,000 people), that they have just left lots of them.

The years of the Khmer Rouge, which ended in 1979 when Vietnam invaded the country, have left lasting and very visible scars on the society. You can't wander off the roadside in remote areas in case of uncleared landmines, (something you consider when your bus stops for a roadside pee-break in the middle of nowhere!). There is a lot of visible poverty, with much begging and street hawking, and a large number of amputees due to land mines. We met a Cambodian lawyer on a bus who was telling us that there is still appalling corruption in government, with votes being bought from the poor and local human rights campaigners harassed by the authorities.

After the capital Susanna and I headed for Sihanoukville, a town on the southwest coast named after the country's king and the location of Cambodia's only beach. We were looking for a few days of beach-type R&R, but in reality we got about three hours on a fairly drab beach in between storms! Nice enough while it lasted though, and we amused ourselves the rest of the time in a bar playing pool on a soggy table underneath a leaky roof and, of course, eating and drinking! So after a couple of nights there we headed back to Phnom Penh for a couple more nights, before taking off northwest for the wonderful ruins of Angkor Wat et al at Siem Reap.

One bus breakdown later, (it wouldn't be travel in southeast Asia without that at some point!), we reached Siem Reap and started fending off the tuk-tuk drivers' offers of tours around the ruins. Eventually though we decided on one guy, negotiated a day rate and took off to see Cambodia's pride and joy.

In the end we spent two days touring Angkor Wat and the other sites, and they really are amazing. There is very little that is off-limits to visitors, and you are free to climb and walk over large parts of the structures. That is obviously great for visitors, but it did make me wonder what kind of wear it's causing to the stones. I suspect that the Cambodian government aren't thinking about that yet, they're too busy calculating the tourist spend as a direct result of this national treasure.

Large parts of the ruins have been left to nature over the centuries, and this has allowed some fantastic sights to develop. There are several examples where an ancient tree has grown out of an even more ancient building, the two now mutually supporting each other in a situation where any attempt to separate them would probably destroy them both.

So having wandered around the old ruins for a couple of days, and enjoyed some neat bars and restaurants in Siem Reap, we moved on. Susanna got a bus to Bangkok to fly back to Helsinki, while I booked myself on a Vietnam Air flight from Siem Reap to Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam.