When I smiled at the woman beside me, she took that as a welcoming sign, picked up my arm, turned it back and forth inspecting it, and finally wet her finger with her tongue and tried to rub off my freckles one of them practiced his English with me, but soon the novelty had worn off. The day was overcast and drizzly and the ride long and monotonous, providing little excitement besides my first glimpses of Central Cambodian stilt houses.
When at last the bus pulled into Phnom Penh, Tayler bargained with a tuk tuk driver who took us to the hostel at which we had a reservation. When the hostel turned out to have overbooked, I was livid. We spent the next hour riding around trying to find a decent spot.
We settled on a less-than-ideal but affordable room with no windows on the ground floor of a place that seemed centrally-located. And the day didn't really get much better. We tried to satisfy Tayler's curry cravings at a nearby Indian restaurant, but the food proved unexceptional and overpriced. We wandered along the promenade by the river, but the weather was foul, the streets were muddy, and the place we stopped for beer didn't impress either of us. Meeting a pair of fun travelers when we returned to the hostel lobby turned out to be the lone highlight of the night.
The next day we began afresh. The tuk tuk driver who had helped us find our hostel had so badly wanted the job of driving us to the local sites, that he arrived at 7am and waited until we emerged from our room at 10. Tayler and I agreed that such dedication merited the job. Moments later, we set off.
I had never partaken in what I might call "political horrors tourism" before and had no idea what to expect from our visit to the Killing Fields, where so many innocent Cambodians had met their ends at the hands of the fanatically extremist Communist regime who ruled the country in the late 1970's.
A solemn pall lay over the one-time farm and Chinese place of burial, despite the beauty of the land itself. Few of the structures used by the Khmer Rouge still stood. Instead, simple wooden signs told of the ways in which soldiers had transported, caged, and murdered their own citizens-- usually simply by beating or hacking at them with whatever blunt farming instrument remained about the grounds, in order to save bullets-- in straightforward, unflinching language, the lack of emotion or embellishment mirroring the cold, calculating manner of the killings themselves.
I had elected to rent the audio tour headset and as I listened to the stories of the place, many told by survivors or the relatives of the deceased, I repeated to Tayler the horrors they detailed. When he could see that my revulsion and empathy threatened to overwhelm me, he would squeeze my hand and pull me away to the next area.
Of course, in such a place, no relief exists. One area, a mass grave for 400-some victims, had been cordoned off with a wooden fence.
But most of it lay open, with a path snaking between craters from which dozens of corpses had been pulled to be identified and memorialized after the regime had broken up. Tiny bits of clothing and human bone and teeth could still be found in the grass.
At one end of the field stood a large tree, massive and beautiful, against which babies heads had been smashed. Pol Pot had believed it better to dispose of the children of his victims than to risk them growing into his enemies, and no method of doing so, it seems, had been too grotesque.
At the rear of the complex, a group of local kids called us over and recited a litany of facts about our home countries. They concluded by standing in a line and singing, in perfect synchronicity, "Please. Help us. We need money. Give us money." They so bowled us over with the routine that we did, in fact, oblige.
As we closed our loop, we listened in disgust and astonishment to the taped testimony of one KR ringleader confessing to having personally sanctioned nearly 15,000 executions. Finally, we arrived where we had started, outside of the memorial.
Between the beige pillars, a simple set of glass-encased shelves stood, viewable from any side, and on those shelves sat over 8,000 skulls excavated from the surrounding graves.
Each shelf housed those of one age group of one sex, like these of boys only 15-20 years-old.
We paid our respects and left, somber and disillusioned but with a far deeper sense of the sorrow and loss suffered by the Khmer people.
But our education was not yet complete. We went next to Tuol Sleng Museum, otherwise known as S21, the most important and infamous of the Khmer Rouge's prisons. Outside of the buildings, which had housed a high school before their penal conversion, the gallows and vessels used for water torture still stood beside the graves of the last prisoners to die in the complex-- their bodies discovered by the soldiers who liberated the city.
Beside the gallows, large boards listed the didactic, catch-22 regulations.
The interrogation rooms, in which unspeakable tortures had been administered, remained unchanged in all ways but one. On the walls hung graphic photographs of the fresh emaciated corpses originally found there.
In other wings, makeshift cells butted up against one another, barely large enough for someone to lie down in.
The last of the main buildings served as a simple memorial, and each ground floor room housed dozens of boards, covered front and back with the photographs of those incarcerated and killed at S21-- thousands in total.
Men and women, boys and girls looked back at me from under glass. Some had smiled at the camera, perhaps not fully understanding the danger. Others had looked into the lens with something resembling resignation.
Interspersed with these portraits of people still healthy upon their arrival were photos of prisoners in the unrecognizable, wasted state in which they typically died, their skin stretched tight over their bones, their finger nails removed through torture, their faces distorted in pain.
By the time I'd reached the last room, I could hardly function. My mouth stood agape and tears rolled silently down my cheeks.
I took a moment before we walked up to the last area of the museum, where exhibits displayed the forced confessions of the victims and posters advertised the work of peace coalitions to increase awareness of the tragedy in hopes of preventing similar events in the future.The most affecting were of course the paintings of local schoolchildren.
I was glad we had come, but I left emotionally decimated. As we walked toward the tuk-tuk, Tayler wrapped his arm around me and said pacifyingly, "You want to go back and watch a romantic comedy?"
What could I do but smile?
-Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
Location:Phnom Penh, Cambodia
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