The Khmer Capital

Standing at the Cambodian border post, in which every employee exuded disinterest, our passports were taken and we imagined what Cambodia may have in store for us. Throughout Vietnam, we had met lots of people who had experienced the less pleasant sides of Cambodia or had skipped the country entirely. However, being two self-assured guys who had survived the roads of the Wakhan corridor and four nights out in Hanoi, we continued unconcerned by the stories and into one of the worst capital cities to spell in the world, Phnom Penh.

Phnom Penh

Arriving in the pouring rain is not ideal. Arriving in the pouring rain kilometres away from your hostel is severely unfortunate. Arriving in the pouring rain, kilometres away from your hostel and without any cash is just every force in the universe conspiring to ruin your day. After trying a few broken ATMs, we found one that worked, hopped in a tuk tuk and made our way to the hostel.

We split our time in the capital with a trip to Kampot but here I’ll deftly mould those two visits into one, like a toddler squishing two globules of playdoh together. On both occasions, we stayed at Manor House hostel and despite the abundance of mosquitos in the evenings, we enjoyed being able to swim in their clean swimming pool. Our first few wanders around the city took us into an embassy filled area, where expats relaxed in open air coffee shops and hermetically sealed luxury cars shipped diplomats through the busy streets. However, before getting too invested in what this city has to offer, I will start this post much like the previous one, with some possibly longwinded, but fascinating recent history. Together we’ll set about discovering the depths of human depravity. Yay!

The Khmer Rouge (hold on to your history hats)

In Vietnam, we had learnt a lot about the turbulent history of the country from the French colonial days to the end of the Vietnam war. But now in Cambodia, we were eager to learn about an equally infamous period in this country’s history, the rule of the Khmer Rouge. 

The Khmer Rouge was the name given to the Communist party in Cambodia that formed with the support of the North Vietnamese Army (Viet Cong) and the Communist party of China. Building their army in the jungles of Cambodia during the 1960s, they overthrew the government of the country in 1975 (despite the extensive bombing effort from the US to destroy key targets). 

Upon seizing power, the Khmer Rouge leadership forcibly evacuated the cities, with anyone remaining being killed on the spot and their houses burned to the ground. The long marches out of the cities killed thousands of children and elderly people. Furthermore, many professionals or people with military ties were executed or sent to labour camps. The remaining displaced urban population were assigned to agricultural communes where they were expected to produce 3x more rice than before the Khmer Rouge rule. With the urban population lacking agricultural knowledge, combined with the lack of food for the workers, famine was inevitable. The strict rules imposed by the Khmer Rouge (where picking berries was seen as “private enterprise” and punishable by death) only sought to amplify the dire situation of the people in these communes. Exhaustion through forced labour, starvation due to failed social engineering and preventable diseases due to the insistence on self-sufficiency (even in the supply of medicine), were the reasons for tens of thousands of deaths. However, while the Khmer Rouge first focussed on agricultural reforms, based on Mao Zedong’s “Great Leap Forward” (which lead to the Great Chinese Famine and the deaths of up to 45 million people), the paranoid and racist autocratic state began to ramp up their actions against the Cambodian people in an effort to ensure their longevity in power. 

Through a special branch of the Khmer Rouge in charge of internal security and “keeping the peace”, all traces of Cambodia’s imperialist past were to be eliminated. That meant reducing the cultural inflow into Cambodian society and therefore restricting opportunities for creativity and knowledge. In order to gain full control over the information the population received, the Khmer Rouge labelled groups as enemies of the state and in turn tortured and killed them. These “enemies” were:

• People with connections to former governments (however as the state grew more paranoid they killed thousands of their own party members in purges)
• Professionals and intellectuals e.g. anyone that understood another language, artists, writers, musicians etc.
• Ethnic Thai, Vietnamese and Chinese alongside other ethnicities from the Cambodian Highlands. Anyone with religious affiliations were also killed, with Muslims being forced to eat pork and the Catholic Cathedral being razed
• “Economic saboteurs” who were urban dwelling people the regime deemed guilty of sabotage due to their lack of agricultural ability 

S21 Prison

S21 (a former secondary school) was one of around 200 torture centres established by the Khmer Rouge and being in the heart of Phnom Penh we went and had a look around.

When you go through the walls and into the green courtyard surrounded by buildings, it’s easy to imagine the children running around going to and from classes. But as you look more intently, as you get closer to the buildings, the barbed wire cladded exteriors of the classroom blocks come into focus. 

Many of the rooms were simple, stark and truly chilling to behold. Bare rooms, stripped of any furniture, any decoration, with one door in and one set of old wooden shutters. In the centre of the room was always a severely rusted metal framed bed, left in its original position. The only other thing in the room was a solitary photograph of what the room looked like when the Vietnamese arrived. In some photos, the bed stood above large pools of blood which were black against the tiled floor, in others, awfully mutilated corpses were shackled to the bed, still seemingly straining against their restraints even after death. In another building were multiple floors of cells, some barely wide enough to fit a person in, stretching the length of the building. Rudimentary holes cut from the walls of the previous classrooms offered doors to the guards and offered us perspective on the scale of the imprisonment. In other larger cells, prisoners were shackled on a long iron bar together. Food consisted of four small spoons of rice porridge and a small leaf soup per day and prisoners were only hosed down every four days meaning that malnutrition and disease were rife. 

While the conditions of imprisonment (which usually lasted 2 or 3 months) were stomach churning enough, torture was a regular occurrence for prisoners at S21. Prisoners were tortured to gain confessions of the crimes they had been charged with. However, the vast majority of people tortured at the prison were believed to be innocent and their confessions were false. Some of the tortures included, waterboarding, hanging, electric shocks, pouring alcohol on wounds, forcing liquid into the stomach and then beating them. Any attempted suicide to escape this torture was met with severe punishments.

Originally, those who the Khmer Rouge no longer had use for, who’s confessions had been received, were killed on site. However, quickly the plot filled up and prisoners were sent to one of the infamous killing fields 15km outside of Phnom Penh. There prisoners were executed by a killing squad of teenagers with machetes, iron bars and other makeshift weapons owing to the fact that ammunition was scarce and expensive. Mass graves for the prisoners contained up to 100 bodies per grave, but often bodies weren’t even buried instead they were just thrown in ditches or lakes.

The prison was discovered by the invading Vietnamese Army in 1979 and the photographs seen in there today were taken by the first photographer inside who reportedly followed the stench of rotting corpses to the gates. Through S21’s 4-year history (1975-1979) 20,000 people were imprisoned there and from those 20,000 only 12 were known to have survived (7 adults and 5 children). After being shut down by the Vietnamese government, it was reopened as a museum less than a year later, the government recognising the importance for future generations to remember what happened there.

As well as the strikingly simple rooms that were left almost untouched, the museum did offer photographic displays. The most memorable display for me was set of adjacent rooms filled floor to ceiling with photographs taken of the individual prisoners as they entered S21. It is one thing to stare at a torture room imagining the people that had endured the horrors that occurred there only 41 years ago. But to look into the eyes of a young boy, maybe only 8 years old, and imagine him in that place was affecting to a new level. You can spend a lot of time looking at individual photographs on the walls or reading individual stories in one of the many books available in the museum, but when you look up and see the thousands of other photos or flick through the pages of the book you realise the scale of the atrocity, the depth of the Khmer Rouge’s sickening ideology. 

In the 4 years that the Khmer Rouge ruled over the Cambodian people they murdered or starved to death 25% of the population of the country. 

Centre of Phnom Penh 

If you’re still with me after your history lesson then let’s continue with what modern Cambodia has to entice you. In reality, Phnom Penh doesn’t offer much to do in terms of big attractions, most people don’t spend more than a couple of days in the capital but we found the place strangely enjoyable. The centre of the city consists of wide streets and numerous monuments and temples. There’s plenty of cafes and restaurants about but it does seem like the city is half finished in most places. We enjoyed wandering to the farcically large Mekong River and seeing the traditional temple designs juxtapose to the high-rise modern developments going up next door.

After finding a day the palace was actually open, we excitedly seized the opportunity to wander around. The complex with all its ornate buildings, expansive courtyards and manicured gardens can be succinctly described as the physical embodiment of a slight shrug quickly followed by a weary sigh. Actually, not sure that’ll suffice as a review for an entire palace complex so here goes. Yes, the buildings were impressive to look at, all adorned in gold and the style of the roofs were especially beautiful. Yet, something about them failed to instil a sense of awe or even interest that I would expect from such a place. As we moved between areas, the architecture remained similar and my interest remained solely a superficial appreciation of the things set in front of me, they continued to garner no further curiosity. The most interesting thing for me was a mural which ran the circumference of a large courtyard depicting fierce battles, mythological beasts and divine beings. The stories told by the mural were fantastical, confusing and enthralling and somewhat made up for the disappointment we felt in the rest of the complex. 

We left the palace, ignored hoardes of tuk tuk drivers and continued our exploration as the sky grew darker. We decided we could wait out the coming rain at a mall I had seen on the map so, confident in this plan, we strode off in its direction. The mall turned out to be a plush underground tunnel snaking its way from one giant hotel/casino to another. Decked out with high-end shops and dazzling displays, we were a little taken aback by the opulence on display. Similarly, the employees of the casino were taken aback by the scruffy unshaven men, clad with the saline remnants of a full day’s sweat, who were walking around their establishment. Feeling like a leper who had just waltzed into the Savoy, I encouraged us to leave before we were removed. So, we shimmied our way out of there, sidestepped some chauffeurs and headed back to the hostel. 

Fight Night  

One of the first things that caught our eye when we came to our hostel for the first time was a board of activities that contained live Khmer Boxing. It was a Friday and we were keen to see a live fight or two so we booked it. We only had to pay for the rickshaw (moped pulling a cart) there and back, entrance to the venue was free. Our driver met us in the early evening and set off to the venue. Tuk Tuks and rickshaws are both fun ways of getting around in Cambodia but in rickshaws you have the advantage of the breeze hitting you and you feel much more connected to the utter chaos you find yourself in. Rush hour hit us and the cooling breeze was replaced by car fumes and the connection we felt with the city was possibly a tad too visceral as cars threatened to obliterate the wooden rickshaw. Eventually, we turned off the main road and took a shortcut. Unfortunately, the shortcut seemed to be the driver ploughing through a large vegetable market asking people to move out the way as they stared at us. The discomfort of that situation passed and we eventually made it to the venue in one piece. 

We were directed to the foreigner section of the venue which was practically ringside while the stands were packed with a rowdy Cambodian crowd. I really wanted to be amongst the crowd but it seemed impossible to achieve so we settled in and got ready for the fights. I’m not sure how long we waited for the fights to start but while my brain slowly disintegrated from the boredom and the hype-man continued to advertise high-end farming equipment, the six special guests were invited to speak. Each one decided to either recount their entire life history in excruciating minute by minute detail or put forward their disquisitions on what the evolution of Kanye West’s discography reveals about the unorthodox cognitive pathways of a musical genius. (It could’ve been either, I don’t speak a word of Khmer). 

Emerging back from the psychotic episode I had had waiting for the fight to begin, we happily watched people punch, knee, kick and elbow each other. It was a night where Thai fighters were being pitted against Cambodians so the crowd was especially excitable. With every knee or elbow landed the whoops of the crowd grew ever more deafening. Having personal experience with the sport myself I was completely absorbed and shouting alongside the locals, what surprised me was seeing Brendan getting into it too. Most of the fights were closely contested, physical yet technical affairs, that still resulted in knockouts. As the fights reached their climax, the crowd was an untameable mob baying for blood so loud that I couldn’t hear myself think. It was brilliant.

Redrum 

An uncommon mood swept over both of us one day. We couldn’t be arsed to move from the hostel, Brendan was keen to get stuck into a book he’d snatched from the book exchange and I was keen to swim. In the morning and early afternoon, we relaxed without a care in the world but we soon decided it’d be nice to be lazy elsewhere. Beforehand, we had seen a community cinema run by volunteers and it seemed like the perfect way to spend the rest of the day. It was only £3 for the day and £1 for a salad bowl of fresh popcorn (the only correct way to use a salad bowl), so we settled in to get our money’s worth. First, we watched ‘Blinded by the Light’ about a British Pakistani boy growing up in Luton in the late 80s who finds solace in the music of Bruce Springsteen. After that we watched ‘The Shining’, a breathless and overwhelming supernatural classic, which is now one of my favourites of all time.

Final thoughts

We got here with only a measly mention of popcorn so, “Where’s the food talk, James?” It’s here, it was always going to be here. Relax and indulge.

• Flavours of India, if I could find my soul I would give it to you for safe keeping. Your samosas are parcels of divine inspiration. 

• Cambodians know how to marinade beef, fact. 

• I’ve never had a more intense internal conflict than in this city. In the embassy area of the city, supermarkets sell all the western goodies, but the one that sent me spiralling into a maelstrom of self-doubt was Crunchy Nut. $8. Eight whole US dollars for a box. And yet I was scarily close to buying it. In the end I walked back empty handed, saddened that I wasn’t cradling that orange box of abhorrently sweet cereal. But I believe this if anything shows my true strength as a man. I will accept words of praise and admiration after this post, thank you. 

In the end Phnom Penh was just what we needed, it was a relaxing albeit briefly solemn visit to a city we didn’t know anything about. I can understand why people spend two nights then move on, but if you want to chill out, learn some history and eat some good food consider spending a bit longer.