Cambodia

We loved Cambodia!  All the people we met were super friendly and welcoming (they were actually happy to have Americans visiting!).  The capital city of Phnom Penh, located on the Mekong River, is a thriving and bustling city, but not overwhelming like Hanoi or Bangkok.  [Roughly 3/4 of the Cambodian population of 18 million is rural, and the vast majority of these rural residents depend on agriculture - particularly rice farming - for their subsistence.]

While it is difficult to imagine when you see Phnom Penh today, as most of you probably know, Cambodia has an unspeakably tragic recent history.  Briefly, the Cambodian monarchy lasted for nearly 2,000 years until events precipitated by the Vietnam War led to its overthrow by the U.S.-allied General Lon Nol in 1970.  A short-lived U.S. and South Vietnamese invasion of troops into eastern Cambodia to destroy North Vietnamese supply lines, including the Ho Chi Minh Trail, triggered massive anti-war protests in the U.S., including the infamous Kent State shootings.  While President Nixon withdrew ground troops, U.S. air strikes in Cambodia continued.  In total, the U.S. dropped more tons of bombs on Cambodia than the total dropped on Japan during WWII!  The destabilization of Cambodia caused by these events led to what can only be described as one of the darkest times in modern human history.

In April 1975, two weeks prior to the fall of South Vietnam, the Khmer Rouge - the Cambodian Communist party led by Pol Pot and supported by the Viet Cong- took power in Cambodia, renaming the country Democratic Kampuchea.  Heavily influenced by Maoist ideology, they immediately closed the country to foreigners and evacuated the cities, including Phnom Penh, forcing people to the countryside to work on rural collective farms, where hundreds of thousand died from starvation.  They abolished money, banking, private property, religion and traditional education in an effort to transform the country into a primitive agrarian utopia.  Anyone thought to be an intellectual of any sort was killed - doctors, teachers, lawyers, and students.  Wearing glasses or knowing a foreign language was viewed as the sign of an educated person and marked a person for execution.  Hundreds of thousands more men, women and children were held, tortured and executed in hundreds of special detention centers.

We visited one of these detention centers in Phnom Penh- the notorious Tuol Sleng prison, a former school converted by the Khmer Rouge to an interrogation and execution center, which now houses Cambodia’s Genocide Museum.  Out of nearly 20,000 people detained there by the Khmer Rouge, only 12 people survived [the picture just below is of the cell where one of those survivors was held].  

We also visited Choeung Ek, a mass grave site where those who survived their time in Tuol Sleng were executed. The victims buried there ranged in age from 4 months to 80 years old.  I will spare you many of the images from there which are just too troubling even to describe.  A memorial stupa at the site contains the remains of nearly 9,000 victims organized by age and gender.

Choeung Ek was only one of nearly 20,000 mass graves discovered after the overthrow of the Khmer Rouge which have come to be known as “the Killing Fields”.  You may remember the 1984 movie of the same name.  In total, between 1.5 million to 2 million Cambodians were killed by the Khmer Rouge, representing a quarter of the total population of the country.  Some report that only 57 teachers and 62 doctors and nurses in the entire country survived.  Our tour guide lost her father in the genocide, as nearly every Cambodian alive today lost one or more family members.  If you’re interested in reading an incredibly compelling first-hand account of the genocide, read First They Killed My Father by Loung Ung.

I’m no philosopher, but visiting these sites one can’t help but wonder what they say about human nature.  For me it is especially difficult to wrap my head around because the Cambodian genocide happened during our lifetime.  As if WWII, the Japanese atrocities across Asia and the Holocaust weren’t horrific enough, it seems the cry “never again” has proven futile - whether it was the millions who died from the horrors of Pol Pot, or the devastating civil war in Rwanda in the 90’s that the West did nothing to stop, or the ongoing civil war in Darfur.  Try the mental exercise sometime of looking up the key dates in some of these conflicts and reflect upon the challenges you were facing in your life on those dates.  It may give you some new perspectives, or at the very least a new appreciation for just how lucky we all have been to never have had to experience such unimaginable horrors.

I certainly don’t want to leave you with the impression that our trip to Cambodia was all doom and gloom.  That wouldn’t be true or fair to the Cambodians of today who have proven themselves to be remarkably resilient.  As I said at the outset, Phnom Penh is actually a great city - one you would never guess had been forcibly depopulated during the Khmer Rouge terror of the 1970s.

After a couple of days in Phnom Penh we headed south toward the country’s second largest city, Siem Reap, home of the world-famous Angkor Wat.  On the way we stopped for a culinary experience at a village that specializes in insect tasting.  Melanie enjoyed playing with a live tarantula more than I did, while we both nibbled on the legs of one of his bbq’d brothers (like every other strange food, tastes like chicken!)

We also tried grilled cicadas.  I’ll stick with the tarantulas….. 

Another stop along the way was at a silk farm developed by a US Vietnam War veteran and his wife where we got to see the process of making silk starting with the silk worms and continuing through to the creation of the silk thread

Angkor Wat, the world’s largest religious monument, was built as a Hindu temple and royal mausoleum in the 12th century, and later transitioned to become a Buddhist temple.  It’s been featured on the Cambodian national flag since the 1800s, and is consistently ranked as one of the world’s most popular tourist attractions.  While it’s undoubtedly a great spot for photo ops, in truth I think I’ve seen enough Buddhist temples on this trip to last a lifetime - or, in the Buddhist tradition, many, many lifetimes!

Our last notable stop in Cambodia was to see a performance of the Phare Cambodian Circus.  The performers come from challenging social and economic backgrounds and have graduated from a non-profit arts school in Cambodia.  If there were a show “Cambodia’s Got Talent” there’s no question they would win it!

Well, that’s a wrap for the Cambodian leg of our journey.   Hope I didn’t depress you too much…. If you ever get the chance to visit, we strongly recommend it!