Ankgor Thom

Angkor Thom was spectacular with all the different carved faces rising above the temple complex. You can see bullet holes where the Khymer Rouge shot at the faces. As I was wandering around I struck up a conversation with a Cambodian family who were visiting from Phnom Phenh, and when I looked from them to the the carved faces I realized that I was looking at the same thing. Cambodian facial features are different from that of the Vietnamese or Chinese, with wider, flatter noses, and thicker lips.

These two shots are of the statuary lining the road to the entry to Angkor Thom, which you can see in the background.


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Angkor Wat

The road to Siem Reap from Phnom Penh was a patchwork of potholes, rocks, dust, grit, dirt, and then thirty miles from Siem Reap, a breakdown - the water pump. Nicki and I were offered a lift with an American named Tom who had his driver come and pick him up. It cost $15, but it was better than standing beside the dusty road for what we thought might be hours. Then, as Nicki and I were cramped in the back of his driver's car with the baggage, a bus filled with our fellow passengers flew by. We stayed at the Home Sweet Home Hotel our first night, then moved the following day to the Sweet Dreams Hotel, which turned into a nightmare when I noticed all the ants in my bed.




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Our first day at Ankgor Wat we went early, at sunrise, because it's supposed to be spectacular. It is. What an amazing place.


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The moat, which surrounds the main temple, Angkor Wat, is a square mile. The entire complex covers 26 square miles. It's necessary to plan some kind of transportation to get from one temple to another. Usually you can arrange for an open taxi to meet you in the morning and drive you around for the day.





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If you'd like to see Angkor Wat from a different perspective you can take a hot-air balloon over the site at daybreak.


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Cambodia 's Cruelest Prison - Tuol Sleng Detention Center

We're to learn more from our failures, but seeing this failure both reminded me and re-asserted to me that nothing has changed. This site was once the brutal Tuol Sleng Detention Center, where thousands of citizens, including children and foreign tourists, were tortured and lost their lives.

Tuol Sleng, which was once a high school, was a somber stroll. I experienced a sense of peace because in essence, it is a graveyard. Souls are finally at rest after the horror, at peace. It is somber and existential. Visitors are respectful of one another, moved by how others have been treated.

Six Cambodian university students approached me as I was looking at broken skulls and torture instruments, and they asked me what I thought about the museum. I told them I thought it was terribly sad. I asked them if they had lost family, and their smiles dissolved. One of the girls pointed to the upper floor, where her aunt had died. They had all lost family, if not at Tuol Sleng, then at Cheoung Ek, or in the desolate countryside. The Khmer Rouge killed teachers, professors, doctors, anybody who worked for Lon Nol's government, anyone educated, and pushed the rest out of town. Over one-fifth of the population died. I read a book while I was there about a woman who lived through the horror and who now resides in the States. Her story talked of the deprivation, sickness, and starvation of the people. The remnants of this catastrophe still wander the country. I talked with the students for a while and they told me they'd like to practice their English. I told them to call me at my guesthouse and I'd be happy to have coffee with them.

The life expectancy in Cambodia is 59 years.


The older pictures show the forced relocation of the people of Phnom Penh to the countryside.

Choeung Ek Genocidal Center - Cambodia

It's a sad truth that some of the most fascinating things to see in Cambodia, besides Angor Wat, revolve around the genocide in the 70s by the Khmer Rouge. While I was in Cambodia, I read some books by ordinary Cambodians, who told the story of their forced relocation into the countryside and the attempted extermination of the upper classes. The Khmer tried to replicate Mao's Cultural Revolution, and like every other dictatorship it eventually failed, but not before millions had lost their lives.

Nicki and I had been renting scooters throughout Southeast Asia. On the morning we went to to get a scooter in Phnom Penh to go out to Choeung Ek Extermination Camp, I had a funny feeling about driving. Nevertheless, we went to the scooter rental shop. They wouldn't rent me a scooter because I didn't have my passport. Then, while a foreigner was leaving, she stopped beside me and shook her head and said, 'good luck.' I took these signals as a sign that we shouldn't rent a bike. I'm glad that we didn't because it was over an hour's drive weaving through ox-carts, horses, people, touts, hawkers, dogs, garbage heaps, buses, trucks, dirt and dust - and not one traffic light!


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The legacy of genocide that the Pol Pot regime left behind - their prisons, extermination camps and killing fields - have now been transformed into mass tourist attractions. One of these sites is the Choeung Ek Extermination Camp, which was first unearthed by the Vietnamese after their liberation of the Cambodians in 1979. It lies just 15 km southwest of Phnom Penh, and preserves the remains of some 9,000 victims.

Upon arriving at the longhan orchard with its green fields and silver-tipped trees blowing gently in the wind, I found it hard to believe that so many horrors could have taken place amongst so much beauty. A dirt path winds around the site, with information about each gravesite written across crude wooden plaques. These grassy mounds, around 129 of them, have now all been excavated and marked with the numbers and the sex of those unearthed, and the condition in which they were found.

Prisoners from Tuol Sleng Detention Camp were transported to Choeng Ek by truck, and upon arrival were either detained in wooden shacks that were constructed from wood with galvanized steel roofs and darkened to prevent prisoners from seeing each other, or else immediately executed and then thrown into mass graves. Chemicals were then thrown overtop to dissolve the bodies.

Another path through the fields takes you to a large stupa, a Buddhist shrine that has been built to commemorate and hold the preserved remains of those that were killed. Beaten and misshapen skulls peer out from behind thick panes of glass, expressions of surprise and horror still etched on their mummified faces. Propped up against the inside walls of the stupa are the leg and arm bones that once belonged to them.

I was very moved by Choeung Ek Extermination Camp, and although I felt conflicted by paying to see something so tragic, it's a place that should be visited in order to remember and respect the people who suffered and died there.
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