Cambodia - Phnom Penh

During breakfast at an outdoor cafe on our first morning in the capital city, Deena observed a cryptic message displayed on the back of a passing tuk tuk which read, “Welcome to Cambodia—Good Luck.” We arrived in Phnom Penh yesterday after a five-hour odyssey on National Road 4, or the Skinny Cow Highway, as I renamed it while traveling next to a silent taxi driver with my sleeping family in the rear seat of a Lexus SUV.  On the way to Sihanoukville a few days ago, Deena counted seventy-one Lexus SUVs that passed us before she got tired of the game. We later found out that a lot of these used vehicles get shipped to Cambodia where the citizens with means snap them up as status symbols.  It’s odd to see so many of these spiffy cars speeding down dirt roads dodging chickens, dogs, and old ladies driving motor scooters with makeshift fruit stands attached as sidecars.  

The major highways in Cambodia are all two-lane roads shared by motorists driving every type of gas-powered vehicle imaginable and playing in the world’s largest game of Mario Kart, where every slow-moving participant MUST be passed immediately by any means available including the side of the road or the path of an oncoming dump truck.  Somehow it all works, and even though the drivers commit atrocious acts behind the wheel, they’re more polite than motorists in other countries, and the bad behavior is just part of the average road trip in Cambodia where Mad Max the Road Warrior would feel right at home.

I try to remain positive in my narratives about the places we’ve visited on this journey, and I do my best to remove the American filters from my out-of-date glasses before settling in for a writing session dealing with my observations on the way of life in other countries.  With that said, it’s hard for me to convey a cheerful tone when describing the bleak Cambodian countryside in which the villages have a  profound, post-apocalyptic look with every surface within fifty meters of the road covered by thick layers of red dust.  There are patches of beauty along the road as bridges span wide green rivers, and scrub-covered valleys stippled with tall palm trees spread out great distances to low ranges of hazy blue mountains.  

Everything changes upon entering the limits of the many small towns, and the highway is lined with old, crumbling buildings and merchants sitting in front of dust-covered stalls fanning themselves in the hundred degree heat.  Small shacks built with thin planking and roofed with plastic tarps border the dirt roads extending from the highway, and barefoot children play in the dirt as scrawny chickens peck around the beds of weeds growing around piles of scrap metal and broken cinder blocks.  

Gaunt, sway-backed cows with their ribs visible through thin cream-colored hides wander in and out of the road oblivious to cars and pedestrians. They show no signs of ownership such as branding, and I wondered if they’re considered community cows.  If a village citizen needs a cow for something, does he or she walk out to the road and lead one of the bovines back home then return it to the highway when finished like using a livestock library?  Beef is prominent in the Cambodian diet—is one allowed to slaughter one of these beasts once they’ve started moving more slowly than the rest of the herd?  Sadly, I’ll never know the answers to these questions as the closest source of information, our taxi driver, motors along in the smiling silence created by the language barrier—a source of constant frustration for the curious traveler.

With the stomachs of my crew back to normal function, we enjoyed a big breakfast before leaving Koh Rong Island, and the two-hour boat ride proved to be thankfully uneventful as we rode the waves back to the mainland.  The crew cooked up a big batch of potatoes that looked like fat purple carrots and distributed them among the passengers, and we were grateful for the delicious snack.  Our reserved taxi was waiting for us back at the Palm Beach booking office, and after a quick bathroom break, we loaded our gear and started the journey to Phnom Penh close to five hours away.  The driver stopped once for gas, and we took the opportunity to load up on snacks like cashews and cookies to tamp down the hunger pangs until we reached the city.

We reached the city limit about 4:00 just when rush hour was starting. We arrived at our apartment an hour later and still had plenty of time to check out Phnom Penh in all its wild glory.  Even though it’s a modern city in many aspects, the capital has been described as having the feel of a frontier town with prominent characteristics of village life firmly settled among the tall bank buildings and car dealerships.  The crowded streets are just as dusty as the surrounding highways, and I expected to see tumbleweeds blowing from the KFC across to the shop selling used engines blackened with old grease.  The thick tangles of electrical cable strung up high above the roadsides and the jumble of old restaurants and small markets reminded me of the streets of Saigon, but central Phnom Penh lacks the greenery of the Vietnamese city with bright red and gold banners touting Angkor Beer strung up anywhere a line can be secured.  

I got brief glimpses of canals as we crossed small bridges, but the water was barely visible through thick vegetation full of floating rubbish.  Small rusted shanties sided and roofed with corrugated metal sat on spindly stilts above the edge of the watercourse in view of the busy modern shopping mall across the street packed with motor scooters.  Considering the nightmarish events of the not-too-distant past, Phnom Penh has survived and once more become a vibrant, densely populated capital city with evidence of foreign investment everywhere.

Our apartment building is located near the tip of the peninsula at the junction of the Mekong and Tonle Sap rivers—a major center of the ancient Khmer empire and French colonial society in Cambodia.  Most of the major development and commerce of modern Phnom Penh is focused on this area, and its influence is slowly spreading across the river to the rest of the city.  Our new headquarters is a spacious, two-bedroom apartment on the fourth floor of a sixteen-story building that boasts a pool, table tennis room, mini mart, and small outdoor cafe.  After many weeks spent in small hotel rooms, we felt as if we were moving into Versailles with two bathrooms equipped with glass-enclosed showers and ten-foot walls painted white with dark stained doors and trim.  Deveny volunteered to sleep on the wide sectional sofa leaving Joseph his own room with a comfy double bed, while Deena and I secured the master suite with a balcony overlooking the neighborhood.  The building has been here a while, and the apartment is starting to show signs of age, and the ant population is thriving in the kitchen, but at thirty dollars a night, we feel like we’ve won the lottery.

After a restful night and a breakfast of noodle soup in the cafe, we summoned a taxi and began our excursion to the Choeung Ek Genocidal Center, a title which sounds as strange to the ear as it looks to the eye.  Out of more than three-hundred killing fields across Cambodia, Choeung Ek is the most well known and has been transformed into a moving memorial, which was the primary focus of our visit to Phnom Penh.  I was aware of the country of Cambodia as I grew up even though I wasn’t sure of its location until I saw the movie, The Killing Fields, in 1985. I was completely unaware of the atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge during its four-year reign of terror.  I wasn’t alone in my ignorance. This communist regime was recognized by the United Nations as a legitimate government until the discovery of the mass graves in the early eighties.  I remember being completely confused after seeing the movie and wondering how so many people could have been brutally murdered without the world knowing about it and stopping it especially in light of the genocide that occurred during the Jewish Holocaust.

Flush with thousands of new recruits after civil war victory in Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975 and in less than three days, evacuated the entire population of two million people to the countryside as they began their new government based on the goal of total agricultural communism, the vision of the regime’s leader, Pol Pot.  Almost overnight, the Khmer Rouge separated families and permanently closed all banks, schools, temples, and all other forms of commerce in order to “purify” the population into a labor force committed to growing rice for the regime.  The villages and rural areas were not able to sustain the sudden population growth of evacuees from the cities, and widespread famine and death from starvation set in immediately.  Pol Pot’s vision of a pure society left no room for any type of subversion; so the program of mass execution was installed and carried out with vigor and intensified toward the end of the regime’s four year reign.  History bears witness to the fact that servicing the paranoia of the despot takes precedence over the health and progress of the state, and in the end, nearly three million people, over a quarter of the entire population of Cambodia, were dead.

The tour of Choeung Ek is self-guided with the aid of an excellent audio guide narrated by a killing-fields survivor who tells the story of the victims forcefully and compassionately.  The execution camp was located in a former orchard, and there are still fruit trees around the borders of the site where close to ten thousand men, women, and children deemed enemies of the state were bludgeoned to death—bullets were too expensive.  While there is reverent silence all through the memorial broken only by the warbling and trilling of birds, the executioners’ victims were killed under bright lights at night with political songs blaring over loudspeakers backed by the roar of diesel generators.  

My mind cannot fathom the black blanket of evil spread over this horrible place forty years ago even though I could clearly see the depressions of the mass graves in the central field that still give up the bones of the dead during the rainy seasons.  Since the audio guide was full of historical sections and survivors’ stories, the four of us decided to split up and tour the site at our own pace and agreed to meet at the central stupa which displays five-thousand victims’ skulls with the cause of death very evident—Deena, Joseph, and I chose to enter the stupa, Deveny did not.  The specific descriptions of evil carried out here are well known, and I’m not going to cover them here.  I was okay through most of the tour until I heard about the caretakers of the site who are committed to collecting the victims’ bones as they surface. They treat the remains with the utmost respect and honor which were denied them during their lives—then I was not okay.

Inside the stupa

Mass graves in front of the stupa

Bracelets are placed to remember the children

Mass graves

The tour ended with the admonition to go back home with the memory of the killing fields in the hope that genocide and mass murder will never again be allowed to happen just as we were sent forth after we visited Auschwitz.  But it continues to happen all over the world, and most of it continues in the open with nations powerless to stop it.  As long as there are charismatic leaders driven by ignorance, fear, and hate under the guise of nationalism, atrocities will continue in this broken world where the value of human life is getting cheaper by the day.  Deena and I committed to show our children the world and its history, and with the good comes the very, very bad.  Like Auschwitz, we can only pray that their memories of Choeung Ek will instill an even deeper and fervent need to extend the sacrificial love of God to His children who bear His image, and contrary to the world’s value system, possess lives of infinite worth.

Our souls needed refreshing after the harrowing visit to the killing fields; so the next day we stayed close to home anticipating the 4:00 pm worship service at the International Christian Fellowship located downtown near the big embassy complexes.  We were fortunate to meet a taxi driver who was honest with his rates and committed to punctuality, so we hired him to take us around town during our last evening in Phnom Penh, beginning with the church service.  Sang dropped us off at the large building where the church was located on the third floor in a conference room where chartreuse fabric covered the walls and burnt orange cushions lay in the chairs.  After fellow worshippers greeted us, we sang all the old familiar hymns and listened to a great sermon based on Mark's description of the conflict between Jesus and the religious leaders.  We met a lot of people and stayed for a while to talk with the pastor after the service, and we were encouraged to hear about the health and progress of the Church in the Kingdom of Cambodia.

Sang picked us up and delivered us to the Riverside, which is the thriving area near the junction of the two rivers. We found a restaurant with a rooftop seating area and enjoyed a meal looking out over the water with a full moon high above the city.  We also found a bakery and picked out pastries for an early morning breakfast as we have another long travel day ahead of us tomorrow when we journey to Siem Reap and the temples of Angkor Wat.  Sang picked us up one last time to take us back to the Mekong View Tower, and he talked the whole time about his dissatisfaction with the government that he thinks spends too much time on shady deals with the Vietnamese while native Cambodians are stuck in poverty.  “My country has Angkor Wat and beautiful beaches, and we still poor, and my children don’t learn English in public school,” he said with dismay in his voice.  “They learn English in private school, but who can pay?”  When we arrived home, Sang wanted to pose for a picture with my little family, and a security guard happily snapped a few photos before we said goodbye to our friend.  Phnom Penh is a tough town, and though it’s experiencing rapid growth, the ghosts of the past are still prominent during the recovery process.  I’m thankful our last memories of the capital city include a gracious family man with a big smile and a passion for the people of Cambodia.

We skipped the fried scorpions