Kepfram & Ellie's Travel Journal

We have started our journey through Cambodia - full of new sites and flavors. We've taken several tuk-tuk rides to help manage the distances and the heat - we've seen public buses, but we weren't around long enough to figure them out.... We are seeing more street level poverty as well as lots of luxury high rise construction, but also lots of smiles, groups walking, running, or exercising together to music in the evenings, a lovely river walk, many Buddhist temples, and lots of saffron-robed monks. We're eating more fish (😋) and less tofu (😭), tasting lots of pepper, lemongrass, and ginger, and looking for our new favorite dishes. 

Still, there is a very dark history to be found in Phnom Penh - think Chinese Cultural Revolution on steroids.... After being destabilized by a secret US bombing campaign beginning in 1969, the Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot rose to power and, in 1975, took the capital of Phnom Penh (which had quadrupled its population to 2 million residents due to refugees from the countryside fleeing the bombing), the Khmer Rouge systematically emptied the country's cities, sending many to or back to rural villages for forced labor, and killed or imprisoned anyone thought to be an enemy of the revolution (anyone not Khmer, anyone religious or educated, as well as their families...).  In less than 4 years, more than 25% of the country's less than 8 million residents had been killed (by torture, murder, malnutrition, starvation, and/or disease), before being liberated by Vietnamese forces in early 1979. Still, the Khmer Rouge government in exile was officially supported by the West and recognized by the UN as legitimate (though Maoist in philosophy, "the enemy of my enemy"...?) - this went on until 1993, when the constitutional monarchy of the Kingdom of Cambodia finally had UN supervised elections for its National Assembly. The Khmer Rouge didn't completely dissolve until 1999!

We visited 2 sites - the notorious "S12" or Tuol Sleng Prison (one of 196 detention centers under the Khmer Rouge), now a Genocide Museum, where ~20,000 were imprisoned/tourtured, and there are only 12 known survivors, and the "Killing Fields" of Choeung Ek just south of the city (one of 300 sites of execution and mass graves), where the remains of ~9,000 people have been exhumed (about half of the total murdered there). Both sites are memorials to the victims and a testament to the reality of the horrors perpetrated in them. At each we really appreciated the beautifully prepared audioguides - giving context to the events and voice to the survivors. Sobering, important, deeply moving. 

The country is healing, but still rebuilding.

Labels: Cambodia